reading books

Holmes: The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet

/ Alex Good / 33 Comments

This has the feel of a more traditional mystery, even though there wasn’t much of a tradition yet. A wealthy banker is given a beryl coronet, one of the “most precious public possessions of the empire,” as collateral for a loan. Not trusting to keep it in his bank’s safe, he takes it home with him and locks it in his dresser. Because that’s the kind of thing you did back in the day. He also makes sure to tell his niece and wastrel son what he’s doing. That night he discovers his son apparently in the act of stealing the coronet, and has him arrested by the police as a few gems from the coronet have gone missing.

After being told the story, Holmes is convinced that the son is innocent. He then proceeds to solve the case by the usual method of getting out his magnifying glass to examine evidence like footprints, going out on mysterious nighttime excursions, and employing “an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” With regard to that final point, once again I didn’t find this maxim very persuasive, as Holmes never excludes what is impossible but only what is highly unlikely. Few things, after all, are impossible. But as I’ve criticized this maxim enough already, I won’t say more about it here.

I think it’s pretty obvious to most readers what’s going on, as once you’ve excluded the most likely suspect all we’re left with is the niece, who is an emotional girl with a habit of giving herself away. She’s not a bad person, but betrays her uncle the banker because she’s got a crush on a dissolute rake named Burnwell who is in need of money. She loves unwisely and too well. Or as Holmes unhelpfully explains to the uncle, “I have no doubt that she loved you, but there are women in whom the love of a lover extinguishes all other loves, and I think that she must have been one.” I mean, someone has to come first.

It’s a pretty good little mystery, even if nothing stands out about it. I did like how the rake who seduces the niece throws away the gems to a fence for such a low sum. No wonder he’s in such dire straits financially; he doesn’t know the value of anything. I’m afraid Mary has made a bad choice, which inverts the usual way one of these stories ends. And where is poor Mary now? “I think that we may safely say,” returned Holmes, “that she is wherever Sir George Burnwell is. It is equally certain, too, that whatever her sins are, they will soon receive a more than sufficient punishment.” Yikes!

Holmes index

The MAD Book of Mysteries

/ Alex Good / 5 Comments

The MAD Book of Mysteries

Since I’m a fan of both MAD Magazine and classic detective fiction, a book like this couldn’t really miss. I also like that it’s full of original stories and not a grab-bag of previously published material, and that all the stories have the same author and artist (Lou Silverstone and Jack Rickard, respectively).

So the line-up of crime-solving all-stars here sounds like the cast of Murder by Death. There’s Hercules Pirouette, Archer Spillane Spayed, Shtick Tracer, Allergy Queen, Charlie China, Perry Maceface, and Shamus Holmes. And there’s also a spoof on G-Men movies now and then, a quick trip to Peanuts-land with Chuck Frown, Private Eye, and a bunch of gags about what cops say vs. what they really mean. Alas, there’s no Nero Wolfe or Miss Marple, though they’re on the back cover. I would have loved seeing them.

The gags aren’t terribly funny but Silverstone knows his stuff and the way he pokes fun at the material will make you smile. He takes digs at Poirot’s long, drawn-out and confusing explanations of the crime, and has Number One Son getting back at his dad for all the mean cracks made at his expense. But the style of humour is mainly geared around running a gag-a-page of snappy comebacks. When Shamus Holmes declares that a murder victim lived near a canal Dr. Whatso says “A canal? That’s eerie, Homes.” To which Holmes replies: “No, alimentary, my dear Whatso!” Because the deceased worked at a candy company you see.

Rickard often gives the supporting characters familiar movie-star faces. James Cagney and Robert Redford, for example, as their era’s representative G-Men. I loved the look of all the stories, though MAD‘s house style of square speech bubbles and sans serif lettering seemed out of place. I don’t know why they couldn’t have played around with that more. Lettering matters.

What I took away the most from revisiting this pocketbook today though is how much the cultural landscape has changed. In the late ‘70s-early ‘80s classic detective fiction could be sent up for a mass audience, here or in the aforementioned Murder by Death, because it could be assumed everyone had some familiarity with these characters. Today I think that kind of awareness belongs to a vanishing few older readers. To be sure, golden age detectives still have their cults, but they aren’t household names anymore. And what’s more, nobody has taken their place. Caricature exploits character, and the old guard had plenty of that. But how can you caricature Inspectors Morse, Rebus, or Gamache? They’re more realistic and psychologically grounded but not as memorable, and give satirists a lot less to work with.

