Yep, the gift-giving holidays are upon us once again. Here’s three recent releases that are among the top of my list.

The Stan Lee Universe, by Danny Fingeroth and Roy Thomas  TwoMorrows Publishing, $39.95 hardcover; also available in softcover and digital

If you’re asking “who’s Stan Lee and why should I care about his universe?” then I’m asking “why are you reading a website called ComicMix?” I’m not going to waste bandwidth establishing Stan’s street cred. The Stan Lee Universe is not the definitive biography of Stan Lee; even at 89 years of age (in three weeks), he’s continuing to create new comics properties and appearing on television shows and in movies and his story remains a work in progress. As a life-long comics fan and practicing professional, I find great comfort in that.

The Stan Lee Universe is a massive gathering of articles, interviews, tributes, and – best of all – items from the Stan Lee Archives from the University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center. All this stuff was hoisted up and organized by two of the medium’s best, Danny Fingeroth and Roy Thomas, both having served time at Marvel Comics with Mr. Lee and both having an encyclopedic knowledge of the field. The folks at TwoMorrows (Alter-Ego, Write-Now, The Jack Kirby Collector) did the design and layout, and the result is a black-and-white and color extravaganza that actually taught me a thing or two about both Marvel and Stan… and I’ve been here forever.

Danny and Roy knocked themselves out, and it shows. No matter what you think you may know about all this, you’ll learn a lot from The Stan Lee Universe and I recommend it most highly to anybody the least bit interested in comics or our American heritage.

Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips Volume 1 by Walt Kelly, edited by Carolyn Kelly and Kim Thompson, consulting editor Mark Evanier, forward by Jimmy Breslin  Fantagraphics Books, $39.99 in hardcover.

Everybody’s been reprinting the great classic newspaper strips with such effort that it almost gives a fanboy like me religion. This Pogo series was announced back when Albert the Alligator lost his egg tooth, leaving Walt Kelly’s many fans panting.

It was worth the wait. We get all the dailies from the long-defunct New York Star from the beginning on October 1948 through January 1949, the series nationally distributed by the Hall Syndicate from May 1949 through December 1950, and the initial year’s run of Sunday strips in color from 1950. Reproduction is first-rate; the paper isn’t quite as good as I’d like, but that’s being really picky.

A lot of the conventions with which we are familiar from Pogo were birthed during this period, and most of the characters with which we are most familiar have already been fully realized during the initial Dell Comics run. Walt Kelly’s wit and charm is unmatched in the history of sequential storytelling, and is in evidence here fully developed.

I’d get this book for Jimmy Breslin’s introduction alone. Go. Read this. You’ll charm the pants off of yourself.

The Art of Joe Kubert, edited by Bill Schelly • Fantagraphics Books, $39.99 in hardcover

I have previously gone on record in this and other venues that Joe Kubert is my all-time favorite comics artist and, once again, I will not establish Joe’s bona fides. I’m running out of room, and that is what Google is for. Fan/historian Bill Schelly who, like Roy Thomas is from the first generation of organized comics fandom, knows his stuff and it shows. This is the definitive biography of Joe Kubert, and I would say it is lavishly illustrated but the word “lavishly” pales in comparison by even a quick flip-through of this 232-page tome.

Pure and simple, this is the tribute that Joe deserves. From his youngest adolescent days working for Will Eisner’s shop (obviously, Will was oblivious to child labor laws) to his golden age work to his innovations at St. John’s Publishing to his latter and most familiar DC work to his current efforts as a graphics novelist, The Art of Joe Kubert truly covers, well, the art of Joe Kubert in all its four-color glory. This is an entertaining read, one that will motivate the young wannabe and illuminate the cultural historian. It even taught me a bit about my own roots as an Ashkenazi-American.

For about a hundred bucks, less if you can talk your comics shop owner into ordering them for you for a discount (c’mon, it’s a guaranteed sale), you cannot go wrong with these three books. A couple decades ago, I would have been thrilled with any one of them during a given year. In 2011, all three were released in recent weeks and that is simply breathtaking. Kudos to all.

THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil

Cover Art: John Byrne

IDW’s COLD WAR #3 will be in comic book specialty shops on Wednesday, December 7th.
Cold War is written and drawn by John Byrne.
 
Former MI6 agent Michael Swann is racing against time to prevent nuclear dominion over the planet from falling into Soviet hands. Which is harder than it looks while preventing his own death aboard a train speeding across Europe in the dead of winter! The penultimate issue of “The Damocles Contract” rolls toward an explosive conclusion!
 
Cold War #3
32 pages.
$3.99.

Click on images for a larger view.

