Superman - Kryptonite Nevermore [2009] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Superman - Kryptonite Nevermore [2009]

The "DC Comics Classics Library" was a short-lived line of hardcovers published by DC from 2009 to 2010, with only nine releases. It seemed pretty ill-conceived, and some of the choices of what to include were frankly inexplicable, but that's another discussion.

The most interesting book in the line was this, the first release (and the only book of the nine I picked up, and even that was on sale several years after the fact for far less than the US$40 list price), featuring a nine issue run of SUPERMAN from 1971, #233-238,240-242 (the missing issue being a reprint giant, which they did instead of Annuals at the time). This was a run by Dennis O'Neil, Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson (with one issue inked by Dick Giordano, and covers mostly by Neal Adams). #233 was also the first issue of Julius Schwartz's editorial run on the book, replacing long-time editor Mort Weisinger, which would last until 1986.

It's a fairly famous run which, except for the first chapter and a few 1980s digests, had mostly been unreprinted for almost 40 years.

This is also a rare example of a DC or Marvel reprint apparently sourced entirely from scans of published comics. Generally for comics of this vintage they seem to go back to the original art or copies of that art, recoloured in modern techniques with or without any attempt at fidelity to the original printed colours.  Even when they have to use printed comics as the source material in most cases they seem to isolate the black lines of the original art (by physical or digital means) to reconstruct an approximation of the original art and recolour that. Not the case with this book. DC used this kind of technique for some 1940s material (some Kirby&Simon material I know for sure, I recall hearing about some others), but not so much for material of this era. The only example I know for sure was the 1970s Kirby/Simon "reunion" on Sandman, which was scanned when reprinted with earlier 1940s Sandman material, and recoloured when reprinted with other 1970s Kirby material. 

I don't think it was the rule for this line of books, where most of the books included material already recently reprinted with the usual techniques. I guess it was experiment in this kind of reprint, and given how it's not used now probably a failed experiment. I have kind of mixed feelings. Part of me likes the esthetic of reprints that look as much like the original as possible, which you don't often get with reprints with shiny new colours on shiny paper. On the other hand, I don't think the technology was quite there in 2009 to do a great job with reprints sourced from aging newsprint, and they made a few specific choices in this particular reprint that I disagree with.  Also, for reprints of this era (where the original colouring was limited and largely anonymous) my interest is in getting the best possible view of the linework, so the closer the source material is to the original art, the better. There's a reason a huge mass of my collection is black and white reprints of colour comics (well, besides price, that was also a big factor).

(just checked, they did a new edition last year, with the usual recolouring they do for most comics of that era. And 25% cheaper, twelve years later)

It's also kind of odd that they go with "Krytonite Nevermore" as the title of this collection. That's the cover blurb from the first issue, and the plot of that issue has one of the innovations planned to mark the new Schwartz era, the elimination of kryptonite as Superman's weakness, being way too common a plot device in the later Weisinger era stories (it didn't take, kryptonite was back soon enough), but the absence of kryptonite is barely mentioned as more than a footnote after the first issue. The main thrust of the story was the duplicate "Sand Superman" created at the same time as the accidental elimination of kryptonite. This duplicate lurks in the background of most of the stories after that, stealing Superman's powers, until the big finale.

This depowering of Superman was one of the other innovations planned for the new Schwartz era, as Superman's powers has gradually increased in over 30 years of continuous publication to a ridiculous level, and the thought was that toning them down a bit might make for more interesting stories. This change also didn't take, Superman was as powerful as ever soon after, maybe even more powerful in some later Schwarz stories than he ever was under Weisinger. Anyway, before this book I mostly heard the stories called the "Sand Superman" stories, not "Kryptonite Nevermore", which describes them better.

Anyway, I'd read about half of these as back issues before getting this book, including the beginning and the end. Overall I'd have to say they're okay. Flawed in a lot of ways, but with some interesting ambitions, and an important step in the history of Superman.

The best part is the art. This is pretty much the middle of Curt Swan's reign as the principal Superman artist. He'd been drawing Superman related stuff among other work since 1950, but from about 1955 on Superman was his main job, and it was a rare Superman comic that didn't have a Swan story or cover.  And of course he continued as main Superman artist until the 1986 reboot, and still returned to the character on a regular basis until he passed away in 1996.

While he's always good and professional, from what I've seen some of the late 1960s work is a little bit less inspired, either because he was drawing essentially the same scene for the twelfth time or he had less compatible inkers.  For this run he was inked by Murphy Anderson, a great artist in his own right. Actually, he started inking Swan regularly on covers a year before this, and on stories a few months earlier, and continued on a regular basis for a few years, plus some later returns (including a great run of ACTION COMICS WEEKLY with a 2-page Superman serial formatted like a newspaper Sunday page). It's probably the best extended run of high quality and artistically compatible inking that Swan ever got.

It probably also helped that he was asked to draw a lot of things that he hadn't done before. In addition to the kryptonite being gone, so are Superman's regular villains, so no third battle this month with Luthor and Brainiac, we get some different situations. Sometimes ridiculous, but different.

And there we get to the problem. Now, I'm as big a fan of Dennis O'Neil as you're likely to encounter today. But even O'Neil will admit (as he does in the afterword to this book), that he was an ill-fit for Superman. At this time this run started, he was still on Green Lantern and a regular on the Batman books, both celebrated and oft-reprinted runs for editor Schwartz. On this though, he didn't quite seem to gel. He had some interesting ideas, but ultimately it seems that wasn't the direction for Superman, and he ends the story in a kind of abrupt way, involving the then-current jumpsuited Diana Prince and unfortunately named I-Ching from WONDER WOMAN. 

Ironically, it seems that a Weisinger carryover, Cary Bates, was the one who gave Schwartz what he wanted, and he was a mainstay on the books with Swan until the 1986 reboot, complete with a full-powered Superman and regular appearances of kryptonite and the classic Superman villains. So I think they misdiagnosed the patient when they tried to operate back in 1970...

So, a book with some merits and some demerits, not nearly worth full price, but worth what I paid for it.