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Aliens: Dead Orbit

/ Alex Good / 6 Comments

Aliens: Dead Orbit

Dead Orbit is a one-man show, being written, drawn, and lettered by Canadian comic artist James Stokoe. It’s impressive when someone can handle all these roles as a comic auteur, but there are times when you think a division of labour might have helped. That’s the feeling I had here anyway. I love Stokoe’s art, which turns a space station into a giant, crumbling oatmeal cookie and sees Xenomorphs hiding in the wicker nests of wiring and machinery. I also liked the visual concept he had of turning the impregnated survivors who are “rescued” being burned to a crisp in their cryo pods so that it looks like rotting zombies are giving birth to chestbursters. That was a great touch, typical of the inventiveness found throughout this comic franchise.

The story, however, is hard to follow. I wasn’t sure of the time scheme, as most of the story is a flashback, but I don’t know how much because within the flashback there are a couple of flashforwards, though not as far forward as the story’s frame. This lost me completely the first time through because I got confused as to when Wascylewski was cocooned by the Xenomorphs. And what happened to the salvagers anyway? It seemed like that might be important, and then it wasn’t.

Things were just moving too fast. At one point there’s even a joke made about how quickly the creatures are growing, which is a poke at Alien that is often picked up on. The point remains however that everything here seems to happen in a rush and even at the end I was still wondering a bit about what was going on and in what order.

The supplemental materials describe Stukoe’s original pitch, which was a much more conventional Aliens story featuring space marines infiltrating a planet infested with Xenomorphs. But at some point he decided to go in a different direction, and this is definitely more like the first film than the second. The crew don’t even have any firearms and have to improvise with whatever tools they can find on the ship. Good luck with that!

Perhaps a little too scrambled in terms of its narrative for its own good, this is still another solid instalment in the Aliens franchise, and not to be missed by franchise fans.

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Marple: The Case of the Perfect Maid

/ Alex Good / 16 Comments

The expression “it’s hard to find good help these days” is the key to unlocking the mystery in this charming story.

We return to the golden days of yesteryear (actually 1942, when a lot of Brits probably had other things on their mind), and a time when hot water bottles were in use (remember them?) and everyone had a maid. Miss Marple has one of course, and the story begins with her maid trying to get Miss Marple to help out her cousin, who is also a maid but who is about to be let go because her employers (spinster sisters) suspect her of having tried to steal a brooch.

Specifically, this maid has been “given notice.” Which is something I don’t understand. I mean, I get that employees should be given notice and that their employers might want to keep them around until they can hire a replacement. That’s the case today in most jobs. But in this case the maid has effectively been fired on suspicion of her being a thief. Why would you want that person in your house for another couple of weeks? Isn’t that just asking for trouble?

Anyway, the unfairly targeted maid is dismissed even though the sisters have been warned that, you know, it’s hard to find good help these days. They luck out, however, and immediately hire a “paragon” of a maid. But is she too good to be true? It seems so when the sisters, and everyone else in the Old Hall they’re renting a flat in, get burgled and the perfect maid disappears.

You don’t win a prize for cottoning on to the fact that the new maid isn’t all that she seems. Miss Marple’s own suspicions are made clear. So what Christie is pulling is the simple trick of throwing suspicion on something that’s not right, in this case the perfect maid, in order to distract us from something that’s also not right, but less obviously so.

A simple trick, but it works. Even knowing Christie’s go-to solutions I still didn’t twig to what was happening. Miss Marple’s trick to catch a thief was a bit too subtle, but the criminal plot actually made sense, which is something I can’t say for all these stories, and I had a good time being played.

Marple index

Demon Slayer Volume 2: It Was You

/ Alex Good / 6 Comments

Demon Slayer Volume 2: It Was You

A mangaka is a comic artist who writes and/or illustrates manga. Demon Slayer’s mangaka goes by the name of Koyoharu Gotouge, which is a pseudonym. His self-portrait or avatar in the comics is an alligator that wears glasses.

