This is the most depressing goddamn book I’ve read in ages. Everyone should go out and read it right now.

Okay, that probably needs a little background. Like, for example, what the hell I’m talking about. ‘Shrill’ is the new memoir by Lindy West (of Jezebel and GQ fame), which jumps around a bit chronologically but is basically the story of how she went from being a shy, vulnerable person who was convinced that she couldn’t be loved to being a badass fat-positive feminist who writes about why she got an abortion and why Daniel Tosh is an asshole whose rape jokes are shitty and unfunny. (Which some folks may remember me agreeing with at the time on this blog…)

I bought it because I was familiar with Lindy West’s writing on Jezebel, because she has always been wickedly funny and brutally insightful and has the kind of take-no-shit attitude that makes me stand up and cheer every time I read one of her pieces. She calls bullshit out for what it is, basically, and that’s always a thing I will enjoy reading. I assumed this would be more of the same, and to some extent it was, but…

This is a book about what it costs to be a badass fat-positive feminist who writes openly about controversial issues on the same Internet as GamerGaters and Vox Day. This is a book about what it’s like to receive six hundred text messages a day explaining how the person on the other end would love to rape you to death if only you weren’t so ugly. This is a book about what it is like to receive a constant, unending torrent of vicious abuse for the crime of being a woman who expresses opinions. This is a book about what it is like to have someone create a Twitter account named after your dad who died of cancer less than a month ago so that they can express, through his lips, what a disappointment you were to him. Basically, if you have any shred of empathy at all, this is like sticking your hand into the fucking pain box from Dune.

But that’s why it’s so important to read. Because as painful as it is to hear about it, it’s even more painful for Lindy West to live it. And Lindy West isn’t at all an unusual or special case; she’s just the person who had the chance to write a memoir about it so that everyone could understand what it’s like just a little tiny fraction of a bit. This is what a lot of women go through on the Internet. All the time. Every day. This is something that if you’re a straight white cishet guy, you need to know about so that you can help, in whatever way you can, in pushing back against it and making the Internet, which is by this point pretty much a default mode of human interaction and not some special Wild West electronic frontier that only the select few need to bother with, a less shitty place for your fellow human beings. And if you think you already know what it’s like, you may want to read the book anyway, because it’s probably worse than that.

Oh yes, and it did also turn out to be wickedly funny and brutally insightful and Lindy West did, in fact, call out a lot of bullshit for what it was. Which was awesome, and did soften the blow of sticking my hand in the pain box just a little bit. But trust me when I say this is not a fun read.

But it’s a necessary one.

There are probably two target audiences for ‘Welcome to Night Vale – A Novel’. Neither of them will be entirely satisfied.

The first is the actual fanbase of “Welcome to Night Vale”, the podcast that began in 2012 and has been spreading through the collective consciousness of geekdom to the point where Stephen Colbert brought the creators (and Cecil Baldwin, the main performer in the series) onto his talk show to discuss it. These people are all intimately aware of the strange and fantastic details that make the series such a wonderful blend of the macabre and the deadpan and know all that can be known about the small desert down where inexplicable things happen all the time. (Which isn’t much, because, well, go look up “inexplicable” and get back to me.)

The second is the people who saw the Colbert appearance (or something like it) and came to the book with only the vaguest notion of what “Welcome to Night Vale” is, and thought that the book might function as an introduction to the strange and mysterious world that Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor have created.

For the first audience, this is a book that takes a while to get going. It focuses on two fairly obscure characters from the Night Vale mythos, pawnshop owner Jackie Fierro and PTA volunteer Diane Crayton, and much of the first half of the book is simply spent establishing them as more than simply background characters whose names are mentioned in passing from time to time. There’s a lot of overlap to their respective story arcs, as well, which means that you’ll frequently feel like you’re reading the same passage twice until the mid-point of the novel when they finally decide to work together to solve their interrelated mysteries.

At that point, the book picks up steam in a big way, and fans of the podcast will be happy to know that the book finally gives out some answers to one of the big questions–who is the Man in the Tan Jacket and why does he keep coming to Night Vale to pursue a vague yet sinister agenda? (The answer is not wholly satisfying, either, to be honest; it requires a lot of squinting and backfilling in every previous story with, “Ah, well, that was all part of my master plan all along!” That said, one of the things about the Man in the Tan Jacket is that he takes “vague” to new heights, so it could very well be that everything was part of a master plan and we just didn’t know it.)

For the second audience, this is undoubtedly going to feel like wandering into a bizarre tangent of a conversation that they weren’t present for–Cecil, the Voice of Night Vale, only appears in a few cutaway sequences and doesn’t interact with the main plot very much at all, and there are a lot of inside jokes that will no doubt just seem like random weirdness to someone not familiar with the podcast. Then again, that’s probably a pretty good introduction to the podcast, because all of the inside jokes got their start as bits of random weirdness until they were promoted. And the revelations about the Man in the Tan Jacket probably won’t mean as much if you haven’t been spending the past three years saying, “Who _is_ this guy?”

Both audiences may be slightly frustrated by the supremely deadpan narrative voice, which takes great pains to smother any surprise or emotional heft beneath a crushing weight of fatalism and existentialism, and which can get almost hypnotically same-y at times. Those people might want the audiobook version, which is read by Cecil Baldwin and has a little bit more verve as a result.

However, all of the audiences will find a lot to like here–there are quite a few read-out-loud funny bits, some genuinely suspenseful sequences (the library looms large in the book), and you will feel surprisingly moved by what happens to the tarantula. Oh, and the plot does hang together quite well even if you feel like the first two hundred pages are mostly about the main characters hoping they can find a way to avoid the narrative altogether and get back to their normal lives.

In short, there are probably two target audiences for ‘Welcome to Night Vale – A Novel’. Neither of them will walk away dissatisfied.

