The Nature of Balance by Tim Lebbon (2000): An early novel from the prolific Tim Lebbon pits a small group of people against nature gone mad. Or at least intensely angry at human beings.
There are elements of Arthur Machen's work throughout the novel, as one reviewer points out in a blurb on the back cover. Of course, Lebbon has a character talk about an Arthur Machen story early in the text, so there's a signpost here, brightly illuminated. It's Machen's "The Terror," in which animals launch an attack on humanity, that's referenced in the novel.
However, there are other Machanesque touches as well that recall other works, especially a discussion of what true natural evil would look like ("The White People") and Machen's ideas of reality being perhaps too horrible to contemplate without some mediation ("The White People" and "The Great God Pan," among others).
Lebbon doesn't attempt to write like Machen. The Nature of Balance is more like SplatterMachen, with all the explicit blood and guts and gore and sexual ramifications shown where they were only (strongly) implied in Machen's early 20th-century work. It works because of Lebbon's strong hand at characterization more than anything else.
The litany of horrors can get a bit repetitive after awhile (never have so many things smelled so "rich" and "meaty" -- the line between gross-out and dog-food commercial can be a thin one). But Lebbon also exhibits a great deal of creativity in depicting Nature gone mad at warp-speed. There's actually something Miltonic in some of the descriptions of what is, I suppose, a post-post-lapsarian landscape, a world in which once again everything has changed, changed utterly. But there's also hope, and hopeful characters amidst the rubble and the crawling tentacles of malevolent trees. Recommended.
The Superman Chronicles Volume 10, containing Superman stories from Action Comics 53-55, Superman 18-19, and World's Finest 7 (published 1942/collection 2012): written by Jerry Siegel; illustrated by John Sikela, Leo Nowak, Jack Burnley, George Roussos, and Ed Dobrotka.
Minor, unpowered villains that include The Snake, The Night-Owl, and Captain Ironfist appear in this chronological collection of Superman stories, all of them originally published in 1942. You can tell America has entered WWII from the covers alone, which feature Superman vs. the Axis powers in various locales (though none of the stories deal with the war directly).
Lex Luthor makes another of his early appearances in "The Heat Horror," this time threatening humanity from his new headquarters inside an artificial asteroid. Jerry Siegel loved his science fiction. There are a few more mundane tales involving mining and racketeers. The three oddities of the volume are also the stand-outs.
In "The Case of the Funny Paper Crimes," Superman battles gigantic comic-strip characters who've come to life and started committing crimes. All the characters and strips we see in the course of the story are riffs on popular comic strips of the time that include Prince Valiant and Dick Tracy. It's one of the most fun and metafictional of all early Superman stories.
But we're not done with metafiction and the super-roman a clef just yet! In "A Goof Named Tiny Rufe," Superman deals with a very, very thinly disguised parody/homage of popular comic strip Li'l Abner and its creator Al Capp. And there are (unnamed) cameos in this story from various Superman editors and writers. Superman writer/creator Jerry Siegel is certainly having fun, as are his artists on this one, doing awfully good approximations of the style and characters of Li'l Abner.
But wait! There's more metafiction! In "Superman, Matinee Idol!," Clark Kent and Lois Lane visit a movie theatre that's showing a Superman cartoon. Indeed, it's a sequel to the first Fleischer Studios Superman cartoon, "Superman vs. The Mechanical Monsters." The story of this fictional cartoon occupies the bulk of the story. Interpolated throughout are scenes in which Clark prevents Lois from learning his secrets (including his secret identity) from the cartoon itself. This story is all play and all meta, a jolly and fairly sophisticated piece of fantasy writing.
These three fantastical, metafictional Superman stories make me wonder if Jerry Siegel had been reading Captain Marvel comics, which were generally more fantastical than the adventures of Superman, and by 1942 almost as popular if not moreso for a brief time.
In any case, they're a delight. Siegel's artists do fine work, especially John Sikela, who approximates both Joe Shuster's style and Al Capp's style in the course of a volume. And I haven't even mentioned one of the greatest scenes in Superman history. See, The Night-Owl has a trained owl with claws dipped in deadly poison. He sends it after Lois Lane. But Superman arrives just in the nick of time... and punches the owl so hard it explodes in a flurry of feathers and claws. That is awesome. Highly recommended.
Batman: The Dark Knight Archives Volume 4 (Collecting Batman Issues 13-16, 1942-43/Collected 2003): written by Bill Finger, Don Cameron, Jack Schiff, and Ruth Lyons Kaufman; illustrated by Bob Kane, Jerry Robinson, Jack Burnley, Ray Burnley, and George Roussos:
Batman's co-creator Bob Kane leaves most of the art chores to other people in this volume of Batman stories from 1942-1943. And the prolific Don Cameron writes the majority of the stories, with an assist from Batman co-creator Bill Finger, who was otherwise writing most of the Batman stories in Detective Comics while Cameron handled Batman in Batman.
One of the pleasant surprises here, other than Cameron, is the art of Jack Burnley. He's not as good at the comic grotesques of those stories with artist Jerry Robinson on them, but he supplies a very straightforward, cleanly rendered adventure version of Batman.
The Batman Mythos was rapidly coming together by this point, barely three years after the Caped Crusader's first appearance. Robin is fully entrenched as Batman's sidekick, and villains such as Catwoman, the Joker, and the Penguin are already making repeat appearances.
Standouts in this volume include the following stories:
"Here Comes Alfred" by Don Cameron, Bob Kane, and Jerry Robinson introduces the (initially fat) butler to the Batman saga.
"The Grade 'A' Crimes by Ruth Lyons Kaufman and Jack Burnley features a rare Golden Age story written by a woman.