I only mention this because Gotouge is both author and artist for Demon Slayer, which I don’t think is the norm. Even though manga is a more conventionalized artistic style than its form of storytelling. You can even buy books on “how to draw manga.” Meaning how to draw comics that look like every other manga comic. Anyway, what led me to bother pointing this out is that my response to this second volume of Demon Slayer has split into a good-bad dichotomy and Gotouge is responsible for both.

I like the story. Toshiro is still a young man on a mission to save his sister Nezuko from her infection with the demon virus. This leads him to fight a series of demons, beginning with the sad, fat demon he was in the middle of fighting in the previous volume, and a trio of demons who have been terrorizing Tokyo. This is all standard stuff, but there are some interesting twists, like the way the trio of demons keep popping in and out of a transdimensional bog. As he slices and dices his way through these bad guys Toshiro finds out the name of the chief demon, the one he has to locate if he wants to save his sister. This is some dude-ish fellow named Muzan Kibutsuji. When Toshiro finds Kibutsuji he’s disguised as a family man with a hip-cat sense of style. He sort of looks like a 1930s American gangster. Toshiro confronts him at one point, but Kibutsuji has a legion of demon obstacles to throw in his way. None of that is going to stop Toshiro’s commitment though. As he bracingly declares at one point: “I’ll follow you to the depths of hell and your neck will feel the edge of my sword!”

This all seemed good, or at least acceptable to me, and I managed (just) to keep up with all the new rules regarding demons and how to fight them that were being tossed out. I only wondered at why Toshiro had to fight the trio of demons with the box he’s using to transport Nezuko still strapped to his back. That was ridiculous.

But then there’s the art. I don’t like the way this comic is drawn. The action has already become repetitive and is confusing to boot. Unless you already know what the Seventh Form Drop Ripple Thrust-Curve is and can see that movement happening. In quite a few places the drawing seemed almost like rough preliminary sketches and I don’t know what Gotouge was doing with the eyes of some of the characters. I don’t think it was just the demons who had bug eyes, and even if it was I thought it looked bad.

Will I read any more of these? At this point I’m not sure. Looking ahead, I know that the series goes on forever. And while I liked the story well enough it’s not a comic I enjoy looking at. So I think I’ll take a bit of a break anyway before I continue.

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Druuna: Morbus Gravis I

/ Alex Good / 27 Comments

Druuna: Morbus Gravis I

I still have the first appearance of Druuna in North America, an issue of Heavy Metal magazine that came out in 1986. More specifically, and regrettably, it’s a copy of that issue as it hit the newsstands in Canada, with several pages removed by state censors. Canada was very tight about sexy stuff back in the day.

Heavy Metal (a magazine that I believe has stopped print publication) had a reputation for publishing adult-themed SF comics, but even so Druuna pushed the boundaries. The brainchild of Italian writer and illustrator Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri, Druuna was a raven-haired bombshell pin-up living in a weird post-apocalyptic urban wasteland where people are mutating into tentacle monsters at the hands of a disease called Evil. It’s a dystopian world where everyone, even the mutants, is driven by sexual lust. Which is a fate of affairs that Druuna is both a victim of and that she exploits as she tries to save herself and her lover Shastar (who is now far gone with the disease).

In terms not only of the plot but the world-building the results are hard to keep straight. From Wikipedia: “During the more than thirty years of publication of Druuna’s adventures in Morbus Gravis, the plot has evolved through several stages, differentiated with numerous jumps in the storyline, with some attendant inconsistencies.” That’s putting it mildly. I was never sure what exactly what was going on, and I don’t think Sepieri was either. That said, I always thought there was more to it than just a futuristic setting for a string of hardcore sex scenes, many of which involved threatened or actual rape. There’s a dream (or nightmare) logic to the proceedings, and in the blurring of technology, sex, and body horror I think Serpieri saw a ways into our future. Druuna could be thought of as a virtual reality porn program that has gone viral in the worst way, blurring the line between love, lust, and sex addiction in ways that have come to seem more and more relevant. Druuna is both the ultimate object of sexual desire and someone who is turned on by that objectification, a male fantasy but also a transcendent figure who reigns over her fallen world of mechanical desires.

This is the ‘80s epic of SF T&A, and right from the start, with Druuna lolling in bed for three pages like a post-apocalyptic odalisque, you know where you are in terms of genre if not in the cosmos or space-time continuum. And forty years later it still works. It’s a comic that’s stuck with me, like being haunted by a sexy ghost. And I’m not going to complain about that.

