Jumanji !!!

Jumanji (1995): adapted from the Chris Van Allsburg book by Chris Van Allsburg, Greg Taylor, Jim Strain, and Jonathan Hensleigh; directed by Joe Johnston; starring Robin Williams (Adult Alan Parrish), Jonathan Hyde (Van Pelt/ Alan's Dad), Kirsten Dunst (Judy Shepherd), Bradley Pierce (Peter Shepherd), Bonnie Hunt (Adult Sarah Whittle), Bebe Neuwirth Nora Shepherd), David Hyde Pierce (Carl), Adam Hann Byrd (Young Alan), and Laura Bell Bundy (Young Sarah):

Jumanji imagines its tale of a magical board game along the lines of any number of 'Forbidden Tome' horror stories over the decades. The movie may be seriocomic and star Robin Williams, but Jumanji the game is pretty horrifying for much of the movie's narrative. 

Jumanji's ground-breaking CGI looks terrible now, far worse than most stop-motion animation of decades past. The monkeys are especially terrible. But the movie, riffing on the Necronomicon and It's a Wonderful Life in equal measure, remains something of a curious hybrid of comedy and horror. Robin Williams is given almost nothing to work with comically; his desperate, traumatized character is one of his finest non-comic performances, delivered here in the midst of what should be comedy. 

Director Joe Johnston (The Rocketeer, Captain America: The First Avenger, and a lot of work on Spielberg movies) works some shocks into the material, though it really feels like this should have been set in the 1930's to play to his (period) strengths. A young Kirsten Dunst and Bradley Pierce are mostly non-annoying children; Bonnie Hunt doesn't have a lot to do. Recommended.

Jumanji: Welcome To the Jungle (2017): adapted from the Chris Van Allsburg book and the 1995 film by Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Scott Rosenberg, and Jeff Pinkner; directed by Jake Kasdan; starring Dwayne Johnson/ Alex Wolff (Spencer), Kevin Hart/ Ser'Darius Blain (Fridge), Jack Black/ Madison Iseman (Bethany), Karen Gillan/ Morgan Turner (Martha), Bobby Cannavale (Van Pelt), Rhys Darby (Nigel), and Nick Jonas/ Colin Hanks (Alex):

Genial, light action-comedy sequel of sorts to the 1995 movie about a reality-altering board game. Now the board game is a retro videogame cassette that pulls players into the world of Jumanji rather than vomiting up portions of the game world into the real world depending on the result of a roll of a dice.

Four high-school kids get dumped into the world of Jumanji and transformed into avatars from the game. This allows Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Karen Gillan, and Kevin Hart to play at teen-aged personalities in adult (and in Black's case, gender-swapped) bodies. 

The Rock seems like he's auditioning for that Doc Savage movie that will never come. Things stay light, occasionally clever, and very CGI-heavy throughout. Rhys Darby (Murray on The Flight of the Conchords) appears as an NPC guide; would that there were more of him. Recommended.

Doc Savage: Skull Island (2013) by Will Murray

Doc Savage: Skull Island (2013) by Will Murray: Will Murray has written more official Doc Savage novels than anyone but Savage co-creator/developer Lester Dent. He's done so since the early 1990's, first adapting and expanding unused Dent plots and radio scripts. Skull Island, though, is different -- an authorized team-up of Doc Savage and King Kong!

Who is Doc Savage? The hero of 181 pulp-magazine novels published between 1933 and 1949, reprinted to surprising popularity starting in the early 1960's and continued by Murray and others once those novels ran out in the late 1980's. Trained since childhood to be a physical and mental marvel, Doc fought super-villains and monsters in that pulp series, becoming the second-most popular pulp hero in sales, after The Shadow.

The Man of Bronze supplied the Superman Mythos (through Doc-savvy Superman editor Mort Weisinger and through Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster) with a number of attributes:

• Doc's Fortress of Solitude predates Superman's.
• Doc's first name, like Superman's, is Clark -- Clark Savage, Jr.
• Doc, like Superman, has a crime-fighting female cousin.
• If the Man of Bronze, Doc's most famous nickname, led directly to the Man of Steel, well, another Doc nickname -- the Man of Tomorrow -- was appropriated verbatim for Superman.
• One of Siegel and Shuster's early Superman pages describes Superman as "A Genius in Intellect! A Hercules in Strength!", which sounds a lot more like Doc Savage than Superman.

Anyway, Skull Island is both terrific and atypical. The frame narrative concerns Doc returning to New York from his Fortress of Solitude c. 1932, too late to save Kong from his tragic fate. Two of Doc's lieutenants, apish chemist Andrew 'Monk' Mayfair and waspish lawyer 'Ham' Brooks, witnessed some of the final battle shown in the 1933 movie from Doc's heavily armored New York offices on the 86th floor of the Empire State Building. So, front-row seats.

