Marvel Zombies Volume 1

/ Alex Good / 12 Comments

Marvel Zombies Volume 1

Disappointing.

2005 was near the point of peak zombie, a genre fad that writer Robert (he’ll let you call him “the zombie guy”) Kirkman had ridden to huge success with his Walking Dead comics. I liked The Walking Dead, and indeed you could say I’m a big zombie fan, so I was definitely on board for seeing how zombification would go with the Marvel universe.

The answer? Meh.

The idea for Marvel Zombies took its start from a storyline in the Ultimate Fantastic Four, and as things kick off here the zombie apocalypse/virus has actually run its course. We’re in the ruins of a depopulated city with only superheroes left. Zombie superheroes, that is. I assume they’ve eaten everyone else.

These aren’t your usual zombies though, and not just because they still have their super powers. It’s not clear what the cause of the zombie outbreak was but the effect is somewhat similar to the classic Romero strain: those infected have a hunger for human flesh, and whoever they bite suffers the same fate (that is, if they aren’t fully consumed). What’s different is that though dead they have their minds entire. They know what’s happened to them, it’s just that they can’t control their appetite for flesh. After a good feast of flesh they’re able to function somewhat normally, but then the hunger begins to grow again . . .

They are, in other words, junkies.

I think more than anything else this is what gives Marvel Zombies its depressing air. To be sure, zombies have been used from the beginning as a kind of metaphor. They started life (after death) as slave labour in the cane fields of Haiti and went on to be identified with the lumpenproletariat, the underclass, or simply the masses. On a planet with too many mouths to feed and an economy without enough decent jobs for everyone, the zombie apocalypse was just what the name suggests: not a vision of the future but a revelation of our own class divisions and environmental crisis. Throw in the generic landscape of bombed-out, urban decay and everything about the premise here just feels grim. And then it gets grimmer.

I appreciated how Kirkman took things in a different direction here, and how dark it all was, but I can’t say I enjoyed it very much. It’s not that it’s too bleak or depressing, but more that the story, at least in the early going, doesn’t have much to do. What we get are fights between the zombies and the usual ascending order of level bad guys (who are now sort-of good guys). They kill Magneto and eat him. Then they kill the Silver Surfer and eat him. And finally they kill Galactus (!) and eat him. In this they are helped along by what I thought was a stupid plot device of having the heroes who eat the Silver Surfer absorbing some of his “cosmic powers” along with his flesh (or whatever it is the Surfer is made of). They need such an energy boost because their rotting bodies keep getting torn apart in their various battles. Captain America has the top of his skull sheared off. Spidey loses a leg. Iron Man loses his entire bottom half. Wolverine and Luke Cage both lose an arm. But they can keep going without losing a step because of the “cosmic powers” (or Power Cosmic) of the Surfer. I thought this was stupid. Given Kirkman had the whole Marvel line-up to play with I thought he should have had more of the heroes being destroyed completely.

The art by Sean Phillips is fine. The zombies are identified clearly by pupil-less eyes and the way lips and gums have disappeared from their mouths, which foregrounds shiny grills of teeth. For whatever reason the sun has gone missing so everything is equally dark, inside and out. Again: depressing. Arthur Suydam reimagines classic Marvel covers with zombie makeovers, even though these have nothing to do with the action inside.

The human story has it that Black Panther (who zombie Giant-Man had been keeping alive to munch on) has teamed up with Magneto’s Acolytes to maybe find some kind of cure. That part seemed kind of vague, but they manage to salvage the head of zombie Wasp so maybe they’ll be able to learn something from that. Meanwhile, the zombies who ate Galactus are hungry again and we’re left with them invading another planet. I can’t say this left me all that interested to see what was going to happen next, but maybe interested enough to carry on a bit more.

Graphicalex

Marple: The Tuesday Night Club

/ Alex Good / 19 Comments

This story marks the first appearance of Miss (Jane) Marple. It came out in something called The Royal Magazine in 1927 and was followed up by a number of others that fell into two sequences, and which were later collected in the volume The Thirteen Problems. I think all of the stories were written before the first Miss Marple novel, The Murder at the Vicarage, which itself was an outlier in terms of its publication date (the next Miss Marple novel wouldn’t come out for another dozen years).

