Book-A-Day 2010 # 281 (11/11) -- Fingerprints by Will Dinski

Beauty is skin deep, they say. But who can see through skin in the first place? And what would we see if we could?

Will Dinski's Fingerprints is the story of one cosmetic surgeon -- a very good, very well connected one -- and a rather quickly burlesqued drive for beauty. It's set in Hollywood, or the equivalent -- the story never says, but the main characters are famous actors, wanna-bees, and the surgeons who rework everyone's faces.

Dr. Fingers is the reigning king of plastic surgery; Dr. Yumiko Tatsu is his indispensable assistant. Dinski sketches their relationship quickly, tossing stars and regular folks into the mix with little or no introduction and expecting the reader to get up to speed. There are at least two overlapping love triangles, but what everyone in Fingerprints really wants is to look better -- to be someone that they're not.

So, inevitably, the young protege goes off on her own, and has a radical, strange new treatment that her mentor never would have countenanced. And that treatment is an immediate, massive success...until its drawbacks become clear. And then Dinski swiftly ends his book; he's just sketching in the outlines of his story here, and has no intention to follow up on all of the implications (or any of them, to be honest).

Dinski also has a stiff style; his characters move blockily, as if they're puppets on sticks, giving all of Fingertips the air of a carefully stage-managed diversion, with just enough detail to be plausible but not so much as to demand deep attention. Fingertips is diverting, but it doesn't go much deeper than that; the characters remain mostly ciphers, their motives unclear or hidden and their actions more puzzling than surprising.


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Book-A-Day 2010 # 280 (11/10) -- Miki Falls, Vol. 3: Autumn by Mark Crilley

Suspension of disbelief is a fragile thing, easy to break -- and it can sometimes be broken just by attenuation. I read the first two volumes of Miki Falls nearly three years ago, as they were being published, and I'd completely forgotten the Maguffin of the series when I finally got back to the third volume, Autumn, last month.

That Maguffin -- which I don't intend to give away here, even though that may turn this review flabby, nonspecific, and euphemistic, so be warned -- is very appropriate for the manga-inspired storyline and art-style of Miki Falls, and is also the kind of thing that's perfectly designed to torque up this young-lovers-against-the-world story, so it's actually exceptionally well-chosen for the needs of Miki Falls. But it's also the sort of element that requires an industrial-sized suspension of disbelief, and -- given the long time between when I read the first half of the story and now -- my disbelief had slowly worked its way down from the vast heights that I'd winched it up to while reading those books.

Autumn ratchets up the tension, as is appropriate for the third act of a four-act work, and that Maguffin is most of the mechanism for doing so -- our heroine, Miki, and her new boyfriend, Hiro, want to be together, but There Are Reasons why they shouldn't be, and those reasons are much larger and more serious than any teen readers will ever have dealt with in their own lives. (Though, of course, teens are famous for thinking that their relatively minor restrictions and rules are horribly demanding chains that will scar their entire lives -- so readers closer to Miki's age will certainly have an easier time hauling their disbelief to the rafters than I did.) There's no final answer here, as of course there won't be (until the fourth book, Winter), but it does get much more difficult for Miki and Hiro, as of course it must be.

So I find that I can't say much about Autumn -- it is nice seeing Crilley stretch himself and work for a somewhat older audience than his lovely Akiko books, but Miki Falls has a similarly sturdy generic framework and only mildly greater depth than the Akiko stories. And his art is clean and expressive in a nearly animation-cell way -- despite the Japanese setting and themes, the art doesn't owe much to manga influences -- though his characters have only the barest vestige of noses much of the time. Miki Falls is undoubtedly much better if one is still an overdramatic teen, but it's pretty good regardless, as long as you can accept the premise for the length of the story.


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Book-A-Day 2010 # 279 (11/9) -- Will Eisner's The Spirit Archives, Vol. 3

This is another one of those times when I have to say "Remember what I said that one time? Well, pretend I'm saying it all over again."

This trip around the horn, the previous iteration was Book-A-Day # 272, Will Eisner's The Spirit Archives, Vol. 1. [1] And the current iteration is a collection of the "Spirit" stories from almost precisely a year later: July 6 to December 28 of 1941. So it's still very early in "The Spirit," and Eisner isn't Eisner yet. (Not that I'm as impressed by his Spirit work as some people are, though.) And, though this book doesn't say so -- it has no creative credits of any kind, though it lists the org chart of DC's then-executive suite, in the usual suits-are-more-important-than-creatives aesthetic of corporate comics -- I think that this run spans the period when Eisner wasn't even working directly on the Spirit, having been caught up in that whole "World War II" thing that was going on at the time.

