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Regency Punk Summer Reading for Adventurous Girls: Penny Blackfeather

Regency Punk Summer Reading for Adventurous Girls: Penny Blackfeather

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Penny Blackfeather
“Brilliant!” (But the cover is less grown up than the content.)
The Girl Reads Blackfeather
“…compares well to the Goth Girl series.”

“This is brilliant...” says “The Girl,” 12, one of my son’s friends.

We’re in the cafe of the kid’s music school and I’ve asked her what she thinks of Penny Blackfeather, a Regency Punk graphic novel that Sloth Comics sent me.

She reads it until we prise it away from her so she can dash off to her recorder lesson.

The next week, we all go for coffee and she dives back in.

She still rates it as brilliant, and thinks it compares well to the Goth Girl series.

“Morgenstern”, my steampunk-loving daughter, 8, is also mesmerised.

She reads it twice and compares it to Adventure Time, her favourite cartoon, and also pronounces it, “Brilliant!”

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New Treasures: Almost Infamous by Matt Carter

New Treasures: Almost Infamous by Matt Carter

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Almost Infamous-small Almost Infamous-back-small

Talos Press is in imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, the same outfit that purchased Night Shade Books and has done a stellar job re-invigorating the imprint. They’ve published some fine titles over the past few years, including Patricia Ward’s Skinner Luce, Martin Rose’s My Loaded Gun, My Lonely Heart, Karina Sumner-Smith’s Radiant, M. H. Boroson’s The Girl with Ghost Eyes, and many others.

Talos does a lot of books that other publishers wouldn’t risk, and that alone makes them interesting. A fine recent example is Matt Carter’s first solo novel Almost Infamous, about teenage superhuman Aidan Salt, who chooses to become the first supervillian the world has seen in decades. San Francisco Book Review calls it “a funny, dark, and thoroughly enjoyable story about friendship, heroism, and the lengths to which we’ll go to disrupt the status quo,” and Booklist labels it “irresistible reading.”

My only complaint is the cover. I understand why they went the comic book route, but it looks like it was designed by someone who hasn’t looked at a comic book in 20 years. With all the dynamic and innovative work being doing in comics these days, there’s little excuse for a comic book-style cover to be as bland and minimalist as this one. I suspect a lot of readers will overlook it because of the cover, and that’s a shame.

Almost Infamous was published by Talos Press on April 19, 2016. It is 312 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital version. The cover art is by Adam Wallenta.

DC’s Continuing Rebirth

DC’s Continuing Rebirth

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Green Lanterns - Rebirth (2016) 001-002Rebirth still sounds a bit weird to say, like I’m saying DC was born in Kenya or something. In reality, I’m continuing from my last post which started my look at DC Rebirth, what I’m referring to as a corrective reboot.

To recap: DC seems to be explaining the discrepancies of the last 5 years (called the New 52) by saying that there’s a plot afoot and everyone in the DCU got their memory reprogrammed. This is comic books, so I’m ok with suspending belief over that one, because I’m intrigued as to who would be powerful enough to fiddle with the memory of everyone in the DCU and why they would do it.

So in the last two weeks, DC has unfolded more of Rebirth through a series of one-shot issues designed to propel readers back into the regular monthlies, some of which have already started under their “rebirth” banners. Here are the seven one-shots:

Batman Rebirth: Bruce gets a new helper. I don’t know yet if he’s a sidekick or not. That will roll out in the coming weeks. The fact that this new hero is a black guy certainly helps with diversity of voices DC will have to tell stories.

I liked the thematic concern too. This issue was about what superheroes do and why they keep going on when villains keep returning, changed, grown, more powerful. These are central questions to the central conceit of the superhero. I liked the hopeful answer.

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Lovecraft’s Dreamlands Via Graphic Novel: Charles Cutting’s Kadath

Lovecraft’s Dreamlands Via Graphic Novel: Charles Cutting’s Kadath

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However, unlike Bill Haley, Lovecraft still owns his genre
However, unlike Bill Haley, Lovecraft still owns his genre
It's like the lovechild of Brighton Pavilion and Portmeirion as raised by Michael Moorcock
It’s like the lovechild of Brighton Pavilion and Portmeirion as raised by Michael Moorcock

HP Lovecraft is a bit like Bill Haley; he arguably created his own genre, but few people now consume his work for simple pleasure.

Just as modern people typically discover Rock and Roll through [your favourite band here], they come to the Cthulhu Mythos through Charles Stross’s Laundry Files(*), through the madness of the Cthulhu Fluxx cardgame, or through the roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu.

Kids…? Well my daughter (8) has a plush Cthulhu who spends most of his time in the naughty corner for trying to eat the faces of the other toys.

Nobody, typically, just happens to pick up an HP Lovecraft book. If they do, they probably bounce. Let’s just say that speculative fiction has produced better stylists and that “of his time” is proving to be less and less able to explain away his racism.