Christie’s inspiration was to make older spinsters more visible and give them a voice. That invisibility is very much pointed at here, as Miss Marple (you feel you have to always type that out with the “Miss”; she’s not like Holmes or Poirot or Wolfe) is one of a circle of friends who have gathered to discuss unsolved mysteries, but she’s mostly ignored as she knits in the corner listening to the others. Indeed at a couple of points in the story she is completely forgotten. And the group have assembled in her house!

Anyway, everyone decides that it would be fun to have the members of the newly formed Tuesday Night Club take turns telling mystery stories that they know the answer to and that the others will try to solve. Why? Because they all think they’re so smart. There’s a writer (Miss Marple’s nephew, Raymond West), an artist (the only other woman), a retired police commissioner, a clergyman, and a solicitor. They are all professionals, with the host being the one true “amateur.” But this will turn out to be her strength. She is a student of human nature, with fewer presuppositions based on a particular life history. Her method is to draw from her knowledge of other incidents in village life and find correspondences between them and the case in hand. And so in this story she is the one who is able to “hit upon the truth,” even as her correct conclusions are dismissed (twice, using the same language) in the final pages.

It’s quick and goes down easy. The solution, however, is probably well out of the grasp of twenty-first century North American readers. Indeed, I don’t think there are very many British readers who will still know the meaning of “banting” (dieting) or that “hundreds and thousands” are what we call sprinkles. And yet these are the two big clues used to unlock the mystery. While she may be a classic, Christie really wasn’t timeless. Which I guess is also a big part of her charm.

Marple index

Miss Marple of St. Mary Mead

/ Alex Good / 6 Comments

An index to my reviews of the Miss Marple stories and novels by Agatha Christie (and others).

The Tuesday Night Club
The Idol House of Astarte
Ingots of Gold
The Bloodstained Pavement
Motive v. Opportunity
The Thumb Mark of St. Peter
The Blue Geranium
The Companion
The Four Suspects
A Christmas Tragedy
The Herb of Death
The Affair at the Bungalow
The Murder at the Vicarage
Death by Drowning
Miss Marple Tells a Story
Strange Jest
The Body in the Library
The Case of the Perfect Maid
The Case of the Caretaker
Tape-Measure Murder
The Moving Finger
A Murder is Announced
They Do It with Mirrors
4.50 from Paddington
Greenshaw’s Folly
Sanctuary

Deuterocanonical Works

Evil in Small Places by Lucy Foley
Miss Marple’s Christmas by Ruth Ware
Miss Marple Takes Manhattan by Alyssa Cole
The Second Murder at the Vicarage by Val McDermid
The Unravelling by Natalie Haynes

Mystery and Detective Fiction

TMI

/ Alex Good / 7 Comments

From The Twittering Machine (2020) by Richard Seymour:

We naively think of ourselves as either “information rich” or “information poor.” What if it doesn’t work that way? What if information is like sugar, and  a high-information diet is a benchmark of cultural poverty? What if information, beyond a certain point, is toxic?

All-New X-Men: Here to Stay

/ Alex Good / 7 Comments

All-New X-Men: Here to Stay

Well, as the title indicates the classic X-Men are here to stay in our own time, where they will have to deal with the Scott Summers/Cyclops-led evil X-Men. Meanwhile, Jean Grey continues to come to grips with her growing psychic powers, people start to question Hank McCoy’s messing with the space-time continuum, Kitty Pryde gets exasperated trying to bring the teenage X-Men up to speed, Angel meets a new friend, Mystique assembles her own gang of supervillains, and Wolverine is angry all the time.

I had a feeling that they were sort of marking time here, especially given that there are two big fight scenes, one a battle with Hydra that feels like a simulation in the Danger Room and the other being a fight against Sentinels that is a simulation in the Danger Room. Neither amounts to much. But overall Brian Michael Bendis keeps the different balls in the air pretty well and the writing is better than average. I particularly like the way Bendis spices up dialogue scenes in interesting ways. In the previous volume it was the two Hank McCoys talking to each other via psychic link-up. In this one we get a heated conversation between Beast and Captain America as filtered through Iceman and Kitty Pride. I thought that was neat.

Unfortunately, I really didn’t like the art from David Marquez (issues #6-8). It felt very generic and crude, with a blandness that seems almost AI generated, and there’s not a lot going on in the individual cells, either in the background or expressed on faces. It’s similar to Stuart Immonen’s work (who did issues #9-10 here), but more cartoonish, if I can make a distinction between a cartoon and a comic style. I can see some people liking it, but it’s not my thing.

Not a great instalment then, but the story interests me and I’ll stick with it for a while. I may not be here to stay, but I’ll hang around for a bit longer.