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Holmes: The Web Weaver

/ Alex Good / 10 Comments

My response to The Web Weaver followed a bell curve. I started off not liking it much. It was wordy, and not in a lively or inventive way. I guess you could say it was written more “in the style” of Conan Doyle than in a modern voice, but the fact is Doyle was in a number of stylistic respects a surprisingly modern writer, and rarely dull. Sam Siciliano seems to be channeling more the spirit of a nineteenth-century potboiler. In any event, the result is that this is a 400-page pastiche and going that long is definitely not the Doyle style. Though it is typical of Siciliano’s Holmes novels.

I did start getting into it though, and through the middle sections I can say I was enjoying it. Watson is missing and narrative duties are split between another medical pair: Holmes’s cousin Dr. Henry Vernier and Henry’s wife Michelle, who is also a doctor. Together they are presented as an ideal couple, to the point (or past it) where you grow tired of how they keep going on about how much they love each other. They’re too good to be true.

Since he’s not around to defend himself, Watson is dismissed as a fantasist whose tales of Holmes are mostly made up. It seems real detective work is dull, routine stuff, and Holmes is bored by it. He wants a challenge and wishes he had a Moriarty (one of Watson’s fictional inventions) for him to match wits with.

Holmes is also miffed that Watson presents him as a cold-hearted automaton where he is really a passionate man of feeling. Perhaps to prove him wrong, our hero falls in love with Violet Wheelwright, a married woman threatened by a gypsy curse. Violet is stuck in a loveless marriage to a brute who is deathly afraid of spiders. Nevertheless, she is good-looking and even plays the violin and chess as well as Holmes. Though with regard to the latter accomplishment I had to wonder how well that was. In one game with Holmes she surprises him with a checkmate, which is something that doesn’t happen to good chess players, who always see the game several moves ahead (or in depth). They (good chess players) usually know well in advance when a position is lost.

Then my enjoyment faded at the end. The thing is, I was pretty sure I knew who was behind everything with over 100 pages left to go, and their motive turned out to be even worse than I thought. The hero/villain is a social justice warrior, fighting the Victorian class system as well as the patriarchy. And this view is endorsed by Michelle, who is sympathetic with such a “view of life” and a crusade against “the self-importance and self-righteousness of Victorian England.” (Did people living even in late Victorian England think of themselves as living in “Victorian England”? I’m not sure.) Michelle even offers an exoneration to the web weaver: “Your goal was a worth one, although you took . . . the wrong path.” And: “Your decency is what drove you to your crimes. What more is decency than the desire for justice and the hatred of injustice? Your acts came more from an excess of decency rather than a lack of virtue.”

This sounds awful, like Prince Andrew saying his hanging around with Jeffrey Epstein was “colored by my tendency to be too honorable.” Talking in this manner goes back at least as far as Warren Hastings being astonished at his own moderation in not enriching himself more with Indian loot. It’s rarely convincing, and it isn’t here. And yet it seems a position Siciliano wants us to sympathize with. I felt uncomfortable about that.

It’s a book that Siciliano put a lot into. I think too much. Some of it was interesting, especially in the middle stretches where I was still wondering what was going on, but it didn’t come together very well. The subplot about the bogus oil company is a good example. It was interesting and led to some pithy observations (“All in all, the higher classes of society are more gullible than the lower ones”) and made interesting connections to our own time, but it felt like the web weaver was probably biting off more than they could chew. Then I didn’t like the ending, and the romance between Sherlock and Violet didn’t feel right at all. A lot of the Further Adventures err on the side of being too light and whimsical, but I wanted more of that here. This is altogether too heavy a case.

Holmes index

Old Man Logan 3: The Last Ronin

/ Alex Good / 11 Comments

Old Man Logan 3: The Last Ronin

Ronin because we’re in Japan. Why? Because Logan/Wolverine is hunting down Lady Deathstrike, who he tore apart at the end of the previous volume, Bordertown. This is apparently “to settle the score for what she and the Reavers did in Killhorn Falls.” So why didn’t he kill her at the end of that book? I can’t say.

