Question AH Cover

 

Next installment of my review of THE QUESTION will be ready soon, I hope, until then here's a 1989 fanzine cover for the series done by Denys Cowan. Some interesting interviews and articles in that issue as well.

Also, since it came up on the Denny O'Neil board that the old Question fansite was defunct, I decided to adopt one of its old features, the complete list of O'Neil's recommended reading from each issues.

WALT & SKEEZIX by Frank King

WALT & SKEEZIX collects the compete GASOLINE ALLEY daily strips by Frank King from 1921 and 1922(*). Shortly into this run, of course, lead character Walt Wallet discovered a newborn baby on his porch, named him Skeezix, and what had been a strip largely about car-related jokes (although those also continued for a while) became one of the few long-running strips to move forward in real-time (continuing to this day, though several cartoonists later).

(*) the strip actually began in late 1918, the first two years probably to be collected down the line a bit)

I was only mildly familiar with the strip, largely through reading some of the Dick Moores era stories in Rick Norwood's COMICS REVUE, a few Frank King Sunday pages from various books and, oddly, the parody "Gasoline Valley" by Kurtzman/Elder in MAD #15 (one of my favourite MAD stories).


Having now read the first two-thirds of this book, I'm glad Drawn & Quarterly have decided to make the effort to reprint them. It's a fascinating read, King was obviously a very skilled illustrator and writer from the start, but very much feeling out an entirely new form with this strip (there are some odd examples of that like when he feels the need to point out that a gap between panels represented several hours, when obviously all that would be used later is a caption saying "Hours later"). A few months into the book he does an extended sequence of some of the cast taking a trip to Yellowstone, which has some interesting storytelling and gags, and in the second year a very good storyline about the cast investing in an oil-well scam.

Of course there are a few things that don't work, mostly those that seem to involve topical references that are now obscure. And the very odd almost monthly strips showing how hen-pecked all the married men are, ending with Walt bragging about how good he has it as a bachelor. And of course the regrettable appearance of the black maid Rachel, although as is pointed out in the introduction, she's at least for the most part represented as a real character unlike many cartoons of the day with black characters of similar appearance.

There's some very impressive reproduction on the work, given the age and the newsprint source material. As a bonus, the inside of the dust-jacket (it's one of those Chris Ware designed books, so you never know where stuff will be printed) has an example of King's original art at close to full size for one strip, and while it does make you regret that the whole book couldn't be printed from similar source material, it does show that what we get is pretty faithful.

In addition to two full years of daily strips, the book also has some extensive biographical information on King, supplemented by some stunningly well preserved items from his family archives, photos going back to the 1800s and early cartooning work, a "drawing lesson" feature he did and an autobiographical piece done in the 1950s for the centennial of his hometown (and inspiration for Gasoline Alley) Tomah, Wisconsin.

A very impressive package, and future volumes should be equally interesting.

EC - Machine From Nowhere (Harrison)

Machine From Nowhere
by Harry Harrison
Weird Science #14[#3] (1950)

Harrison did a handful of stories for the early New Trend, mostly in collaboration with Wallace Wood, but a few solo. Of course before long he moved on, and became much better known for his prose science-fiction than for his comics.

This is the only one of his solo jobs I've seen, and it's really little more than average. It's about a scientist who finds himself building a strange machine that came to him in his dreams. A small ship then emerges from the machine and flies out to get uranium, which vanishes into the device. In the end he finds out it's a time machine from a post-nuclear war future, sent to get enough fuel to enable the remnants of humanity to move to another world.

The art's a bit bland compared to the heavy styles of most of the regular EC artists, but it does tell the story. The story itself doesn't have many surprises, but was probably more fresh a half-century ago.

Various things

Michael Ryan interviews Stephen R. Bissette on the subject of TYRANT and other things over at the Palaeoblog.

Dark Horse plans reprints of Joe Kubert's TARZAN (originally published by DC from 1972). Expensive hardcover editions, unfortunately, but still good stuff. Hopefully the reproduction source will be good, unlike their recent hardcovers of Gold Key material.

Interview with Charles Vess, well worth reading, about his BOOK OF BALLADS. Good to hear it seems to have been doing well.

WHO Triple Play

Took out three more (sort of) DOCTOR WHO tapes from my library.

"The Androids of Tara" I mostly liked. It's a Tom Baker episode in the middle of the season where he and the original Romana (who I like better than the replacement Romana) were sent to find the pieces of the Key of Time, or some such. Kind of a goofy story that involves a medievel world which for some reason has some high tech like life-like androids, and a princess who is convieniently a dead-ringer for Romana. Some fun stuff. K-9 has a big role in this one, and I still haven't decided what I think of him. On one hand, funny sometimes, and played off Tom Baker well. On the other hand, a freaking robot dog?