(One interesting note: the stories in Will Eisner's The Spirit Archives, Vol. 3 are all eight-pagers, while the stories a year previously were seven-pagers. There's no explanation for the change, though I suspect the "Spirit Section" had shrunk and the other two strips had disappeared.)

So, once again: these are pretty good, as golden age adventure stories go. The flying car is much less in evidence than the year before, and Eisner (or whoever) is starting to do some very structured stories, most of which work pretty well in context. But this is still Golden Age stuff, very early in the history of modern comics, so it's very talky and generic, with occasionally ugly drawing and panels that still only rarely function as a page as a whole. You need to put your historical glasses on when looking at a work like this, though it can definitely be enjoyable if you do.


[1] Which hasn't posted yet as I write this, so I can't provide you with a link.

Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Book-A-Day 2010 # 278 (11/8) -- Mister I by Lewis Trondheim

Hey, remember what I said about Lewis Trondheim's other book of pantomime comics, Mister O? (Please tell me you do -- it was only back in Book-A-Day # 201.)

Well, Mister I is very much the same kind of thing -- the same layout, the same repetition of initial premises through various permutations, the same horrible ends for the main character. But Mister I is a tall guy who wants food -- we presume that he's hungry, though he's most often trying to steal an apple pie from a windowsill, which speaks of mischief and desire rather than hunger. Mister I is just as successful in his endeavors as Mister O was -- which is to say, not at all. He's eaten by what's probably a dog, shot, gored by a bull, beaten to death, drowned, and crushed by any number of objects. (It's not a happy life for a pantomime character in Lewis Trondheim comics.)

And, again, these are wonderful comics, the equivalent of a great Chuck Jones Roadrunner cartoon on the page. The figures are stylized to make them everymen (or everybirds, or everbulls), which also keeps the violence -- and there is a lot of violence, just like those old cartoons -- funny rather than appalling. Mayhem and attempted pie-stealing have rarely been this funny.


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 11/6

There's probably a stack of packages -- little presents from the Package Fairy, as I like to put it -- waiting for me, but, as I write this, I don't actually know what they are. I will be home in a few hours, though, so -- if all goes well -- I'll be updating this post later today with a list of what actually did arrive last week. If all doesn't go well, it may take me a couple of days longer....

Update:

Well, I was intending to update this with the books that came in last week -- and I'd even typed up a couple of them, before a Firefox crash deep-sixed that work -- but this week was busier than even I expected and the mail was slower than expected.

Actually, the tally is:

• Last week: 20
• This week: 1 (which I'd seen previously in bound galleys)

So what I'm actually going to do, seeing as it's already time for next week's list anyway, is just leave this post barren, empty, and forlorn, and move all of last week's books up to next Monday's post. (I may have just confused myself with that explanation; if you managed to follow it, you win three-and-a-half Internets.)

This update, thus, is to say that there is no update. Reviewing the Mail will resume regular service on Monday, November 15th.

Book-A-Day 2010 # 277 (11/7) -- Cinderella: From Fabletown With Love by Roberson & McManus

Spies, as we all know from two generations of Cold War stories, are smart, resourceful, infinitely dangerous, and -- above all -- stunningly fabulous in all ways. Cinderella is the Fables universe's answer to Natasha Romanoff, Emma Peel, and Sydney Bristow: secretly the most deadly agent of the expatriate community of otherworldly refugees, while by day posing as the empty-headed rich-girl owner of a shoe store.

Cinderella: From Fabletown with Love is Cindy's first solo mission; she previous appeared, mostly in a supporting role, in the main Fables series. Here she's trying to track down the source of a new pipeline of magical items, flowing from the otherworldly Homelands into the mundane world and threatening to break the secret of the Fables. She tracks and fights her way from London to New York's Fabletown, and then back out to Dubai and more otherworldly realms. As usual with a solo miniseries, there are some secrets from her past that she has to confront before the end -- isn't that always the way?

