Mighty Marvel Masterworks: Daredevil Volume 2

/ Alex Good / 31 Comments

Mighty Marvel Masterworks: Daredevil Volume 2

This volume is a direct continuation of Daredevil’s beginnings as collected in the first Mighty Marvel Masterworks: Daredevil. As such, a lot of what I said about the character there still applies. To take just a few of the points I raised in my review of that book:

(1) “Effectively, Daredevil isn’t blind at all. Anything he needs to be able to do, he can do.”

To take some examples from the issues collected here: In the boat to Ka-Zar’s home of Skull Island (not that original, is it?) Daredevil can “sense vegetation . . . such as Earth has never known for millions of years! As though I’ve been transported to the dawn of time!” Now how would he know what vegetation smelled like (I assume he’s smelling it) millions of years ago? Also, he can identify people at a distance not just from their smell (as in previous issues) but from reading their emotions. How does that work? Just reading heartbeats?  And what are we to make of his “indescribably accurate hearing” that allows him to “tune in” to police short-wave radio broadcasts as he vaults above the city? There seem to be no limits to his (dis)abilities.

(2) “For the most part Daredevil is taking on B-list baddies who are nonetheless a lot of fun.”

So in this volume the “omnivorous”(?) and “omnipresent”(?) Owl is back. The Masked Marauder shows up, is defeated, and then teams up with the Gladiator, and is defeated again. Not the Strontian Gladiator, by the way, but Melvin Potter, a big guy with a chip on his shoulder who runs a superhero costume shop. So they’re a pair of B-listers. Then there’s the Ox, who is a big dumb guy (I’ll bet you never would have guessed) who gets a genius-level intelligence upgrade when a mad scientist switches bodies with him. The Plunderer (or Lord Parnival Plunder, to give him his full title) is a modern-day pirate who would have more of a Marvel afterlife because of his family connections (he’s actually the brother of Ka-Zar). Because I wasn’t as familiar with these guys I actually enjoyed them a lot more. They don’t have god-like super powers but are mostly just either really strong or really smart. And they’re all driven by a sense of bitterness at the world for not respecting them enough. I think this might have had been one of Stan Lee’s hang-ups.

(3) “On the downside, and as I’ve mentioned before, there’s his hopeless portrayal of women. The love triangle going on between Matt, his law partner Foggy Nelson, and their secretary Karen Page is just an annoyance.”

The office-romance stuff with Foggy always lusting after Karen who in turn has a secret crush on Matt plays out again here. And at least Lee seems to have recognized how painful it all was. After one cutaway to the land of thought-bubbles revealing hidden desires we get this editorial comment: “See how we try to please everybody? We even presented the preceding page for the benefit of soap-opera lovers!” And in a later issue, after another such romantic interlude, we get this apology: “Many thanks, Marvelite, for staying with us during the hearts and flowers portion of our yarn!”

This self-awareness, however, only goes so far. This part of the Daredevil story is painful. It does play a bit of a role when Foggy dresses up as Daredevil in an attempt to gain Karen’s affection, but otherwise it’s pointless. Pointless and annoying. At one point “Sensation-monger Stan” even gives his “batty bullpen” a “no-prize award” for presenting seven thought balloons in one panel. Which is as awkward as it sounds.

Speaking of Foggy putting on a Daredevil costume, it’s interesting how this is a motif in several of the comics here. When the Ox goes on a rampage he dresses an unconscious Daredevil in his clothes so that the police will mistake him for the troublemaker and lock him up. And then later the Masked Marauder has his entire gang wear Daredevil costumes as a way of diverting DD from the heist that the Marauder is planning. By sheer coincidence I read this volume at the same time as I was reading Chip Zdarsky’s Daredevil comics and the idea of people dressing up as Daredevil was a significant plot point there too. I also remembered that this was something that turned up in Frank Miller’s Born Again story arc, when Kingpin got a psycho killer to wear a DD costume to kill Foggy and Karen. Were imposters something Daredevil had a special problem with?