However, unlike Bill Haley, Lovecraft still owns his genre. He pretty much nailed Cosmic Horror, and though we have chipped off racist carbuncles, all the tropes still bear his mason’s mark.

This means that Lovecraft’s Mythos serves the the same function in the Geek community as the Classical world served amongst educated Victorians. They would remark on somebody being “Hector-like”, we joke that our  pasta bake “turned into a Shoggoth”.

This creates the interesting problem that the our shared subculture leans heavily on a set of texts that are increasingly unreadable for both literary and ethical reasons!

The answer, of course, is to retell the stories in other media, which is where books like Charles Cutting’s graphic novel Kadath come in.

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Blogging Marvel’s Master of Kung Fu, Part One

Blogging Marvel’s Master of Kung Fu, Part One

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MOKF15Special Mavel Edition is a little remembered comics reprint title of the early 1970s. Its fifteenth and penultimate issue dated December 1973 featured the debut of a new series, Master of Kung Fu. Marvel’s timing was perfect as Bruce Lee was now a major star at the U.S. box office and David Carradine’s Kung Fu series was a critical and ratings success on the small screen.

Marvel had optioned the rights to Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu characters several years before when Pyramid paperback reprints of the 13 Rohmer novels were selling strong thanks to the popularity of the Christopher Lee film series. Marvel already had their own Fu Manchu clones in the form of the Yellow Claw and the Mandarin, but Master of Kung Fu gave them the opportunity to build a contemporary martial arts title out of a sequel to Rohmer’s highly influential thriller series.

Conceived by Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin, the decision to incorporate Sax Rohmer’s characters was at the insistence of Marvel editor Roy Thomas. Englehart enlisted the aid of Robert E. Briney, publisher and editor of The Rohmer Review fanzine to ensure the continuity was consistent with Rohmer’s long-running literary series.

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Rebirth: DC’s Corrective Reboot

Rebirth: DC’s Corrective Reboot

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366074__SX640_QL80_TTD_The last time I blogged about a reboot, the word may have given people hives. But don’t reach for your anti-histamines yet. Well… keep them handy. Your reboot allergic reaction may not be triggered by a Corrective Reboot.

What the heck’s a corrective reboot? Well, it’s like corrective lenses.

I reviewed comics for weeklycomicbookreview.com from 2008-2010. I covered mostly DC, with a fair chunk of Dynamite (I love me my John Carter of Mars, The Lone Ranger, and Kato). I read Superman and Wonder Woman and Green Lantern, but my favorite DC titles seemed to be Red Robin (Tim Drake), Batgirl (Stephanie Brown, mentored by Barbaba Gordon AKA Oracle) and Dick Grayson as Batman. I guess, looking back, I like it when sidekicks make good.

Shortly after I stopped reviewing, DC did a reboot called The New 52. Some of the continuity was preserved, but some wasn’t. As… counter-intuitive as that sounds, the result was that about ten years was shaved off of all the DCU and we lost some sidekicks and some relationships.

For example, prior to the New 52 reboot, enough time had passed for four Robins to have swung about in scaled Underoos (Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, Tim Drake and Damian Wayne). And of course, many of the DCU’s greatest buddy relationships (or romantic ones, in the case of Green Arrow and Black Canary) had time to form.

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After the Twilight: Walt Simonson’s Ragnarök

After the Twilight: Walt Simonson’s Ragnarök

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Ragnarök: Last God StandingWalt Simonson’s published eight issues so far of his ongoing comics series Ragnarök, along with a trade paperback collecting issues 1 through 6. Simonson, a veteran master of the comics form, is joined for the book by colorist Laura Martin and letterer John Workman. Edited by Scott Dunbier, Ragnarök’s published through IDW, and Chris Mowry’s credited with “production” on the first seven issues while Neil Uyetake gets the production credit on the eighth. What is Ragnarök beyond that? A fast-paced, adventurous saga. A grim playing-about with Norse myth. A super-hero high fantasy that nods to the past while telling a new and distinctive tale. And: a comic as exuberant as it is well-crafted.

The Viking legends say that at the end of time the heroic gods battle the assembled forces of evil, lose, and the fire giant Surtur destroys the world. Simonson’s imagined a story that takes place after the great final battle, but before the burning of the earth. In Ragnarök years have passed since the defeat of the gods. Then a mysterious figure hires a family of black elf assassins to kill a dead god. Things go wrong, and that god, a very familiar god who wields an unstoppable warhammer, instead awakens. Alone in a world ruled by his enemies, the zombie-like god that once was Thor seeks divine vengeance.