Doc accepts the task of moving Kong's body from its impact site at the base of the Empire State Building and preparing it for transportation back to Kong's home of Skull (Mountain) Island. Once Doc has sent an embalmed Kong on his way in the world's largest burial shroud, to be shepherded back to Skull Island by promoter Carl Denham in the hold of the freighter that fatefully brought Kong to New York, he tells Monk and Ham the story of his first encounter with Kong.

A young Doc Savage sets off on a sea voyage with his generally absent father in 1920, after Doc's return from WWI. Clark Savage, Sr. wants to find his missing father, Doc's grand-father, 'Stormalong' Savage, lost for years somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

Battles with head-hunters and pirates come along before the Savages discover Skull Island, hidden within its permanent fog bank. On the island is Stormalong Savage, along with the monsters we saw in the original King Kong and some dinosaurs and perils we didn't see in King Kong. And there is Kong, of course.

Given the chance to tell a story about Doc Savage before he was Doc Savage (if you know what I mean), Murray delves much more into the psychology of the young hero. Clark Savage, Sr. has just been murdered as the first Doc Savage novel, The Man of Bronze, begins. Here, I think Murray does a swell job of fleshing out the relationship (and lack thereof) between the two Savages. Stormalong is also a terrifically fun and poignant figure. So, too, Kong, a threat who becomes an ally to the Savages, possibly because they don't have designs on taking him back to civilization.

Murray gives us some lovely moments, often spiked with graphic violence -- Doc has not yet adopted his 'no killing' policy. Indeed, he wouldn't adopt this until several novels into his career -- the early Doc Savage novels present a fairly murderous Doc.

Skull Island also acts as a welcome antidote to Peter Jackson's ridiculous retconning of King Kong into a really big gorilla. King Kong, faithful to the original novel, is almost completely bipedal and resembles no ape on Earth -- he truly is a rara avis, a different species. This makes sense. In Peter Jackson's world, a tiger would exactly like an over-sized domestic cat and an ostrich a big chicken. Screw you, Peter Jackson.

Anyway, this is a swell Doc Savage novel, somewhat revisionist insofar as we delve into the origins of Doc's psychology (and into the origins of the Doc Savage Oath!). It's fun without being entirely weightless, as good pulp entertainment should be. Highly recommended!

Pulp Heroes, Pulp Horrors

BPRD: Hell on Earth Volume 2: Gods and Monsters (2011-2012/ Collected 2012): written by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi; illustrated by Guy Davis and Tyler Crook: Another day in the battle between the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense and the unleashed forces of Hell. Good times! Some stuff happens. We see the effects of the ongoing invasion of Earth. A new character is introduced. An old character meets a shocking, though perhaps not final, fate. Some cool-looking monsters rampage around. It's all part of a larger story, and would work best read in sequence with that story. Lightly recommended.

Lobster Johnson 1: The Iron Prometheus (2007-2008/ Collected 2008): written by Mike Mignola; illustrated by Jason Armstrong: Set in the 1930's of writer-artist Mike Mignola's sprawling Hellboy Universe (Earth-Hellboy?), the Lobster Johnson series is an homage to the American pulp magazine heroes of the 1930's. It's part of Hellboy continuity, which means the reader knows Johnson's fate. So it goes. Johnson possesses traits of pulp heroes The Spider, The Shadow, and Doc Savage, while wearing a costume that's part standard superhero, part-Green Hornet.

The Iron Prometheus was the first of the Lobster Johnson miniseries. It's pulpy fun, with the mysterious, masked Lobster Johnson battling Nazis and monsters and an ancient evil to secure a super-weapon with magical properties. Mignola's tendency to underwrite was well underway here -- for a five-issue story, The Iron Prometheus is awfully thin at times. As written, it's 40 pages of story spread out over more than a hundred. We get characterization for a supporting character, but none really for Johnson's associates, much less Johnson himself. And one of the late sequences is almost completely opaque when it comes to clearly portraying what happened. It's fun, but almost too minimalist to be successfully pulpy. Lightly recommended.

Doc Savage: The Silver Pyramid (1987-88/ Collected 2009): written by Dennis O'Neil; illustrated by Andy and Adam Kubert: DC Comics' late 1980's revival of the Doc Savage pulp hero series as a comic book was intermittently successful -- indeed, successful enough that, while short-lived, it's probably no worse than the second-best comic-book Doc Savage, just after Marvel's 8-issue B&W Doc Savage comics magazine of the 1970's.

Writer Denny O'Neil scripted DC's beloved Shadow comics revival of the 1970's. He's tapped here as well, to uneven but mostly successful effect. There's a lot of stuff to get in -- the story spans 40 years -- and O'Neil keeps things moving along while also supplying a fairly dense plot, as the Savage novels often did. There's super-science, lost civilizations, Nazis, and new members of Doc's rollicking band of associates. It was successful enough to launch an ongoing series that lasted 20 issues -- not bad for a Doc Savage revival series. Actually, that's the longest lived Doc Savage comic series since the 1940's!

