Amazing Fantasy Omnibus

/ Alex Good / 8 Comments

Amazing Fantasy Omnibus

The comics collected in this omnibus edition cover a Marvel title that was in flux for most of its short life: from Amazing Adventures to Amazing Adult Fantasy, to simply Amazing Fantasy (the first issue of which contained the debut of Spider-Man). The numbering remained constant though, so Spidey’s first appearance was in Amazing Fantasy #15, even though that was the first in the serie to be so titled.

Anyway, Marvel was spinning its wheels a bit here trying to find its core programming, not yet having landed on superhero fare as its bread and butter. Titles like Fantastic Four and The Hulk were just starting at the same time and in the recurring adventures of Doctor Droom in Amazing Adventures we can see an obvious precursor to Doctor Strange. Instead of superheroes, Amazing Adventures was mainly about monsters, while Amazing Adult Fantasy (“The magazine that respects your intelligence!”) was more like a comic version of The Twilight Zone.

It’s always nice to read an honest critical introduction. In his intro to the Amazing Adventures section Stephen Bissette makes the point that, well, these weren’t great comics. Nowhere close to being up to the level of EC ten years earlier (admittedly pre-Code), they’re only juvenile and silly, culminating in the giant Ssergo being yoinked from the surface of the Earth by a “large sky-hook from Jupiter.” That wouldn’t have impressed six-year-old me.

“Truth be told,” Bissette admits, “what Amazing Adventures became remains far more interesting than what it was.” And what it most immediately became was Amazing Adult Fantasy. It was an unfortunate title even when it debuted in 1961. As Stan Lee tried to explain in a mailbag, “the only reason we put the word ADULT on the cover, is to distinguish our carefully-edited, and literately-written mag from the usual crop of comics which seem to be slanted for the average 6 year old with a 3 year old mentality! Anybody with brains enough to appreciate AMAZING ADULT FANTASY is our type of reader.” Remember, this is the magazine that respects your intelligence! And to their credit, the short stories in AAF (mostly written by Stan Lee’s brother Larry) are all pretty interesting in the Twilight Zone style I mentioned, with lots of last-panel plot twists. “The Terror of Tim Boo Ba!” which graces the cover of issue #9 as well as this omnibus edition is a great example. And there are even a couple of stories that riff on the classic Twilight Zone “To Serve Man” episode. But whether I’d call this stuff brainy is another question. The stories rely pretty heavily on simplistic caricatures, like the guy who builds a fallout shelter in his backyard and says things like this as he locks himself away:

“Goodbye, you poor fools! I don’t care what happens to all of you! But I shall live safely in my shelter and laugh at you when the bombs fall! Nothing can harm me here – nothing! Not even a direct hit by a nuclear bomb! I’ve enough provisions and oxygen to last five years! No matter what happens to the others, I shall survive! And if any of them try to get in to share my safety with me, I’ll laugh at them! I paid for this shelter . . . it is mine alone! . . . Nothing can harm me! No one can hurt me! Ha ha ha . . . let the rest of mankind perish! Who cares?!! I’ll be the last man alive on Earth!”

I don’t have to tell you that things don’t work out quite as he expected.

Still, as corny as it all is these stories are a lot of fun, and Steve Ditko’s art gives them an extra jolt. There’s a thing throughout of placing all-red figures against all-yellow backgrounds that has an electric effect. It’s all about heightening the impact, the visual correlative of the all-caps, all-exclamation mark speech bubbles that were the fashion at the time. I mean, when you have a character introduce himself matter-of-factly by saying “My name is Henry Burke! I’m a scientist!” then you know there’s nothing that isn’t going to feel like it’s being yelled or screamed in your face.

But in our own age of eye-ball grabbing headlines and click-bait thumbnails I think we have to smile. You do what you have to do to get attention in the media economy, and if that means always being dialed up to 11 then so be it.

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Bookmarked! #131: Bookstores No More XVI: The Children’s Book Store

/ Alex Good / 12 Comments

I don’t know much about the Children’s Book Store. I’m pretty sure I was never in it so I don’t know where I got the bookmark. I also don’t know what happened to the store as it’s not at this location anymore and probably no longer exists. At least I couldn’t find anything about it online.

I love the way the bookmark lets you make a list of the books you’ve read on the back. Things like that were lots of fun when I was a kid.

Book: Great Is the Truth: Secrecy, Scandal, and the Quest for Justice at the Horace Mann School by Amos Kamil with Sean Elder

Bookmarked Bookmarks

Holmes: The Hound of the Baskervilles

/ Alex Good / 6 Comments

After “The Final Problem” you could be forgiven for thinking it was over for Sherlock Holmes. Not so much because the famous detective had apparently plunged to his death from the top of the Reichenbach Falls, but because Doyle had said he was done with him. What’s more, there were good reasons for believing he meant it. Many of the stories he’d written leading up to that “final” episode had been uninspired efforts, not worth bothering with.  Doyle himself clearly wanted to move on.