This also includes an introduction by Paul Levitz, an afterword by Dennis O'Neil and  some house ads for the Superman revamp of the era (which including Jack Kirby's run on JIMMY OLSEN).

Epicurus The Sage [2003] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Epicurus The Sage [2003]

This is a compete collection of Epicurus The Sage stories by William Messner-Loebs and Sam Kieth, previously published as two books in 1989 and 1991, a short 1993 anthology story in FAST FORWARD #3 and a fourth story, new to this volume. The original books were published by Piranha Press, DC's short lived creator-owned imprint (1989 to, just barely, 1994, with only a handful of publications after 1992). This book is published by Cliffhanger, an imprint of Wildstorm, by this time an imprint of DC after it was an imprint of Image.

At the time of the first book Messner-Loebs was mostly working as a writer, in the middle of his run of FLASH, and just off a well-regarded run on JONNY QUEST, although a few years earlier he was best known as an artist, on his own book JOURNEY and also on Michael T. Gilbert's MR. MONSTER.  Kieth had just made a splash with the SANDMAN series he co-created with Mike Dringenberg and Neil Gaiman, leaving that after five issues. He'd soon be doing some popular things over at Marvel before he and Messner-Loebs would re-unite to considerable success over on Kieth's THE MAXX series.

But back to this book, it's the tale of the philosopher Epicurus, living in Athens and trying to establish himself among other better known philosophers like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle (yes, the dates don't match up). This ahistorical version of Ancient Greece winds up being meddled with by the Gods of Olympus, who appear to be even more foolish and, with their powers, dangerous than the mortals. Epicurus, his best friend Plato and young Alexander the Great (who they wind up taking care of) do their best to sort things out.

 

I was nineteen, just the right age to be a mark for the Piranha line, and had been reading SANDMAN from the start and enjoyed Kieth's work there, and liked some of Messner-Loebs work (can't recall offhand what I read before this and what after), so the first book ("Visiting Hades") was a surprisingly easy buy for me, even at $10 at a time when many comics I bought were still $1. Didn't regret it for a minute, loved that first book from the first page, read it over and over. And a year later I took a philosophy course and actually understood even more of the jokes.

Happy to report that it still holds up, though to be honest it's only been a year or so since I last read it, and it's never been more than three years between readings.

The second book ("The Many Loves Of Zeus"), well, after that almost sure to be a let-down, and it was, but still enjoyable.  Kieth's art is starting to get really out there, into a style which served him well, and the story has a bit less focus, but I still liked it.

I didn't get FAST FORWARD when it came out (don't recall even seeing it, but I got it since), so that story  ("Riding The Sun") was  new to me. It's in black and white, and looks great. It stretches the anachronisms even further, if possible, with our heroes meeting Homer. Really liked this one, Kieth's art is a bit more like the first book, and it's a solid story.

The final story ("Helen's Boys") is new to this book, over a decade later (though I'm not clear on when it was done, feels like it might have at least been started closer to the first two books, maybe abandoned and finished later, but that's just speculation). It's a bit of a muddle, re-telling bits of the story of the Trojan War through a Messner-Loebs/Kieth lens before dealing with the aftermath while Epicurus, Plato and Alexander flee Athens after Socrates is killed.  Yeah, the timeline is well and truly busted by now. If there's ever a fifth story I'm sure they'll meet Immanuel Kant...

I liked bits, I can see the bones of a good story, at least as good as the second book, in here, but it doesn't come together in the end. If it was an abandoned third book it's nine pages shorter than the first two, which might have helped flesh it out.

Anyway, on balance, the first and third stories are really great, and the other two have their moments, even if they suffer by comparison to the company they keep.

TV - The Nevers (2021)

THE NEVERS is a theoretically on-going series created by Joss Whedon, although thanks to revelations about his behaviour on previous projects his name is used as little as contractually possible in publicity for the show.  It aired a short six episode series in 2021, a second series (produced without Whedon's active involvement) is allegedly in production but unscheduled.  Whether it continues beyond that is unknown at this time.

I generally think Whedon's work is... okay. Maybe not a fair way to state it. I think most of his work has some very good points, and can rise to excellence, but is always flawed in many ways, and I'm not sure he's ever hit a home run. Which makes him on balance... okay.

That's pretty much where THE NEVERS lands so far, as well. The series is set in 1899 London, three years after a mysterious event gave a variety of people in the London area (mostly, but not exclusively, women) random super-powers, called their "Turns", while those with powers are called "Touched". One group of these people have been gathered together in an orphanage, financed by a wheelchair bound matriarch and led by brassy young Touched named Amalia True, whose Turn involves glimpses of the future and clearly knows a lot more than she's telling.

A lot of this is really just X-Men meets Buffy in Victorian England, remixing old bits while adding just enough new things to make it not as stale. Amidst mostly bog-standard super-powers they manage to come up with a few clever "Turns" for the characters that I haven't seen before (but then I don't really keep up with the current comics, much less the dozens of TV shows now on).  The first few episodes are really promising, those that are written or directed by either Whedon or his frequent collaborator Jane Espenson. Seemed like a solid show at that point, if a bit too blatantly reveling in being free of the restrictions of Whedon's previous network/syndicated TV shows, with some nudity and swearing that seem more like an HBO mandate than organic.

Falls off a bit after that, parts of the middle of the season feel like a parody of old Buffy episodes.  Whedon's tricks are old but still effective, and have become part of the culture but are still very easy to mess up. Improves a bit in the penultimate episode, which has some of the best bits of the series.

Then the finale in the big turn, where everything you know is wrong, secrets are revealed and all that usual noise. I didn't care for that. It probably comes a bit too early in the run of the show, it needed a bit more to establish where we are before upending everything, and at this point I think it makes it a less interesting show.

I'm about 50/50 on whether I'll watch the next series of episodes if/when they're ever available.  There's enough stuff to like in the concept, but it did seem to need Whedon's direct hand, which will be absent. Well, I'll cross that bridge if I ever come to it.