The Kubert Brothers -- artistic sons of legendary DC artist and mentor Joe Kubert -- are very young here. It shows sometimes as they have trouble maintaining consistent faces for some characters. And they're still too similar to their great father. But overall, the art works. They've already got fair command of action and of opening up the pages to one- and two-page compositions. Their interpretations of Doc's two most popular aides, Monk and Ham, are dreadful, but I don't think they designed them on their own. But they are terrible. Oh, well. Recommended.

All-American

Essential Captain America Volume 2 (1968-1970/ Collected 2004): written by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Jim Steranko; illustrated by Jack Kirby, Jim Steranko, Gene Colan, John Romita, Joe Sinnott, Syd Shores, and others: The great transition period of Captain America begins here, as co-writer/penciller Jack Kirby gives way to Jim Steranko gives way to John Romita gives way, finally, to Gene Colan, who would stay on the book for a few years as penciller. 

Early red-giant-phase Stan Lee writes Steve Rogers, Captain America, as such an angsty bastard that the book occasionally shudders to a halt, bloated and inert and over-stuffed with bathetic self-pity. Redemptively, the art is good throughout, and Steranko's innovative lay-outs are such a  show-stopper that they've been collected and re-collected on numerous occasions. I don't know that the Gene Colan/Joe Sinnott art team ever entirely works for me -- Sinnott's inks normalize Colan's pencils a bit too much, make them a bit too smooth. 

It's 1968 when the collection begins, and Kirby and Stan Lee are clearly producing too much material at the time -- Lee's writing is well into its state of decay. Kirby is still great, but he's decreased the number of panels per page already, as he did on all of his Marvel books in the late 1960's. It makes for more interesting visual storytelling but also a real and notable decrease in content. Cap's African-American pal The Falcon makes his debut here. Once Kirby and Steranko leave, the new villains become ridiculous, as Lee flounders to create interesting villains and mostly fails. Recommended.

Doc Savage: The Spider's Web (2016/ Collected 2016): written by Chris Roberson; illustrated by Cezar Razek: Writer Chris Roberson nails venerable pulp hero Doc Savage much more effectively in his second go-round on the Man of Bronze's adventures for Dynamite Comics. Cezar Razek is a pleasant, straightforward cartoonist. I wish Dynamite would put an artist more, well, dynamic, on the new adventures of Doc Savage. So it goes. Any time Doc has to deal with an Earthquake Machine is all right with me. Recommended.

Reconstruction of the Fables

Justice Inc. (2014-2015/ Collected 2015): based on characters created by Lester Dent, Walter Gibson, Paul Ernst, and others; written by Michael Uslan; illustrated by Giovanni Timpano and others: I mean, if you're going to resurrect the three most popular heroes of America's pulp era of the 1930's and 1940's, you might as well get a writer who knows the characters and is willing to have fun with them. Michael Uslan (sometime comic-book writer and listed as one of the producers of every Batman movie since 1989) knows Doc Savage, The Shadow, and The Avenger.

Maybe a bit too well: a recurring meta-joke about the young Doc Savage's haircut looking like Clark Gable's hair recurs a couple of times too often, as does a bit in which various people react to Doc's 'skull-cap' haircut. Both jokes stem from things exterior to actual Doc Savage stories: the illustrators of Doc's pulp magazine novels in the 1930's were told to make Doc look like Clark Gable; the tremendous, iconic Jim Bama cover illustrations for the Doc Savage reprints from Bantam books in the 1960's gave Doc a skull cap/widow's peak hairstyle based on a misreading of the novels (Doc had a close-fitting helmet that looked like this, but it wasn't actually his hair). See what I mean about knowing too much?

But anyway, Justice Inc. is actually fun. Its revisionism makes sense within the bounds of the story. And the revisionism doesn't fundamentally alter the characters of these three heroes. Doc and the Avenger still believe in the rule of law; the Shadow still has a tendency to act as judge, jury, and executioner. Together, they're a fun, occasionally bitchy team.

And they face villains familiar to fans of Doc Savage and the Shadow, slightly revised in what's really a very Marvelesque attempt to create links among characters who were never linked in the pulps. Both the Doc Savage and Shadow villains behind the potentially world-shattering conspiracy that drives the plot now share part of an origin with the Shadow, at least when it comes to the Shadow's somewhat murky and plot-convenient mental powers. 

Originally published as a six-issue miniseries from Dynamite, purveyors of ancient copyrighted characters for ancient fans, Justice Inc. isn't a mind-blowing super-epic. It is very entertaining however, which is more than I can say for a number of recent efforts to breathe new life into Doc, the Shadow, and the Avenger (DC's depressing Firstwave, I'm looking at you!). 