On a final note, when a gang of thugs break into Matt Murdock’s office he tells them that he has “business with Murdock too – and I hate to take sloppy seconds!” Today the expression “sloppy seconds” basically has only one meaning, and it’s one that goes back quite a ways. Though I’m not sure what it would have meant to readers in September 1966, the date of the issue Daredevil uses it in here. Good for a laugh anyway.

Graphicalex

Bookmarked! #84: The Rich Coast

/ Alex Good / 9 Comments

Painted leather. I’m a little ashamed to admit that pulling this bookmark out of my collection I not only had no recollection of who gave it to me, but that I wasn’t even sure where Costa Rica was. Central or South America? I wasn’t sure. So of course I had to look it up.

Book: Encyclopedia Britannica (1973 edition)

Bookmarked Bookmarks

Holmes: The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle

/ Alex Good / 10 Comments

Apparently there are no blue carbuncles, a carbuncle being a red gemstone cut a particular way (with a polished convex face and not faceted). So I guess that’s why this particular carbuncle, which is found in the crop of a goose, is worth so much. Given liberties like these I always wonder why people get so worked up over confusions in dates and geography and other consistency errors within the Holmes canon. Doyle was just making things up.

How did the carbuncle get into the crop of a goose? That’s the mystery Holmes is out to solve, and it’s one which leads him on a wild goose chase through London. It’s all a lot of fun and I don’t think it’s meant to be taken that seriously. Holmes, for example, is fine with letting the thief go at the end (while also, presumably, pocketing the reward for finding the carbuncle). There’s also not a lot of deduction going on but more the wearing out of shoe leather as Holmes, in bloodhound mode, drags Watson back through the reverse supply chain of dinner table to barnyard. The one tour de force of drawing inference from the observation of the slightest cues comes at the beginning when Holmes tells us everything we need to know about Henry Baker just from looking at his hat, and I’m not sure how seriously we’re supposed to take that either. We can give him a mulligan on determining that Baker was an intellectual based on hat size alone since at the time the big head=big brain connection was currently the fashion. The other conclusions he draws, however, are so far-fetched as to be what we’d expect in a parody of his method. Though of course they all turn out to be correct. “My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don’t know.” Indeed it is.

Noted in passing: at one point Holmes is described as laughing “in the hearty, noiseless fashion which was peculiar to him.” This made me wonder what a hearty, noiseless fashion of laughter would look like. I guess it wouldn’t sound like anything, as it’s noiseless. Did Holmes throw his head back and shake quietly?

Holmes index

DNF files: End Times

/ Alex Good / 17 Comments

End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration

By Peter Turchin

Page I bailed on: 52

Verdict: Peter Turchin is a professor of historical social science whose baby is a field he calls cliodynamics. What this basically refers to is the mapping of historical processes by the use of mathematical models, in short a science-based grand theory of history of a kind that has long been popular both among historians and writers of fiction.

Normally I would have eaten a book like this up, as I’m quite fond of theories of historical cycles and evolution, from the Greek kyklos to today’s Big History. Turchin acknowledges this long tradition, but sees cliodynamics as something new mainly in its use of large data sets. It’s Big History meets Big Data, with the latter taking the form of something called Seshat or the Global History Databank.

I’d be on board with this approach if cliodynamics had come up with something really new, but I came away disappointed with its findings. All human societies “experience recurrent waves of political instability,” or alternating integrative and disintegrative phases that usually last around a hundred years. There are various factors that lead to a disintegrative phase or period of crisis and social collapse, including popular immiseration, weakened political legitimacy, high levels of social inequality, and exogenous shocks like climate change. The “most important driver of social and political instability” Turchin identifies though, and the one that has led to his making his mark in this field, is “elite overproduction.” Which means too many people holding an elite rank in society without enough positions of elite power to satisfy them. It’s like a game of musical chairs where the number of chairs stays the same but the number of people keeps growing.

This is a new idea, and one that has taken hold in the broader public discourse, but I think perhaps the main reason for this is that it reflects a contemporary concern. And specifically it feels like the concern of an academic, who no doubt sees a great deal of this sort of thing every day. That is, qualified Ph.D.’s who are unable to find good jobs. Then there’s the way the argument is geared toward explaining our current political climate and the Trump phenomenon in terms of a disintegrative phase. In a term historians like to use, this feels a lot like “presentism.”

