Author: Alex Good

Daredevil: Chinatown

/ Alex Good / 6 Comments

Daredevil: Chinatown

This comic constitutes the launch of the Back in Black series, a semi-reboot of the Daredevil character that was part of the “All-New, All-Different” Marvel branding exercise that kicked off in 2015. What I mean by a semi-reboot is that it isn’t an origin story but it does involve a universe jump as we’re now in a timeline where nobody knows that Matt Murdock is Daredevil except for his former law partner Foggy Nelson. Or I guess it’s the same timeline but one that’s been adjusted by the powers-that-be so that Matt has regained his virginity. How all this happened is explained later in the series. And yes, it’s lame.

That introduction aside, this is a decent story by Charles Soule that mixes the traditional Daredevil plot that has DD fighting gangs in New York (though it’s Chinatown this time, not Hell’s Kitchen), with the supernatural elements of the Hand joining the fun. Instead of a defence attorney Matt is now a prosecutor, and he has a suspicious Chinese cult in his sights that’s run by a guy named Tenfingers. So called because he has ten fingers (or nine fingers and a thumb) on each hand. To be honest, I thought this was really silly, and all the extra digits seemed more like a disability than a superpower, but it does make him stand out.

Anyway, Tenfingers stole some bad mojo from the Hand and now they want it back. This leaves Daredevil, along with his protégé Blindspot (don’t call him a sidekick, though “apprentice” may be OK), caught in the middle of a high-level gang war, with lots of innocent civilian lives in danger. Much fighting ensues.

Blindspot (apparently the fourth Marvel hero to go by that name) seemed like a character with some potential. He’s a young undocumented Chinese immigrant who’s invented a battery-operated invisibility suit. He knows some martial arts as well and is a handy guy to have around. Unfortunately, his mother works for Tenfingers so family dysfunction bites him in the ass. But you do get the sense that DD genuinely cares about him and is doing his best to be a mentor. That side of the comic works quite well.

The art by Ron Garney is more stylized and rougher around the edges than the generic Marvel house manner, and it fits here. I thought it really worked for the action scenes, of which there are a lot. I’m not a fan of Daredevil’s black costume though, or the flaming DD’s. Not an improvement on the all-red outfit, at least in my eyes. But maybe since they decided they were doing a reboot they figured they might as well spring for some fresh duds and see what people thought. Well, thumbs down from me.

Graphicalex

TCF: Someone You Know

/ Alex Good / 5 Comments

Someone You Know: An Unforgettable Collection of Canadian True Crime Stories
By Catherine Fogarty

The crimes:

“Murder in the Morgue: The Two Faces of Steven Toussaint”: the supervisor of the morgue at the University of Toronto Medical School kills his co-worker, burns down some churches, and then disappears. His body is found a year and a half later.

“Deadly Secrets: The Murder of Gladys Wakabayashi”: a jealous wife kills a woman she suspects her husband is romantically involved with. Years later, she is tricked into confessing as part of an elaborate police sting.

“Lost Boy: The Murder of Nancy Eaton”: a descendant of the wealthy Eaton family befriends a troubled teen who ends up killing her.

“Sins of the Son: The Disappearance of Minnie Ford”: a woman is killed by her brutish son and her body thrown in a lake.

“A Mother’s Love: The Ma Duncan Case”: a mentally disturbed mother gets upset at her son’s marriage and arranges for the pregnant bride to be murdered.

“Enemy Within: The Murder of Glen Davis”: a wealthy philanthropist is murdered by a grasping heir. It turns out the killer was left nothing in his victim’s will.

“Behind the Laughter: The Phil Hartman Story”: a popular comedian is shot in bed by his wife. She later kills herself.

“Back to Reality: The Murder of Jasmine Fiore”: a contestant on a crass dating show kills his wife and throws her body in a dumpster.

“Hollywood Horror Story: The Murder of Iana Kasian”: a rich fellow trying to make it in the entertainment business kills his fiancée in a horrific manner.