Giovanni Timpano's art has just a touch of the illustrative retro feel that such a project requires. His renditions of the various iconic characters are mostly swell. Somewhere in the Uslan/Timpano collaboration is an occasional difficulty with smooth panel-to-panel and page-to-page progression. It's not jarringly off-putting, though it occasionally causes one to struggle making sense of what has just happened.

My only other real complaint isn't actually a complaint: Uslan understandably limits the roles of the various sidekicks and helpers of the three great pulp heroes. Many of them make cameos (Monk Mayfair, Margo Lane, and Pat Savage most prominently), but there clearly wasn't room for both the crossover and an encyclopedic use of all the major characters from three different pulp-hero rosters. Especially when Albert Einstein, Howard Hughes, and H.G. Wells make relatively major appearances. So it goes. 

If this is the last time we see a new Doc Savage comic-book adventure, he goes out on something of a high. And I'd imagine the Shadow and the Avenger aren't far behind him. Well, probably. All three characters have been remarkably stubborn about shuffling off the pop-culture coil to this point. Recommended.

Fighting 'round the World (1933)

Doc Savage: The Polar Treasure  by Lester Dent writing as Kenneth Robeson; restored and edited by Will Murray and others (1933/This edition from Nostalgia Ventures 2007): From the first year of the adventures of pulp superman (and partial inspiration for Superman) Doc Savage comes The Polar Treasure, a fairly bloody voyage into the North Polar regions in search of a lost ship and a buried treasure. 

Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze, was already a physical and mental marvel early in his career, as were his five compatriots. Doc's main chronicler, Lester Dent, had done a lot of research on polar exploration for other projects before penning this novel, and the research certainly came in handy: it's a compellingly eerie and dangerous landscape for a Doc Savage adventure.

These reprints from Nostalgia Ventures offer Doc's adventures in something close to their original magazine size of the 1930's, along with reproductions of covers from their original appearances and in some cases from the Bantam reprints that started in the early 1960's and ran until the early 1990's (!). Pulp Maester Will Murray and others also restore sections to the novels when there have substantive changes to Dent's manuscript dating all the way back to the original publication. Here, that adds about 1000 words to the novel. It's all good though occasionally racist fun, with Doc's violence not yet toned down by Dent. Also, Doc Savage beats up a polar bear. Recommended.

Doc Savage: The Pirate of the Pacific  by Lester Dent writing as Kenneth Robeson; restored and edited by Will Murray and others (1933/This edition from Nostalgia Ventures 2007): Fairly bloody and somewhat racist Doc Savage adventure from Doc's first year of publication, lovingly restored and presented by the fine people at Nostalgia Ventures. Doc and his five merry pranksters foil the attempt of a modern-day pirate to stage a coup in a thinly disguised Philippines (here dubbed the 'Luzon Union'). 

All the stuff involving Mongols and 'half-castes' and 'yellow people' speaking pidgin English can be pretty tough sledding at times, and the narrative does get stuck on a ship (literally) for what seems like an interminable number of pages before we finally reach the Luzon Union. Maybe the weakest of the early Doc Savage novels, with an atypically un-weird super-villain behind everything. It really feels more like a job for the Shadow or Terry and the Pirates or those guys who fought Fu Manchu all those times. Lightly recommended.

Cancelled

Spirit World: written by Jack Kirby, Mark Evanier, and Steve Sherman; illustrated by Jack Kirby, Mike Royer, and Neal Adams (1970-71; collected 2012): An oddity caused in part by DC's inability to commit to new projects in the 1970's, Spirit World was supposed to be part of DC's foray into the world of black-and-white comics magazines. And it sort of was.

But DC hedged its bets by creating a whole other shell company to have its name on the covers, constantly downgraded what the book would contain, and ultimately dumped it on the market in such a way that the first issue may have never reached most newsstands.

Jack Kirby and friends put together this magazine, along with In the Days of the Mob, which had a similarly truncated existence. Kirby's Boswell, Mark Evanier, lays out the odd circumstances surrounding the creation of Spirit World. DC comes across as even more bumbling than usual for the time period.

The stories here are a lot of fun, both from the first issue and the never-published second issue. Along with a fumetti and a prose piece, we get some horror pieces that lean on parapsychology rather than the overt supernatural. One of the ghosts is a cousin to the composite ghost-monster of Robert Bloch's classic story "The Hungry House," and Kirby's visualization of such a thing is one of the kicks of the volume. Recommended.


Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze: written by Chris Roberson with Shannon Eric Denton; illustrated by Bilquis Evely with Roberto Castro, John Cassaday, and Alex Ross (2013-2014): Well, the covers by John Cassaday and Alex Ross for Dynamite's quickly cancelled Doc Savage title were great. The time-leaping, eight-issue storyline that began and ultimately ended Dynamite's Doc Savage comic was not such a great idea.