"The Boy Who Wanted To Be Robin" by Cameron and Burnley introduces the idea of a criminal training himself to be a sort of 'anti-Batman.'
"The Two Futures" by Finger and Burnley offers a grim vision of an Axis victory in WWII.
"Swastika Over the White House" by Cameron and Burnley is a rare WWII story in which Batman actually battles Nazi saboteurs.
"The Adventure of the Branded Tree" by Cameron and Burnley may be the first example of a strange sub-genre of DC superhero stories, those that are narrated by an inanimate object, in this case a roll of paper. It's also part of a fairly widespread tradition of showing superheroes reading about their own exploits in the comic book that they're appearing in. You'd be amazed how often this sort of meta-fiction shows up in comics of the 1940's.
In all, an enjoyable and surprisingly dense read. The comics of the 1940's often had crude art, but they generally offered a surprisingly generous amount of prose along with that art. They certainly weren't for the illiterate as they were so often accused of being. Recommended.
The Superman Chronicles Volume 9: (Collecting Action Comics 47-52, World's Finest 6-7, and Superman 16-17, 1942/Collected 2011): written by Jerry Siegel; illustrated by Joe Shuster, John Sikela, Fred Ray, Leo Nowak, and Ed Dobrotka:
The chronological reprinting of Superman stories from the beginning, regardless of what title the stories appeared in, continues here with an offering from several months of 1942. America has just gone to war, and while the covers reflect this -- Superman doles out punishment to Hitler on one cover, for instance -- the stories have not yet caught up to reality.
We do get some great battles with super-villains, however, and a not-yet-omnipotent Superman. The Man of Steel's powers are still developing four years after his first appearance. He still seems to be vulnerable to poison gas, for instance, and he still needs to push off from something to fly.
The gems of the volume are two linked stories pitting Superman against Lex Luthor, previously a red-headed evil scientist who has now mysteriously gone bald like another early Superman foe, the Ultra-Humanite. "Powerstone" and "When Titans Clash" see Luthor gain powers greater than Superman's from the mysterious, titular Powerstone. For once, Superman's wits and knowledge of Luthor's psychology must save the world, not his strength.
One bizarre story all but recreates the story of The Natural, as Lois Lane and Clark Kent discover a baseball prodigy while on a train ride to MLB spring training. Did Bernard Malamud read Superman comics? Annoying unpowered foes The Prankster and The Puzzler also make their first appearances. They really seem like rejects from Batman's Rogues' Gallery.
The volume also offers a battle against a mind-controlling tyrant self-dubbed The Emperor of America and a battle against the first iteration of long-time Superman foe Metal[l]o, here a guy who's taken "super-serum" and dressed in a suit of impregnable metal, but later to become the Man with the Kryptonite Heart.
Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel keeps the ideas cracking. This Superman is a bit more Establishment than Siegel's original version, though still much less authoritative and pompous than he would become in the 1950's. And he still seems to operate in a world where he's at least partially an Urban Legend -- many criminals don't know who he is, thus leading to much fruitless gun-play and fisticuffs.
Superman's artistic father Joe Shuster only illustrates one story here, "Man or Superman?," and parts of it seem to be traced from his previous work. Even this early in the game, Shuster was being undone by his declining eyesight. John Sikela and Leo Nowak do solid work as Shuster's ghosts. Sikela is perhaps the closest to Shuster's style of all the ghosts, though he's more polished and less pleasingly raw than Shuster. Nowak gets more of Shuster's cartooniness in his art, but even less of that raw power and dynamism. In all, recommended.
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| Art by Fred Ray |
The Superman Chronicles Volume 9: written by Jerry Siegel; illustrated by Joe Shuster, John Sikela, Ed Dobrotka, Leo Nowak, and Fred Ray (1942; collected 2011): Co-creator Joe Shuster's rapidly failing eyesight and other factors saw him pushed to the margins of the Superman comic books as early as 1942, just four years after the Man of Steel forever altered American comic books. Thankfully, Shuster's rough-hewn style was still considered the gold standard for depicting Superman, so these adventures still look a lot like Shuster's work, though only one story actually was drawn by him.
Superman's other co-creator, Jerry Siegel, was still writing the Man of Steel: his entry into World War Two (and into ever-expanding degrees of getting screwed over by what would eventually be re-named as DC Comics) was still in the (near) future. There are still some traces of that muscular, socialist, agit-prop Superman in evidence here, though very muted. For the most part, Superman fights either non-powered gangster-types (The Prankster, The Puzzler, Talon) or people who've somehow developed powers as great or greater than his (Luthor, Mister Sinister, Metalo).
The Luthor story is a wild one, mysteriously absent from most 'Best of' Superman collections. In it, having already harnessed electricity to make himself nearly as strong as Superman (guess what happens when the authorities give Luthor the electric chair!), Luthor gets control of a magical artifact that makes him nigh-omnipotent...and then he makes Superman into a normal human being!
I really like John Sikela's art on many of the stories. He's very Shusteresque, though much more polished than Shuster (and thus somehow also much less bursting with nearly uncontrolled energy). Fred Ray also does lovely, polished work on the various covers (Ray would only draw one interior Superman story in his career, but he drew dozens of covers for the Man of Steel, several of them often-imitated and iconic).
It's actually fascinating to see how much reading the average comic-book consumer was expected to do in 1942. This volume takes about three to five times longer to read than a similar-sized volume of most superhero comics would take today. No wonder people were more literate. They actually had to READ comic books. Highly recommended.
The Nature of Balance by Tim Lebbon (2000): An early novel from the prolific Tim Lebbon pits a small group of people against nature gone mad. Or at least intensely angry at human beings. 
