Tuf Voyaging (1986) by George R.R. Martin

Tuf Voyaging (1986) by George R.R. Martin: A 'paste-up' novel of stories and novellas published over about a decade, Tuf Voyaging tells of several adventures of Haviland Tuf. Tuf lives several thousand years in the future, during George R.R. Martin's 'Thousand Worlds' universe in which humanity has spread out across the galaxy (that's the Thousand Worlds) after the collapse of its Federal Empire. 

Tuf starts off as a quirky but somewhat unsuccessful freighter captain. Personality-wise, Tuf sometimes seems like a first draft for Varys in A Song of Ice and Fire. However, circumstances detailed here put him in sole control of a 30-km-long seed ship, the last of its kind, built by that Federal Empire's Ecological Engineering Corps.

This seed ship, named Ark, can do just about anything biology-related. Thanks to vast libraries of genetic material, genetic manipulation machines, and other doodads, the Ark can unleash planet-destroying plagues, planet-saving biological miracles, or even a few telepathic cats. Tuf finally has a way to make money. And so he does.

This may be Martin's most traditionally Golden-Age science-fiction work. Tuf is quirky and a fairly solid judge of human character, and the stories themselves are the sort of 'science puzzle' stories made popular by writers that include Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. Martin seems to be having a lot of fun with the biological puzzles Haviland Tuf faces, and so too the reader.

Even the discovery of the Ark rests on a puzzle being solved -- and Tuf figuring out how to survive that finding. He will then be confronted by a variety of puzzles on different worlds. The puzzles and the solutions are ingenious. It's all breezy science-fiction fun with a few serious points about over-population, religious mania, and cruelty to animals along the way. And, of course, the dangers of invasive species. Especially when that invasive species is humanity. This would make a fine TV series. Come on, guys! Highly recommended.

As in Stretchy

Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched To Their Limits (2001): by art spiegelman and Chip Kidd: Writer-artist Jack Cole was one of the brightest of the bright spots of the 1940's 'Golden Age' of American comic books. And he was Hugh Hefner's go-to artist during Playboy's first few years. And he seemed to be on his way to success on a syndicated comic strip when he committed suicide in 1958. 

The reasons for the suicide remain shrouded in mystery. The brilliance of Jack Cole almost from the beginning of his professional comic-book career is not a mystery but pretty much a fact: he was a genius.

And a very weird genius at that, one weird enough to captivate Art 'Maus' Spiegelman, whose contempt for superhero comics is pretty well-documented, and Ace Book Designer Chip Kidd. Spiegelman's essay on Jack Cole appeared previously in a magazine; here, in book form, it's buttressed by comics and art and Chip Kidd's oddball lay-out.

Jack Cole's Plastic Man was a wonder for about a decade. Plastic Man's stretchable, squeezable, Protean nature allowed Cole to play with lay-out and space and panel composition in innovative, always enjoyable ways. Plastic Man always seemed on the verge of breaking out of his comic book altogether. Even the best of those who came after Cole couldn't recapture Cole's manic, fluid, occasionally polymorphously perverse vision of the comic book.

The latter stages of the book showcase Cole's own protean ability to change styles, from his full-page, one-panel 'Good Girl' art cartoons for Playboy to his stripped-down comic-strip style. He was a rare sort of genius, doing popular yet often dazzlingly weird and avant-garde work. Highly recommended.

The Old and the New-Old

Batman (Detective Comics) Archives Volume 2 (1941-42/Collected 1991): written by Bill Finger and Don Cameron; illustrated by Jerry Robinson, George Roussos, Bob Kane, Fred Ray, and others: The Batman Mythos begins to mature with great rapidity in this second archive of stories from Detective Comics (where Batman premiered in 1939). Robin is part of the team, the Joker and the Riddler are recurring villains, and the origin of Two-Face appears here.

As Batman co-creator Bob Kane (with writer Bill Finger, finally being credited by DC in 2016, more than 40 years too late for the long-deceased Finger) doing less and less artwork, Batman's art gets progressively better because frankly, Bob Kane sort of sucked when he wasn't swiping other people's art. Jerry Robinson is on-board for the Joker, a character he co-created, while also supplying a much more pleasingly cartooned, detailed, and often funny Batman and Robin. George Roussos supplies his usually capable inks, complete with his ever-present giant moons.