“Murder in the Suburbs: The Case of Lucille Miller”: classic case from the 1960s about a woman killing her husband by drugging him and putting him in a car that she torches.

“Black Widow: The Many Lies of Evelyn Dick”: notorious Canadian case of a woman who killed her infant son and then seemed to have some role in the killing of her husband. She was found not guilty of the latter murder at trial and subsequently disappeared.

“No Way Out: The Jane Stafford Story”: a woman kills her abusive spouse, and her trial sets a major legal precedent for “battered wife” cases.

The book:

I wonder what makes a crime story “Canadian.” If it takes place in Canada? If it involves Canadian criminals, or Canadian victims?

I raise the question of labeling just to introduce what you get in this book. The subtitle refers to “Canadian True Crime Stories” but we could be more precise and say that it’s a collection of murder cases. And specifically they are cases that illustrate the point that most homicides are indeed committed by someone the victim knew. “Interpersonal and intimate partner violence accounts for most murders in our country. While we are all taught about ‘stranger danger’ as young kids, the reality is that we are more likely to be sleeping with, socializing with, related to or married to our killer. And that is deeply disturbing.”

The twelve cases are divided into four sections relating to killers who are the friends, kids, lovers, and spouses of their victims. But again the classification scheme doesn’t seem totally on point. You could argue that each of the three murders in the third section were cases where someone killed their spouse, so they could just as easily have been included in the fourth section. Instead, what distinguishes the stories in the third section is the strange coincidence that they all deal with murders involving ex-pat Canadians living in California. All that sunshine does things to us.

(I should expand on a point here. When I say that the cases in the third section were arguably spousal killings I mean that Jasmin Fiore apparently had just had her marriage to Ryan Jenkins annulled (though there are no records of this) and that Iana Kasian was only Blake Leibel’s fiancée. What I also want to add here is that both these women were killed after their relationships had fallen apart but when they agreed to meet with their exes in a gesture of conciliation. As I’ve said before, this is not advisable. If you’re splitting up, you should make a clean break and never get together with your (violent and abusive) ex again. And you definitely should avoid meeting with them alone.)

As far as the writing and research goes I thought Catherine Fogarty did a good job relating the facts and not dragging things out unnecessarily. There were places though where I wished she’d done a bit more digging, especially with regard to cases that are now decades old. The first case here, for example, left me with a lot of questions. Starting with whether the killer’s name was Steven or Stephen Toussaint. Both spellings are used. Meanwhile, all of the sources are news reports from 1998-99 and they don’t offer any resolution on a number of points. Did Toussaint kill himself? How? We’re only told that his body was badly decomposed, but it still seems odd to me that they couldn’t determine any cause of death. And why did it take so long to find his body? Fogarty wonders about this herself, as the body was discovered (18 months later) only 500 meters from where Toussaint’s car had been abandoned and there’d been a supposedly extensive search of the area. We’re only told the body was in an overgrown, wooded area. Were the search parties just too lazy to get into the weeds?

With increased hindsight you might expect some of these questions to be more fully explored. Another point that came up in the next case, also from the 1990s, bothered me. Just how did Jean Ann James dispose of so much physical evidence when she killed Gladys Wakabayashi? There must have been a lot, and James had been the “number one suspect” of the police. She said she’d burned her bloody clothes in the incinerator at her son’s school, but this was an explanation that was later proved false because there was no incinerator at the school and anyway the amount of blood there must have been would have gotten everywhere. To have cleaned up so well is remarkable. Fogarty assumes James threw her clothes in a dumpster, but there must have been more to it than that. I guess we’ll never know.

Aside from being Canadian true crime stories dealing with cases of murder committed by people close to the victim, another theme I found popping up was that of the double life. This made me wonder how much the notion of a double life is something real and how much of it is a myth. To be sure, we all have public and private selves. Or personalities that are different at work and at home. Dickens noticed that a couple of hundred years ago. So do we all lead double lives?

