Tagged: Science Fiction

In the late 1980s, DC Comics thought it could reimagine everything. Frank Miller’s Dark Knight did it for Batman, Alan Moore handled Swamp Thing, and John Byrne changed Superman. Moore again took on the core idea of a superhero universe in Watchmen. And, to set the tone for all of that, Marv Wolfman (and George Perez) upended the DC Universe entirely a few years earlier with Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Even secondary reimaginings, like Mike Grell’s take on Green Arrow and Grant Morrison’s on Animal Man and the Doom Patrol, were strong successes. But DC had a very deep bench, full of characters who hadn’t seen the light of day in years.

So someone had the crazy idea — maybe writer Howard Chaykin, maybe some DC functionary — to radically reimagine DC’s minor space-adventure characters, mostly left fallow since the end of the Silver Age, into a major “serious” story and bring them into the then-present day. The idea was approved, and a three-issue miniseries rolled out in 1990, written by Chaykin and drawn by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez.

It was called Twilight . You’ve probably never heard of it.

It’s not very good. That may be why you’ve never heard of it.

In common with a lot of Chaykin’s work, there is a fascistic blonde using unsubtle Nazi imagery, sexual sadism, and boundless narcissism to conquer everything nearby. Somewhat unusually, this is a man, and it’s Tommy Tomorrow, who was originally a hero. My guess is that all of the actual villains of the old DC space comics were so infinitely boring that none of them would be suitable.

Other folks that show up, in more-or-less recognizable form, include Star Hawkins, Space Cabbie, and Manhunter 2070. In the best 1980s fashion, they are all tormented, twisted people — alcoholics, robot-lovers, robot-haters, fanatics, self-aggrandizing creeps, and general assholes — as opposed to the sparkling cardboard cutouts they were in the 1950s. This may not be entirely an improvement, but it’s definitely a change.

At the core of the story is two-thirds of the cast of the “Star Rovers” stories: Homer Gint is our narrator and fills the usual wisecracking Chaykin hero role. Karel Sorensen breaks from Chaykin tradition by being a blonde who is not evil, and who is transformed into a supposed goddess at the end of the first issue. The third Star Rover, Rick Purvis, appears a little at the beginning to be smarmy and obnoxious, then disappears entirely. The other characters circle the central narrative — Karel becomes a goddess; Tommy wants to steal her power because he’s the usual Chaykin wanna-be dictator — at what is usually a great distance and to no clear purpose, until the end, when everyone does get to play a role.

Oh, since this is a Chaykin story, there must be a good brunette girl — it’s Brenda Tomorrow, Tommy’s estranged wife, who I think was invented entirely for this series. She wanders around the outskirts of the plot as well, but, to be fair, there’s a lot of going-nowhere plot to wander around.

Twilight is very talky, and dull in it’s talkiness — these are mostly highly unpleasant people yelling at each other for pages on end or spouting silly technobabble for equally long times. They are also deeply concerned with the ethics and ennui of immortality, which is no more interesting here than it usually is. So Twilight is a slow read. The only upside to that is that it gives the reader more time to savor Garcia-Lopez’s very good late-80s art.

I suppose these characters were slightly better known at the time, almost thirty years ago, but they’d still been missing from DC Comics for at least twenty years at that point, and most of them for thirty. So there would not have been much of an audience clamoring for more Star Hawkins stories in the first place — which I suppose is good, since any such large group would have been appalled by the changes Chaykin rang on the characters.

Frankly, it boggles my mind that anyone thought this was a good idea, on any level. Twilight might be the quintessential ’80s comic: a badly fumbled re-imagining that makes a whole bunch of characters that no one cared about darker for no good reason and was published in a fancy format with ludicrously Lynd Ward-esque covers.

(My other possibility for quintessential ’80s comic would be Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters, which jumped equally hard on an entirely different bandwagon.)

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Other people’s childhood adventure stories are rarely that impressive when you discover them as an adult. That doesn’t mean they’re bad — or any more so than your childhood adventure stories — it just means that you should have read them at the right time, when you were ten or so and ready for anything.