Graphicalex

What does that even mean? Part II

/ Alex Good / 12 Comments

I can’t figure this out. First off: what is a promise? Is it anything like a guarantee? Probably not. Second: how do they define “fresh”? Past the expiry or best-before date? Visibly starting to go bad? Unfit for human consumption? Third: if something is not fresh, should they even be giving it away for free? Shouldn’t they be getting rid of it? Lots of times you can get stuff at the grocery store for 50% off because it’s getting old, and in some cases (like bread) stale and even moldy. Clearly it’s been marked down because it’s no longer fresh, or at least as fresh as it should be. Can I take it to the cashier and demand I get it for free?

Index

TCF: Summer for the Gods

/ Alex Good / 10 Comments

Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion
By Edward J. Larson

The crime:

A media circus came to Dayton, Tennessee for a couple of weeks in July 1925 as high school teacher John T. Scopes was put on trial for teaching evolution in a state-funded school. William Jennings Bryan joined the prosecution, while Clarence Darrow served on the defence team. Scopes was found guilty and fined $100, a verdict that was later overturned on a flimsy technicality so that there was no conviction to be appealed.

The book:

In my review of Blood & Ink I brought up the subject of a “trial of the century.” I don’t know if the Hall-Mills trial was ever referred to as such, but the author Joe Pompeo uses it as a chapter heading in that book. In any event, the Scopes Trial took place the year before and Edward Larson notes how calling it the trial of the century was already a “shopworn designation,” especially since Darrow’s previous case, the Leopold and Loeb trial that took place just the year before, had been widely referred to in the same terms.

Was the Leopold and Loeb trial the first trial of the century, or the first trial to be named as such in the media? I don’t know. But the Scopes Trial was a big deal and so probably belongs on a shortlist of contenders for that title. There is a strong counterargument to be made against its inclusion in such a list though. Just for starters, it was always meant to be a media event – a symbolic statute, a show trial – and very little was at stake. Technically it was a criminal misdemeanour case, though as the Chicago Tribune would sniff at the time, “It is not a criminal trial, as that term is ordinarily understood.” But then, they were saying that because they were broadcasting it live via radio and they wanted to allay concerns that this wasn’t in some way improper. Then, after the verdict, the media were quick to dismiss the whole show as a sort of nine days’ wonder. The New York Times would say that the abrupt end of the trial saved “the public from having its ears bethumped with millions more of irrelevant words.” This from the paper of record that, as Larson observes, had “used as many as five telegraph wires at a time to carry reports from Dayton.”

Another point against its century status is that it was unclear, even at the time, what the trial was actually about or what the different sides were trying to prove. For Bryan, the issue had to do with the principle of majority rule. “It is the easiest case to explain I have ever found,” he wrote to a fellow prosecutor at the start of the trial. “The right of the people speaking through the legislature, to control the schools which they create and support is the real issue as I see it” (emphases in the original). Darrow was playing for different stakes: “Nothing will satisfy us but broad victory, a knockout which will have an everlasting precedent to prove that America is founded on liberty and not on narrow, mean, intolerable and brainless prejudice of soulless religio-maniacs.”

Given these different agendas, both sides were able to claim victory: “The prosecution claimed a legal victory; the defense a moral one.” At the same time, neither side was satisfied: the defence complaining that nothing had been settled while supporters of the statute “could scarcely hail a ruling that all but directed prosecutors not to enforce the law.” Which makes you wonder to what extent a win-win is always a lose-lose.

A final point against calling it a trial of the century is that the verdict seems never to have been in doubt. This was evidenced by its immediacy:

The jury received the case shortly before noon and returned its verdict nine minutes later. They spent most of this time getting in and out of the crowded courtroom. “The jurors didn’t even sit down to think it over,” one observer noted, “but stood huddled together in the hallway of the courthouse for the brief interval.”

Nine minutes! I’m not sure, but that must be some kind of record, especially for a case this long.

Given the larger-than-life personalities of Bryan and Darrow the table was set for high drama, but the great debate between the two comes off, at least to my ear listening to it a century later, sounding scripted and pointless. Maybe it’s the effect of having Inherit the Wind playing in my head (a text that’s duly questioned here). But more than that, you really can’t defend the Bible as history or science. Religion doesn’t make any kind of sense if you look at it that way. So all the back-and-forth about when God created the world is silly, as I think most people understood at the time.