Usagi Yojimbo - Yokai [2009] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Usagi Yojimbo - Yokai [2009]

This was an original hardcover painted colour comic created by Stan Sakai to celebrate the 25th anniversary of his rabbit samurai character Miyamoto Usagi (now rapidly closing in on his 40th anniversary). Up to this point Usagi had mostly appeared in black and white comics, with some forays into colour, but usually standard comic colouring (mostly by Tom Luth). Sakai had painted a few covers and short stories, but nothing this extensive before, a full 56-page painted story.

Pretty much classic Sakai, one of the most dependable comics being published for almost four decades now. This is one of the Usagi stories with a supernatural element ("yokai" being translated as "haunts"), as he winds up in a dark forest and encounters various demonic creatures of either Japanese myth or Sakain imagination attempting to complete a once-a-century ritual to enable them to conquer the world of the living. Fortunately he encounters an ally from earlier in his years of wandering.

Sakai is always masterful, but it's a special treat to see him flex some other muscles like he does in this story. Not just the colouring, which is suitably gloomy when it needs to be, and also well suits the variety of strange creatures he brings in, but this also has a more open storytelling format than the standard Usagi story, with fewer panels per page, a greater use of splash pages and double page spreads and a generally quicker pace. 

This includes a short interview with Sakai, along with an example of the creative process of the book, with eight steps in the process to create one panel.

The story was reprinted in the USAGI YOJIMBO SAGA LEGENDS collection in 2017.

Patty Cake Vol. 1 Sugar & Spice... Mostly Spice [2001] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Patty Cake Vol. 1 Sugar & Spice... Mostly Spice [2001]

This is a collection of some of the earliest of Scott Roberts’ long-running PATTY CAKE series, taken from the first three (of nine) issues self-published by Roberts (as Permanent Press) in 1994-1995. By the time of this book it was on the fourth series, being published by Slave Labor imprint Amaze Ink, eventually seeing at least 44 issues by 2005, many of them double sized, with as many as 52 pages of content from cover to cover.

This is pretty good stuff. I first read this material a few years after it was done, after I'd already some of Roberts' later work. I think he improved very quickly and is much more confident and polished within a year, but there's a lot of heart and potential in this rough earlier material. Roberts is heavily inspired by classic humour comics, most notably Harvey Kurtzman, with a frantic energy and an anything-for-the-gag ethos. Even early on he varies the contents from longer stories to single page strips, pin-ups, phony ads and activity pages. He also introduces a few of the cast of family and friends that join young Patricia Bakerman in her journey to discover how the world works, a cast which would grow much more in later issues.

I think my favourite story in this collection is "Surprise Twist", a 16-page epic about Patty Cake's father taking her on a shopping trip. To the surprise of no one who's taken a kid shopping, it doesn't go well.  It's a real emotional roller coaster, and Roberts cartooning is really excellent in catching every single feeling Patty Cake goes through.  A nice glimpse of the kind of stuff Roberts would be doing more often in years to come.

Strip AIDS U.S.A. [1988] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Strip AIDS U.S.A. [1988]

This is an anthology edited by Trina Robbins, Robert Triptow and Bill Sienkiewicz, published by Last Gasp and inspired by the STRIP AIDS anthology published the previous year in the UK. It was designed to raise funds for an AIDS charity and awareness about the disease.

Most of the pieces were newly created for this book. The notable exception are five pages of syndicated newspaper comics addressing the issue scattered throughout the book, led by Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury.

Obviously this is an artefact of its time, almost always well meaning, so hard to criticize, often strident in a way that's understandable in the context of the time, but sometimes awkward now.

For me the highlight was "Mourning Son", a story set in the world of TALES FROM THE HEART by Cindy Goff, Rafael Nieves and Seitu Hayden, a series based on Goff's experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa in the early 1980s. Great little story looking at the issues from a different angle from the other stories.  Man, that series really was one of the great unfinished symphonies of 1980s comics...

Too many other things to talk about, and sometimes hard to find them with the lack of a table of contents (this listing is therefore invaluable). A few other highlights were by Howard Cruse, William Messner-Loebs, Alison Bechdel, Gilbert Hernandez and Jaime Hernandez.

State of the weblog address, 2022

Hm, I've actually posted quite a bit in the last few weeks, and not just obituary posts. That had to come as a surprise to my regular reader(s?).

So, what's up with that?  Well, I pass this "beautiful, gory layout" a few dozen times a day (and there's another bookcase, plus some stuff in boxes). 

This is almost every comic publication I have not in standard US comic book format, over 1800 individual items. But sometimes it seems I keep re-reading the same five books (slight exaggerations). Most of these I've read, although some not in decades (and my memory's not so good these days). A good number I started but never got around to finishing. Some of them I never got around to reading, either because I got them with a pile of other things I was more eager to read or wasn't in the mood for at the time and they just got lost in the shuffle. So I've decided to take a stab at (re)-reading all of it over the next few years. I figure at one book I day I can manage that in five years. So I grabbed two dozen of the books at a whim, pretty much one from each shelf, and every day I try to read at least a bit of each. I make up complicated rules on how much I can read a day (which I freely ignore if I get caught up in a section).  Been working pretty good so far, finished about 20 books in the last two weeks (replacing each in the reading pile with another from the same shelf).

This coincided with me having the urge to write some more on this weblog, so as you might have seen, lots of unusual activity lately. For some reason my instinct right now is to write too much, I feel an odd need to run down the history of the characters, the creators, the publisher and my personal history with the book. Trust me, the posts you see are nothing compared to the first drafts that make the screen, much less the zeroth drafts in my head.  I'll probably settle down a bit after a while, to just a quick comment on each book. Longer than a tweet, but not by much.

Also been trying to catch up a bit on some TV shows and movies. For a little while I've been mostly resorting to comfort watching, stuff I've been multiple times before that requires minimal attention. Got a huge backlog of available stuff to watch, as you might have seen on recent posts about THE PRISONER and BELGRAVIA. Expect more of those, but not exclusively British. Although I am almost done with TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY, and have some DOCTOR WHO to watch. And could catch up on TASKMASTER. And have heard good things about THE IN-BETWEENERS. Okay, maybe exclusively British...