Full disclosure: I’ve known Graeme Burk and Robert Smith? through a variety of online Doctor Who fan communities since the series was an obscure line of novels carrying on in the wake of the cancelled TV show. I have attended conventions with them, I’m big fans of them as people as well as authors, and I have been commissioned on occasion by Robert for essays in one book or another. (Including the recently released Outside In 2, by ATB Publishing, where I wax opinionated on “The Christmas Invasion”. You know, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.) The point is, I am probably magnificently biased when it comes to the recently released ‘The Doctors Are In: The Essential and Unofficial Guide to Doctor Who’s Greatest Time Lord’.

That said, it’s tremendous fun to read. It’s not an episode guide, because goodness knows we are spoilt for choice when it comes to that. (Including one by Burk and Smith?, as it happens.) It’s also not a history of the program, because again, there are plenty of great ones out there. Instead, this is a book of critical analysis–the authors take a look at the various facets of the Doctor’s magnificently complex personality, embroidered by thirteen actors and dozens of writers, directors and producers over the years, and try to figure out just what makes him tick. Is he a brooding and melancholy survivor of unimaginable devastation? A cold, alien wanderer in the fourth dimension? A puckish sprite who revels in making mischief for the wicked? (Um, yes to all of the above. Sorry, spoilers!)

Naturally, with fifty years of stories to mine for material, there are a wealth of interpretations to draw upon, and a wealth of conclusions to come to. That’s where the book shines, really; Burk and Smith? are among those rare people who can disagree completely and totally and not get upset about it. Over the course of the book, they clash over topics from “Does ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ really live up to its reputation?” to “Was the Third Doctor too cozy with UNIT?” to “Was Matt Smith prone to trying to punch up a bad script by flailing his arms and shouting a lot?” And impressively enough, their answers are always well-reasoned and informative even when they disagree. Even more impressively, they disagree profoundly for much of the book and the tone is still light-hearted and humorous.

Is it essential reading? Well, it does serve as a basic reference guide to the series–Burk and Smith? do give a potted history of the making of the series as they discuss each Doctor, there’s a list of recommended viewing that will certainly serve as a good place to start, and the back of the book contains a list of resources if you want to know more. But I will admit (as do they, in the back of the book) that there are other books out there that serve as a more comprehensive guide to the history of the show both in front of and behind the cameras. This is intended as light reading, not as reference material.

In other words, if you already have one of a dozen or so episode guides, behind the scenes books, or reference manuals on Doctor Who, this probably isn’t going to tell you anything you don’t already know. But if you’re the sort of person who already has episode guides, behind-the-scenes books and reference manuals on Doctor Who, you’re probably the sort of person who appreciates reading one that’s well-written, entertaining and far from merely a dusty compilation of facts about the series. If that’s the case (whether you own all those other books or not, really) you will get a lot of enjoyment out of ‘The Doctors Are In’.

Sad to say, this isn’t a review of a comic book featuring a collection of D-list superheroes who band together to fight enemies that escape the notice of the heavy hitters. Because that would be awesome. Instead, this is a coffee table book by Jon Morris that describes a number of…let’s just say misguided attempts to create the next Batman or Superman. Going in chronological order from the Golden Age up through the Modern Age (the most recent entry covers Maggott and other late-90s mutants), it shows a variety of characters from the poorly thought out like Doctor Hormone (who’s basically a scientist who solves every problem with “hormones”) to the interesting concepts that never caught on (711, a wrongly-convicted prisoner who breaks out of jail every night to stop crimes he learns about from his fellow inmates) to characters that simply can’t come back (like ROM. DAMMIT.)

The book is a little bit light on information–for the most part, this isn’t due to a lack of research, but simply due to a lack of things to write about. Most of the characters under discussion only had a handful of appearances, many deservedly so, and Morris is able to cover their entire publication history in just one double-page spread. There is, fundamentally, only so much you can say about NFL Superpro or Congorilla. That does mean that no particular hero ever wears out their welcome…well, except perhaps AAU Shuperstar, the superhero who appeared only in ads for shoes and who spoke exclusively in shoe-related puns…but it does mean that the book is really just a light and goofy read rather than a reference book.

Which does mean that if you’re going to buy this, you do have to consider whether it’s worth almost $25 (list price) for what’s basically a silly book about goofy superheroes. As a collection of information, it may not be. However, it’s worth mentioning that the production values on this are first-class; every page contains excellent reproductions of classic comic art (some of them from luminaries like Kirby and Ditko, who were amazingly talented but didn’t always knock it out of the park). It’s certainly the sort of thing that you can leave out as a conversation piece, even if the conversation will probably trend towards things like, “There was really a superhero named Bozo the Iron Man?”

On the whole, I’d say that while you may want to look for a bargain on it, it’s definitely worth a look. If nothing else, it’s a heady mix of discovery (“So that’s where those ‘Nature Boy’ memes came from!”) and nostalgia (“Hey, wait a second! I liked Slapstick!”) If you’re a comics fan, check this one out.

The other day, someone mentioned to me that there was a really good webcomic called “Strong Female Protagonist” that should be in the Hugo conversation. They provided a link to www.strongfemaleprotagonist.com in with the comment, and I clicked on that link…and about six hours later I came up for air, having devoured every scrap of extant material, and started waiting for the next installment to be posted.

Because it is phenomenal. Brennan Lee Mulligan and Molly Ostertag are two people who have really given an immense amount of thought to the way a superhero universe would work, and they’ve come up with some really fascinating answers. And the best part is, those answers lead to more questions, and those questions make for great plot hooks that lead to fantastic stories. For example, “Why is it that you never see any superheroes with the power to generate cheap, pollution-free energy?” or “What practical use is super-strength and invulnerability in combating systemic social injustices like racism?” or “If Wolverine has a healing factor that strong, wouldn’t he do more good by just becoming an organ donor?” (The answer to that one is, by the way, one of the most heart-rending things you will ever see in a comic book story.)