Cinderella is less intense and obviously themed than the main Fables series, though not as frivolous as the Jack of Fables series. (So, in proper fabulistic fashion, it's the baby bear -- just right.) Chris Roberson, best known for prose, shows himself equally adept at writing adventure stories for the comics form, and Shawn McManus, whose rounded lines sometimes veer towards the twee, is quite good here, dealing with the incidental humor (and the diverting sideplot back in Fabletown) as well as the action scenes. It's a line extension, sure, but it's a pretty good one, and the world can always use another tough princess spy, for my money.

Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Book-A-Day 2010 # 276 (11/6) -- Revolver by Matt Kindt

Violence in American comics is usually deeply stylized, the result of eight decades of iterated attempts to get "serious" to snag older audiences and subsequent retreats to the safe shores of appropriate-for-young-readers bloodlessness. But Matt Kindt comes out of a different, more serious tradition -- none of his people have any superstrength, and bullets wound them, even kill them, quickly. So his take on comics violence owes more to literary fiction, where violence is a sudden, shocking intrusion on the world as we expect it, than it does to anything we're used to seeing under a DC Comics imprint.

Kindt dives into a new genre with Revolver, after the WWII espionage behind most of his earlier work; this is an unabashed science-fictional story, with one man oscillating between two alternate worlds day by day. Sam works as a photo retoucher at the newspaper Post-Dispatch, in Chicago. He's not all that good at it, since he doesn't care about his work, or about much of anything.

But his life is torn in half when he realizes that he's alternating days in different worlds -- one in which everything goes along normally, boringly, and another in which every possible thing is suddenly going wrong at once: major computer worm attacks, multiple deadly pandemic diseases, major terrorist attacks in medium-size cities across America, and a dirty bomb that just wiped out Seattle. Sam is shocked -- more shocked in the normal world, actually, befuddled by the banality of life after the high drama of his other days -- but quickly begins to use what he learns in each world to help him in the other. And there is a connection between the two worlds, of course: Sam has much to learn and a major role to play.

Revolver has been described as reminiscent of Philip K. Dick, but that's mostly in the setup; Sam himself is very much not a Phildickian hero. He's much too active and engaged, and particularly too violent -- he's the product of a culture thirty years later and amped up by a relentless string of explosion-filled movies, all priming him to spring quickly into action-hero mode, even though he has no history with violence. (There may be a bit of audience-identification wish-fulfillment going on there -- though it's also true that nearly all of Kindt's major characters have been remarkably good at violence.)

It's all a bit too patly dualistic -- Sam also oscillates between two women, his girlfriend Maria and his boss Jan, and the linchpin for the separation of these two worlds is another dualistic game -- and the violence does come too easily, and too successfully, for Sam. For all of Kindt's scratchy, battered art, this is a slick story, about a young man secretly at the center of all of the important things happening in his world and how he takes control of it all. Revolver is not as tense or harrowing as Super Spy, but it's still a solid Matt Kindt story about real people in unreal situations, and that's pretty good.


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Book-A-Day 2010 # 275 (11/5) -- The Amazing Screw-On Head and Other Curious Objects by Mike Mignola

We're all used to Mike Mignola being deadly serious. Hellboy has his quips and lighter side, but his stories are dark, bordering on horror -- the creatures he fights, after all, are doing their best to call down Elder Gods and stranger entities that would end all human life on earth, just for starters. And so that whole universe is dark and foreboding -- it suits Mignola's art very well, and his sensibility even better.

But there's no man alive who has only one mood, so Mignola, every so often, indulges his lighter side. Back in 2002, there was an oddball one-shot called "The Amazing Screw-On Head," a Victorian-era monster-fighting story that was deeply Mignolan in the expected ways, except for the straightfaced, almost self-parodying lunacy of the hero and his antagonists. Eight years later, that story and a few related pieces -- most of them brand-new for this book -- have been collected as The Amazing Screw-On Head and Other Curious Objects, and it's as nutty and fun as the one-shot it grew out of.

The stories are all loosely related; there's a long new piece about a previous adventure of Doctor Snap, who was an ally of the villain, Emperor Zombie, in the Screw-On Head story, and there's a story about the childhood of the long-ago figure whose tomb gets raided by Emperor Zombie, and some shorter pieces with even odder connections.