I was both unconvinced and not very excited by any of the findings of cliodynamics. I don’t think integrative “golden ages” of internal order are typified by “cultural brilliance” while times of troubles experience “declining high culture.” As Harry Lime famously put it in The Third Man: “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Lime’s speech is celebrated because it gets at a historical truth. To take another example, one of Turchin’s periods of extreme crisis is the lead-up to the American Civil War, but this was also America’s literary Renaissance. Countless other instances could be cited. Revolutionary times tend to be cultural volcanoes.

So cliodynamics paints with a broad brush. But in other ways a brush that isn’t broad enough. Just in the early chapters it seems like Turchin, in his list of factors contributing to social disintegration, was missing a more obvious and more foundational causal explanation: overpopulation. In the historical examples he gives of disintegrative phases the immiseration of the masses is mainly driven by the fact that the masses were growing at a pace that outstripped the economy’s ability to provide for them. And the overproduction of elites could be seen as a function of overpopulation as well. But once you focus on something as basic as this then cliodynamics itself doesn’t seem to be saying anything new.

Maybe in the rest of the book Turchin took all this in some truly groundbreaking directions, but by the time I quit I was pretty sure he was just filling out the old story of things falling apart with some new terminology and lots of numbers, while turning history into a database that wasn’t informed by any depth of understanding about what really happened in the past.

The DNF files

Old Man Logan 2: Bordertown

/ Alex Good / 7 Comments

Old Man Logan 2: Bordertown

Let’s start off talking about place. I don’t like visiting the Marvel multiverse because I’m never sure what timeline or alternate Earth we’re in or on, but at least I was getting adjusted to the set-up in this series after the Berserker volume. In that book Wolvie was sent back from a dystopic (post-supervillain takeover) Wild West to what I guess is our current reality. But things kick off here at X-Haven: “Refuge for mutantkind and headquarters of the X-Men. Located in the Limbo Dimension.” Damn it, we’re in another dimension now? I had to look X-Haven up online and found out that it was created in 2015. Who can keep up with all this except the most determined fanboys and –girls?

Anyway, after a bit of talking between Wolverine and Storm at X-Haven, Logan is back (via teleportation) to the present day and driving his motorbike north. “Really north. Through Canada and beyond . . .” Wait, north of Canada? What does he mean? Russia? Because to get there he’d have to drive over the North Pole and technically be heading south. But then we’re told he arrives at Killhorn Falls in the Northwest Territory: “Nothing but a few rows of trailers and shacks along the Alaskan border. Whole community is built around a gravel quarry sitting on a small port in the Gulf of Alaska.”

Now wait just a minute. The Northwest Territories (it’s a plural) does not share a border with Alaska. That would be Yukon Territory. And the shoreline of the Gulf of Alaska is all part of Alaska (the panhandle), and notably not northern Alaska but the south-east part.

And this was all written by Jeff Lemire, who is Canadian. I don’t get it. Are we in another weird dimension or is Lemire just lost when it comes to geography?

Putting this to one side, I liked this instalment of the Old Man Logan series, but in terms of the larger story I felt like there wasn’t much there. Basically Logan heads off to this remote mining town when Lady Deathstrike and the Reavers show up, so he destroys them while defending a little girl who in one timeline he is going to eventually marry. At least I think I have that right, but don’t hold me to it.

The fighting is good and Sorrentino’s art is aces again in evoking the dark world of aging butchery that Wolverine inhabits. That double-page spread of skeleton Wolverine laughing with skulls dropping from his mouth is quite something. Then in issue #8 we get a vision of the depressing Gotterdammerung that was the supervillain uprising and it’s pretty bleak. But as Logan knows, getting old is itself pretty bleak. That’s just the kind of series this is. I was going to say that’s the kind of world this is, but since it’s many worlds I can’t.

The bonus comic is Uncanny X-Men #205 from 1981, a Chris Claremont story that has Wolverine fighting Lady Deathstrike and the Reavers again. Or not really again, but before. Or maybe not before because time is as loose a construct as geography in the multiverse. It’s a good comic though.