Not in the sense that I think most people use the term, and certainly not as you find it employed in true crime writing. In that latter context what it usually means is the good neighbour/family man who is a serial killer or homicidal psychopath on the side. But it could also mean something more innocuous. Was there anything exceptional in the marriage of Phil and Brynn Hartman? “Behind their perfect-looking family façade, there was trouble – tension, jealousy and addiction.” Indeed their marriage was on the rocks. But this is common if not more the rule than the exception in any marriage. Or take this description of Stephen Toussaint:

He was a hard-working family man with an effervescent personality and a great sense of humour. But beyond Sunday school and bowling nights, there was another side to Stephen Toussaint that neither his family nor church were aware of. He was a man of dark secrets.

What were these dark secrets? All we seem to know is that he was an alcoholic, which had in turn affected his work at the morgue. Which in turn led to his murdering a co-worker. Toussaint had a drinking problem, but a double life? Was he two different people, at work, at home, or at the bar?

To some extent everything about us is always a façade. The point a collection like this drives home is that we all have secrets and that nobody, not even those closest to us – children, spouses – knows us fully. And even if such perfect knowledge existed, there’d always be a random element impossible to predict.

Noted in passing:

Glen Davis was shot in the stairwell of an underground parking garage. Yes, it was around 1:45 in the afternoon, but does this count as being “gunned down in broad daylight in a busy area of the city”?

Ryan Jenkins mutilated Jasmin Fiore’s body, specifically removing her teeth and finger joints post-mortem, to prevent recognition. He did not reckon on the fact that breast implants have serial numbers printed on them that could be used to confirm her identity.

Takeaways:

Given that you can never really know someone, you should observe their behaviour and assume that this will remain consistent over time. In the most notorious case here Jane Hurshman fell for Billy Stafford because she was impressed that he was “kind, gentle and listened to Jane talk about her marital troubles.” In fact he was notorious for being a violent and abusive drunk. Jane knew about his “less than stellar reputation” but . . . “love is blind.” It cannot afford to be.

True Crime Files

Gideon Falls Volume 4: The Pentoculus

/ Alex Good / 45 Comments

Gideon Falls Volume 4: The Pentoculus

Ah, things were really clicking in this series now. There’s a lot of jumping around, from the different dimensions accessed by the Pentoculus (that’s the multiverse machine Norton Sinclair built in his barn) to the different bodies that the Laughing Man (or as I call him, the Bug God) inhabits, but I found it all reasonably easy to follow. In part because the threads were starting to be drawn together, as the main characters (it is written that there must be five, constituting a kind of Fellowship of the Bug) all finally find themselves on the same page. Dr. Xu even gets to see herself as Old Dr. Xu in the village dimension, which is somehow at the center of everything.

In addition to the Fellowship of the Bug there are also other networks in play, including the uninspiring Ploughmen and the Bishop’s gathering of bug-fighting priests. Meanwhile, the Laughing Man is vomiting his bugs into his victims in the sort of mouth-to-mouth process that has long been popular in horror movies (see my note on this in my review of The Invasion). Once possessed, these people go on bloody rampages, all (I think) just to get attention since the Laughing Man only needs to possess Danny in order to open all the doors. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe it’s just because Danny, as a character, seems like such an empty vessel thus far.

Lots of slam-bang action, and Andrea Sorrentino was really pulling out all the stops when it comes to fragmenting the page into hallucinogenic collages. This is always been his style, and with this series he gets to indulge it fully. So overall it’s a series that’s finishing strong, making me hopeful for the conclusion.

Graphicalex

Marple: 4.50 from Paddington

/ Alex Good / 8 Comments

The year is 1957, though it’s never mentioned and I’m only saying that because of the publication date. What does this mean? Well, when the conversation turns to “foreigners” one can no longer safely assume that the French are meant, because “nowadays we have so many nationalities over here, Italians, Germans, Austrians, all the Scandinavian countries –.” Meanwhile, family members aren’t sent off to India because “that is all done with now.”

As for England’s green and pleasant land, even in St. Mary Mead there’s a nearby airfield so that the jets flying over break the panes in Miss Marple’s greenhouse. And, drafty and cold, a confessed “anachronism,” Rutherford Hall is now caught in a web of railway lines. None of the Crackenthorpe heirs has any attention of living there. They just want to sell it to developers, for whom it will be worth a fortune.