But it all starts off with that 2002 story, in which President Abraham Lincoln -- who else? -- calls on Screw-On Head, who is some kind of steampunk robot, to solve the theft of the Kalakistan Fragment from the Museum of Dangerous Books and Paper. Screw-On Head is sure this is the work of the dastardly Emperor Zombie, and so it turns out to be -- so Head, after carefully choosing the right body for the job (his name is precisely descriptive; he's a robot head with a threaded neck who fits into various robot bodies), sets out with his trusty manservant Mr. Groin and his trusty dog Mr. Dog. Zombie, along with his henchman Doctor Snap and a nameless vampire woman, have used the Fragment to enter the tomb of the ancient conqueror Gung, and Head must stop them, which of course he does. In outline, it's much like many other Mignola stories, but this one is far less serious than any of the rest.

Following a few pages of Head-related pin-ups, the other stories begin with a story of Gung, who outwitted the devil when he was just a boy. Next comes "The Magician and the Snake," co-written (and from an idea by) Mignola's daughter Katie, aged seven at the time, which is the touching story of a magician and his best friend, a snake. And then there's "The Witch and Her Soul," in which the devil makes some evil puppets -- "and that's a good day's work for me!" "The Prisoner of Mars" -- in which Dr. Snap kills his friend, Professor Cyclops, is executed for his crime, and then travels to Mars -- follows, and then the book ends with the silent "In the Chapel of Curious Objects," which connects more of the previous stories together, in its own way.

Mignola has always had an off-center, quirky sense of humor, but that stays pretty far down in the mix in the Hellboy-verse. In these stories, it comes front and center, and it's a lot of fun -- this book is to regular Mignola as Bob Burden is to '70s-era JLA, or Zippy the Pinhead is to Doonesbury: something odd, and not entirely explicable, but a joy to watch and thrillingly unpredictable.


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Quote of the Week: Just Business

"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."
- Hunter Thompson

Book-A-Day 2010 # 274 (11/4) -- How Shall I Tell the Dog? by Miles Kington

Impending death provokes many different reactions -- as Dr. Johnson once said, it does concentrate the mind wonderfully. Some go through the usual stages of denial, bargaining, and so forth, while others leap straight to acceptance. Still others spend their time thinking of books they could write about dying.

Miles Kington is in the last category; he was a well-known British humorous writer [1] (of a daily column for the Independent, among many other things) when he learned, in 2007, that he had inoperable pancreatic cancer. On top of his regular work -- he kept up that daily column faithfully; the last one appeared on the day he died, January 30, 2008 -- he began a series of letters to his agent, Gill Coleridge, about the ways he was thinking about "cashing in" on his impending demise. How Shall I Tell the Dog? collects all of those letters -- although it's clear, as an afterword by Kington's widow Caroline states, that the letters were all performances, meant for the public rather than actual private letters to his agent.

Kington seems to steam straight to acceptance -- or, at least, got his other stages out of the way before starting this project -- and points out, several times, that he doesn't like the soppy kind of cancer book and isn't going to write something like that. (And then, usually, slyly asks Gill if there's a lot of money in books like that, because he could possibly be convinced otherwise.)

How Shall I Tell the Dog? is made up of several dozen letters -- most of them around the length of a newspaper column, which should surprise no one -- that don't mention cancer all that much, actually. (Kington knows exactly how funny cancer isn't, and so steers away from it most of the time, except, occasionally, for effect.) Kington is never sorry for himself, or despairing, or morbid -- as he writes in the first letter, "all this miasma of hand-wringing crystallised into one single thought: I did not have as much time left as I thought in which to do all of the important things of life" -- but instead focused on business...though his business is thinking up funny things.

So he runs through his take on the book 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, thoughts on having new holes put in his belt, clearing out his papers, old friends from Punch, famous last words, funeral (and tombstone) videos, yodeling, and other loosely related topics. It's quite funny, and often unexpectedly touching -- Kington is trying to get on with things in the limited time he has left, and every so often that just becomes too painfully clear.

The list of funny books about death is a short one, and the list of tasteful funny books about death even shorter. In fact, I can't think of another one right now (though I'm sure there must be some). This is a book that it would be entirely appropriate to give to your maiden aunt -- as long as you're absolutely sure of her robust good health, that is. And it also will read best the younger and more healthy the reader is -- to reduce, as much as possible, any hypochondriacal feelings, for one thing -- which means that it behooves you to read it as swiftly as possible, since none of us are ever going to get any younger.