THE EXCAVATOR by J. M. DeMatteis (with Vassilis Gogtzilas)

Hot off the digital press is THE EXCAVATOR, a new novella by J.M. DeMatteis, copiously illustrated by Vassilis Gogtzilas with a cover and ten interior illustrations. The pair previously collaborated on the AUGUSTA WIND comics.  Details on the new book, including many of the illustrations and a long sample, over on the publisher's site.

I've written more than once about my affection for many of DeMatteis' comics before, a field he's been prolific in for over four decades. His prose fiction is much more rare, with only the novel IMAGINALIS and the prose sections of ABADAZAD before this (both very enjoyable). While those were children's literature, heavily influenced by classic work by the likes of Lewis Carroll and L Frank Baum, this new one is definitely an adult story.

I highly recommend it, and it's a bargain at 99 cents (even better, included with Kindle Unlimited in Canada, not sure about other places). It moves fast, has a lot of twists, ends up in an interesting place and manages to put in a lot of emotional depth intertwined with the fantasy narrative.

Might spoil some stuff best discovered in reading after this point.

It begins very much like a classic TV anthology show, like the TWILIGHT ZONE (a show DeMatteis has some experience with), with the story of a woman who suddenly finds that all the memories of one of her children have vanished. This is disturbing enough, then she finds the memories are being held for ransom with the threat of more erasures, or excavations as the blackmailer calls them.

At this point I think I've got a handle on it, it's going to be a ZONE thing (or maybe BLACK MIRROR, with some early references to dark web crypto payments for the ransom). But then the FBI get involved, and it becomes more of a dark action/horror story, with hints of police procedurals. Then there are several more twists. Very well paced, and very well told in a visual manner as you'd expect from someone with as much comic book and screenplay experience as DeMatteis, every step of the way I could see this mentally as a comic book or as a movie. The Gogtzilas illustrations help with that as well, all moody and full of foreboding. I did have one little plot quibble still open at the end, but it was minor, and I may just have missed something.

It ends in a place where there could very much be further stories in this world (in fact, I wouldn't be surprised to one day see this adapted as the two-hour pilot to an EXCAVATOR series for one of the fifty streaming services available now). If there are, I'll be there for it.

Doctor Strange - Into Shamballa [1986] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Doctor Strange - Into Shamballa [1986]

This book by Dan Green (writer/artist) and J. M. Dematteis (writer) featuring the Steve Ditko created character Doctor Strange.  It's part of Marvel's "graphic novel" line, launched in 1982. They'd stopped numbering the line shortly before this, but external numbering by release date puts it as #23 of 75 releases between 1982 and 1993.

DeMatteis had only written a fill-in for the character a few years earlier, but also wrote him extensively in DEFENDERS. He'd later have a short run on the regular series in 1995 and a DEFENDERS miniseries in 2005.  Green is mostly known as an inker, following some early 1970s full art jobs at DC, but he did pencil a few issues of DOCTOR STRANGE in 1983, as well as inking a Gene Colan run on the book before that.

I'll admit, the first time I read this book, maybe 25 years ago, I didn't care for it that much. It's told in an odd way, mostly through captions presenting a second person narration directly addressing Doctor Strange, lettered in an elaborate calligraphy by Ken Bruzenak (back before computer lettering was common, so presumably done by hand), with minimal dialogue. I recall it all seemed very pretty but more than a little pretentious.

I liked it much more this time around, maybe because I've read a lot more DeMatteis comics in that time, so I'm more used to his rhythms. I really had to slow down a bit reading it from my instinctive speed. I found it helped to read it out loud. Slowing down also helps to appreciate Green's artwork, which is way ahead of its time for fully painted super-hero artwork. Just lovely stuff when you take the time to appreciate it.

Overall it's an interesting interpretation of Strange, sent on a mission around the world to complete a spell at the behest of his deceased master. Not sure it's exactly in line with how I see the character, but I think it's a valid version. I remember being not entirely satisfied with his short 1990s run on the character, I'll have to try it again some day (I think it makes a brief reference to this story).

DeMatteis was interviewed for an Italian reprint of the story, posted here. The story's never been reprinted in English, but Marvel has of late taken to incorporating their "graphic novel" line in the appropriate place in their chronological Epic reprints, so this will probably be in one of those within a few years.

Doug Wildey's Rio - The Complete Saga [2012] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Doug Wildey's Rio - The Complete Saga [2012]

Doug Wildey was best known for his animation work, in particular the creation of the 1964 show JONNY QUEST. He had a few stints in comics, including a lot of well-regarded western stories published by Marvel in the 1950s. He had a few minor returns to comics, the major one in later years being the adventures of Rio, a wandering gun-for-hire in the old west.  First published by Eclipse in their ECLIPSE MONTHLY anthology, it would later be published by Comico, Marvel and Dark Horse. At the time of his 1994 death Wildey had an unpublished book featured the character completed and another one in progress.

This large hardcover collection from IDW brings in everything available from Wildey's work, almost 300 pages, including those two unpublished books, with all but ten pages photographed from Wildey's original artwork.  The first three stories (from ECLIPSE MONTHLY) were done with traditional comic book colours, so are black and white here (except for the pages that had to be sourced from printed comics). After that Wildey did fully painted artwork, so the stories are full colour as published, but without some of the production clean-up. Pretty much like one of the publisher's "Artist's Edition" line, except not the full size of the original art.

I was a big fan of Wildey's RIO back when I encountered it getting back issues of ECLIPSE MONTHLY, where it was definitely the highlight, and was lucky enough to still be able to find the subsequent books. It was one of the best realized western comics I've ever read, with lush realistic rendering and complex stories with a lot of plot twists and humour. I was thrilled to discover two decades later that there were two more stories to read, and made the uncharacteristic decision to spring for an oversized hardcover brand new, figuring a softcover was unlikely (I lost that bet, a smaller softcover came out in 2014, but I'm still glad I got this one).