But at least the kids are alright. They’re reading something called “space fiction.” Because who knows? Someday manned space flight might be a thing.

I thought this was a really enjoyable book, but not a great mystery. You can tell why it was the first Miss Marple story to be adapted into a movie, as Murder She Said (1961) starring Margaret Rutherford. There’s a Hitchcockian hook at the beginning and then a manor house mystery that plays at times like a bedroom farce as all the Crackenthorpe men get handsy with Lucy Eyelesbarrow. Including Old Man Crackenthorpe himself, who has one foot in the grave!

And who could blame them? Good help is so hard to find, especially in 1957, and Lucy is a certified keeper. She not only cooks all her meals from scratch, she even peels the mushrooms. I’ve never heard of anyone doing that, but I guess it’s a sign of class. Or was.

But as much fun as it all is, it’s not, as I’ve said, a good mystery. As critic Robert Barnard put it, “Miss Marple apparently solves the crime by divine guidance, for there is very little in the way of clues or logical deduction.” Things are wrapped up quickly, through a ludicrous stratagem, and the great detective’s explanation left me as baffled as Barnard was as to how she managed to identify the killer. This isn’t playing fair with the reader, and I expected more from Dame Agatha.

I can’t leave off without mentioning another of Christie’s old-fashioned Britishisms. It comes when Miss Marple is talking about finances: “Women have a lot of sense, you know, when it comes to money matters. Not high finance, of course. No woman can hope to understand that, my dear father said. But everyday LSD – that sort of thing.”

I pulled a blank on LSD. I was sure the old pussy (that’s how you referred to old ladies back in the day, to the point where Inspector Craddock doesn’t know what else to call them) didn’t mean Lysergic Acid Diethlamide. It’s 1957 remember, not the ‘60s. But what did she mean? After some Internet sleuthing I discovered it’s an abbreviation for pounds, shillings, and pence that’s derived from the Latin currency denominations librae, solidi, and denarii. I don’t know if it’s an expression much in use anymore even in England.

Marple index

Game night

/ Alex Good / 12 Comments

So many games, so little time.

This past weekend I stopped by Gryphcon, which was being held in the basement of the University Centre, which for some reason is called Peter Clark Hall. Not the University Centre. That’s called the UC. Just the basement. This big room in the basement is Peter Clark Hall. Isn’t that weird? I always think of a Hall as being, if not a building, at least something above ground.

Anyway, Gryphcon is the annual board game and role-playing game “convention,” and it was quite well attended this year. Lots of people playing games, some of which I knew but others I’d never heard of. I took the above picture just as they were cleaning up. It’s a table that had some of the free games that drop-ins could play. That is, just pick-up games and not the registered games involving modeling kits, role-playing campaigns, or the elimination rounds for the Settlers of Catan tournament.

I’ve played Codenames. It’s a great game, already a classic. I’ve played Ticket to Ride. Great game play, but calculating who won at the end is a bit of a drag. I’ve played Skip-Bo, which is a fun and really simple card game. It’s definitely more for kids. I’ve never played Settlers of Catan though I’ve watched it played and it seems like fun. I played Pandemic once and I think it’s the kind of game you have to spend a lot of time with to enjoy. I’ve played Clue. It’s one of those old-favourite board games that I don’t think holds up that well. And that’s it for this table. (You can click on the pic to make it bigger.)

The Avengers: Four

/ Alex Good / 8 Comments

The Avengers: Four

Tight. I liked it.

Four is a retro-flavoured miniseries written by Mark Waid that has Captain America heading a new Avengers team after the OGs “decided to take some time off.” So they’re now down to four members: Cap, Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, and Quicksilver. Since the newbies are all “reformed villains” and relatively underpowered Cap has his work cut out for him whipping them into a functional unit. A point that’s underlined by the way they get their butts kicked out of the gate by the Frightful Four, with all the bad press that follows. Egged on by the media, even the public start getting into it, mocking the “Mighty Pretenders.” Things are really not off to a good start for the not-so-fab four.