[1] Although almost completely unknown on my side of the pond; the first time I heard his name was in a review of this book, last year.

Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Book-A-Day 2010 # 273 (11/3) -- The Fun Never Stops! by Drew Friedman

Reading Drew Friedman's 2010 book Too Soon? reminded me that I'd missed his 2007 comics collection, The Fun Never Stops!, so I had to remedy that situation as quickly as possible.

As Too Soon? collects Friedman's illustration work for the last two decades, The Fun Never Stops! does the same for his comics, hoovering up most (if not all) of his strips after the periods covered in Any Similarity to Persons Living or Dead Is Purely Coincidental and Warts & All. After a short appreciative foreword by Dan Clowes and a much longer introduction (giving a good account of Friedman's entire career) by Ben Schwartz, Never Stops divides itself into seven possibly-thematically organized sections, all titled "The {some manner of enjoyment} Never Stops!"

Not all of those sections entirely make sense to the outside observer -- "Frolic" is obviously the Duke of Eltingville section, but otherwise they each are a general Friedman goulash, filled with some illustrations and more short stories about minor, mostly aged, celebrities seen semi-sympathetically (if not always coherently) and contemporary celebrities treated somewhat worse, as the latest extrusions from the sausage factory. Friedman always prefers the bizarre juxtaposition, like "America's Love Affair With Ethnics Hollering One Word Over and Over" (9 panels of famous movie moments in which someone yells the same thing twice) or "A Very Jerry Year" (a prediction of several unlikely things that would happen to Jerry Lewis in 2005) or "Fred & Ricky Join NAMBLA" (in which Mr. Mertz and Mr. Ricardo "make love to young boys") or "Everybody's Buddy" (Buddy Rich as a hair-tempered madman) or, at the non-celebrity extreme, "Retired N.Y.C. Elevator Men Theorize on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy."

There are no individual copyright dates -- a few stories have a date incorporated into the art, but the book doesn't provide any list of dates -- but I get the impression that the comics in this book skew much more towards the 1991 side of the subtitle than the 2006 end. (That's hard to determine, though, particularly since Friedman's interests are always with the old and obscure anyway -- a Jerry Lewis strip could be from any time at all, since it's really about the '60s Jerry.) The illustrations may skew somewhat later; Friedman's gotten vastly more illustration work over the past two decades, and 1991 is when that started ramping up.

Drew Friedman comics have to be experienced rather than described; he has a distinctive, warped sensibility, intensely steeped in old pop culture but with an almost literary detachment and a relentless tropism towards ugliness, unlikely connections, and random cultural detritus. What sells it is that unflinchingly realistic drawing style -- when you look at a Drew Friedman picture, you know it must be true in some way, because a fake could never look that good. Never Stops! isn't quite as zany as Any Similarity, nor does the new book have the startling punch that the weight of his early work did. But that's partly because we live in the world molded by Friedman and his fellow travelers in '80s comics and humor -- from Spy magazine to Peter Bagge. He can't shock us as he did simply because it's not the early '80s anymore, and Drew Friedman illustrations have been quietly mocking celebrities from the pages of the biggest publications of the world for two decades now -- in the battle of Friedman vs. the world, the world lost long ago.


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Book-A-Day 2010 # 272 (11/2) -- Will Eisner's The Spirit Archives, Vol. 1

The great foundational classics of a genre often look small and unimpressive several generations later -- the fact that they were foundational meaning that later works have been built up on top of them, and even far above them. Serial works suffer from this more strongly than self-contained, compact stories: a serial story is a journey, and the beginning is neither the end nor the high points along the way, but just the place where it all started.

So the early months of Will Eisner's "The Spirit" -- long lauded as one of the greatest expressions of the comics form ever, by anyone, and a triumph of art on a world-historical level -- will inevitably be a disappointment; they're far below the level that the feature eventually achieved. (I might add that I find much of that praise overblown to begin with; even the best of "The Spirit" is mostly impressive for what Eisner could accomplish within a limited space, using stock characters -- and, like so much of the early history of comics, "great" applies much more to art than to story. [1])

Will Eisner's The Spirit Archives, Vol. 1 reprints the first six months of the "Spirit" story -- June 2 through December 29 issues of 1940 -- as they appeared as a comic-book-sized insert in millions of newspapers across the country. They're adventure stories in the costumed-hero idiom, very much in a talky, mildly populist Golden Age vein, and Eisner was still laying the ground rules of his world in most of these stories.