Character development of anyone other than Doc was almost non-existent as the storyline spanned 80 years of the adventures of Doc Savage, with everything tied together by an overarching plot that made Doc look like something of an idiot. The time-leaping also gives us almost no significant time with any of the assistants old or new. Simply doing justice to Doc's cousin Pat and his five original assistants in eight issues would have been difficult; the series adds a couple of dozen more assistants over the years.

Interior artist Bilquis Evely was something of an ill fit for the series -- the young illustrator is pretty bland at this point, something evident right from the first issue as Doc's assistants, very distinct physically in the original novels, become almost interchangeable on the page. He's not good with period detail, and he doesn't seem to know how to make the necessary talking-heads sequences visually interesting.

Philosophically, a story pointing out Doc's faults isn't necessarily a bad idea, but it may have been a bad idea to centre your first storyline on Doc's shortcomings. It makes for something of a depressing read, which isn't something one associates with the pulp adventures. And Doc's cock-ups are so spectacular in several of these issues that it's hard to understand why he isn't in jail. Everywhere on the planet.

Doc's next comic-book appearance will apparently be at Dynamite in a six-issue miniseries also starring fellow Street&Smith pulp heroes The Shadow and The Avenger. I still look forward to it. As to Doc, something more along the lines of IDW's Rocketeer Adventures, an anthology miniseries with several stories per issue by an assortment of writers and artists, seems to me the way to go with this. Making things fun would probably also be a good idea. Lightly recommended.

Grand Pulp Railroad

The Great Pulp Heroes by Don Hutchison (1996): Canada's own long-time genre historian, editor, and writer Don Hutchison gives us a book on the two decades or so in which single-character pulp-hero magazines flourished in America. It's a fun, breezy, and informative read. For some reason, ChaptersIndigo once had about a million copies of these things in stock at $2 a pop. So, they're out there.

American pulp(-wood, for their cheap, acid-heavy paper) magazines followed a peculiarly evolutionary path. They started off in the first decade-and-a-half of the 20th century as generalists. Magazines that included Argosy and All-Story published stories from every genre (including the first serialized Tarzan and Mars novels from Edgar Rice Burroughs).

Then the magazines specialized in terms of genre (fantasy, science fiction, mystery, Western, et al.) and then sub-genre (flying adventure stories, 'spicy' detective stories). Finally came the magazines devoted to individual heroes. The Shadow, simultaneously a radio hero, was the first hero to get his own magazine. The sales success of the Weird Avenger of Crime swiftly led to imitators (Phantom Detective, The Spider) and slightly different types of heroes from the same company, Street & Smith (Doc Savage, The Skipper, The Avenger).

This was a world in which sound movies had just appeared, and in which radio and the pulp magazines dominated the day-to-day entertainment business. There was no television, much less the Internet or computer gaming. Even electricity had not yet been supplied to all Americans. Or indoor plumbing. And the problems of the Great Depression seemed to fuel a desire in a lot of readers to see heroes who took up arms against gangsters, murderers, evil rich people, and crazy dictators.

Of course, like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a recurring character in The Spider and the Operator 5 series), most heroes were rich people who fought for the common good. That trope, which predated the hero pulps, still persists in such comic-book superheroes as Batman and Green Arrow today, in whatever media in which they appear.

The pulp adventure heroes had a time of about 22 years from the first appearance of The Shadow in magazine form to the last issue of the last surviving hero-magazines in 1953. Subsequent decades would see reprints and revivals, though only The Shadow and Doc Savage have proved to have any staying power in the popular imagination.

While it lasted, though, the adventures -- especially in the 1930's -- ran wild and wooly. The Spider and Operator 5 probably had the most apocalyptically destructive adventures, with whole cities and indeed countries (including all of Canada in the case of Operator 5) being wiped out in every issue. Doc Savage and The Shadow did a better job of keeping most of New York standing, which may be why they were the gold standard for heroism.

The pulps in their entirety even managed to arouse censorship flaps from time to time. New York's Mayor LaGuardia threatened all the pulp publishers based in New York (which is to say, all of them) with expulsion if they didn't clean up their act. Pulp magazines were blamed for youth crime. Of course they were.

Hutchison's book performs its most valuable service in giving plot synopses of many of the most outlandish adventures of these heroes. The Spider, Operator 5, and G-8 stories often seem like fever dreams of ultraviolence and desperate heroism. Even the failed magazines deliver some truly bizarre moments, none moreso than the single issue of a magazine devoted to a super-villain rather than a superhero, The Octopus. That guy was bananas.

So if you can track this down, go forth and do so. Only some glaring typos and a lack of colour illustrations disappoint, though the B&W cover reproductions are still swell. Highly recommended.