Things get much worse however when they rescue a young Thai lady named Cressida from the Stranger. Cressida has the power to drain the life force from others, leaving them dried-up husks. She can either absorb that life force or transfer it to someone else, making them “better, faster, stronger.” Which sounds a bit like being a coach for the Olympics.

The Avengers basically adopt Cressida and start calling her Avenger X. But she has nefarious plans of her own, apparently being motivated by revenge. I don’t know for what. Her character isn’t filled in very much, and she even mocks the suggestion made at one point of providing an origin story. The Stranger considers her to be not a mutant, even though she says she’s had her powers since she was a kid. I think we just have to take her as a given.

She’s a formidable enemy though, both in how she schemes to set the Avengers against one another and for her (borrowed) superpowers. Indeed, she’s basically too much for this new team and at the end the OGs have to come back and lend a mighty hand. Which I thought was a bit of a cop-out. The story arc seemed to be the familiar one of the team coming together and solving their own problems. The way they’re thrown a literal lifeline here undercut all that.

Still, I loved the throwback feel to the art and the way the story held together. It’s a nice, satisfying unit, with all the different sub-adventures contributing in different ways to the main Cressida storyline. In terms of character the good guys are conflicted and the bad guys wicked in their usual bickering, arrogant way. Good and evil are complementary and evenly matched, and Waid can bring both darkness and humour to the proceedings (Wizard’s epitaph for Avenger X was a bitchy twist I wasn’t expecting!). In sum, it’s nothing wildly out of the ordinary, but it does everything a superhero comic is supposed to do, which was a treat.

Graphicalex

Cla$$war

/ Alex Good / 12 Comments

Cla$$war

In which a bunch of cynical, burnt-out, and horny superheroes, created by an ex-Nazi scientist with a thing for human experimentation, dress up in stars-and-stripes costumes and fight America’s wars. But when one of the members of the team (he’s just called “American”) develops a conscience the world’s mightiest heroes are soon fighting among themselves.

With a synopsis like that I was expecting something very much along the lines of The Boys, and that’s what Cla$$war is. But Cla$$war actually came first, running from 2002 to 2004 while The Boys was 2006-2012. And Marvel’s Civil War storyline, which also shares some similarities to what we get here, kicked off in 2006 as well. Actually, at the time Cla$$war was thought to have been influenced by DC’s The Authority, but Rob Williams says he didn’t know The Authority before he started writing and that his inspiration was more drawn from the Noam Chomsky he’d been reading.

The title, complete with dollar signs, is a bit misleading. In fact, I’m not sure why it was chosen. Nothing in the comic addresses class war in the sense of economic exploitation and the effects of entrenched social inequality. Instead, its target is American imperialism. The Enola Gay team (that’s what they’re called) are more supersoldiers than superheroes, fighting alongside the troops in foreign countries while the political rot deepens at home.

I wasn’t thrilled by the story here, not because of any political leanings (I like Chomsky too) but because the political message wasn’t new. The references here are up to date, with the president that American begins by attacking (he publicly brands the word “LIAR” on his forehead) being a stand-in for George W. Bush, and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq being referenced as earlier forays by Enola Gay. But it also felt a lot like the 1970s, with the Vietnam War and the political conspiracy thrillers of the time. And the invasion of Glenada is clearly a reference to the 1983 invasion of Grenada.

That said, I came away thinking this is a comic that should be better known. Perhaps being published by Com.x, a smaller British comic publisher, meant it didn’t get as much exposure. I thought the art by Trevor Hairsine and Travel Foreman was first-rate, and while the story was pedestrian I liked the way the different characters sparked off one another. American is a bit of a stick, but the other members of Enola Gay, while jerks, have distinct and complicated personalities. And the new superfreak the Nazi doctor whips up in his lab had real potential. I wanted to read more about all of these guys, but for whatever reason the series didn’t continue. It was initially planned to run for 12 issues but they only did six. As things stand the story breaks off, with only the character of Heavyweight now removed from the picture. Twenty years later I doubt we’ll see the series continued, at least in the way Williams might have intended. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a sequel.