So the first two issues establish The Spirit's typically unbelievable origin -- he was a young "criminologist" (which here seems to mean "private detective") who was buried after he appeared to be dead after a fight with a villain, but who came back to life and quickly established a huge base and "crime laboratory" in his tomb in the local cemetery. He's omni-competent at this point, like most of his four-color ilk, and the shine won't come off his smile until after the war. The Spirit starts out working hand-in-glove with the local police -- personified by Commissioner Dolan -- but then is driven away by not-entirely-believable plot machinations, and then stays an outlaw to the local police at the same time that he signs up for the draft and becomes a super-secret agent for the US government. (You don't go to Golden Age stories for consistency -- energy, yes, but not consistency.)

The supporting cast -- Dolan, his daughter Ellen, the racist caricature of a cabbie Ebony White -- fills in over the course of this period, and the Spirit also gets a ridiculously useful flying car, which I don't recall at all from later stories. Eisner's art is rough and scratchy to begin with, but gets more graceful and refined -- though still primarily in a Golden Age style -- as the months wear on. There are a couple of femmes fatale here -- notably the lawyer Black Queen -- but they're not as important, central, or alluring as they would become after the war.

This period of "The Spirit" is less interesting as a work in itself than as a bridge, from the usual Golden Age hugger-mugger to the more precise and careful work Eisner did five or ten years later. It's better than the general run of adventure comics of its era, certainly, but that is not particularly high praise.


[1] I reviewed -- using a very loose definition of that word -- The Best of the Spirit back in the summer of 2008, and also covered the 17th volume of this series in one of the periodic clumps of graphic novel reviews I used to do.

Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Book-A-Day 2010 # 271 (11/1) -- Strange Tales, by a whole bunch of people

Strange Tales credits four series editors, one collection editor, two editorial assistants, an assistant editor, an "editor, special projects," a "senior editor, special projects," an editor in chief, a publisher, an executive producer [1], and a Senior Vice President of Sales (for no obvious reason, unless everyone thinks that David Gabriel would have made a really good editor, if his life had gone differently) -- not to mention a partridge in a pear tree and at least ten ever-lovin' lords a-leaping -- so I hope you'll forgive me if I don't spend any more time trying to figure out who did what to make this these stories exist in the first place or turn them into a book. There aren't quite as many suits as they are creative types -- the back of the book credits twenty-seven creators or teams -- but it's a very close race. (And note well that the office types are all up front, while the creative types are relegated to the end -- there isn't even a table of contents to list what's in Strange Tales.) Perhaps that explains why Marvel needs to make so many of its comics $3.99; they seem to be stacked like cordwood at the office, and it can't be cheap to keep all of them fed.

Strange Tales is an anthology of Marvel stories that aren't much like the usual run of Marvel stories, by creators who usually do more personal (and interesting) work than the monthly long-underwear punchfest -- though they all apparently have some interest and and affection for these characters, or they wouldn't have gotten involved. (Everyone's nostalgic for something.) It collects a three-issue series of the same name from 2009 (not to be confused with the various series over the year that have starred Dr. Strange and others), plus Peter Bagge's 2002 one-shot Startling Stories: The Megalomaniacal Spider-Man, for a total of nearly two hundred pages of comics.

But those two hundred pages -- except for Bagge, who has a 23-page Spider-Man story and another 22-pager staring the Hulk -- mostly come in two- or four-page clumps, giving the creators just enough time to set up and then deliver their punchlines. Those punchlines are pretty soft, as well, mostly relying on the juxtaposition of Stan Lee-esque high superhero drama and pronouncements with dull, everyday life. So Jason has Spider-Man moving his fight with Dr. Octopus into a bar to impress Flash Thompson; Max Cannon does the "real" (mundane) versions of the origins of Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four; James Kochalka shows Hulk fighting rainbow versions of himself, and the rain; Nick Bertozzi details MODOK's love troubles with a female minion; and Michael Kupperman sinks low enough to do an Avengers fruit pies joke.