All of that could be bloodless, but Mulligan and Ostertag do a great job of turning these abstract moral questions into grounded, meaningful human dramas. Protagonist Alison Green, aka “MegaGirl”, is a character who feels utterly real, someone granted great power for no apparent reason (although there are definitely hints that “no apparent reason” isn’t remotely the same as “no reason”) and is struggling to deal with it in the same way that any normal person would. She’s no paragon of seamless virtue–there’s a brilliant scene where she admits to a supervillain that she fantasizes about killing people hundreds of times a day, simply because the logic of “beat up the bad guys” is so seductively easy–but she’s immensely sympathetic nonetheless. She’s a good person trying to do her best to make the world a better place, but she admits to not knowing what that is.

And the supporting cast is great too. I don’t want to talk too much about it, because I’ve already probably hinted too much at spoilers, but there are a lot of interesting and unique takes on classic comic tropes. It’s a series that actively resists the temptation to slot people into the role of “hero” or “villain”; even the worst characters, like the twenty-foot tall guy with meat cleavers for hands and super-strength, turns out to be all too human and all too relatable, and some of the superheroes turn out to be petty, arrogant and stupid. They’re not superhumans; they’re humans with super powers, and they’re all trying to figure out what that means in a world where their only guide is a medium where all the problems end in thirty-two pages or less.

I could go on–I’ve barely said anything about Ostertag’s magnificent art, which gets better with each and every installment, or about the sparkling and literate dialogue–but at some point I have to just tell you to go read the entirely free comic instead of listening to me talk about it. I will say this: You will never look at the world the same way again after reading ‘Strong Female Protagonist’, much less a comic book. If ‘Watchmen’ was a major step forward in treating comics as real literature that analyzes what makes a so-called “superhero” tick, then this is the next step on from ‘Watchmen’. And it’s about time.

It occurred to me that the novelization of ‘Shada’ might be something that readers here would be interested in, if they knew about it, and that it might also be something that readers here might not know about. So this is both a review, and an explanation of what exactly ‘Shada’ was, and how there came to be a novelization of it by Gareth Roberts from Douglas Adams’ original script.

In addition to being tremendously famous for his ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ series, Douglas Adams also spent a bit of time as a writer and script editor for Doctor Who. This was just before ‘Guide’ hit it big, when he was mainly known for contributing a few bits to the final series of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”. (The one without John Cleese.) His big breaks came in a sudden burst, which is why he wasn’t on Doctor Who for very long. But he did do three scripts–the modestly successful “Pirate Planet”, the incredibly well-regarded “City of Death”, and “Shada”…which never actually completed filming due to a strike at the BBC, and which wasn’t remounted for the ensuing season because incoming producer John Nathan-Turner had no interest in doing anything his predecessor Graham Williams thought was a good idea.

“Shada”, in other words, is that rare beast – an unproduced screenplay by a now-deceased legend of science fiction at the absolute height of his skill, which can’t be filmed at this point due to a simply insurmountable number of practical hurdles. But this is where a peculiar tradition of Doctor Who comes in, a legacy of one of the few sci-fi/fantasy series out there to predate video recording in any of its media. Virtually every single episode of the classic series of Doctor Who was adapted as a novel, in order to allow fans to experience episodes that had been broadcast before their time and which (due to the BBC’s policies at the time on repeats and the previously noted lack of home media) they would probably never have the chance to see again. These novels were occasionally done by the original author, but frequently they were adapted by other hands.

While he was alive, Douglas Adams’ stories were among the few that had not been adapted into novels; Adams preferred to adapt his own stories, and the company with the rights to the Doctor Who books simply couldn’t afford his page rate. (According to Adams, every time a new editor took over the line, they had the exact same conversation with him about the chances of adapting his books, and he politely gave them the exact same responses each time.) But tragically, Adams died far younger than anyone that brilliant has a right to, which meant that even the adaptations seemed like a longshot.

Enter Gareth Roberts. Those of you who are fans of the new series might recognize him as the screenwriter of “The Lodger” and “The Shakespeare Code”, among others, but he made his reputation on Doctor Who as an author of several pastiches of the Graham Williams era of the show. His novel ‘The English Way of Death’ (now sadly out of print) is considered to be one of the finest encapsulations of that period’s whimsy, effortless humor, and penchant for borderline fantasy, and he’s always been an outspoken fan of Williams and Adams. As such, when the rights issues were finally sorted out with the Adams estate, Roberts was the first choice to adapt Adams’ unfilmed script into a novel. (For the pedants in the crowd, yes I am aware that the script was also adapted for audio by Big Finish Productions with Paul McGann reprising Tom Baker’s part, and that there is an unofficial animated adaptation done by Ian Levine using Paul Jones as a Tom Baker impersonator. This is the first mass-market adaptation.)

(Yes, I’m also aware that the sequences that were shot were released on video and DVD, with Baker providing linking narration. That’s not a proper adaptation. Sheesh.)

So now that you know what the novelization of ‘Shada’ is, the question that undoubtedly follows is, “Is it actually any good?” And the answer is, “Yes. Not as good as you’d expect a lost Douglas Adams masterpiece to be, but it’s definitely a fun read.” Roberts doesn’t quite have Adams’ deft touch for comic prose, but singling him out for that is almost entirely unfair. He’s not trying to be Douglas Adams. He’s trying to write Gareth Roberts’ very good adaptation of a Douglas Adams story, and he succeeds magnificently at that. His opening line alone is one of the better starts to a novel that I’ve read lately: “At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways – with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, ‘Wait a second. That means there’s a situation vacant.'”