"Mawdryn Undead", a Peter Davison episode, was a bit of wasted potential, with the return of the Brigadier, which should have led to a much more entertaining story, but didn't. Massively disjointed storyline, several scenes seemed missing, so I wonder if it was originally written for more than four episodes. And this episode featured the introduction of the one thing DOCTOR WHO needs less than a robot dog, a sullen teenage boy as a new companion, Turlough (one that the other companions didn't seem to care much about, as part of the disjointed nature of the story is that they're constantly forgetting Turlough was supposed to be around). And set up as a traitor by the horribly overacting Black Guardian as well. I didn't watch too much of the Davison DW originally, but I remember seeing the beginnings of a few when they were showing complete serials on weekend afternoons on the local PBS station and finding the companions kind of lame. I do think Davison seems good, but didn't have the material to work with.

The third one I got kind of confused me for a minute. It's called "The Curse of Fatal Death", which I almost didn't reserve because the title sounded so dumb. Then I picked it up and the cover lists Rowan Atkinson as the Doctor, and I wondered if I somehow missed that in my knowledge of DW chronology. Of course checking the back revealed that it was a parody special done for charity. Anyway, best thing I can say is that the money went to a good cause. There were a few amusing jokes, a lot more misses. The "making of" documentary was more entertaining, especially the fans who lent their expertise in making the TARDIS sets and the Daleks (which they'd made for a fan film project). Also on the tape are three parodies from various UK sketch comedy shows, none of which are brilliant but are generally better than "Fatal Death". Shorter, at least.

THE QUESTION by O'Neil/Cowan #7 - #11

 

Got delayed on my QUESTION re-reading during the hiatus. Last time I got up to #6.

#7 brings us "Survivor", the story of long-time Hub City gambling kingpin Volk and his attempts to come clean. Oh, and he's also a wolf of some sort. This is a nice example of how the occasional fantasy elements were handled in the series, in a sort of sideways "did it happen, what does it mean" kind of way instead of the more explicit uses of fantasy in most super-hero comics. A lot of really nice scenes for Cowan/Magyar to shine.

#8 is another one of my favourites, "Mikado", about Vic's search for a connection in a string of "fitting vengeance" related attacks in the city accompanied by a figure dressed in a Mikado costume quoting Gilbert and Sullivan's opera. This is a really well constructed story, does a great job of bringing up a few questions, keeping up the suspense and moving along the overall plot of the series.

#9 - #11 form the three part Santa Prisca story, where Vic's scientist pal (and inventor of his faceless mask) Aristotle Rodor gets kidnapped and taken down to the tropical crime haven and Vic has to follow. A lot of nice scenes on the way down there, I especially liked the bit where Vic has a flashback to his college days and then goes for information to a guy from those days, now in the DEA.

Down in Santa Prisca, the story takes a turn for the weird as we find out that the kidnapper is a drug lord who simultaneously revels in and is repulsed by his own sadistic behaviour, and who hopes to use Rodor's scientific knowledge to transform mud to gold and cleanse his soul. It's an interesting echo of some of the major conflicts that Vic faces in himself in the course of the series, and ends with a similar use of magic as we saw in #7.

Next time around, a few more favourite stories, including a trip to the northwest and a meeting with the local hero, who O'Neil had some experience with.

More WHO

Got caught up on the new DOCTOR WHO series with the last few episodes. Still nice, although a few things always feel off in every episode. Nothing I can quite put my finger on, but sometimes they seem to just be trying too hard to be cute or clever, and it really doesn't work (or sometimes does work, but not in the context of the series). Fortunately that's the minority of the time, and for the most part they deliver dopey sci-fi in the best DOCTOR WHO tradition.

Only watched one original series serial recently (got quite a few waiting for me to pick up from the library), and interestingly it had a lot of the same problems. It was "City of Death", a late Tom Baker era story I hadn't seen before. Overall I liked it a lot, and the parts of it that fit DOCTOR WHO fit beautifully. However, there were quite a few things that didn't, starting with the Paris setting. It would be fine if there weren't all these superfluous scenes of the characters running through Paris just to show that they were really there. It was also kind of odd seeing Douglas Adams credited with story editor, and realizing halfway through that he must have done a lot more than that, since a hugh part of the plot is identical to a Dirk Gently novel (a bit of web research shows that Adams did in fact co-write the episode under a fake name). Those parts were good, I'm a big fan of Adams, but they really didn't fit the series as well as they could have.

I have to say, I also really did not dig Romana as a companion much. I'm not sure why in the middle of the Baker years they started to move away from the companions being from contemporary Earth and had them from other worlds and times, but I'm pretty sure it was a mistake (and moreso making another Time-Lord a companion), and am glad they went back to the more traditional sort for the new show.