The story felt to me like it was falling apart. The first book set up the idea of a Logan from the future coming back to prevent the supervillain uprising, but then that idea was sort of shot down because how can you prevent anything in the multiverse, where all things are not only always possible but ever-occurring? So then Logan went north to a Canadian mining town and fought Lady Deathstrike and the Reavers. And this book kicks off with him having tracked Lady Deathstrike to Japan, in order to finish her off. I didn’t feel like there was any through narrative here but just Logan going from place to place and fighting different bad guys.

Well, as things turn out Lady D. was just being used as bait to lure Logan into a trap set by the Silent Order and their superpowered mutant level boss the Silent Monk (who is actually quite loquacious). They have a big fight and . . . Logan is on the road again. But perhaps all roads lead back to home.

You’ll be able to tell from this quick synopsis that I’m not a big fan of Jeff Lemire’s work on the story here. I think there is a larger narrative, but it’s hard to keep in focus and in the meantime these side alleys aren’t very interesting and just feel like they’re not going anywhere. On the plus side, however, Andrea Sorrentino’s art really does a bang-up job of carrying the load. I love the way he builds pages and images around text and sound effects that become important design elements, like the wallpaper of BRAT-AT-AT-AT machine-gun fire, the explosive THOOOM!s, the SNIKTs of Logan’s claws extending, and the FWIP labels that come with individual arrows sticking into him. Our hero really takes a shit-kicking in these comics, and you don’t just see it, you hear it. Which, in turn, helps you feel it, in a good way. One complaint I’d register though is Sorrentino’s bizarre way of rendering a muscular mid-section. Both Logan and Sohei have six-packs that go up almost to their necks, and their abs look like giant tumors. He does all his shirtless male heroes like this, and it looks sick.

In short, a visually brilliant and well-designed comic that brings the action but I really didn’t care too much about where the story might be going, despite the time spent trying to build up Logan’s relationship with Maureen and maybe starting a family. I guess I should give points for at least trying to do something in this direction, but given the shattered narrative it just wasn’t working for me. Maybe you have to be more up than I am on all the different timelines. Also there’s no bonus comic included with this volume so that was a bit of a letdown too.

Graphicalex

Titans Vol. 2: Made in Manhattan

/ Alex Good / 7 Comments

Titans Vol. 2: Made in Manhattan

The Return of Wally West left off with Deathstroke wondering who Wally West was, but we don’t pick up on that here for some reason. There’s just another quick cutaway to Deathstroke spying on the gang’s flashy new headquarters, the Titans Tower, which rises out of the East (or Hudson?) River across from the Manhattan skyline. I don’t know how they got a building permit for that, but surprisingly they do acknowledge that this might have been problematic.

So . . . instead of Deathstroke what we have here is the return of Bumblebee, in a storyline that has an evil company called Meta, run by the Fearsome Five, offering to take superheroes’ powers away (they’re a curse as well as a blessing, you see) and then selling them on the black market. This was five years before Facebook turned into Meta, which for all anyone knows is up to something even worse. I don’t know if there was any connection there.

I wasn’t too happy that the Titans, despite ditching the “Teen” prefix, are in fact still a bunch of undergrads. Titans Tower is just the typical superhero dormitory, with a gym and a cafeteria and individual bedrooms with posters of rock stars on the walls. They spend a lot of time eating pizza and drinking pop. There’s boyfriend-girlfriend nonsense going on with Donna and Roy (Arsenal), and Wally and Linda. They get mad at each other, kiss and make-up, etc. I found this juvenile, but that shouldn’t be surprising. I think they were still going for an adolescent demographic.

It’s a decent comic. There are two storylines. The first is the one where they take on the Fearsome Five. In the second, which was a standalone that ran in Titans Annual #1, the four junior Titans are transported to a very dark site where they meet up with their four seniors. So there’s Wally West Flash and Barry Allen Flash, Nightwing and Batman, Tempest and Aquaman, and Donna Troy and Wonder Woman. It’s unclear who was behind the abduction, but the eight heroes come together and smash their way free of the prison they’re in, which turns out to have been in Alaska.

Both stories end abruptly. The Fearsome Five are sent packing, leaving the Titans to speculate as to who was fronting them. And the ghoulish guy who was running the extraordinary rendition scheme in Alaska disappears through a dimensional doorway, where he meets the sinister force who was pulling his strings. But that’s all we get, as we never see who was behind it all.

And as I say, Deathstroke is still waiting in the wings. I think it’s time for him to start getting more involved.

Graphicalex