The plot is a fairly classic Doctor Who concept – a megalomaniac (in about as literal a sense as you can get this time) plans to take over the universe using forbidden Time Lord secrets that have been concealed at Cambridge, and the Doctor (accompanied by Time Lady Romana and robot dog K-9) have to stop him. But there are a number of clever twists and elegant misdirections between Cambridge and the lost Time Lord prison of Shada, and I really don’t want to give any of them away for the benefit of those of you who haven’t had the whole thing summarized multiple times in old Doctor Who episode guides. Suffice to say that this is a perfect example of doing something new and clever with an old idea, and the story hangs together very well.

The only issue I had with the book, and this may be my reaction as a long-time Doctor Who fan who had heard about this one for years as a “lost classic”, was that I couldn’t help spending my time wondering which bits were taken directly from Adams’ original script and which were added by Roberts with the benefit of thirty-odd years of hindsight. (The joke about “edible ball bearings”, for example, I’m reasonably sure belonged to Roberts.) I wound up wishing they’d also simply published the shooting script, so that I could see what had been done and when and by whom. It was a bit of a distraction, but one that a less obsessive person might not have to deal with.

On the whole, though, I thought it was a great story well-told, and I think that any fans of Douglas Adams will enjoy it. Pastiches of classic authors have a shaky track record, especially of Douglas Adams (I don’t think, for example, that I’ll ever recommend Eoin Colfer’s ‘And Another Thing…’) but this one stands out as a fun read in its own right.

I found a copy of ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ yesterday at a used book store for a dollar and change, which makes me tremendously happy because I can’t find the house copy and I have at least two people I’ve been meaning to lend it to. I’ve been meaning to lend it to them for a while now because they’ve never read it, and I think they should…which is where this gets complicated.

Because the last time I asked what media all geeky people should experience, it kind of got bogged down in questions about what the hypothetical lender was trying to instill into the lendee, and whether the idea was worthwhile to begin with given that every generation develops its own cultural touchstones and doesn’t necessarily need other people’s. Which is certainly true…goodness knows, I’ve never insisted that my daughter watch the things I loved when I was a kid solely so that she can understand my childhood experiences. (Which isn’t to say we’ve never watched Bugs Bunny cartoons together.) But I don’t think it’s as simple as saying, “You shouldn’t force your classics on other people,” because I’m a lit major, and science-fiction is a branch of literature.

And like all good literature, good science-fiction/fantasy inspires and influences its successors. Sometimes in obvious ways–there’s no question that ‘Star Wars’ inspired a generation of film-makers to use Lucas’ cinema verite style in their own sci-fi films–and sometimes in less obvious ways, like the New Wave science-fiction of the Sixties and Seventies that was a conscious reaction against the pulps. Experiencing these influential stories (let’s shy away from calling them “classics” for the moment, as that’s a loaded term) can help you get more out of the current output in the field by showing you more of what influenced and inspired the current writers, just like reading Norman Mailer will help you get more out of Chuck Palahniuk.

So with that squarely in mind as our goal, “What science-fiction/fantasy media is influential enough that you’d recommend it to someone as useful in helping them understand the roots of their current “genre” interests?”, then what would be on your list? Feel free to answer in the comments!

Let’s start with the full disclosure: I know Lars Pearson, publisher of Mad Norwegian Press, well enough to be on a first-name basis with him at conventions. He has provided me with a few free books, some because I’ve helped him out with proofreading and some because he’s just a really nice guy. That said, I would still be telling you about how much I love the series of essay books he publishes even if none of that were true, because they’re really quite excellent on a number of levels. And apparently the Hugo voters agree with me, since one of them has already won a Hugo and there’s another nominated even as I write this (which is one reason I’m writing this now, because voting is still open for ‘Queers Dig Time Lords’ and it’s the best one yet. The other is I just saw him at a Doctor Who convention and I’m in the mood to talk about stuff that happened at the con.)

The essay series, which started with ‘Chicks Dig Time Lords’ and moved on to Whedon, comics, and has more in the works, is primarily intended as a space for people whose voice has traditionally been underrepresented in fandom to write about their experiences. The writing has been almost universally great, with some essays by excellent professional authors and new voices from within fandom, and it’s also been insightful. When you think you’ve seen it all, especially in a fandom like Doctor Who that’s now going into its fifty-first year and which had a period of about fifteen years with nothing to do but rewatch old episodes and talk about them to each other, there’s no substitute from getting a fresh perspective on the subject from someone whose life experience is different from your own. I’d never thought of relating the process of regeneration to transgender issues, but the metaphor was described so wonderfully in ‘Queers Dig Time Lords’ that I can’t see it any other way now. To me, it’s important to give these perspectives a voice, and I’m glad Mad Norwegian feels the same way, because opening oneself up to new perspectives helps you to appreciate other people as people. I always feel like I come away from these books with a tiny sliver of someone else’s viewpoint in my head, and it’s absolutely fascinating.

And they’re fun, too. Seanan McGuire (also known as Mira Grant, for those of you who’ve read her zombie novels) provides a hilarious piece in ‘Chicks Dig Time Lords’ describing her kid-self’s confusion about whether or not the Doctor was real–he was on PBS, after all, just like ‘Nova’ and ‘Wild America’. And Laura Mead gives an essay in ‘Chicks Unravel Time’ simply entitled “David Tennant’s Bum”. Because perspective is one thing, but nobody wants to be boring.

I’m really hoping that ‘Queers Dig Time Lords’ wins a Hugo, because I do think it’s better than ‘Chicks Dig Time Lords’; there are several essays that are genuinely moving, and I hope Hugo voters agree with me. But I also just think they’re worth reading, and I think that the people who read this site would like them.