Which makes it all the more surprising that he did bring Holmes back in his greatest adventure and, as Christopher Frayling puts it in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, “one of the greatest crime novels ever written . . . if not the greatest.” Normally, when a writer or any artist feels so checked out, you don’t expect them to bounce back. But perhaps the amount of downtime helped in this case. “The Final Problem” had come out in 1893 and The Hound of the Baskervilles was published in 1901. That was a lot of time off and it seems to have allowed Doyle to fully recharge. He did write several novels and numerous stories in the interim, little of which has lasted, but when he brought Holmes back (and that was not, initially, his plan) it was with a renewed sense of energy.

Doyle’s energy is mirrored by Holmes’s enthusiasm in taking up the Baskerville case. You can hear it in his voice when Dr. Mortimer tells him how he judged from the amount of cigar ash dropped on the ground how long Sir Charles had stood by a wicket-gate. “Excellent!” Holmes cries. “This is a colleague, Watson, after our own heart.” The analysis of footprints (which Mortimer has also observed) and cigar ash being two of Holmes’s three favourite go-to clues. The other, in case you’re interested, being handwriting, which also comes into play here.

A second jolt of excitement is felt when Holmes finds out that the killer who has been stalking Sir Henry in London told his cabman that he was a detective and that his name was Sherlock Holmes. “The cunning rascal!” Holmes exclaims. “I tell you, Watson, this time we have got a foeman who is worthy of our steel.” The game’s afoot and Holmes is loving it. As a reader, how can you not share his joy?

Aside from the form the clues take there are other familiar elements. Holmes talks about his method, for example, saying things like “The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.” It goes without saying that it is those unobserved-because-obvious things that are of supreme importance. Then a page later he tells us that “a concentrated atmosphere helps a concentration of thought.” This is a point he hasn’t pushed “to the length of getting into a box to think, but that is the logical outcome of my convictions.” Unlike his point about observing the obvious I think we can take this as more of an eccentricity. He’s on firmer ground when he responds to Dr. Mortimer’s accusation of guesswork by claiming that his method inhabits “the region where we balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination, but we have always some material basis on which to start our speculations.” That’s excellent advice. But as a final example, his claim that “It is the first quality of a criminal investigator that he should see through a disguise” may make us think of how badly he was embarrassed in A Study in Scarlet when he didn’t recognize a healthy young man disguised as a little old lady.

There are also some slips, of the kind that keep annotators active. The most glaring of these is the way the hound is painted in phosphorous. Not bloody likely! But we should keep in mind that Doyle didn’t care very much about such mistakes. “I have never been nervous about details,” he wrote, “and one must be masterful sometimes.”

And it is a masterful performance. Despite Holmes himself disappearing from the middle part of the book the pace never flags as. Watson himself points to how, near the end of his stay at Baskerville Hall, “these strange events began to move swiftly towards their terrible conclusion.” Even having read this book many times I still find it a page-turner. The business with the stolen clothing is a great hook, as is the motif of the net, with Holmes and Watson as both the hunters and the hunted. There’s also an interesting class element to pick up on. When Mortimer names the “only men of education” in the neighbourhood we know these are the only real suspects, as early British detective fiction rarely paid much attention to the “peasants” (as they are always referred to here). And finally there’s the odd treatment of the escaped convict Selden. In film adaptations they often try to soften this character, as someone with the mind of a child or some such disability. But Doyle paints him as a wicked man, someone who was spoiled growing up and then sank “lower and lower” until he is now little better than a beast. In our only glimpse of him he appears as “an evil yellow face, a terrible animal face, all seamed and scored with vile passions.” This does not, however, stop Watson and Sir Henry agreeing to allow him to escape. A reciprocal sense of loyalty to one’s loyal servants apparently went a long way.

A real treat then – in my opinion the best of the Holmes adventures and a landmark work in its own right. Because the story takes place before the events of “The Final Problem” it wasn’t necessary to explain Holmes’s escape, but I think it’s just as remarkable anyway how Doyle was able to bring him back from the dead.

Holmes index

Marple: Sanctuary

/ Alex Good / 7 Comments

Fun fact, when this story was first published in the U.S., in serial form, it was under the title “Murder at the Vicarage.” This despite the fact that Christie had already written a Miss Marple novel with the same name. I wonder what was going on there. Was she being lazy? Forgetful?

Another bit of background: the story was auctioned as part of a Westminster Abbey restoration appeal. Maybe that explains why the body is discovered in a church. Because otherwise I didn’t find the explanation for that part very convincing.