The original stories are better than ever in this format. The early ones look sharp without the colour. In fact, Wildey does enough shading and tone work that it's hard to believe he drew it for colour (I'll have to check if it was announced for the black and white ECLIPE MAGAZINE before that was converted to the colour ECLIPSE MONTHLY).  The painted stories look as good as ever.

The completed unpublished story is "Red Dust In Tombstone", featuring some of the famous residents of that town, might be my favourite Rio story.  Lots of nice touches in it.

"Reprisal" is the unfinished story, although the level of unfinished varies from page to page, sometimes wildly within panels of the same page. Almost half the pages are pretty much done, while a few are in layouts, with penciled in dialogue and a few pages more tightly rendered. You can still read the whole thing, and it's another great story, part of me wishes he was able to get it done while another part is glad to have it in this form, just to see how he worked.

Art Adams' Creature Features [1996] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Art Adams' Creature Features [1996]

No secret that Art Adams, he likes the monsters. This collection brings together a few examples of that from the previous few years, under a new cover by Adams and with a goofy introduction by Geof Darrow.

First up is his 1993 adaptation of the 1954 movie CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, written by Steve Moncuse and inked by Terry Austin. I think the story was that Dark Horse got the license to various Universal horror movies, and Adams wanted to do a sequel to CREATURE, but was persuaded to to an adaptation first. No sequel followed, unfortunately.

Been a long time since I've seen the movie, but this seems pretty faithful to what I remember. Which might not be a good thing, as the movie has a lot of slow bits between appearances of the creature, which work better on screen than on the page. It really comes alive here when the creature shows up, which takes too long (especially since its appearance is obviously no great surprise, being on the cover of the book). I think a sequel might have been a better way to go. There are some fun bits, and the Adams/Austin art is always pretty.

Next up is a Godzilla story from a 1992 one-shot, co-written by Adams and Randy Stradley. This plays much more to Adams' strengths, with Godzilla attacking a remote Japanese island which is protected by a giant samurai demon. Lots of action ensues, full of iconic drawings of Godzilla. Might be my favourite Art Adams comic of all time.

A few shorts in the back, two early hard-to-find 4-page Monkeyman & O'Brien stories, featuring Adams' original characters, a giant ape and giant girl, designed to let him draw any kind of monster stories he wants and a colour version of his adaptation of Alan Moore's poetic ode to kaiju, "Trampling Tokyo", from NEGATIVE BURN #18 [1994].

Trotsky - A Graphic Biography [2009] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Trotsky - A Graphic Biography [2009]

Rick Geary does this 100-page biography of  Russian leader Leon Trotsky, published by Hill & Wang, a prominent publisher of history books which has had a small line of mostly non-fiction comics over the last two decades, including several other biographies. Geary also did one of longtime corrupt FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover.

If you're familiar with Geary's most famous work, the TREASURY OF (VICTORIAN)(XXth CENTURY) MURDER series (16 volumes to date, 1987-2016), then you know what to expect, well researched history of the topic, mostly told through captions with occasional dialogue, telling a complex story in a nice clean and casual manner, backed up by some excellent cartooning in Geary's unique style.

I'm not really too familiar with this history, any classes I had focused on Canadian and American history, and were also more years than I care to admit ago. So I only had the basics of the Russian Revolution and subsequent rise of the USSR, which was obviously a lot more complex than what I read about. I found it fascinating to read about it through the lens of this one key participant, seeing just how long it percolated, through various plots and plans ending in jail or exile, until the eventual outcome. Which was followed by more plots and plans and exile, of course.

Obviously I only got this because it's Geary, not any real interest in the subject matter, but I came out kind of curious to find out more. Maybe not enough to read an actual history book, but maybe if there's a documentary or something on the topic...

TV - Belgravia (2020)

So, finally got around to watching the 2020 6-part series BELGRAVIA, created by Julian Fellowes (based on his novel), the creator of DOWNTON ABBEY, and with much of the same production team as DOWNTON.

Now, I had a bit of a journey with DOWNTON, which lasted six seasons and 52 episodes from 2010 to 2015 (and to date two subsequent films). I started watching it just as it was ending, and it wound up taking me about three years to finish it. I'd usually watch five or six episodes at a steady clip, two or three a week, usually enjoying it, but it would take very little to distract me from that and I'd wind up not watching it for a few months until the next time I had nothing to watch and remember DOWNTON. I guess on balance I'd have to say I liked it, but by the end it was really a sense of wanting to finish what I started that kept me going at the end rather than pure joy (and of course now they keep doing movies, it'll probably never end).

So that was what I was expecting of BELGRAVIA, which is set in a similar milieu of British upper class society, although almost a century earlier. I expected to like it, and since it was only six episodes (with no sign of a second season two years later), under five hours, I was hoping it could hold my attention.

It far exceeded that. This was everything I liked about DOWNTON and almost nothing I hated about it, compacted into a tight little package. I was expecting it to take a few weeks to watch, and instead I ended up watching the first four in one sitting, and pretty much had to force myself not to continue on to the next two, and instead savour them the next day, with a few hours between them. Just a delight. About the only thing it was missing was someone like Maggie Smith's Dowager Countess character from DOWNTON, which was probably for the best since that would have invited unenviable comparisons.

Now, no illusions on the actual quality of the thing, it's obviously a soap opera about people with a ridiculous level of mostly unearned wealth and the problems they mostly create for themselves with their rigid class structure, and a few of the twists are frankly a little ridiculous in an effort to wrap everything up with a nice bow (I spent most of the last episode wondering if they were going to do something bold and out of left field before they mostly wrapped it up in genre conventions). But for what it was I enjoyed it immensely, far beyond what I had any right to expect. The cast was mostly perfect (as usual for such things I sometimes had trouble telling the endless parade of middle aged white men apart), the script had a lot of humour, the sets and costume looked great (I'm sure it was all anachronistically clean and polished, but I've got no way to judge). I think I might watch the whole thing again someday, and might even read Fellowes' novel.