I always feel like I should begin a review like this with a disclaimer, so full disclosure: I’ve been reading Paul Cornell’s books since he was transforming Doctor Who novels into something utterly beyond awesome with ‘Timewyrm: Revelation’. I’ve been on a few mailing lists he was on, and there’s a non-zero chance he might remember who I am. So I may have some bias here, is what I’m saying.

That said, ‘London Falling’ really is excellent.

It’s part of the “urban fantasy” subgenre that has become more and more popular over the last decade or so, specifically the sub-sub-genre that involves police getting involved with the supernatural. I’ve read and enjoyed other books in this field of interest (I also highly recommend Ben Aaronovitch’s Folly series. I also admit to bias there too, because ‘The Also People’ was freaking METAL.) This story involves a seemingly untouchable drug kingpin who gets arrested and dies in custody all in the same night. The attempts to investigate his death lead to several members of the crime squad gaining the Sight, able to see the secret London only visible to practitioners of magic.

Cornell makes an absolutely riveting choice in this book by making it clear very early on that Seeing the secret London has absolutely fuck-all to do with knowing what the hell any of it even means, let alone having any control over it or getting magical abilities from it. The book is absolutely suffocating in its intensity at times; the characters have no Wise Mentor, they have no Book of Thoth, they have been dropped into the deep end and it’s sink or swim. And oh by the way there’s a fucking whirlpool over there.

The characters each deal with the craziness in their own way; Costain, an undercover cop, has what can only be described as the most pragmatic religious conversion in human history, while Ross finally gains explanations for the impossible strangeness that’s tainted her entire life. (I’d go into more detail, but I’m avoiding spoilers as best as possible, because there really is a lot of good twisty stuff in here.) All of them share one important coping mechanism, though; they’re all coppers, and they all fall back on their police training. Cornell meticulously researched the novel, adding a layer of authenticity to the real-world aspects that helps sell the more fantastical elements.

The ending does come off as fishing for a sequel just a bit, but not so terribly much that I minded (although I suspect that if you didn’t like the book as much as I did, you might feel a bit more strongly about it.) On the whole, I have to say that I enjoyed this one and I’m looking forward to his next book.

In its long, storied existence, ‘Dragon Magazine’ really did a lot to create “gaming humor” as a legitimate subgenre. Think of all the great tabletop gaming comics out there, from ‘Yamara’ to ‘What’s New With Phil and Dixie’ to ‘Dork Tower’ to ‘Knights of the Dinner Table’, and odds are they showed up in ‘Dragon’ at least once. A lot of online comics like ‘Order of the Stick’ wouldn’t be around if not for pioneering strips that said, “Yes. Fantasy is weird and people rolling dice to make it up is even weirder. But isn’t it awesome?”

‘Nodwick’, which also has its roots in ‘Dragon Magazine’, is a comic not so much about the tropes of gaming as about the tropes of the kind of fantasy universe you’d get if the rules of physics were supplanted by the rules of gaming. The heroes are a band of not-too-bright, not-too-heroic adventurers who are more interested in killing monsters and getting swag than in actually doing the right thing. They have one truly good person, the team cleric, but even she has her little blind spots…namely, her belief that healing magic and resurrection spells make it not such a big deal when the group’s fetch-and-carry-and-walking-trap-detector henchman, Nodwick, gets badly mauled on account of being the only person who isn’t an adventurer.

Mind you, he’s also the only person with a drop of common sense, which is where the humor comes in. Nodwick frequently saves the day by being the one who spots the intelligent, easy solution that nobody comes up with because they’re all too busy being fantasy heroes and trying to find the official, genre-sanctioned solution. And even when he can’t get out of the obvious and terrible fate awaiting him (thank goodness for magical healing duct tape!) he acts as a Greek chorus, commenting on the absurdity of the way fantasy tropes work.

But the sneaky thing about ‘Nodwick’ is the way that Aaron Williams slides an actual story into things, right under your nose. Silly villains like the exiled god Baphuma’al eventually become serious antagonists, goofy MacGuffins like Piffany’s first kiss become important plot points, and the whole thing builds to a surprisingly epic finale. Williams is a master at this kind of backdoor worldbuilding (see his superhero comic, ‘PS238’, for another example), and you’re so busy laughing that you don’t even see it coming. When he gives unlimited cosmic power to a hamster who’s also the President-for-Life of the Henchman’s Guild, that’s funny. When said hamster becomes instrumental to the final battle between Good and Evil for the sake of the universe, that is freaking METAL.

I don’t want to get too much into detail about ‘Nodwick’, because the best par of humor is experiencing it for yourself for the first time, so…just take my word for it. ‘Nodwick’ is funny. And it’s also good.

There are some comics out there that for some reason just didn’t get the kind of success they deserved. ‘Leave It To Chance’, the series by James Robinson and Paul Smith, was a huge critical success that won the Harvey and the Eisner Awards for Best New Series in its first year, and yet it only ran for thirteen issues, the last appearing in 2002, seemingly never to be seen again. And yet ‘Wolverine: Origins’ ran for fifty issues. Sometimes there ain’t no justice.

Because the thirteen issues that did run were absolutely fantastic. The series was a high-concept blend of elements from ‘Doctor Strange’, ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘His Dark Materials’, although the series itself predated at least some of these. It concerns Chance Falconer, the daughter of a famous wizard and mystic guardian, who’s eager to follow in her father’s footsteps. Her father, who has been a powerful wizard long enough to know that it’s a hard path to walk and is filled with pain and heartache to spare, forbids her from studying magic. This goes about as well as you’d expect these sorts of things to go, not because Chase is willful or disobedient but because she knows without being told that her father has made tremendous sacrifices for the sake of the world, and she’s mature enough to want to grow up to be her father’s daughter. So she makes friends with a small dragon (yes, it’s shades of Paul Smith’s X-Men run, but the man draws freaking adorable baby dragons, so fuckit) and goes about helping people in her own small way with her own modest magical talents.