But, to advocate for the other side, you can still make an argument for its “trial of the century” status. But this is mainly because of its long cultural afterlife. “Dozens of prosecutions have received such a designation over the years,” Larson concludes, “but only the Scopes trial fully lives up to its billing by continuing to echo through the century.” That probably has more to do with political developments though, and in particular the rise of evangelicalism as a political force in the U.S., than with the trial itself. In the battle between modernists and fundamentalists that the Scopes trial represented it seemed at the time as though the fundamentalists had been thoroughly beaten. They would, however, rise again, gaining strength from a resurgent Southern pride and sense of regional identity.

Given its now “mythic” status, it’s nice to have something like an authoritative version of the events setting the record straight. That said, I can’t say I enjoyed Summer for the Gods very much. It’s not a great read and the characters are poorly drawn. Darrow comes off a bit worse for wear and Bryan a bit better. The secondary players are indistinguishable and the legal maneuvering difficult to follow. It did win the Pulitzer Prize for history and I’m guessing that was for its research.

Noted in passing:

I don’t think Bobby Franks is properly described as a “former schoolmate” of Leopold and Loeb. He lived across the street from Loeb, to whom he was related, and went to the same high school Leopold had attended, but he was quite a bit younger.

Takeaways:

Trying to establish the “truth” of a religion, whatever that might mean, is pointless. And even if that were your goal, a criminal trial wouldn’t be the place for it.

True Crime Files

Swamp Thing: The Bronze Age Volume 2

/ Alex Good / 11 Comments

Swamp Thing: The Bronze Age Volume 2

We sort of swing from the good to the bad here. First up we have the back half of the initial run of Swamp Thing comics, issues #14-24. This has lots of the usual nuttiness, including Swampy fighting demons, robots, and even a clone of himself that grew out of the arm that was cut off in an earlier story (this gives us the awesome Swamp Thing vs. Swamp Thing cover for issue #20 that also fronts this omnibus edition). I especially loved the Dr. Seuss-inspired Ultra-Cerebralociter, a machine that has the power to turn the brains of all the world’s leaders into “mush.” It even comes with a DANGER: HIGH VOLTAGE warning label on it. You’ve gotta love this stuff. Then of course there’s the purple writing that was the house style of the time, with Swamp Thing being described so often as a “mockery” (as in a “muck-draped mockery” of a man, or a mockery of life itself) that I was wondering if there was something in the style guide that said the word mockery had to be used a certain number of times every issue.

Unfortunately, sales were really poor so the series was discontinued. Issue #24 was the last, though the script and draft pencils and inks for the never-published issue #25 are included as an appendix with this edition, which is a really nice bonus.

The rest of the book has Swampy (along with Deadman) teaming up with the Challengers of the Unknown, a team of heroes who are now as unknown as their challenges. Who were the Challengers, you ask?

Ace Morgan: Former test pilot – now leader of the Challengers!

Rocky Davis: Onetime champion heavyweight wrestler!

Red Ryan: Electronics expert and world renowned mountain explorer!

Professor Haley: Scientific genius and deep diver into – the unknown!

Oh, and just in case you think this is a boys only club:

June Robbins: honorary Challenger and research physicist.

June is the buxom blonde who Rocky and Red have a falling out over. Yes, it’s that hokey.

Anyway, there are two main Challengers of the Unknown storylines. The first has them going back to the charmingly named town of Perdition to fight the reawakened spirit of the Lovecraft-demon M’Nagalah in a surprisingly yucky bit of horror, and the second has them jumping forward 12 million years to fight a bunch of solar tyrants who are offloading their excess monsters onto twentieth-century Earth. Beginning, alas, with Toronto: “an orderly city. A city of peaceful and pleasant people. A city with one of the lowest crime rates on the continent.” These stories are plenty crazy enough, but Swampy is just an extra, albeit more competent at smashing bad guys than the Challengers. His fight with the Persuader is the highlight.

Also included are a couple of Brave and the Bold team-ups with Batman and a frankly kind of lame crossover that has him fighting alongside Solomon Grundy against Superman (it’s complicated, but Swampy is still a good guy).

I think there are interesting storylines here, some of which had to be left as dead ends when this run was canceled. We never hear anything more about Alec Holland’s brother Edward, for example, a guy who seemed to have a pretty justifiable grudge against his brother. Like his arm restoring itself, however, cutting the series off wasn’t going to be the end of the “mossy man-brute.” He’d be back!

Graphicalex