Those pieces -- and the dozen-or-so others on similar lines -- are mildly funny, but they're mostly pretty obvious, and not even as oddball and goofy as the similar DC collections Bizarro Stories. (Of course, DC has a long history of bizarre goofiness, while Marvel has always tired to be as cool and collected as possible -- but there's plenty of What The?! issues with sillier premises than most of the stuff here.)

There are some standouts, though: Stan Sakai's reworking of the Hulk as a samurai is a fully developed, touching, story; Junko Mizuno's version of Spider-Man is childish in all the best ways; Dash Shaw's art style works remarkably well for a Dr. Strange story (that, nevertheless, has a weak punchline ending); Tony Millionaire's Iron Man is an authentically bizarre story about talking luncheon meats; Paul Hornshschemeier has a very talky story that at least is about some interesting ideas; and Matt Kindt takes his now-standard WWII spycraft focus and ports it wholesale into a Black Widow story. But, all in all, Strange Tales is mild and thin, doing the kind of jokes that Fred Hembeck has made a career of for several decades without bringing more than a dash of independent energy and outlook. It's either a wasted opportunity, or exactly what we all should have expected: a sign that a big corporation can co-opt just about anyone it wants to, with the right bait.


[1] Fifty quatloos for anyone with a plausible explanation what such a person does for a book; in films, the EP traditionally is among the most egomaniacial of the money-men, requiring his name to be on the final project though his role was mostly limited to opening his wallet and attempting to seduce starlets.

Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 10/30

As you read this, I'm far away from my usual haunts, and probably in line for some roller coaster or other. But that's no reason why I can't still bore you with a list of the books I saw last week!

As usual, I haven't read any of these yet, and they're a quite diverse mix -- but neither of those, I think, are bad things:

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me is a new collection of fairy-tale retelling, edited by Kate Bernheimer and including stories from forty-one interestingly varied names, from Neil LaBute and Kelly Link to Joyce Carol Oates and Francine Prose, with stops for Aimee Bender, Neil Gaiman, Rikki Ducornet, Shelley Jackson, Karen Joy Fowler, Kathryn Davis, and John Updike. As you might guess from a few of those names -- the ones who are dead, I mean -- this is not an original anthology; all of these stories have been published before, and are only being brought together here for the first time. I will note, mildly, that it seems odd to have a collection of modern fairy-tale retellings without a single story from the pioneering series of books edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling -- but that's the Curse of Genre yet again, I suppose. My Mother She Killed Me is being published in trade paperback by Penguin this month -- right in time for Halloween.

When I saw the new book from Mercedes Lackey in my mail, I was going to say something about how it's been a while since I saw a book from her. But then I checked and realized that she had a new Valdemar hardcover (Intrigues) last month, plus a paperback of a recent Arthurian novel (Gwenhwyfar), and has a Valdemar story collection (Changing the World) in December and another novel (Invasion) in March. So she's plenty busy, and I just haven't been paying attention. (There was a time when I read quite a bit of Lackey, so I fell like I should be keeping an eye on what she's doing -- though, clearly, I haven't been much good at that.) Anyway, this particular new book is called Trio of Sorcery, and it's a Tor hardcover in November, with three brand-new novellas, including new stories about Diana Tregarde (heroine of three very early urban fantasy novels) and Jennifer Talldeer (heroine of Lackey's early novel Sacred Ground). The heroine of the third story here is named Ellen McBride, and I won't swear that she's never appeared in a Lackey book before -- but, if she has, I don't recognize her.

Then I have two deliberately silly books for younger readers, both parodies, both from the same publisher. First, and most obvious, is Harry Potty and the Deathly Boring, a graphic novel parodying you-know-who (no, the nice one, not his no-nose villain) by Stefan Petrucha and Rick Parker. It's being published by Papercutz in November, and it looks to be full of "funny" names -- Dumb-As-A-Door, Nosewarts, Whiny Stranger, Valuemart and the Odor Eaters -- so, if you're looking to see a hugely popular series taken down a peg, here's the place to go.

And last is another book from Papercutz, in their modern revamp of the "Tales from the Crypt" series. It's called Wickeder, and it has three vaguely horror-tinged parody stories -- the title tale, which takes off the Gregory Maguire novel (or, more likely, the musical, or, possibly even more likely, a vague sense of what the musical might be about and a vaguer memory of The Wizard of Oz); a second story about "the Stinky Dead Kid," a Wimpy Kid parody that isn't told in diary form; and "Kill, Baby, Kill," which is either about the BP oil spill or Sarah Palin, or, just maybe, both. It will be out in November.