The stories are well-written; the character of Chance is charming, and the supporting cast is great as well. (My favorite moment is when the dragon is batting at a computer’s screensaver like a kitten.) The series is collected in two volumes, and I really don’t want to say anything more for fear of spoilers. I will say this, though. When people read ‘Justice League: Cry for Justice’ and wondered just what the fuck happened to James Robinson, they said it because they were all thinking of series like this.

In this particular case, I think it’s probably “Things Everyone Loves About Comics: Karl Kesel”. Because really, who has bad things to say about Karl Kesel? He’s a phenomenally talented inker who’s been working in the indsutry for decades, alongside everyone from John Byrne to Rob Liefeld, and who has a gift for making everyone he works with look better. (If you’re thinking, “He sure didn’t make Rob Liefeld look good,” remember that I just said “better”. Industry legend has it that Rob turned in the pencils for the final issue of the ‘Hawk and Dove’ mini-series late, without and hands or feet drawn in for any of the characters, then took the metaphorical phone off the hook. Those hands and feet you see there? All the work of the inker, which means they may be the only correctly drawn feet in a Liefeld book ever.)

In addition to his art, he’s got a lot of great writing work under his belt. The 90s ‘Hawk and Dove’ series he did with his then-wife Barbara remains a cult favorite, with all sorts of the things I absolutely love about comics that we never get to see enough of. (They actually created new villains for the series! It had unironic humor! The heroes used their powers cleverly, and were sympathetic and likeable! There was a really strong supporting cast, and good love interests for each of the two leads, who despite being male and female didn’t spontaneously fall in love! …until after the series ended, but in the interests of staying relentlessly positive I will not touch ‘Armageddon 2001’ with a twenty-meter cattle prod.) (And neither should anyone else.)

He did a phenomenal, well-remembered run on ‘The Adventures of Superman’ that’s perhaps best known for introducing the new Superboy…who wasn’t always that emo, I swear! As with ‘Hawk and Dove’, his run was always characterized by well-written, funny dialogue and fast-paced adventure (which he carried over to his two excellent runs on ‘Superboy’. Probably my favorite moment in the history of the character was when Knockout tried to manipulate him into becoming a supervillain, finally trying to cement his corruption by telling him to kill another villain in an issue-ending cliffhanger…only to  told, at the start of the next issue, “Are you nuts?”) He wrote ‘The Final Night’, which was a nice, tight, one-month crossover of the kind we saw for about four years from DC and then never again, which gave Hal Jordan a noble, dignified send-off that undid a lot of the poor treatment he’d suffered at the hands of DC’s editorial crew and probably should have stayed as the final end for the character. He also did some nice work for the probably-misconceived but still well-written Tangent line from DC (he was the one who did the Joker stories).

Over at Marvel, he had a tragically underappreciated Daredevil run (anyone remember the awesome story where Mister Hyde was framed for murder and Matt Murdock had to defend him? That was Karl Kesel.) He also wrote the first few issues of ‘Fantastic Four 2099’, the really high quality ones before the line utterly imploded because Marvel fired the line editor and all the talented writers walked in protest. (There is, somewhere, an alternate universe where Marvel kept Joey Cavalieri on, and Peter David and Warren Ellis and Karl Kesel kept writing their respective titles for another few years at least. I want to go there and steal all the comics.) He wrote an awesome FF annual where Ben Grimm traveled to a parallel universe where Marvel time mapped to real time one-to-one, and Johnny was in his late forties and thinking about retiring and leaving the whole “super hero” business to his kids. (High concept, and funny as hell.) He also wrote some great fill-in issues of the regular FF series, including the one where Ben Grimm was revealed to be Jewish (in what was ultimately a very touching Jack Kirby tribute. Another thing that Kesel loves to do is to tribute Kirby in ways both small and large. I approve.) I’m still hoping that someday he’ll get a regular gig writing the FF, because he has their voices down perfectly.

Oh, and he also did a really cute and clever “inverted X-Files” series called ‘Section Zero’ that was a victim of the implosion of the Gorilla Comics company, but that was way ahead of its time and presaged series like ‘The Middleman’ and ‘Warehouse 13′. It’s a frustrating theme of Kesel’s writing that all too often, he’s not considered to be a “hot” creator, and his work gets short shrift as a result. Either someone more famous comes along to write the book (like Kevin Smith on DD), or sales aren’t high enough to sustain a series. Which is a damn shame, because I’ve never read a Karl Kesel comic that hasn’t brought a huge smile to my face.

Oh, and if all that doesn’t convince you that he’s awesome, he just sold his whole comics collection. Why? To pay the medical bills of a special-needs baby he adopted. Even if he’d never written or drawn a single comic, that’d make him special. When you add it to everything else, it makes him one of comics’ unsung heroes…but I like to think that everyone who knows anything about him knows that he’s one of the great ones.

When I say, “I really love Godzilla”, I feel like the first thing I need to do is be more specific. After all, even if we narrow it down specifically to comics, Godzilla is one of those iconic characters that will pretty much always have a chance at a comic book, because there’s just something in all of us that sees a giant dinosaur on the cover, smashing up a city, and says “WANT.” But in this case, I’m talking specifically about the 1977-1979 run that Marvel did, the one they later collected in ‘Essential Godzilla’. Because not only does this one feature the giant lizard we all know and love, it’s actually set in the Marvel Universe.