So lots of Wolverine’s claws coming out with a Snikt! sound and lots of limbs being detached. Plus Wolverine learning to accept his identity as agent of chaos, madness, and death, which is a familiar character arc for him. You do get the sense that he’s growing tired of all this though, and that now the game is playing him.

Graphicalex

Swamp Thing: The Bronze Age Volume 3

/ Alex Good / 10 Comments

Swamp Thing: The Bronze Age Volume 3

After the initial run of Swamp Thing comics ended, along with Swampy’s brief sojourn with the Challengers of the Unknown (covered in The Bronze Age Volume 2), it looked as though the character was going to be left on the shelf for a while. Luckily, DC changed their mind and so we got a new series titled The Saga of the Swamp Thing, which was written by Martin Pasko. This omnibus edition presents #1-19 of that run, along with The Saga of the Swamp Thing Annual #1, which is a comic adaptation of Wes Craven’s 1982 movie and doesn’t really fit into the canon.

Because they were sort of starting over here we get a quick recap of the origin story. Which is understandable. What’s harder to get is why they keep coming back to retell this same bit (Alec Cross blowing up in his lab and then jumping into the swamp, where he’s transformed by his “biorestorative” formula). After a while, wouldn’t they think that regular readers knew how Swamp Thing came about? But perhaps there weren’t enough regular readers yet.

Immediately a depressing note is struck. Swampy is still mourning the loss of his beloved Linda, and wishing to God that he could join her in death. And as things proceed it seems as though that wish may be granted, not through mortal combat with the forces of evil but because we’re constantly being told that the mucky monster is “dying of some as-yet-unknown-ailment.” But why they keep making such a fuss over this is beyond me, for two reasons: (1) the ailment doesn’t seem to slow him down much, if at all; and (2) in the end it just turns out to be a bit of E. coli that’s quickly cured with a dip in his bio-restorative swamp. This seems to be the sort of thing that an editor should have been asking Pasko about. “Martin, where are we going with this disease angle?” And perhaps there was a point to it all in the beginning but things took a different direction. That happens.

The first 13 issues tell a single story, with a couple of minor digressions. This has Matt Cable and Abigail Arcane being replaced by Lizabeth Tremayne and Dennis Barclay as Swampy’s traveling companions. These three are opposed by the Sunderland Corporation, which is a generic bunch of baddies who basically run the U.S. military-industrial complex, and a “herald of the Antichrist” figure in the form of a fast-growing girl who is clearing a path for the coming of the Beast. She’s also tied in with Nazi occultism and such. Basically, she’s just everything bad. Her Van Helsing is a former concentration camp kapo named Dr. Helmut Kripptmann who soon joins the monster-hunting team.

It’s all wildly overwrought in a mythic kind of way (you can see what Alan Moore saw in the franchise), but I found it quite interesting and compelling on its own. My main problem with it is that Swamp Thing sort of became someone just along for the ride a lot of the time, especially since he was feeling poorly. And indeed I think this is a problem that all these early Swamp Thing titles had. They had good stories and well-drawn supporting casts, but Swampy himself keeps fading into the background. Maybe it’s because he has such trouble communicating, barely able to croak out a few words at a time. That’s quite a limitation for a leading man. Also, he’s obviously without any love interest (though one story here does play with the idea of him missing out on a woman who would understand him).

The digressions from the main storyline are also a lot of fun. The empaths who are used to absorb the injuries to Sunderland operatives were a neat idea, and the island of shipwreck survivors who reshape reality into classic old movies (King Kong, Casablanca) was a laugh. Things didn’t just fall apart after the initial 13-issue run either, as we then get a two-parter with Swampy facing off against a crystal man/living computer and then having to deal with the return of Arcane in a revolting insect form. There’s no keeping that guy down, even if he keeps coming back more damaged than ever.

A dark comic, what with the empaths, the town of vampires, and the child slayer storyline (dedicated, in 1982, to “the good people of Atlanta, that they may put the horror behind them . . . but not forget”). But it’s still full of the free-form imaginings that made Swamp Thing something just a bit different in the comic book canon. The outlier is the final comic, which, as mentioned already, is an adaptation of Wes Craven’s movie. It’s pretty standard stuff, and doesn’t connect well with the rest of the Swamp Thing mythology (Arcane, for starters, is a completely different sort of character), but fans will like having it in here anyway.