I was forty-eight when I first read the adventures of Valerian and Laureline. It was just the other week, in Valerian: The Complete Collection, Vol. 1 . That is much older than it should be, but I could argue that I’m not French, which made it hard to come across these books at the proper time. In any case, I read them now. So what?

Complete Collection Vol. 1 brings together the first three adventures of our space-and-time-hopping duo, written by Pierre Christin and drawn by Jean-Claude Mezieres. (And even the front matter agrees that the first two are a bit off-model for what the series eventually became — a little thin, a little less interesting. So maybe it’s not just me.) This particular volume looks to be a slightly rebranded version — for the recent Luc Besson movie — of the first in a standard collection of the whole series. And a big uniform set of books is the kind of thing that only happens, obviously, when something is really popular for a long time.

The omnibus aspect and the movie means there’s more frontmatter here than usual for a graphic novel — a three-way interview with Christin, Mezieres, and Besson (conducted by no one the book cares to mention); several very puffy “isn’t this thing totally awesome” mini-essays; a claim that everything in filmed SF since about 1970 directly descends from Valerian; and a precis of the three stories reprinted here. All of that frontmatter is also copiously illustrated, with panels from the comics, photos of the creators and Besson, concept art from the movie, and related stuff.

First up is 1967’s Bad Dreams, in which 28th century spatio-temporal agent Valerian is sent back from his leisure-society utopian future to the French Middle Ages in pursuit of a fugitive from his time who has discovered working magic and is going to use it to conquer the world. (The “magic that actually works” thing is strangely not a big deal, and looks like it never came up again.) Along the way, he meets a local girl, Laureline, and has to recruit her when she becomes a unicorn for a while learns about time travel and Valerian’s organization.

Next was a big two-part epic from 1970, The City of Shifting Waters and Earth in Flames, in which the villain from Bad Dreams (Xombul) escapes and time-travels back to the obligatory late-20th-century apocalypse, landing in a 1986 New York inundated by rising seas in the very early days of an event that I have to assume will kill the majority of mankind. (As usual, this is just background — what I tend to call “backswing fantasy” because it clears out space for the mighty hero to swing his sword.) Valerian and Laureline team up with a surprsingly-not-depicted-in-a-racist-way black crimelord (and, eventually, a Jerry-Lewis-as-the-Nutty-Professor scientist) to eventually defeat Xombul and keep the timeline clean.

“Keeping the timeline clean,” of course, means “letting several billion people in the northern half of the world die horribly over the course of the next few months or years.” But you can’t make adventure stories without megadeaths, can you? And, anyway, our heroes do their job and get out — hooray!

The omnibus ends with what they call the first real adventure of Valerian and Laureline, 1971’s The Empire of a Thousand Planets. This is the one, I think, that was adapted into the Besson movie, though the story here doesn’t bear much connection to what I saw in trailers. Our heroes are sent to another planet in their own time — I have the vague sense the time-travel plots stopped entirely at this point, but I could be wrong — Syrte, the seat of an empire that spans a thousand planets. (Earth, by comparison, is rich and powerful technologically, but does not seem to be an imperial power and is mostly hermetic, since the vast majority of its citizens spend all of their time in computer-controlled dreams.)

They are shockingly unprepared for this mission, in ways that are convenient to the plot and to create quick action, and learn that a group called the Enlightends has been slowly taking over Syrtean society and life. The Enlighteneds capture and shanghai our heroes, and the rest of the story is a series of escapes and recaptures, battles and confrontations, and learning about various plot-important things from sneaky overhearing and Talking Killers.

But, then again, it is an adventure story, so I just restated that in a roundabout way. Valerian and Laureline are in a somewhat old-fashioned style — these stories are forty years old — because they are still alive to be captured (and escape again) repeatedly. Somewhere along the line we realized that horrible villains would really just kill people, and our adventure stories changed tone.