Why is this important? Because I love superheroes even more than I love giant monsters, and a comic that combines both of them is just sheer, undiluted joy from beginning to end. The premise involves Godzilla heading to America, so you get SHIELD hunting the beast in their helicarrier (I’ve described the series in the past as “like ‘The Fugitive’, with Godzilla as Richard Kimble and Dum-Dum Dugan in the Inspector Gerard role.” If you don’t see this as instantly awesome, I feel a little bit sad for you.) Doctor Demonicus, in his first appearance, takes on the role of primary villain…and frankly, Doctor Demonicus is the world’s best at being the world’s worst evil super-genius. How can you not love a mad scientist who exposed himself to exotic radiation, only to get a painful skin disease instead of super-powers?

The first half of the book (and this, more than most series of the time, really reads like one 24-chapter story, albeit slightly shaggy-dog in form) involves Godzilla stumbling across various other monsters, usually ones created by Doctor Demonicus, and fighting them while SHIELD tries to figure out which monster is the bigger threat. SHIELD, in turn, creates a giant robot to fight Godzilla called Red Ronin…like you do…only to have it stolen from them and used for other purposes. This is the merely entertaining chunk of the book…

But it’s the last half where things really get nuts, as creators Doug Moench and Herb Trimpe really go all-out in showing the war against Godzilla. The Fantastic Four and Hank Pym get enlisted, using Pym particles to shrink Godzilla down to a size where he can be managed easily. But a rat-sized Godzilla escapes into the sewers of New York…and Pym’s research reveals that he’s already developing a tolerance to the gas. With time running out, the FF go on a desperate lizard hunt…which leads to a fight between the Thing and a human-sized Godzilla…which leads to the team banishing Godzilla into prehistory using Doom’s time machine…which leads to the inevitable Godzilla/Devil Dinosaur team-up…which finally leads back to the present and an all-out gigantic battle between the Avengers and Godzilla that absolutely has to be seen to be believed. The last issues move at a ferocious pace, each time upping the stakes and presenting Godzilla’s rampage as something that really is a crisis-level threat to the Marvel Universe, and while some might call the ending a cop-out, really, I feel like it’s the only way the series could end. (No spoilers, of course, but does anyone really think it ends with Godzilla dying?)

On the whole, this is the kind of series that could only be made in a big, sprawling shared universe like Marvel and DC, and it’s genuinely thrilling to see such an iconic monster being let loose into that universe…and then treated with considerable respect, albeit in a goofy sort of way. You will finish this book smiling, and there’s nothing wrong with that in my book.

As I noted about a month ago, it’s genuinely unfair for me to tell you about things I dislike without letting you have an idea of the things I like as well. After all, when Roger Ebert writes a movie review, he’s not handing down the Truth From On High; he’s just telling you what he thought of that movie. It’s up to you to decide whether that’s useful to you. So with that in mind, here’s a positive post for you, filled with love and affection for a medium I love despite my occasional frustration.

And yes, I do love ‘Acts of Vengeance’. I can almost hear the cries of shock and anger before I even finish the entry: “‘Acts of Vengeance’? It was nothing but a big dumb crossover full of superheroes hitting each other! It didn’t even make any sense! If all those supervillains really teamed up, why would they just switch opponents instead of ganging up on people! How could you love something that was just a bunch of brainless fight sequences?”

Because it’s a bunch of AWESOME brainless fight sequences. This is a crossover that’s firmly and unpretentiously a popcorn summer blockbuster translated into comic book form, with tons of spectacular battles stitched together with just enough of a plot to make it all plausible. Yes, it’d make much more sense for the villains to gang up on the heroes, instead of coming up with a cockeyed plan that was almost bound to fail. Why, it’s almost as if they were being somehow manipulated by an untrustworthy trickster god who was really more interested in pissing in Thor’s Cheerios than in actually coming up with a plausible scheme for world domination on behalf of six people he doesn’t care about! (Seriously, this crossover is Loki in full-on prick mode. Absolutely nobody gets anything good out of this; the villains wind up in as much chaos and confusion as the heroes. You can almost picture Loki pouring himself a cognac at the end of each issue and sipping it slowly while he watches the highlights on Mystic Pay per View.)

Of course, with the plot being as thin as it is, the story lives and dies on its big moments. And this crossover does not skimp on the big moments. There’s an epic Thor vs. Juggernaut slugfest (that also introduces the New Warriors, comics stalwarts through most of the next decade); there’s a running subplot where Spider-Man gains the Captain Universe powers and proceeds to fight way above his pay grade against the likes of Graviton, Dragon Man and the Hulk (he actually punches the Hulk into orbit at one point); there’s a hilarious fight between the grey Hulk and the Grey Gargoyle (hint: being made of stone does not actually help much against the Hulk); there’s a wonderful tie-in Damage Control miniseries written by the late, great Dwayne McDuffie; Walt Simonson’s debut on the Fantastic Four falls within this crossover, and you actually get to see Victor von Doom’s idea of a prank (along with how efficient the FF’s security system is, and which members of Congress are secretly mutants)…and I haven’t even gotten to Quasar vs. the Absorbing Man, Magneto vs. the Red Skull (turns out teaming an ex-Nazi with a Holocaust survivor was not such a great plan), the first appearance of the new Psylocke, and the Punisher vs. Doctor Doom.

In every comic fan, deep down, there is a thirteen-year old kid waiting to get out. ‘Acts of Vengeance’ is everything that thirteen-year old kid could ever want, plus a scene where Quasar fights Venom and the Living Laser accidentally jumps through the Watcher’s portal to blow up Thunderbird in an alternate universe. How can you possibly go wrong with all that?

This week Marvel is renaming Thunderbolts to Dark Avengers, presumably to boost sales by disguising the comic as an integral part of the Avengers franchise.  I’m not sure it’ll work, but Thunderbolts has always been my favorite comic book so I appreciate the effort.  Since I’m concerned that Dark Avengers #175 won’t exactly be a perfect jumping-on point, I’ve decided to help out with a quick introduction to what T-bolts has been about, and why I hope Dark Avengers will continue along the same themes.