The stories, most written by Finger, are at their best when they pit Batman against his growing rogue's gallery. Batman vs. mobsters is sort of boring. Batman vs. a mind-reading scientist, the Joker, or the Penguin is pretty great. One of the things to note about the early Batman is how text-heavy and panel-heavy it is. Kids were much faster readers in 1941! One wishes at times that the art was allowed to breath at times with fewer panels per page, but it would be years before this was true in the superhero comic book except in rare exceptions drawn by the Eisner or Simon&Kirby Studios. Recommended.

The Boy Commandos Volume 1 (1941-42/Collected 2010): written and illustrated by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby: Terrible, muddy colour reproduction caused by somebody who doesn't know how to use a colour scanner makes for some tough pages in this collection. Still, it's rewarding to read one of the first 'kid gang' comics. And what a gang! Co-writer-artists Joe Simon and Jack Kirby basically serve up Our Gang with Heavy Weaponry in the Boy Commandos, as a bunch of prepubescent boys run around Europe and Asia machine-gunning the crap out of the Axis powers. 

And they're sanctioned by the Allied military! 

The Boy Commandos are a multi-national group nominally led by adult Captain Rip Carter. Their adventures are wild and woolly, and a lot more fun than those of most adult WWII comic-book characters. One can see how the 'kid gang' comic became a popular one in the 1940's before fading out around the end of WWII. Recommended. Boy, this needs to be colour-adjusted, though.

Essential Fantastic Four Volume 2 (1963-1965/Collected 1995): written and illustrated by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby; inked by Chic Stone, George Roussos, Vince Coletta, and Frank Giacoia: The Stan Lee/Jack Kirby Fantastic Four (the stretchable Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Girl, Human Torch, and super-strong Thing) starts to become a more recognizable, traditional superhero comic in this second collection of the FF's 1960's stories, in glorious B&W because this is an Essential B&W collection. They fight fewer monsters and more traditional super-villains. They also fight the Infant Terrible in a story that whoever wrote the Trelayne episode of  the original Star Trek may have prior to penning "The Squire of Gothos." 

The FF's goofiest, funniest enemies from their first volume of adventures -- the Red Ghost and his Super-Apes (!!!) -- do appear here in all their ridiculous glory. The Watcher, the Blue Area of the Moon, Doctor Doom, Prince Namor, the Super-Skrull, and the Mole Man return; Dragon Man, the Hate Monger, Mr. Gideon, the Frightful Four (including yet-to-be-revealed-as-Inhuman Medusa), and Franklin Storm debut. 

Team-ups with Doctor Strange, the Avengers, the X-Men, and a brief Peter Parker cameo sell the interconnectedness of the growing Marvel Universe to the reader. There are many stand-out stories here. Probably my favourite pits the mighty, wise-cracking Thing against a maddened, more-mighty Hulk for page after page of terrific superhero combat. The Thing's later pummeling of Dr. Doom is also a personal favourite, drawn with succinct power by Jack Kirby.

Stan Lee is typically bombastic and melodramatic throughout, with the slapstick antics of the eternally bickering Thing and Human Torch to add humour. The inking of Kirby's pencils starts off rough with George Roussos, who's a terrible fit with Kirby. It picks up with Chic Stone. Joe Sinnott's masterful inks of Kirby on the FF are still a year or so away by the end of this volume. Highly recommended.

Thor: Godstorm (2001-2002; collected 2011): written by Kurt Busiek; illustrated by Steve Rude and Mike Royer: Fun homage by Busiek, Rude, and late-career Jack Kirby inker Mike Royer to the sort of story normally found in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's run on The Mighty Thor in the 1960's. Thor's battle with the sentient thunderstorm Godstorm occurs in three different eras as depicted in the story. 

Busiek does that thing he does in which his writing is both homage (to Stan Lee) without being overly imitative of Lee's melodramatic verbiage. Steve Rude gives us his own action-packed, sometimes cartoony pencils, made to look just a bit more Kirbyesque than usual by Rude and inker Royer. My only complaint here would be that I'd like more of Busiek, Rude, and Royer's Thor. It's swell. Highly recommended.