These three stories are fun and zippy, full of action and incident, and they do definitely get better and more assured as they go along. (Bad Dreams isn’t bad, but it’s a little shaky, and the casual use of transformation magic in particular is far different from the rest of the material here.) They’re still fine fare for ten-year-olds of all ages, and I enjoyed them quite a bit, even if I hadn’t imprinted on them as a youth.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

People will tell you that The Ghost in the Shell is a single story, about a cyborg cop in a complex future Japan and her pursuit of a mysterious AI called The Puppeteer. They are lying to you.

Oh, that thread is here, and the very last installment here sees the conclusion of that story. It’s a plausible lie, like all the best ones.

But Ghost in the Shell is three hundred and fifty pages of comics, across eleven long chapters, and most of those chapters are individual episodes of our heroine murdering lots of people because the government tells her to. Puppeteer comes in during one of those murder sprees earlier in the book, and then returns in the aftermath of yet another kill-that-guy mission for something like an ending.

There is a lot of pseudo-philosophical talk about brains and bodies, and a whole lot of skiffy bafflegab — which I think was not translated as crisply and clearly as it should have been — about the cyberpunk details of the technology here. But that’s not nearly as unique as Ghost‘s boosters pretend it is — or as coherent.

Of course, we do have to remember that Ghost started serialization in 1989 and was collected in 1991 — cyberpunk wasn’t new at that point, true (in fact, I think “Vincent Omniveritas” had declared it dead several years before), but Ghost showed that cyberpunk was going global and infiltrating new media. If you think of it as an ’80s cyberpunk comic, Ghost is pretty good — it has a complex, lived-in world, lots of interesting technology turned to criminal and/or destructive purposes, and a deeply jaundiced view of anyone in power. Masamune Shirow might have been working on the other side of the world, in a different language, and a different medium than the first wave of cyberpunks, but he could see what was important in that mode and turn it into the stories he wanted to tell.

The street finds its own use for things, as they say.

In this case, it’s the story of a cyborg mass-murderess, who is our heroine because she kills people the government aims her at, and we still thought that was good enough in the ’80s. (She does get in trouble near the end for her bloody work, but only because she was unfortunate enough to do it where a camera could see it — the killing itself is never questioned for a second, by anyone in the book.)

As you might guess, I found it a lot to swallow. Oh, not that a government would have a secret assassin — that’s traditional enough in this kind of story. Maybe a bit that she’s part of a big squad with a code number ending in nine — explicitly shown to be one of a series of similar teams with mostly non-overlapping opportunities for mass murder  — which implies a level of bloodthirstiness that seems unlikely to be sustained for very long, even in a country as full of targets as Japan. Mostly because Major Motoko Kusanagi never really becomes a person: she’s a collection of standard manga reactions and poses, there to be in the middle of the action and do Cool Stuff. Her entire personality is “dangerous sexy manga chick.”

Again, 1989 was another world — Japan doubly so, manga triply so. But, coming to Ghost in the Shell now, it does not look terribly impressive.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

I should probably stop writing about Saga through the lens of my own expectations. I want it to be a single story that started with the birth of one child in this space-fantasy universe, and to have it end well in a way that wraps up that story. But it’s becoming more and more clear that creator Brian K. Vaughan instead sees Saga as a universe to tell stories in, and that those stories will all be somewhat related to that central family.

So I’m looking for a unity that isn’t here, and will never be here: Saga will run as long as people keep buying it (or until artist Fiona Staples decides she wants to do something else; I can’t imagine this continuing without her), and it will be a normal comic-book, full of issues that are separate stories or add up to an “arc” of three or six issues. Eventually, it will stop, for whatever reason, but the whole of Saga is not a single story and there’s no way to make it one at this point.

I’m sad about this, because there are enough serialized adventures in comics already and not enough stories, but no one asked me. I do hope I can draw a line under than thought here, and leave it buried: it’s not a useful framework for looking at Saga going forward from here. (And I see I keep saying a variation of the same thing every time I write about Saga, which must be tedious on your end: see my posts on volumes one , two , three , four, five , six , and especially seven for my repeated cataloging of pointless objections.)