Millennium [2008] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Millennium [2008]

This is a collection of the 8-issue weekly series by Steve Englehart, Joe Staton and Ian Gibson for DC comics, their big crossover event of 1987, with over three dozen labelled crossover issues over two months. Englehart and Staton were the regular team on GREEN LANTERN / GREEN LANTERN CORPS for over two years leading up to this (and Gibson did a short fill-in run in the months leading up to MILLENNIUM), so as you'd expect the concept of the book spills out of Green Lantern concepts, namely that a member of the Guardians of Oa and a member of their female counterpart group the Zamarons arrive on Earth to guide the next stage in human evolution through a small group of their Chosen. Their plan is opposed by the Manhunters, a group of robots that rebelled against the Guardians billions of years ago (as apparently established in some 1970s JLA issues by Englehart which had never been reprinted until recently), so they recruit various super-heroes to help them.

I got back into buying comics a few months after this ended, somehow wound up with the first and last issues of the crossover at some point. The first seemed promising, the last seemed confusing. A number of books that I ended up getting back issues of were involved in the crossover (WONDER WOMAN, JLI, SUICIDE SQUAD, LEGION, SECRET ORIGINS, OUTSIDERS, plus a few other single issues), so I have about half the crossovers, where I usually had to mentally gloss over the Millennium aspects when getting to those issues. Never felt motivated to get those middle six issues, until I saw this book on sale a few years ago, and then it's taken me a few years to get around to reading it.

Overall I'd say it's a mess. I run hot and cold on Englehart, but not usually this much in the same book. A handful of things I really liked, but he can never get any momentum going in here, where various scenes throw to an (unreprinted) crossover issue, and then the characters pop back in here an issue or two later without any good explanation of what happened to them. And on one hand I can admire his desire to create a genuinely diverse group for his Chosen, especially back in the 1980s, but his execution was... something else. If you haven't seen Steve Englehart trying to write a Jamaican accent, you haven't seen Shakespeare the way it was meant to be done. Maybe I'll try again in a few years with all the crossovers available to me (if I ever get DC's "Infinite" reading service I think most of the books I don't already have are available there), but I doubt it'll improve it much.

The art is also a bit odd. Not sure where the Staton/Gibson combo comes from, don't think I've seen Gibson inking another artist otherwise. It's uneven, better as it goes, then the ending looks kind of rushed. But with a weekly book with a single art team that's not surprising. A shame, I think Staton with the right inker and the time to do it would be perfect for this kind of crossover.

Can't really recommend this. It all ended up being a footnote in DC history, with Englehart leaving GREEN LANTERN CORPS within months of this series, and the Englehart/Staton spinoff book NEW GUARDIANS lost Englehart halfway through #2 and was cancelled after a year.

Daredevil - Born Again [Hardcover] [2009] (Random Comics Theatre)

 Random Comics Theatre

Daredevil - Born Again [Hardcover] [2009]

This is a collection of the 7-part "Born Again" story by artist David Mazzucchelli and writer Frank Miller that ran in DAREDEVIL #227-233 in 1986. Mazzucchelli had been the artist on the book for the previous two years, with writer Dennis O'Neil, getting steadily better as he went from just pencils to full art. Miller had been the artist then writer/artist on the book from 1979 to 1982, returning for a fill-in the previous year and then scripting the issue before this run.

It's a pretty famous story, so I won't get into the details much. Suffice to say that frequent Daredevil foe the Kingpin finds out, through a plot contrivance, that DD is really lawyer Matt Murdock. He then proceeds to ruin Murdock's life in a multi-faceted attack before almost killing him, only for Daredevil to rise from the ashes.

I'm not a huge fan of Miller, but this is probably my favourite of his works, certainly the one I come back to the most. The lion's share of the credit for that has to go to Mazzucchelli's artwork, of course, but Miller manages more than a few clever bits. Also a few absurd bits, of course. The ending falls apart a bit, definitely the weakest part of the story, with a few other super-heroes popping in and a convoluted storyline involving Captain America that seems to drop in from another series before getting an abrupt end to the story we've actually been reading. Really does feel like Miller thought he'd be on the book at least a little longer.

This was one of the first reprint books Marvel did when that became a regular part of their publishing line in 1987, with a barebones edition which they kept in print intermittently for the next two decades. This version was a significant upgrade, adding in a reprint of #226 after the main story (which has Dennis O'Neil co-writing and Dennis Janke inking), copies of Mazzucchelli's layouts for various issues and a copy of Miller's script for the finale.  A softcover version of the book came out shortly after, which I think they've done a slightly better job of keeping in print. IDW has also done a book reproducing Mazzucchelli's original artwork in a few different formats.

Boneyard Volume One [2002] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Boneyard Volume One [2002]

BONEYARD was a humourous fantasy/adventure comic by Richard Moore, published for 28 issues by NBM from 2001 to 2009, collected in seven volumes. Looks like they started a colour version of the books at one point, but that only got half-way through, and Moore did a oneshot at Antarctic Press in 2013, but nothing since, and the books seem to be mostly out of print (the one-shot is available digitally).

I heard some good things about the book over the years, but don't recall ever seeing the serialized comic when it was coming out (it's a pretty unusual format for the publisher, which mostly does European imports in deluxe formats), and very rarely saw the collections, usually stray copies of later ones, but somehow found this copy of the first one a few years ago, I think on a remainders table.

This collects the first four issues, setting up the series about Michael Paris, a young man who inherits a graveyard outside a small town, finding it inhabited by a variety of creatures, chief among them a vampire named Abbey. Hijinks, of course, ensue.

I thought this was pretty good, a bit rough around the edges but with a lot of entertaining bits, more than a few genuine laughs, a nice variety of character designs and decent storytelling in the art.

The format doesn't really do it any favours. It's about an inch wider and two inches taller than a standard American comic, and the artwork doesn't really need the extra size. It the whole series were available in a nicer format (say a dozen issues per book, standard comic size, maybe even large digest size) I'd probably check it out. 