Russell T. Davies, the man responsible for the highly successful resurrection of Doctor Who and its spin-offs Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, last left his Hollywood career to return to Manchester, England to take care of his ailing partner.

This summer, Andrew Smith was diagnosed with brain cancer. As matters progressed, Smith and Davies decided they wanted to be closer to their friends and family. As of this writing, Smith’s prognosis has remained private.

Davies, whose many credits also include creating and writing Queer As Folk, Casanova (starring David Tenant) and The Second Coming (starring Chris Eccleston), is expected to resume his entertainment industry career at some point in the future.

If you ever want to, you can take any history book, cross out the title and scribble “Why The British Are Dicks” on it and it would suffer no loss in its accuracy. Most history after 1600 can be attributed to explaining the meaning of that sentence; Britain and France were the biggest colonial powers in the last couple centuries, and when they started to realize that they couldn’t actually tell others what to do, they mashed a few cookie cutters on a globe and created a whole bunch of countries that quickly fell into ethnic civil war because their borders were based on the location of natural resources and not tribal boundaries. Ergo, the common governments that were set up by imperialism became mechanisms for conflict as different ethnic groups fought to control it for their own interests.

Oh don’t get me wrong, the British and French produce cool things like “That Mitchell and Webb Look” and Daft Punk, but as far as geopolitics go, don’t bother reading about them unless you want chronically high blood pressure.

Jordan didn’t really have this ethnic problem as badly as, say, Nigeria. The kingdom was made in the early 20th century, and its borders were and are fairly stable. Some extremist elements would say that Jordan deserves to be folded into Greater Israel, but this isn’t a widely discussed idea. The Golan Heights is about the only thing anyone is still arguing over for ownership, at least in the immediate vicinity of Jordan. Otherwise, the kingdom has enjoyed unity ever since its creation.

I only really know Jordan as “one of the countries that got pulverized by Israel in the 1967 war”, so Merik Tadros’ graphic novel “The River Jordan” is an interesting look into a country I have little current knowledge of. It only spends a little bit of time in the country, but it still plays an important role in the themes of the novel.

Illustrated by Greg Houston, this book is based on actual events, and is semi-autobiographical. It follows the story of two families of the Nasir brothers and the tragic events that tear the two families apart. The narrative specifically views the story through the eyes of Rami, the youngest son of one of the brothers. The plot follows the events of the story almost like a documentary, with a voiceover box stating things in plain, factual exposition, even when it lets us see what characters are thinking.
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There’s a tremendous bit of nostalgia wrapped up in Super 8, one of last summer’s most pleasant surprises. For adult moviegoers, it makes us long for the pre-Internet days when a movie can arrive and surprise us. The movie is clearly director J.J. Abrams’ homage to the movies of Steven Spielberg, the ones he grew up watching thirty years ago, movies filled with the fantastic including Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T.

But, Abrams’ valentine is intended for today’s more jaded moviegoer and as a result, unlike the benevolent aliens who visited Earth in those two films, the ones seen in the new film are more terrifying, evoking an entirely different set of emotions. But, the innocence of childhood is retained as Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) and his pals set out to make a movie and wind up having the adventure of a lifetime.

Like the best of Spielberg’s work, this movie evokes happy memories of childhood and family so just as important as the friendship ties is the relationship between Joe and his widower father Jackson (Kyle Chandler) in the middle American town of Lilian, Ohio.

Given the setting of the story, it makes perfect sense that the young teens are using a Super 8 camera to shoot a zombie film as the previous cycle of zombie movies was just winding down. They witness and record a train wreck that unleashes a deadly secret, one the military and sheriff Dad try to contain. Unfortunately, and just like in a good Spielberg film, odd things keep happening: there are the missing dogs, missing metal objects, and then people go missing.

Abrams knows how to ratchet up the suspense and then lull you into complacency with all the family drama between father and son and young romance as Joe notices Alice (Elle Fanning) in a new way. And since this is a film about kids, of course they unrealistically factor into the climax in ways less organic than in E.T. Still, you don’t often get two top filmmakers collaborating on something that has this much heart and soul as opposed to mere pyrotechnics (although this offers those up, too). Abrams also benefited from another winning score by Michael Giacchino.They wisely spent their $50 million budget, turning out a compelling 112-minute movie that you can enjoy at home.

Paramount Home Video sent a DVD for review and the standard transfer is excellent along with superb sound. The extras available on this single-disc package include some fine Audio Commentary from Abrams, co-producer Bryan Burk and DP Larry Fong.  There are tons of fun-sounding extras on the Blu-ray disc but we’re left without them, instead just able to see “Deconstructing the Train Crash”,  a nice featurette complete with storyboards and interviews.