It is a terrible story. The only good part was the description of Miss Marple and Bunch as survivors of the linen sale. This was the first of the Marple stories where I honestly didn’t care what was going on and so wasn’t paying much attention when it came time for Miss Marple to wrap things up. A waste of time even for her biggest fans.

Marple index

The new me-dia

/ Alex Good / 12 Comments

No Oscar buzz . . . yet.

The release of the documentary Melania, which is about what the wife of Donald Trump was busy doing during the lead-up to his second inauguration, has been met with a predictable chorus of critical carping. Most if not all of which I’m sure is well deserved. Yes, the film itself was a $40 million bribe that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was making to the Trump family in order to curry favour. And I’m sure it’s every bit as bad and soul destroying a movie as reviewers have been saying. Here’s Mark Kermode, a reliably level-headed Everyman: “It’s horrible. It’s the most depressing experience I’ve ever had in the cinema and I’ve seen A Serbian Film, I’ve seen Cannibal Holocaust. I’ve never felt this depressed in my life in the cinema.”

That may be a fair take, but Melania is not a unique phenomenon. The way celebrities use their money and power to shape the public presentation of their lives is a subject I’ve been banging on about for years. Most recently I talked about how the tennis player Naomi Osaka was being lionized by the media for her attempt to assert “narrative control” of her public image, and related it to other sports figures like Tom Brady, Michael Jordan, and Venus and Serena Williams who had all been the subject of documentary and autobiographical films they had also been involved in the production of. As I put it then:

Everyone wants that kind of control. But who has that privilege? Only the most powerful. Billionaires. Those with “massive social-media followings.” Celebrities who own their own media companies.

Melania Trump is another figure in the exact same mold, and served as a producer on Melania. As I said over ten years ago in a post on celebrity biographies:

Whatever or whoever the subject, the same rules of the dance apply and the “sausage-making process” does its job. There’s nothing sinister or even wrong with that, but you have to always keep it in mind any time you’re getting access to a source that has a clear interest in spinning a story a particular way. Which is to say, any source. The story you’re hearing is the one they want you to hear. It may be true, but that’s beside the point.

I find the way people try to draft celebrities or billionaires onto different political teams ridiculous. Some rich and powerful people may be slightly better than others, but none of them are the friends or (shudder) “allies” of the common people, and their program when it comes to trying to “control the narrative” of how they are presented in the media is always exactly the same. To call it whitewashing or propaganda or advertising for their personal brand should go without saying. No one should be surprised at what Melania is like, not because of the kind of person Melania Trump is but because they’ve already seen this movie and read this book countless times already. If you’re not seeing or reading something that someone doesn’t want you to see or read then it’s just an ad.

Brrrrr

/ Alex Good / 12 Comments

Weather updates for yesterday morning and today. It wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t the case that it’s been like this for over a month. It’s that time of year when you start to feel like enough is enough.

The Return of a MAD Look at Old Movies

/ Alex Good / 9 Comments

The Return of a MAD Look at Old Movies

I started off my review of The MAD Book of Mysteries by saying that since I’m a fan of both MAD Magazine and classic detective fiction it was a book that couldn’t miss.

Well, because I really like both MAD and old movies, when I was a kid this was another favourite pocketbook of mine, even though I know I didn’t pick up on many of the references. At least the more specific ones. I always wondered, for example, who Rhonda Fleming was, and even today I’m a bit surprised that she was a household name in 1970. But the send-ups aren’t of particular movies so much as genres. There’s a circus movie, a submarine movie, a pirate movie, a mad scientist movie, a historical biopic, etc.

There are strings of gags that I’ve remembered for fifty years now. Here is a police captain and his deputy busting into Dr. Fear’s Frankenstein-style laboratory.

Deputy (seeing the corpse on a tabe): This man has no pulse, Captain!

Captain (grabbing hold of Dr. Fear): Aha! And if my powers of detection serve me correctly, I believe this man is the thief! All right, swine, what did you do with that man’s pulse?

Deputy: You don’t understand, Captain! This man is dead!

Captain: Dead? Then he doesn’t need his pulse! We came all the way out here for nothing!

And here’s a bit from the WW2 submarine story:

Lieutenant: Sir, this may sound like a scatter-brained idea, but why not stuff our clothes and some junk and a little oil into one of the torpedo tubes and shoot it to the surface? When they see the oil slick and stuff, they’ll think they got us!

Captain: Not bad, lieutenant, but I’ve got one even better. Why not wait till they hit us, then hold on to everything so that nothing floats to the surface, and drive them crazy wondering!

Credit Dick De Bartolo for the writing there, and Jack Davis for the art. This was a book of new material (that is, not stuff taken from the magazine) and as the title indicates was a sequel to A MAD Look at Old Movies. Unfortunately I never read that one or had a copy and they’re quite expensive now on the second-hand market (where I’m sure they’re not in the best of shape given how well-read they likely were). This makes me wonder why someone doesn’t republish these old MAD books and magazines in some new editions. I’m sure there’d be a market. Just look at how popular the EC Archives titles are. Get on it!