Death Note Black Edition #1 [2010] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Death Note Black Edition #1 [2010]

In general my taste in Japanese comics runs to older material. Tezuka, Nakazawa, Kojima/Koike. I used to try a lot of modern stuff, especially as it's become so readily available from the library both in print and digitally, but a lot of it leaves me cold, and even stuff I start off enjoying I get a little bit tired of three volumes in, and looking at the vast expanse of thousands of pages it'll take to finish the series I give up. Sometimes I tell myself I'll try again when the series ends, but usually by that time I forget. I did enjoy some of Urawawa's work (MONSTER, 20th CENTURY BOYS) to the end, and should probably catch up on his other stuff. It's been a while since I've tried a new series

But my favourite modern Japanese comic is easily DEATH NOTE by Takeshi Obata and Tsugumi Ohba (originally serialized 2003-2006), enough that after reading it from the library I ended up getting these omnibus editions, which consolidate the twelve original volumes into six thicker books with a larger page size and smarter design (you do lose a few colour pages from the smaller books, but that's a fair trade).  I've probably read the series all the way through at least four times, and will sometimes just pick a volume up and read a random chapter.

For those unfamiliar, the series is about a Shinigami (God of Death) named Ryuk who decides to have some fun in the mortal world by dropping his Death Note for a human to find. It falls into the hands of Light Yagami, a high school student, who is alarmingly quick to exploit the possibilities of a notebook which can cause the death of anyone whose name he writes in it. While initially he's strict about only using it on criminals who "deserve" it, his actions quickly draw the attention of the police, including a famed reclusive investigator called "L", and Light unsurprisingly quickly drops all pretense of righteousness and shows he's the pure villain of the piece, nicknamed "Kira" by the public, willing to use the notebook on anyone who gets in the way of his goal to be the "God" of a world he'll mold to his desires.

Just a really enjoyable series. This first book quickly sets up the situation, including some of the intricate rules of the Death Note, and also sets up the investigation into Kira by "L" and the Japanese police. It's especially rewarding to re-read these early chapters knowing where things are going to end up. It's also, despite the dark subject matter, one of the funniest comics I've ever read, with the humour popping up in some unexpected places.

And that reminded me to check and I see that PLATINUM END, another fantasy series by Obata/Ohba recently ended, so I should give it a try. I tried their BAKUMAN series (non-fantasy about the life of Japanese comics creators), but it didn't grab me. If I like PLATINUM END I may give it another try. And I just saw that there's a short story collection for DEATH NOTE which was recently released. I'll have to give that a look. Fortunately my library has some copies, all praise and thanks to the concept of public libraries in general and the Toronto one in particular...

The Judas Coin [2012] (Random Comics Theatre)

 Random Comics Theatre

The Judas Coin [2012]

Walter Simonson did this hardcover collection of six original short stories looking at various DC characters throughout history, thematically linked by the presence of a cursed silver coin, one of the thirty that Judas was paid to betray Christ, as seen in a short prologue.

The book has its genesis in the 2004-2006 DC series SOLO from editor Mark Chiarello, where every issue a single artist was given the 48-page book to create a solo anthology (sometimes with other writers, letterers and colourists, other times living up to the title). The series only lasted twelve issues, although reportedly many other creators were approached to contribute to it. Not sure if any evidence of other issues ever showed up, but Walter Simonson's plans persisted, grew to over twice the page count and a considerably upscaled format by the time it came out in 2012, with collaborators John Workman and Lovern Kindzierski.

Following the biblical prologue, the first story goes to 73 AD and a tale of an aged version of the Golden Gladiator, a short-lived feature from the earliest issues of THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD. 

Jumping ahead to 1000 AD, the second story features another longer-lived character from the same B&B issue, the Viking Prince. Obviously Simonson's affinity for that subject matter can be seen in his earlier work on THOR, and continues on his subsequent work in RAGNAROK. Gorgeous looking epic story.

Pirate adventures next in the 1720 AD story of Captain Fear. This is a short-lived 1970s feature which Simonson had some history with in a few 1981 backups. Some great naval adventures here.

A western next, with popular scoundrel Bat Lash in 1881 AD. Only western I know of Simonson drawing, and it's some great stuff, my favourite in the book. Clever story very much in keeping with the original series, which I'm quite fond of. 

Back to a character Simonson has some history with, Batman, set in "The Present" and with the only choice for a story about a coin, Two-Face. Fun little story presented in a newspaper strip format in black and white with some red highlights.

Finally we jump to 2087 AD with an unexpected revival of Manhunter 2070, an obscure never-reprinted feature by Mike Sekowsky in a late-period run of SHOWCASE. I've never read any of those, but if this is any indication, it's very strange. Of course Simonson has some history with the Manhunter name, but this is a completely different character, and Simonson's art has an odd Japanese animation influence melded with his usual style.

Very enjoyable concept for a book and well realized, with Simonson exploring a lot of different genres.

What's New #1 [1991] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

What's New #1 [1991]

This is the first of three (ignore that "No. 1 of 2" on the cover) collections of Phil Foglio's humourous gaming related comics from the pages of hobbyist magazines featuring a cartoon version of himself along with his companion Dixie Null. The first two issues were published by Palliard Press. I think, but haven't verified, that a second edition of this book was published by Studio Foglio. There are definitely two editions of the second book, and then the third and final book was only published by Studio Foglio.

The book opens with a new 8-page story, "Roll Models or How They Met", providing an unneeded but highly entertaining origin story for our hosts, and definitely the highlight of the book. We then jump back a decade to the May 1981 edition of DRAGON MAGAZINE, where Foglio launched an unassuming single page black and white strip with a series of quick jokes about gaming, intended as a one-shot. This continued in every issue of the magazine for three years, with an upgrade to colour starting on the eighth strip and expanding to two-pages (sometimes longer) with the tenth. This book has the first two years of strips. The next year and another new story are in #2, while the third book has the strips from a revival in another magazine, THE DUELIST.