Graphicalex

Marple: Strange Jest

/ Alex Good / 10 Comments

In my notes on A Murder is Announced I talked about how hard it was to think of it as being set in the 1950s. Christie’s own mental outlook on life crystallized in the 1930s and her cozy mysteries harken even further back. The buildings in the village of Chipping Cleghorn seem “done round about in Victorian times,” and Miss Marple (in “Miss Marple Tells a Story”) describes herself as “hopelessly Victorian.” Victorian is an adjective that’s used again to describe Miss Marple in this story, though in a slightly unexpected way (when she gets excited she’s said to respond with “Victorian gusto”). But “Strange Jest” came out in 1941 in the U.S. and ’44 in the UK, the delay presumably being due to the fact there was a war going on at the time.

There’s no mention of the war here, but only a mystery possibly involving an inheritance that takes the form of a buried treasure, like something out of Treasure Island (published 1883). And the main clues are drawn from the Victorian era as well, with letters seeming to have been mailed from the 1850s and a reference to “gammon and spinach.” This latter meant nothing at all to me (sort of like “hundreds and thousands”), but it is, or was, a slang expression for nonsense, its usage dating back to Dickens’s David Copperfield (published 1850). I think you might have to be a Victorian relic yourself to have picked up on that.

I thought of this story as a clever homage to Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” with the amateur detectives tearing the property apart to find something (a letter, as it turns out) whose meaning is hiding in plain sight. “There’s really no need to make it all so difficult,” Miss Marple tells the treasure hunters. And once again we have an ending where the young lovers are set nicely on their way in the best comic style.

Marple index

Top of the world

/ Alex Good / 6 Comments

Something about this guy perched on the roof made me smile. It seemed so incongruous. At least he didn’t brain himself flying into one of those mirrored windows. (You can click on the pic to make it bigger.)

The Last Days of American Crime

/ Alex Good / 5 Comments

The Last Days of American Crime

The Last Days of American Crime is a fairly standard neo-noir heist story about a tough guy who works as a security guard who teams up with a pair of crazy-sexy punks to make a big score. A lust triangle ensues, and one of the guys has to be the odd man out.

If it had stayed on that level I think it would have worked reasonably well. But author Rick Remender wanted to add more than just a twist to the proceedings and I’m not sure if all he added to the mix was a plus.

Here’s what’s new. First of all, the U.S. is switching to an all-digital currency and the trio are looking to steal one of the machines that will control said currency. How? I really wasn’t sure about this, but chalked it up as just a MacGuffin. They could just as easily have been stealing gold or jewels from safety deposit boxes. Second: the heist is on a strict schedule because it has to be done before the government begins broadcasting a signal that will operate as a neuro-inhibitor, preventing people from committing any crimes or doing anything that they know is wrong. How? Well, I couldn’t explain the science to you, because there isn’t any, but even granting such a signal was possible I don’t see how it would work on a practical level. There are thousands of laws people break every day because they’re unaware of them. Do those get shut down as well? Or what happens when a psychopath who doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong decides he wants to keep killing people? This latter is a question that gets asked, and answered, in the finale here, and it underscores how little thought went into what’s called the American Peace Initiative.

Why add such a gimmicky pair of plot elements to such a basic heist story? Maybe just because the heist story was so basic Remender thought he needed something really “out there” to jazz it up. And I guess digital currencies and behavioral control are current issues, playing off fears of things like China’s social credit system. But meanwhile, the America we see before the signal is a hellscape of carnage: all domestic terrorism, gang violence, and bodies piling up in the streets. I guess something should be done about that. I mean, the bad guys are thinking of fleeing to either Mexico or Canada, and Mexico seems to be ahead of the country that’s full of “moose-fucking, commie-Mountie, hockey motherfuckers.”

In sum: it’s very violent, somewhat hard to follow, and unnecessarily futuristic, but I did find it a stylish riff on an old story that has some juice in it yet.

Graphicalex