Read in October

This was the month when I completely forgot about Antick Musings' fifth anniversary -- and I'm not going back to catch up, so I'll let any interested parties troll through the archives themselves -- in my pursuit of Book-A-Day. (Even more so, since I was pushing to get far enough ahead for my November vacation to look seamless -- I'm almost there as I write this, and it looks like Book-A-Day will continue to chug away even while I'm not around.)

And, since I was still doing Book-A-Day, this is, once again, just a list of links:

• Kazuto Okada, Sundome, Vol. 7 (10/1)
  
• Graham Roumieu, Me Write Book (10/2)
  
• Fabio Moon & Gabriel Ba, De:Tales (10/3)
  
• David B. and Pierre MacOrlan, The Littlest Pirate King (10/3)
  I wrote about this in my graphic novels column for Realms of Fantasy, but it would have been for the February issue, and the magazine folded before that. Update: RoF has since un-folded, so my review should appear in due time.
  
• Mitch Schauer and Mike Vosberg, RIP M.D. (10/3)
  I wrote about this in my graphic novels column for Realms of Fantasy, but it would have been for the February issue, and the magazine folded before that. Update: RoF has since un-folded, so my review should appear in due time.
• Drew Friedman, Too Soon? (10/4)
  
• I*n Fl*ming, Alligator (10/4)
  
• Kathryn & Stuart Immonen, Moving Pictures (10/5)
  
• Greg Rucks and J.H. Williams III, Batwoman: Elegy (10/6)
  
• Jonathan Lethem, Karl Rusnak, Farel Dalrymple, and Paul Hornschemeier, Omega the Unknown (10/7)
  
• Stephane Blanquet, Toys in the Basement (10/7)
  I wrote about this in my graphic novels column for Realms of Fantasy, but it would have been for the February issue, and the magazine folded before that. Update: RoF has since un-folded, so my review should appear in due time.
• Anthony Lappe and Dan Goldman, Shooting War (10/8)
  
• Julia Wertz, Drinking at the Movies (10/11)
  
• Alan Moore and various artists, Supreme: The Story of the Year (10/12)
  
• Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio, editors, Stories (10/12)
  
• Holly Black and Ted Naifeh, The Good Neighbors, Book Two: Kith (10/13)
  
• Fred Van lente, Dean Koontz, and Queenie Chan, Odd Is On Our Side (10/14)
  
• Carrie Vaughn, Kitty Raises Hell (10/14)
  
• Simon Gardenfors, 120 Days of Simon (10/15)
  
• Jason, Werewolves of Montpelier (10/16)
  
• Darwyn Cooke, Richard Stark's Parker: The Outfit (10/18)
  
• Lars Martinson, Tonoharu, Part Two (10/19)
  
• Bob Sehlinger & Len Testa, The Unofficial Guide: The Color Companion to Walt Disney World (10/19)
  
• Charles Burns, X'ed Out (10/20)
  
• S.G. Browne, Fated (10/20)
  
• Bob Sehlinger & Len Testa, The Unofficial Guide: Walt Disney World 2011 (10/20)
  
• Mike Mignola et. al., Hellboy: Masks and Monsters (10/21)
  
• Various, Strange Tales (10/22)
  
• Will Eisner's The Spirit Archives, Vol. 1 (10/22)
  
• Drew Friedman, The Fun Never Stops! (10/23)
  
• Miles Kington, How Shall I Tell the Dog? (10/24)
  
• Mike Mignola, The Amazing Screw-On Head and Other Curious Objects (10/24)
  
• Matt Kindt, Revolver (10/25)
  
• Chris Roberson & Shawn McManus, Cinderella: From Fabletown With Love (10/26)
  
• Kage Baker, The Bird of the River (10/26)
  
• Will Dinski, Fingerprints (10/27)
• Mark Crilley, Miki Falls, Vol. 3: Autumn (10/28)
• Lewis Trondheim, Mister I (10/29)
• Will Eisner's The Spirit Archives, Vol. 3 (10/29)
  

As you read this, I'm probably on a theme-park ride. Hope you're doing something equally exciting.