Rocketeer Redux

The Rocketeer: Hollywood Horror: written by Roger Landridge; illustrated by J. Bone and Walt Simonson (2013): A fun, more cartoony-than-usual artistic take on the late Dave Stevens' pulp superhero. This is the sort of fun, continuity-light comic book that DC and Marvel simply don't bother making any more. Landridge keeps the dialogue zippy, and Bone really has a pleasing pen line.

Along with the usual appearances by the never-named Doc Savage (creator of the Rocketeer's rocket pack) and his comrades Monk and Ham, this miniseries gives us (also-never-named) takes on the high-society detection team of Nick and Nora Charles from The Thin Man movie series of the 1930's and 1940's.

Continuity for IDW's ongoing series of Rocketeer miniseries by different creative teams continues (and the next one apparently teams the Rocketeer and Will Eisner's The Spirit, with art by 80's X-Men artist Paul Smith) does move along a bit, as the ownership issue of the Rocketeer pack is finally resolved in a logical fashion.

The Howard Hughes joke (which the Disney movie turned into an actuality because of not having the rights to Doc Savage et al. and not having the leeway the comic book did to show the characters without naming them) gets riffed on again, as does H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Recommended.

Earth's Greatest Hero

Tom Strong Volume 1: written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Chris Sprouse, Alan Gordon, Art Adams, Jerry Ordway, Dave Gibbons, and Gary Frank (1999-2000): Ah, Tom Strong, Alan Moore's delightful homage to Doc Savage, Tarzan, Superman, and pretty much any other hero you might want to throw in there. This is Moore's least cynical, most big-hearted creation, a glimpse of how things might have been if DC hadn't pissed him off all those years ago and he'd instead taken up the writing chores on Superman.

Here, we get the origin of Tom Strong, raised from birth to be the world's greatest physical and mental specimen. We also get some adventures circa 2000 fighting super-Nazis and giant, intelligent slime molds and self-replicating super-machines, and flashback stories detailing Strong's back-story from the 1920's, 1940's, and 1950's. The present-day stuff is beautifully rendered by Chris Sprouse and Al Gordon, while the flashbacks contain crackerjack, period-appropriate (Tom's adventures span 100 years and about 100 genres) artwork by others. Highly recommended.


Tom Strong Volume 2: written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Chris Sprouse, Alan Gordon, Alan Weiss, Paul Chadwick, Gary Gianni, Kyle Baker, Pete Poplaski, Russ Heath, and Hilary Barta (2000-2001): The highlights of this second volume of Tom Strong adventures are a two-issue visit to Terra Obscura, Earth's alien-occupied twin, and the battle in The Tower at Time's End. The former is a loving nod to decades of crossover team-ups between super-heroes of different Earths. The latter is an in-depth homage to a class Captain Marvel Family adventure of the 1940's, complete with a C.C. Beck art tribute by Pete Poplaski that's a delight. Highly recommended.


Tom Strong Volume 3: written by Alan Moore and Leah Moore; illustrated by Chris Sprouse, Karl Story, Howard Chaykin, Shawn McManus, and Steve Mitchell (2002-2003): Much of the action here is taken up by Tom Strong, his family, and assorted allies battling an invasion of giant, space-faring ants. It's fun. Recommended.


Tom Strong Volume 4: written by Alan Moore, Peter Hogan, and Geoff Johns; illustrated by Chris Sprouse, Karl Story, Jerry Ordway, Trevor Scott. Sandra Hope, Richard Friend, John Dell, and John Paul Leon (2003-2004): Tom Strong gets to see his own life through the looking glass when a mysterious invader of the Stronghold HQ tells him the story of an alternate Earth's Tom Stone, who initially seems to have been a much better version of Tom Strong. But things change. Recommended.


Tom Strong Volume 5: written by Mark Schultz, Steve Aylett, Brian K. Vaughan, and Ed Brubaker; illustrated by Pasqual Ferry, Shawn McManus, Peter Snejberg, and Duncan Fegredo (2004): The only volume without any actual writing by Alan Moore, this one ends on a great two-parter that works as an homage to Moore's own work, specifically Miracleman/Marvelman, by Ed Brubaker and Duncan Fegredo. Recommended.


Tom Strong Volume 6: written by Michael Moorcock, Joe Casey, Steve Moore, Peter Hogan, and Alan Moore; illustrated by Chris Sprouse, Karl Story, Paul Gulacy, Jimmy Pamiotti, Ben Oliver, and Jerry Ordway (2005-2006): Thanks to DC's acquistion of Wildstorm, the former Image Comics imprint that was producing Tom Strong and the other titles in Moore's America's Best Comics line (Top Ten and Promethea chief among them), Tom Strong comes to a somewhat abrupt end as Moore pulls the plug rather than work for DC any longer, even at one remove (DC acquired Wildstorm near the beginning of Moore's ABC Comics line and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen).