Graphicalex

Marple: Greenshaw’s Folly

/ Alex Good / 20 Comments

If you’ve read around in any of Agatha Christie’s work you know that one of the things that characterizes her mysteries is their theatrical nature. Murder is rarely a spur-of-the-moment sort of thing. It’s not just planned and premeditated but scripted, along with prepared costumes and very exact timings built into the plot.

If you’re playing along at home, these mysteries are often the most difficult to figure out. You may correctly guess whodunit but throw your hands up at how they did it because the “how” is so layered. One of the prime instances of this is Death on the Nile, but this short story is another good example. I think I knew right away who was going to kill Miss Greenshaw, and the way the murder was presented was so ridiculously dramatic made clear that it was being stage-directed, but I didn’t have it all figured out. In part because I don’t think that would be possible based on the evidence we’re given. As one critic remarked, this story is “a notable example of Miss Marple’s habit of drawing solutions from a hat, with hardly a trace of why or wherefore.”

At least the murderer had the good sense not to leave the body in the library. We’d already been down that road before with Miss Marple, and it was as much a cliché as it was then as it clearly is here. “The only thing the library needs is a body,” the collector of “monstrosities” opines. “Those old-fashioned detective stories about murder in the library” knew what they were about. So instead we settle for the drawing room. Bonus points though if you know what the reference to “Paul and Virginia” is to. They are, apparently, the subjects rendered in a “colossal bronze” found in the library of Greenshaw’s Folly. My guess is that they represent the lovers in an eighteenth-century French novel of the same name.

Marple index

Mighty Marvel Masterworks: The Avengers Volume 4

/ Alex Good / 20 Comments

Mighty Marvel Masterworks: The Avengers Volume 4

I read this shortly after reviewing the Marvel Epic Collection containing The Avengers #1-20. What we get here are issues #31-40, and while the line-up of heroes is mostly the same as at the end of the Epic Collection volume, and I think the spirit of their adventures is similar, things were under different management. Jack Kirby had been replaced by Don Heck and Stan Lee was in the process of letting Roy Thomas take over writing duties. And as much as Lee and Kirby are justly lionized for being two of the creative giants who got Marvel started, I don’t think there’s any falling off. In fact, I prefer what we get from Heck and Thomas over any of the Lee and Kirby collaborations. Comics were growing up fast.

The earlier issues have more of Lee’s hyperbolic salesmanship. “Read this yarn slowly – carefully! It’s just possibly one of the most deeply-moving, off-beat thrillers of the year, and we want you to savor every prize-winning panel!” I wonder what prizes he was referring to. Or there’s this: “Caution! Whatever you do, wherever you go, be sure to hang on to this irreplaceable ish, for it’s certain to become one of the most talked-about collectors’ items in the annals of comicophilia! We kid you not!” Lee said “I kid you not!” a lot, and I think it’s where I picked the expression up.

We’re also still in the days when The Avengers actually weren’t the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. Captain America’s shield is just a regular metal disc that is easily bent or destroyed and then replaced. The Scarlet Witch only seems to know a few basic spells, and her “hex power” is underwhelming. The Wasp is pretty much useless, as always, and forever swooning over the hunky boys she meets. Goliath starts off being stuck in his giant size and one of the storylines has him having to figure out a way to get small again. And he still needs to work on other things. In the final issue the Wasp has to give him a ride because she has wings and he doesn’t and she asks an obvious question: “Why don’t you give yourself the power to gain wings when you shrink?” His lame reply: “Y’know, I’ve been so busy on other projects, I never thought about it! Maybe I will, one of these days!”

As a result, they need to focus on teamwork to fight off the bad guys they face. Especially the mighty Ixar (“the Invincible”). Or the Thinker and his team of B-listers. I kind of liked how the Thinker wasn’t some superhero but just a computer nerd who tries to calculate the best way to take down the Avengers. A computer nerd must have seemed cutting edge at the time. Then in the final issues Hercules unofficially joins the team and he adds some much needed muscle given that Thor and the Hulk are out. Giant Man never seems to pull his weight as a clean-up hitter.

So this is quite entertaining in the mid-‘60s Marvel way. I enjoyed seeing the word “sawbuck” for the first time in a long time, and then realized I’d never had any idea what a sawbuck was. It’s a $10 bill, in case you were wondering, so called because the Roman numeral X looks like a sawbuck, which is a style of sawhorse. Timely trivia aside, the Avengers were on their way here to becoming the franchise they would become but they still needed a lot of work before they’d be fully assembled.

Graphicalex