Difficult, in talking about this book, not to talk about Simonson’s stunning work in the 1980s on Marvel Comics’ version of Thor, one of the greatest post–Jack Kirby runs on any book in Marvel’s history. After having drawn some issues of the book a few years previously, he took over as both writer and artist with issue 337 and began a long-ranging story that finally ended in issue 382 (he’d given up art duties a bit more than a year before). Simonson brought a new awareness of myth to the book, and a striking design sense grounded in Norse culture as interpreted through a Kirbyesque lens. He also brought a powerful grasp of comics craft and storytelling technique.

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Monsters, Super-Science, and Devastating Family Secrets: Aurora West by Paul Pope, JT Petty, and David Rubin

Monsters, Super-Science, and Devastating Family Secrets: Aurora West by Paul Pope, JT Petty, and David Rubin

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The Rise of Aurora West-small The Fall of the House of West-small

When I started my new job last month, I began taking the train into the city every day for the first time. St. Charles to Chicago, an hour each way. That’s a long time to be staring at all those suburbs going by. So I did two things immediately: I upgraded to a new iPhone 6s, which allowed me to keep up with all my blogs on the go (especially Politico, Tor.com, and MSNBC), and I started catching up on graphic novels.

For my first month on the job (at least until Alice got me a subscription to The New York Times as a birthday present last week), I read almost exclusively comics and graphic novels on the train, digging into the huge stack I’d accumulated over the past eighteen months. I read Original Sin, a cosmic mystery featuring Marvel’s greatest heroes as they attempted to solve the murder of The Watcher. I enjoyed Rick Remender’s gonzo dimension-hopping adventure Black Science, and the 2016 Hugo nominee Invisible Republic, a really superior far-future political thriller, and lots more.

In short, I read some pretty fine stuff. But the crème-de-la-crème was a two-volume story featuring Aurora West, a compelling heroine who was completely new to me: The Rise of Aurora West and The Fall of the House of West. Aurora accompanies her father Haggard West, greatest hero of the beleaguered city of Arcopolis, as he races across rooftops, investigates the mysterious origins of the strange plague of monsters bedeviling his city, and solves bizarre crimes. But in the process Aurora stumbles on clues relating to a long-forgotten crime, and begins an investigation of her own… one that leads to a series of revelations that challenge everything she knows, and threatens the very future of Arcopolis.

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Hope, Heroism, and Ideals Worth Fighting For: Darwyn Cooke, November 16, 1962 – May 14, 2016

Hope, Heroism, and Ideals Worth Fighting For: Darwyn Cooke, November 16, 1962 – May 14, 2016

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Darwyn Cooke
Darwyn Cooke

I was surprised and deeply saddened on May 14th to learn of the death from cancer of comic artist and writer Darwyn Cooke, at the much too early age of 53.

Over the past decade, I have gradually lost most of my interest in current comics, especially ones from DC and Marvel that deal with long established characters; the medium (always with some honorable exceptions, of course) has largely grown too violent, too jaded, too self aware and self indulgent to produce much work that engages me.

The shock for shock’s sake taboo breaking, the endless restarts and reboots, the universe-altering big events that promise to “change everything” — they all long ago began to merge together into one dull blur, like an old chalkboard that has been written on and erased too many times. How often can you really “change everything” before you are in danger of eradicating the ties of memory and affection and shared history that connect a medium and its audience? That’s what happened with me, anyway. What the hell — maybe I’m just getting old.

There are exceptions though, as I mentioned, and Darwyn Cooke was one of them. I was always eager to see anything he produced; when a new Cooke was in my hands, I felt as young as I did the day I bought my first comic book (House of Mystery 175, July-August, 1968).

I could go on and on about his gorgeous art, but I won’t; if you’re at all susceptible to the charms of the four color world, you know at one glance that you’re in the presence of a master, and in this context at least, a picture is truly worth a thousand words. Just find a Darwyn Cooke story and marvel at the dynamic beauty and storytelling skill that leap from the pages.

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Superheroes in Prose: A City-Smashing Interview with the Editors of the New Anthology Tesseracts Nineteen

Superheroes in Prose: A City-Smashing Interview with the Editors of the New Anthology Tesseracts Nineteen

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Tesseracts Nineteen Superhero Universe-smallGet a load of this: Superheroes! Supervillains! Superpowered antiheroes. Super scientists. Adventurers into the unknown. Costumed crimefighters. Mutant superterrorists. Far-future supergroups. Crusading aliens in a strange land. Secret histories of covert superspies… and more! All in a Canadian setting.

This is the call for stories that went out in 2014 for the anthology Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen by EDGE Publishing which is launching this month. Its editors are Claude Lalumière and Mark Shainblum.

Claude has edited thirteen previous anthologies, including Super Stories of Heroes & Villains, which was hailed in a starred review by Publishers Weekly as “by far the best superhero anthology.”

Mark Shainblum co-created the comic series Northguard and the bestselling humor book series Angloman, which later appeared as a weekly strip in The Montreal Gazette. Mark also collaborated on the Captain Canuck daily newspaper strip. I caught up with Claude and Mark for an e-interview.

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