So: here’s Saga, Vol. 8 , collecting another chunk of six issues. The first of these even seems to be an attempt at an introduction for new readers, that old standby of serialized comics. Let me just note that “new-reader friendly” is only important in a medium where going back to the beginning is infeasible or impossible: Netflix has built a big business on letting people binge from Season One Episode One.

Anyway, this volume is the story of an abortion. Well, it’s described as an abortion, repeatedly, but the baby is dead in the womb — in a mystical, woo-woo kind of way that means that child is also a ghost running around nearby — which means the medical procedure is actually quite distinct from an abortion. One suspects Vaughan might be trying to make points, or just be provocative for the sake of being provocative. The big events at the end of the last volume left that child dead in the womb, and apparently it’s not simple to just get him out. (If anything were simple, it wouldn’t be Saga.)

I find it harder and harder to write about the Saga volumes at this point: I’m trying not to give away who needs an abortion, even though that’s blindingly obvious to any semi-serious reader of the series. But I feel like the plot details of part forty-three of an umpty-ump part story shouldn’t be splashed around; I think most readers will want to get here under their own power. And, more seriously, Saga is becoming more and more soap-opera-ish with each issue: I forget precisely which TV-head is the guy running around in this issue (Count something? the Duc of NBC? Crown Prince Cyborg MCMLXXVI?), and I can’t remember where Lying Cat got to (she’s not in here at all), and I’m only vaguely invested in the some-other-horrible-person-has-captured-The-Will-and-has-now-learned-our-heroes-exist-oh-woe plotline.

Look, these are sturdy, well-built characters. They inhabit a big, complicated universe. Staples can draw any damn thing Vaughan can throw at her, and make it look both real and retroactively obvious. Many of the relationships here are ones readers care about and are invested in. But Saga seems to be still proliferating, and the initial burst of energy that was so enticing is slowly expanding into that big universe, like the Big Bang, and is cooling and becoming less excited as it goes.

Hmm. I guess I can’t stop talking about the same issues with Saga every damn time. Oh, well. Saga has gone from being a thunderbolt of energy and passion to a solid, entertaining space adventure comic. It’s still very nice, but it’s not what it was.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

At some point, writing about an ongoing series becomes gibberish to the uninformed and spoilers to the slightly behind. (Maybe not both at exactly the same moment, but both eventually.) I’d like to think that can still be a long way off, that I can spin out interesting things to say about the fourth volume collecting a SFnal comic, but it’s not me that will be the judge of that.

A lot of plot has come before we hit the first page of Descender, Vol. 4: Orbital Mechanics — by the way, does that title feel like it’s just a random skiffy-sounding reference? asking for a friend — full of character and incident and shocking revelations and worldbuilding and all that good stuff. (See my posts on the first and second and third volumes for more details of the good stuff.)

We’re also into serious split-the-party multi-threaded plotting here: as we begin, TIM-21 is running away from TIM-22 on Machine Moon, while Telsa and Quon are trying to escape that same place, seeing as how they’re meat-based organisms and the robots take a dim view of that. Meanwhile, Andy has reunited with his now-cyborged ex-girlfriend Effie and is back on 21’s trail. That sounds like they’re all going to get together, doesn’t it?

But no — writer Jeff Lemire has plenty more complications to work through in this space-opera universe, so any tearful (or gunfire-filled) reunions will have to wait for a while. We’re still in frying-pan-into-fire mode here, as nearly all of the characters we’re supposed to like are in worse positions by the end of the book. I have to admit I wonder how long Lemire can keep that up: eventually, everybody is going to get killed or the last-second escapes will get silly. But, for now, there’s enough stuff going on in this universe to keep it all plausible.

Artist Dustin Nguyen is still chugging along here — I particularly like his use of color in this book to indicate mood and environment. It’s a seemingly small thing that can be very effective, particularly when one person is making all of the art.

I still hope that Descender has a specific story to tell, with a real ending — that it’s not going to just spin out complications for as long as people will buy it. The only way to tell that will be through time; we’ll have to wait and see. For now, this is still an excellent space opera in comics form.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

It’s taken two library systems to get me caught up on Zander Cannon’s giant-monsters-in-prison comic series, and that seems a lot more complicated than it should be. But any system that gets books you want to read into your hands is, in the end, a successful system — so I’m not going to complain.