The legendary Michael Moorcock scripts a two-parter in which Tom and friends cross over with some Moorcock characters (and one extremely familiar looking black sword), while Moore himself writes the final issue, a crossover with the apocalyptic ending of Moore's Promethea series. Highly recommended.

3 > 4

Planetary Volume 1: All Over the World and Other Stories; Volume 2: The Fourth Man; Volume 3: Leaving the 20th Century; Volume 4: Spacetime Archaeology; written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by John Cassaday, Laura Depuy and others (1998-2009):

One conspiracy has stolen humanity's future, systematically eradicating potential heroes and benevolent scientific advances, all in the name of power. That's The Four, a quartet of astronauts gifted with astonishing powers during a secret attempt at a lunar landing in 1961. They are the worst humanity has to offer.

The other conspiracy is attempting to stop The Four and help humanity progress as it was supposed to. To do so, secrets must be unearthed -- of the Four, and of all the strangenesses of the world that have been lost, misplaced, or stolen. That's Planetary.

It's the end of the 20th century when we begin and the beginning of the 21st century when we end. Planetary offices span the globe, but its central investigators appear to be three people: Elijah Snow, born on January 1, 1900 along with a host of other superpowered individuals, able to control temperature and mysteriously bereft of a number of his memories; Jakita Snow, super-strong and super-fast; and the Drummer, who can see, store and manipulate all forms of information.

First they investigate, as the 20th century goes to sleep, a lost world of strangeness and charm, a world familiar to us from popular culture but subtly changed. An island of giant monsters north of Japan. A ghostly, avenging Hong Kong cop. Giant ants created to guard the mysterious Science City Zero in the Arizona desert. The lost space 1851 capsule of the Baltimore Gun Club. 1930's renaissance man and adventurer Doc Brass and his six amazing compatriots, stopping the end of the world on New Year's Day 1945, with the world unaware. A multiverse of extraordinary fractal complexity, shaped like a snowflake. The lost African super-city of Opak-Re. An entire Earth murdered to provide the Four with storage space.

And the loathsome Four. Forged by Nazi science and a hatred of everything human and superhuman. Four extraordinary humans who have spent their lives destroying or stealing the extraordinary. Why? To what purpose? And where did their powers come from?

And who is the mysterious Fourth Man of Planetary, the financial backer behind the scenes?

Warren Ellis's writing remains spare and echoey and witty throughout, leaving the reader space to imagine all the permutations of the jam-packed pop-cultural landscape across which Planetary stalks the Four without moving into the pompous or purple. It's meta, but not in the way that Alan Moore's similar-but-quite-different League of Extraordinary Gentleman is meta: the characters of Planetary aren't fictional characters in a mutating world of overlapping fictions. They're real people in a multiverse whose fundamental laws suggest that everything real resembles fiction, stories, myths, legends, all of it explained by mad science and madder cosmology.

John Cassaday's art justifiably won a number of awards. It echoes the styles of others when it needs to echo, but throughout maintains a marvelous vastness and spaciousness, an epic look nonetheless capable of evoking the familiar and the normative.

There are lovely character moments, moments of profound sorrow and loss, and wide as the widest widescreen moments of revelation and epiphany and wonder. Recurring throughout is Elijah Snow's catchphrase -- "It's a strange world. Let's keep it that way." In these four volumes or in the larger Absolute Planetary volumes, this remains one of the four or five truly essential superhero comic books of the last 20 years. Highest recommendation.

Apocalypse

Firstwave: Doc Savage: The Fourth Day, written by Ivan Brandon and Brian Azzarello, illustrated by Nic Klein, Phil Winslade and J.G. Jones (2010-2011): 1930's and 1940's pulp-magazine hero Doc Savage has never had a lengthy comic-book run. The Firstwave line from DC was meant to rectify this problem by taking Doc more fully into the realm of alternate history and away from the unsuccessful replication of the format and content of his pulp adventures. Doc's amazing gadgets and amazing heroism have altered history since the end of the First World War, leading to a 1930's landscape in which cellphones and atomic weapons are common.

Alas, the first story arc in the Firstwave Doc Savage stunk to high heaven thanks to a writer who'd never written comics before and an artist unsuited to the project. Ivan Brandon and Brian Azzarello came on board for this, the second Firstwave story arc, and while they quickly got the quality of the book up, it was apparently too late -- cancellation is, so far as I know, now a sure thing.

Oh, well. The alternate history Doc and his amazing cohorts move through in this 7-issue arc really is pretty interesting. A war has left the Middle East all but destroyed and cut off from the world outside. But when a threat to the outside world is broadcast from within the wasteland, Doc and his men are sent by the U.S. government to discern the seriousness of that threat and to snuff it out.