This is some great stuff. I'm only casually familiar with gaming and the associated culture and I loved it. I'm sure a few of the more subtle bits went right over my head. Or maybe not, since Foglio's note at the end on the origin of the strip mentions he created them without ever playing a FRPG.

Apart from the new intro, done by a far more seasoned Foglio, my favourite bit was the gamer gift guide ostensibly designed for non-gamers and the strip about how gaming prepares you for real life. "They're letting anybody into the Thieves' Guild these days!"

The only real complaint is that the margins on the book are a little tight for the binding, thanks to the magazine dimensions they were drawn for. The edges of the strips disappear into the spine. This is less of a problem in the Studio Foglio editions of the other two books I have, so I've always been on the lookout for the reprint of this book, if it exists. Or maybe just hoping for a collection of all three books and any subsequent stories (the third book mentions a return to DRAGON MAGAZINE, but if that happened and if those were ever collected I do not know).

(looking around some more, doesn't look like a second edition of the first book was ever done, and there was a second DRAGON run that went on for quite a while, never reprinted but most of the strips from every run appeared as a webcomic, no longer on the official site but archived here)

TV - The Prisoner (1967-1968)

So, I've got a long and convoluted history with the short run British TV show THE PRISONER (created by George Markstein and Patrick McGoohan), which ran for just 17 episodes from 1967 to 1968. After hearing about it for a few years, it was actually going to be broadcast on a local channel when I was 16 in 1986. For various reasons dealing with schedules and my most annoying high school classmate being overly enthusiastic about it I only ended up watching a few weeks of  it (in retrospect, I should have just told him I stopped watching it while continuing to watch it).  In the years since there was always something coming up whenever a chance to watch it would come up, from missing tapes at the video store  or library to power outages to broken VCRs to scratched discs. In most of those cases I could have missed a few episodes and still watched the ending, but at some point I convinced myself I had to watch them all in order the first time through or not at all. Of course at any time in those years I probably could have just bought a set of tapes/discs, but my interest and the price just never balanced out on the right side of that equation.

(Oddly somewhere in there I did acquire a set of Dean Motter's sequel comic book series, though I never got around to reading it past the first issue. Also read most of Jack Kirby's unfinished mid-1970s adaptation of the first episode. Curious about Gil Kane's unfinished version, done after that, too. Wish they'd release those in an affordable mass market edition as opposed to the expensive original art facsimile edition)

And of course for the last five or so years it's been trivially easy for me to watch the show, but somehow I never got around to it. And it's not like I haven't watched a lot of junk TV that I knew I would like a lot less in that time. Anyway, I finally got around to it over the last three weeks, one episode most days.  For the most part I liked it, definitely came out feeling less like I'd wasted my time than with many shows (yes, I'm talking about LOST, always assume I'm taking a shot at LOST...).  I mean, there are some truly awful episodes towards the end, before the two-part finale, but even those had a few stylistic touches that made me not regret watching them. Except maybe "The Girl Who Was Death", which I'm pretty sure was a script from GET SMART that accidently got sent overseas.

(actually, just reading up on it, I see it was apparently an unused script from Patrick McGoohan's previous show, DANGER MAN. Which makes me much less eager to try watching that series, which I had been considering. Seriously, if it wasn't just the finale left after that I might have given up)

Anyway, conclusion is you should probably watch it, but if you're not determined to watch all of them you can very easily just pick the top half and watch the following:

Ep. 1 - Arrival

Ep. 2 - The Chimes of Big Ben

Ep. 3 - A. B. and C.

Ep. 5 - The Schizoid Man

Ep. 7 - Many Happy Returns

Ep. 9 - Checkmate

Ep. 10 - Hammer Into Anvil

Ep. 16 - Once Upon a Time

Ep. 17 - Fall Out

And honesty, you can probably drop out either "A. B. and C." or "The Schizoid Man" if time is tight. But not both, you need at least one.

And if possible space them out a bit more than I did, maybe two a week maximum. That's what I'll probably do for a rewatch eventually. That makes a pretty entertaining modern day season of a TV show which definitely doesn't feel like it's over fifty years old.

More spoilery stuff follows, only for those who have watched it or never will.

I think the furthest I ever got before was  the episode, "Dance of the Dead", so everything after that was new. I'm not surprised, that was maybe the second worst episode, and I probably wasn't inclined to jump through hoops to continue after that, and was looking for an excuse to drop it. Almost did this time, when the effort to watch it is trivial. And that would have been a shame, because my god, the next two episodes are so good. "Checkmate" was probably the best since the debut, fully realizing all the potential I saw in the series, and then "Hammer Into Anvil" blew that away, showing the series has potentials I didn't even dream of. Maybe one of the best hours of dramatic television I've ever seen. 

Of course, the series never got anywhere near that again, with a series of episodes that are at best filler until we get to the concluding storyline.

Now, that conclusion, I wish I'd been able to come into that cold, but I've had over 30 years of cultural osmosis about it clouding my head. With that in mind, I'd have to say I kind of liked it, admired parts of it, thought it had a lot of potential, could have been better, was an utter mess. I'm conflicted, is what I'm saying. I suppose the only real way to interpret it is as an allegory, but that's unsatisfying. I find it kind of interesting that the interpretation I keep coming back to involves using mostly aspects of the show that really only pop up in episodes that I didn't like and plan to skip in the future. I mean, if we accept that the world we're in has aspects of technology that involve complete mind transference and an almost complete and total ability to selectively wipe out and restore memories than it seems obvious that our escaping quartet, No. 6, the returning No. 2, young No. 48 and the butler, all have modified duplicates of the same mind, the person running the Village as a grand experiment, presumably the actual No. 1 (with the ape-masked laughing No. 1 with 6's face being a failed version or there to shock or divert No. 6). I'll be curious to see if I feel the same way whenever I re-watch it without the episodes that utilize those elements.

Well, that's probably enough about a 55-year old show. Maybe more when I've read the comics. Be seeing you. Damn, that's a cliched way to end it. Would you believe "Missed it by that much..."?