Cannon is following the Classy Cable TV style here: six-issue mini-series, each basically self-contained, coming out about the same time each year. I expect that gives him time to do some other comics work as well, and (more importantly) time to plan the next series and promote the book of the last series, as comics is getting more and more disconnected from the just-put-something-out-in-pamphlet-form-every-month business model. (And, let’s be honest: that model was good for the companies that owned the companies and characters, but not so good for anyone else in the pipeline.)

So: here is Kaijumax, Season Two: The Seamy Underbelly . Electrogor, the nice guy who looked like our main character back at the beginning of the first season, has broken out of prison with Green Humongo, and the two of them are hiding out with Red Humongo, who is Green’s brother despite their having completely different origins. But the cast of characters is much wider than just our two fugitives, and they’re scattered all over the place — I’d say “around the world,” but one of them spends substantial time on what I’m pretty sure is the moon.

Cannon has backed his way into something like a racial allegory, though he has an afterword where he denies that was the point, and explains that the parallels came as he turned “giant monsters in prison” into something more than just a joke idea by trying to take it seriously. I found it an interesting strand of the story — kaiju as a minority group, dispossessed and discriminated against, and the family dramas between the cop kaiju brother and the criminal kaiju brother. I’m not part of the racial group that the kaiju mostly reference, so I can point to that element and note it, but readers who are closer to a real-world version could have very different responses.

Anyway, there’s a big cast, sprawling around the world and elsewhere, of cops and criminals, jailers and jailed, corrupt and honest, and those who cross all of those categories. It’s a fairly dark moral universe for both the kaiju and those they call “squishies.” (Cannon plays it monster-movie style, but there has to be a lot of death in the background of Kaijumax. Every monster in prison represents at least a few thousand dead humans, maybe more.)

And it’s a noirish cartoon version of every monster movie ever, too: giant piloted robots and giant self-aware robots, lizards from the depths of the ocean and Lovecraftian beasts from between the stars, demons and mad scientists and scheming sons. It’s only because the monsters are so apt to get addicted (to nuclear power, to fictional monster-drugs) that this world even still exists.

Season Two is darker than the first one, almost paradoxically, since this is the storyline taking place almost entirely outside of prison. But prison is where things are relatively simple, right? You follow the rules (official and unwritten), you keep your nose out of places it shouldn’t be, you keep your head down, and you do your time. There’s no place to keep your head down in the wider world, and everywhere your nose is could be a place it shouldn’t be.

You have to be able to take Kaijumax seriously to enjoy it — to accept the premise, admit the science is severely bent at best, and appreciate the models. If you can do that, it’s a fine comic about loyalty and friendship, good and evil, what you have to do and what you can do, and, as the first book put it, terror and respect.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Trust is a tricky thing in stories: you have to trust the person telling the story will do a good job to keep rewarding that person with your attention.

Brian K. Vaughan had my trust and hugely lost it, in his Ex Machina  series with artist Tony Harris, and I’ve been giving each of his projects the side-eye since then, watching to see if the same thing would recur. That’s probably not fair, and it might have made my posts on the earlier Saga books — volumes one , two , three , four, five , and six — less useful than they could be.

But there’s an essential tension in a standalone, ongoing comic book: is this one story, or is it a series of stories? Most comics tell several stories in a row: sometimes simply, with a story in each issue, and sometimes complexly, across dozens of issues of dozens of titles for two months to then abruptly stop and pick back up with the next big crossover. But Spider-Man or JLA or Marvel as a whole is not a story — they’re walls made up of separate but interconnected stories.

Saga, though, has always presented itself as a story. A story told by a grown-up Hazel, some time in the future, which presumably explains how she can tell us things that happened in secret far away to other people. A story with a single through-line: how this family got through a galactic war and (we hope) found peace. So we’re expecting more than just twenty-some pages of action each month; it all has to add up to the story of this family.