Brandon and Azzarello do pretty well balancing Doc's superlative competence in every area of human endeavour with the mistakes an idealist can make when stuck in shades-of-gray situations. Nic Klein's art is solid throughout, though like a lot of contemporary comic-book art it could really use less full-process, painterly colour -- murkiness is not always a virtue.

The major flaw in the series is that things are deadly serious -- there's none of the loopy, sophormoric jauntiness of the pulp novels. This is serious business, and the grimness wears on one after awhile. Pulp novels were actually fun. Comic books, more and more, really aren't. Klein, like every comic-book artist other than Dave Stevens and Tony DeZuniga, has absolutely no idea how to draw "Monk" Mayfair. Is it so hard to look at the descriptions in the novels? Argh. Nonetheless, recommended.

Falls the Shadow

The Shadow: Blood & Judgment, written and illustrated by Howard Chaykin (1986): 1986 was the year that three comic-book-industry-changing books came out from DC Comics -- The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen and this violent, sexy and irreverent reimagining of the old Shadow radio-and-pulp character. The other two are still in constant print; alas, because this is a treatment of a character licensed from another company, The Shadow: Blood & Judgment has, so far as I know, only been available in used bookstores and on EBay since about 1989.

That's a shame because it's fucking awesome, though I can understand why oldy timey Shadow fans like Harlan Ellison squeaked and gibbered with outrage when Chaykin's miniseries first appeared. It's revisionist on almost every level, making the Shadow both an even more bloodthirsty avenger of crime and an even bigger bastard in his personal life than was ever imagined in the old pulps and radio shows of the 1930's and 1940's. Somewhat confusingly, the confusing opening of the Alec Baldwin Shadow movie of the early 1990's sort of lifted some of its concepts from this miniseries and not from the original pulps. So it goes.

As a back-issue-bin bonus, this miniseries spawned an even more irreverent and hilarious ongoing series that ran for 19 issues, an annual, and a Prestige Format two-issue Avenger miniseries spinoff. In that later magnum opus, writer Andrew Helfer and artists Bill Sienkiewicz, Marshall Rogers and Kyle Baker took about as much piss out of the Shadow (and really out of weird avengers of crime in general) as one could without completely deflating the concept.

I like reverence as much as the next guy, but Chaykin's take is giddy fun involving characters who are generally really, really well-dressed (no one draws natty clothing like Chaykin) and often really, really perverse. Unfortunately, the grim-and-gritty late 1980's comic marketplace took its cues from the violence of this and other books but pretty much left out the humour (mostly black) and the stylishness. Still, this is thrilling stuff, even moreso in the context of today's moribund Doc Savage and Avenger DC reboot universe, First Wave. Someone should have hired Chaykin et al. to steward that one. It might have got cancelled just as quickly, but at least it would have been awesome sauce while it was being published. Highly recommended.

Botch Sauvage

First Wave, written by Brian Azzarello, illustrated by Rags Morales, Ed Bryant and Phil Winslade (2010-2011): My God, what a fantastic fucking botch DC Comics' resurrection of pulp hero Doc Savage in his own weird little comic-book universe turned out to be. Cancellation now seems to be set in stone, and all I really care about is whether or not DC will still publish the Showcase compilation of Marvel's great, short-lived Doc Savage B&W magazine-sized comic of the mid-1970's. Now that was a resurrection!

It looked so promising to begin with, as Doc, an alternate take on Batman, the Spirit, the Blackhawks, the Avenger, and a number of other reconfigured DC characters would fight evil in a reimagined 1930's where the inventions of Doc and other heroes and villains had essentially started the 21st century 70 years early.

Unfortunately, grimness and moral murkiness dominated -- it all felt like a reboot from the grim 'n gritty late 1980's. Furthermore, this introductory miniseries took forever to get anything going in the way of an interesting plot, and was perennially late to boot (as in, close to 18 months for 6 issues). And here and in the First Wave Doc Savage series, fun was pretty much nowhere to be found. Instead, we got a grim slog and a paucity of likeable characters.

I suppose a further problem arose from the concept itself (that is, a universe reconfigured by Doc's presence). Alan Moore's Doc Savage homage, Tom Strong, pretty much followed the same premise. The difference lay mainly in the fact that Alan Moore was writing that in his full jolly metafictional mode, making Tom Strong's adventures a delight whereas NuDoc just kept giving me more and more of a headache.

Future pulp reboots should probably leave Azzarello out of the mix -- I can think of few good contemporary comic-book writers less suited to updating a frothy pulp hero originally aimed at a readership of 14-year-olds. Tom Strong is awesome, though, as are the appearances of Doc-like heroes in Warren Ellis's Planetary and Dave Stevens' Rocketeer. Buy that stuff instead. It may be time for the original Doc to be reabsorbed by the eternal slurry of the pop underverse. Not recommended.

Back in the Day

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