Marvel readers probably know Thunderbolts best for its first storyline, about a team of new superheroes that turned out to be supervillains plotting to take over the world.1  Since then T-bolts has widely been regarded as a villain book, but I think that’s an inadequate description.   Thunderbolts is less about guys in black hats as what it means to wear the black hat, or to take it off and try on a white one.  This is where redemption is usually brought up as a major theme, but I don’t think the book is about becoming good any more or less than it’s about being bad.  It’s really about good and people put in a position where they must question their goodness or badness.  Thunderbolts is the comic where Baron Zemo found his principles and Henry Peter Gyrich abandoned his; where Hawkeye became received a 20-year prison sentence and Venom became a federal agent.  It’s where Radioactive Man developed into a three-dimensional protagonist and Speedball degenerated into a one-dimensional lunatic; where Songbird found a cause worth dedicating her life to and Nighthawk just found a bunch of assholes mooching off his money.  In short, saying Thunderbolts is about villains is like saying Legion of Super-Heroes is about teenagers.

That might sound like I’m knocking other well-known “villain books,” most notably Gail Simone’s Secret Six and John Ostrander’s Suicide Squad.  Far from it.  But what sets Thunderbolts apart is its central theme of hope–hope that bad guys can become better guys and the control of hope to influence the world for better or worse.  Ultimately the Suicide Squad is only trying to survive its next job to get a reduced prison sentence, and the Secret Six is only out to take care of themselves, but the Thunderbolts usually have loftier ambitions, even if they sometimes end up tilting at windmills.  The book plays upon multiple contradictions–villains as heroes, sociopaths as teammates, the forces of evil as a force for hope–and it tends to feature characters who can find methods in that madness; lateral thinkers looking to accomplish big things with unlikely resources.  The T-bolts are the kind of guys who plot to defeat an Elder of the Universe with a handgun and recruit the Man-Thing to be their Batmobile.

For most of the past fifteen years, Thunderbolts has been at the top of my reading pile.  It’s at its best when its cast is devious enough to be cunning, but not so professional that they could hack it as A-list heroes or villains.  The recently-concluded time-travel story arc (#163-174) is a perfect example: The Thunderbolts stomp around the past with little regard for the damage they might cause, but they prove surprisingly competent in overcoming whatever problems are thrown at them.  The appeal of a villainous character, as Jeff Parker recently observed, is that they can fail and make mistakes in ways that heroes won’t.  But more to the point, a villain playing hero can also think outside the box and make unexpected choices about both heroism and villainy.  Thunderbolts has tended to take flat or underutilized characters and revamp them in this way, giving them choices to ponder and problems to confront that are more stimulating than robbing a bank without being caught by Spider-Man.  Baron Zemo, for example, is a pretty decent antagonist, but he’s more interesting when he’s trying to be his own definition of a hero, and far more compelling when you’re not sure if he’s out to save the world, rule the world, or both.

There isn’t room here to relate the entire Thunderbolts backstory, so I’ll only briefly recap the past five years.  Originally the T-bolts were independent operators, but when Iron Man nationalized the superhero population in Civil War, the team was reorganized as a federal program for rehabilitating supervillains and putting them to good use doing superhero work.  Norman Osborn (of Green Goblin fame) was put in charge, and although he perverted the team’s mandate of redemption, he was eventually promoted to Iron Man’s job.  Osborn recreated the Avengers in his image, restaffing the team with several of his Thunderbolts in what is commonly called the “Dark” Avengers.  Eventually, the real superheroes put a stop to his psychotic notions of national security, and the Dark Avengers were disbanded.2

In the aftermath, the Thunderbolts program was revived with Luke Cage at the helm.  Along with longtime Thunderbolts like Mach-V and Songbird, Cage ran the team like a work release program, recruiting hardened criminals willing to do superhero jobs in exchange for preferential treatment.  But this setup was a little to Suicide Squad to work in Thunderbolts, and was doomed to fail–the chain gang found an opportunity to escape and took it.  At the same time, Norman Osborn came back with a second phony Avengers team, which was quickly defeated and incarcerated by the real ones.  This new Dark Avengers team has been assigned to Cage as replacements for his missing prisoners, and their first mission is to hunt down the Thunderbolts. 3

That brings us to Dark Avengers #175, which starts a storyline written by Jeff Parker and illustrated by Kev Walker and Declan Shalvey.  They’ve done a great job with T-bolts for several years, and by now they have my full confidence that they can take a new cast of obscure and unimpressive characters and come up with something fantastic.  (I never gave a crap about the Ghost or Boomerang before they joined the Thunderbolts, but under Parker they’ve become two of my favorites.)  Parker’s scripts are a perfect blend of the  ribald humor we got from Fabian Niceiza and the grim earnestness of Warren Ellis’s classic run, along with his own flair for the bizarre and grotesque.  Walker and Shalvey keep up with wherever the stories take them, from Satana’s harem of succubi to the inside the Juggernaut’s soul to the dungeons of Camelot.

Over the years people have wondered why I’m so crazy about Thunderbolts, but the simple fact is that the comic has had an almost uninterrupted streak of good-to-great creative teams, and it’s pretty hard to pick out a bad issue.4  As long as Dark Avengers remembers where it came from, I expect that it’ll continue that streak and be some damn good comics.  I highly recommend giving it a try this month.

1. They successfully conquered two thirds of the world, for a few hours, and I don’t think they get nearly enough credit for that.  That’s more than Lex Luthor ever did. [↩]
2. This is a very abbreviated summary of Thunderbolts #103-143, Dark Avengers #1-16, and Siege #1-4. [↩]
3. For more details, see Thunderbolts #144-174 and New Avengers vol. 2 #18-23. [↩]
4. Hell, even “Fightbolts” wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t a Thunderbolts story. [↩]