And the longer a story goes on, the bigger the ending has to be to suit it. (Ask George R.R. Martin.) With the issues collected in this Volume Seven , Saga is now forty-two issues long — that might be half of the whole, or more, or less. We don’t know. The debt of that ending is continuing to grow, and will grow until we get to it.

Is it a good sign or a bad one that this volume collects a complete arc, with a definitive shape? (Does that make it a story, or a chapter?) This is some of the strongest work in Saga since the beginning, as if Vaughan and artist Fiona Staples cracked their knuckles and said “OK, we got the family back together — now it’s time to fuck shit up.” That’s a good sign, whichever way you fall on the story question.

In the end, I think I land on a slightly different set of questions: is Saga still compelling? is it still moving in the same direction? does it seem to have not just a vector but real velocity on its path? are these people still real and true to themselves?

And, from these issues — or this chapter, or this Volume Seven, call it what you will — the answer to all of those questions is still yes. So I’m still on board, though I would like to have a sense of how big the story will be overall. All stories have to end, even the good ones. Even this one. Stories that don’t end aren’t stories, they’re just things that happened.

And I want Saga to be a story. It has the potential to be a great one.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

The Mystery Tweens are solidly becoming Mystery Teens in The Case of the Forked Road , which means the boys have all seemingly lost 50 IQ points and keep punching each other for no reason. [1] So any mystery solving will be left to the girls, this time out.

Since this is a volume seven, before I go any further, there are two notes. First is that you don’t need to know anything going into this book. Well, OK: these are kids in a secondary school in Tackleford, the oddest town in England. You can pick that up from the book, and it’s all you need to know. Also, this is a collection of a webcomic , so you can always read as much of it as you want online.

But, if you do want to know more, let me direct you to my posts about Bad Machinery books one , two , three , four , five , and six . You may also be interested in the pre-Bad Machinery comic Scary Go Round , also set in Tackleford, which led to the comic-book format Giant Days, of which there have been several collections so far: one two three four .

The book version of The Case of the Forked Road, as usual, is slightly expanded from the webcomics version, with some pages redrawn a bit and others added to aid the flow. It also begins with a new page introducing the main characters and ends with several related old Scary Go Round pages — both of those introduced and narrated by Charlotte Grote, Allison’s current troublemaking smart-girl character (following a string of such in the past).

As usual, Allison is great at capturing speech patterns and the half-fascinated, half-oblivious attitude of teens — the girls discover a mystery this time, in the suspicious activities of a elderly lab assistant they call “Grumpaw.” But they have no idea what this guy’s name is, and have to go through convolutions just to get their investigation started.

They do, of course, and eventually find a fantastical explanation to the question of Grumpaw and the mysterious and strangely ignorant schoolboy Calvin. And the dangers they have to deal with this time out are directly related to the stupid violence of some male classmates. (Though the cover shows that it’s not the boy Mystery Teens; they stay offstage most of the time, and are useless when they’re on it.)

Allison writes smart stories that wander interestingly through his story-space and gives his characters very funny, real dialogue to say on every page. And I think his stories are best when he draws them himself: his line is just as puckish and true as his writing. That makes the Bad Machinery cases the very best Allison books coming out now.

One last point: if you’ve complained that previous Bad Machinery volumes — wide oblong shapes to show off the webcomic strips — were physically problematic, then you are in luck. The Case of the Forked Road is laid out like normal comic-book-style pages, just as these strips appeared online. So you no longer have that excuse, and must, by law, buy Forked Road immediately.

[1] If you think this is some kind of sexist nonsense, my currently sixteen-year-old son can tell you a story of some of his fellow students on his recent trip to Germany and Italy. These young men got into trouble because they were throwing some “hot rocks” around — as you do when you discover some rocks that are warmed by the sun, in a nice hotel in a foreign county — until, inevitably, windows got broken. There are boys who avoid the Enstupiding and Masculinizing Ray of Puberty, but they are few and beleaguered, and the general effects of the ray hugely debilitating.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.