Graphicalex

Holmes: The Ripper Legacy

/ Alex Good / 6 Comments

I didn’t much care for this. David Stuart Davies is a decent writer and a renowned Holmesian, but something just felt off.

As one of the Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series it’s a pastiche, but the narrow meaning of the word “pastiche” is that it’s an imitation of the style of previous works, and that might be a place to start. While part of the book is presented in the canonical manner of being the written recollections of Dr. Watson, the excerpts from his journal are interlaced with chapters from a third-person omniscient point of view describing actions and events occurring elsewhere. Holmes’s thoughts are even described, which I found jarring.

Also, if not quite jarring but disconcerting, was the character of Holmes. He’s quite unpleasant here, especially in the early going. Not just brusque but rude and insulting, even to the husband and wife who have lost their 8-year-old child. He’s also not very impressive as a detective. He knows that the lost child had been adopted because . . . his picture doesn’t look like either of his parents. Later, he will be embarrassed when he pays a pair of prostitutes to tell him where he can find someone when he’s standing right below a tavern sign with the person’s name on it. So much for his powers of observation. Another big clue will be provided by pictures of the same country house hanging on the walls of a man’s office and home. Even Watson should have noticed that. But then a pattern is held to where Holmes is always one step ahead and Watson a couple of steps behind (which leads to his being captured by the bad guys not once but twice).

Another point that I thought out of place was some of the action. Here’s a taste:

Inside the chamber, Henshaw had taken advantage of the distraction caused by Gaunt’s exit and had scrabbled across the floor to retrieve the gun. With a cry of satisfaction he grabbed it and, clambering to his feet, aimed it at Holmes. Without hesitation, he pulled the trigger. The detective feinted to the left, the bullet just clipping the shoulder of his overcoat. Henshaw roared his dismay and was about to shoot again, but Holmes fired first. Henshaw was hit in the chest and the force of the blow flung his body backwards. With an animal-like bellow he crashed against the far wall of the room, and then slowly slithered down to the floor, leaving a thin trail of blood in his wake.

Watson describes this scene as being “like some violent mummer’s play,” but what it sounds like to me is hard-boiled detective fiction of the American school. And this isn’t the first man Holmes kills in the book.

A pastiche is fan service, and certain popular elements tend to show up in a lot of them. Characters like Mycroft Holmes and Professor Moriarty weren’t seen very often in the canon, nor do the Baker Street Irregulars appear more than a couple of times, but they’re here again, as they are in most Holmes pastiches. But the problem with recurring characters like these is that they become stock figures. Here is Moriarty finally coming face-to-face with Holmes:

“Call me sentimental, Sherlock Holmes, but I have a whim to take a final drink with you. We have gazed at each other for some time across the great divide that separates us and yet we share some strange kind of bond. We are both masters of our profession, you and I; meticulous, brilliant and resourceful. It is these qualities that almost make us brothers.”

You can see what I mean by calling this stuff fan service. But while fans may eat it up I thought it just seemed tired.

The plot itself, finally, mines the Stephen Knight thesis that the Ripper slayings were meant to cover-up the affairs of Prince Albert Victor, then second-in-line to the throne. I don’t think this is very likely, but it has been a popular source for subsequent fictions, like the film Murder by Decree and Alan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell. I thought it unnecessary here though, and couldn’t figure out why the government considered it to be such a big deal that the prince had a love child. Wasn’t that common to most royals? And how would anyone prove it anyway? The eye test?

So to me it felt like going through the motions, giving Holmes fans a bit of everything except maybe a cameo from Irene Adler (another minor figure from the canon who has enjoyed a long deuterocanonical afterlife). But the mystery wasn’t that interesting and there was an air of glumness and nastiness about it too. Not my thing, but if you wanted to be generous you could see it as an attempt to grow the brand.

Holmes index