A Stretch of the Imagination

Plastic Man Archives Volume 7: written and illustrated by Jack Cole (1946-47; collected 2006): Another jolly, anarchic, cleanly rendered volume of Golden Age Plastic Man adventures, written and illustrated by the stretchable hero's creator Jack Cole and members of Cole's studio. Plastic Man is one of the few Golden Age comic books that holds up today, not just as a historic curiosity, but as an exemplar of the form and of the superhero genre.

Plastic Man's adventures are funny and fun without being weightless (the death count is surprisingly high). Cole's imagination found wings with a hero who could look like pretty much anything, battling crooks who were comic grotesques. While Plas works for the FBI (the first superhero to work for a government agency, so far as I recall), he remains a curiously liminal figure -- a bringer of chaos and anarchy in the cause of law and order.

While Cole would 'cut loose' on the splash pages of Plastic Man's adventures (taking a cue from the Will Eisner studio's Spirit, upon which Cole worked briefly), he primarily worked his narrative magic within a fairly conventional panel layout. It's inside the panels that everything cuts loose, and within which little jokes and sub-stories play out in the background in a manner which anyone who's read the later Mad magazine would recognize, though I think Cole was taking his inspiration from great comic strips that include Bringing Up Father (aka Maggie and Jiggs), Krazy Kat and E.C. Segar's Thimble Theatre (aka Popeye) when it came to the dense shenanigans occurring around and behind the main action of a strip.

The product of a true visionary and artist, Plastic Man is one of those rare Golden-Age comic-book creations who has never been improved upon by writers and artists other than his creator. Lovely, lovely stuff. Highly recommended.

When Men Were Superheroes and Women Were Secretaries

All-Star Comics Archives Volume 2; written by Gardner F. Fox and Sheldon Mayer; illustrated by Jack Burnley, Bernard Baily, Sheldon Moldoff and others (1941-42; collected 1992): In the 1940's, the Justice Society of America was what would later be DC Comics's first group of superheroes, created in part to boost interest in the lesser-known characters of the infant DC superhero community (Superman and Batman were honourary members who didn't really participate in the adventures, while other characters that included the Flash and Green Lantern would also become honourary members once they became popular enough, though both those heroes would eventually return to active status as the superhero boom of the early 1940's started to bust at the end of World War Two).

The first few appearances of the JSA involved members meeting to tell stories about recent cases. Quickly, though, All-Star Comics would showcase the evolution of the superhero group, with members first doing solo duty in individual stories oriented around a common quest and then members actually fighting together against a common foe.

The main JSA members at work here include Johnny Thunder, Dr. Mid-nite, Hawkman, Dr. Fate, the Atom, the Flash, the Spectre, and Green Lantern. We also get the first 'bonus' insert story in superhero history, as Wonder Woman gets introduced in a solo story in one issue. Eventually, the JSA would deign to make her their recording secretary, a skill I'm pretty sure life as an Amazon didn't prepare her for.

In this second archive edition, the stories are firmly in the second mode, with the heroes teaming up at the end for the sake of closure. Gardner Fox and editor Shelly Mayer were inventing a sub-generic form on the fly, with no real antecedents unless you want to get goofy and claim Jason and the Argonauts as the first superhero group. Wartime concerns form the motivation for the cases in this book, as the heroes seek to raise money for European war orphans, bust saboteur rings, and secure America from aerial attack with a super-secret 'bomb shield.'

This last quest -- and the last story in the book -- sees Fox finally start to write stories with a certain amount of fanciful 'oomph' to them. The JSA gets dispatched singly through a time-portal in order to retrieve plans for the bomb shield from several hundred years in the future. This allows Fox to finally play with exotic locales (cities in the sky and beneath the sea) and a certain amount of humble-pie for the JSA members, who discover that the average man of the future can mop up the floor with all but the most powerful of them.

Comic-book art in the 1940's could often be pretty awful (the page rates of the time didn't exactly make for a rewarding work situation), though the craftsmanship of the artists would increase as the months flew by. Jack Burnley, a longtime 'ghost' on the Superman comics, draws the Starman episodes here with skill and a certain degree of professional slickness, while Bernard Baily on the Spectre remains one of the more idiosyncratic artists of the early Golden Age. Recommended for superhero fans.