These Zombies Are Making Me Thirsty

Books:
World War Z by Max Brooks (2007): Oh, zombie, where is thy sting? Brooks' novel was a sensation a few years back, in part because it unfolds the story of the great Zombie war within a fictionalized oral history modelled on Studs Terkel's structured oral histories of World War II, the Great Depression and other major American events. It's a clever conceit, though moving from narrator to narrator (and country to country) works against the development of suspense at points, much less horror.

More than 40 years after George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead started our never-ending fascination with zombies, the rightness of some of Romero's choices related to the wrongness of some of the choices of other zombie chroniclers only stands out more. Brooks goes with what's now become the almost cliched viral/rabies model of zombieism -- zombieism is spread by bite or by zombie body matter getting into an exposed cut or otherwise somehow getting into one's bloodstream. This probably seems like a good idea, but the number of pandemics in human history spread through these means is, roughly, zero. It's just not that effective a means of viral or bacterial propagation, which is why we don't all have rabies right now.

Romero, of course, never explained what was actually causing zombies in his first two zombie movies. More importantly, there was no 'Patient Zero' style beginning point -- one day, everyone who ever died and had enough flesh left on his or her bones to allow for mobility rose from the grave. And everyone who died after that, regardless of cause of death, would also rise from the dead. Now that's a disease vector that could overwhelm civilization!

Brooks' viral model, on the other hand, doesn't bear too much hard thinking because one realizes that between the limits of propagation and the modest limits of his zombies' intelligence (they are, if anything, much stupider than Romero's slow-moving hordes), most of the book's apocalyptic scenarios would be impossible. How do these slow-moving hordes which have a tendency to fall off, into or over any obstacle in their way manage to form up into gigantic masses of tens of millions of zombies in the American Midwest and other locations? I have no idea. It seems to me that these zombies would probably end up at the bottom of every cliff, hill, overpass and canyon in the world. So it goes. Several weeks into the zombie war, one would imagine the Grand Canyon would be full of zombies.

There are a lot of pleasures in this book, and the verisimilitude Brooks achieves with his technical research into weapons and various survival issues is impressive, but the whole thing falls apart if one thinks too hard about those million-zombie armies. So don't. Recommended.



The New Lovecraft Circle, edited by Robert M. Price (1996): Gleaned from thirty years of the second wave of Lovecraft-inspired horror writing, Price's anthology is sort of Fundamentalist Lovecraft. Many of the stories follow the same first-person narrative model of many of Lovecraft's major Cthulhu stories, with one man recounting the zany events and evil tomes of forbidden knowledge that led him to some terrible revelation or other. I tend to prefer somewhat looser interpretations of the Cthulhu Mythos, but there are some genuine thrills and chills here, along with some early Ramsey Campbell Lovecraft pastiches that I'd otherwise have to pay a couple of hundred bucks to read in his out-of-print first collection.

One of the problems a lot of the writers have is their overwhelming desire to roll out one of the Big Guns of Lovecraft's evil pantheon of alien gods, especially sea-dwelling Cthulhu, who's supposed to be in the South Pacific but who pays visits to New England and California prior to being vanquished by the usual dodgy means. A lot of the stories fall more into the August Derleth Cthulhu mode, in which the Cthulhu Mythos becomes a source for modern high fantasy and not for horror. There's nothing technically wrong with this approach, but it does mean that wonder and terror are a bit thin on the ground at times. Recommended for completists.


Comics:


Daredevil: Born Again, written by Frank Miller, illustrated by David Mazzuchelli (1986; collected numerous times): Miller (300, Sin City) came to prominence as writer and artist on Daredevil in the early 1980's. After a few years away, he returned to team with Mazzuchelli on what remains one of the great 'reset button' narratives in superhero comics history. Basically, criminal mastermind Kingpin discovers Daredevil's secret identity and proceeds to destroy his life. And that's just the first issue.

There are small story-telling glitches here and there that the editor should have fixed at the time (why Miller makes super-soldier Nuke blind like Daredevil but without the radar senses makes sense metaphorically but not literally), but overall this is 'the' Daredevil story, or at least 'the' Frank Miller Daredevil story. The hero gets stripped down to his basics, losing a lot of accumulated psychological baggage along the way, and even gets his first girlfriend back (Karen Page), albeit in dire straits herself.

One can see Mazzuchelli's art develop from issue to issue, sloughing off standard super-hero tics and moving towards the more European style he'd use when he soon hereafter collaborated with Miller on Batman: Year One. It's really all about faces and mood with Mazzuchelli at this point in his career, suiting a book that has a lot of explosions but which relies on character development for most of its major kicks.

The Kingpin has never been more demonic, and Miller also manages the neat trick of making the Avengers god-like again when he briefly drops them into the narrative -- they don't really belong in Daredevil's urban vigilante world, and that's the point, though a world-weary Captain America does lend Daredevil a helping hand in the last two issues. This is grim and gritty stuff from a time before endless dark reimaginings of superheroes had made "grim and gritty" a pejorative. Highly recommended.



El Diablo, written by Brian Azzarello, illustrated by Daniejel Zezelj (2001): This four-issue miniseries sees Azzarello reimagine one of DC's obscure Western characters as a possibly supernatural avenger. We don't really know, in the end, because El Diablo (if it is him) is only onstage for about three panels and never speaks, though he does hiss. And kill a whole lot of people. Or does he? Yes he does.

The narrative provides us with two big shocks and a lot of little ones, playing out like an expanded version of an old EC or even Jonah Hex morality tale, complete with a blackly comic (and just) ending. Zezelj's artwork is suitably murky throughout, sometimes to the point of resembling woodcuts more than pencil-and-ink. Recommended.

And Rex Harrison as Abraham Lincoln

Comics:


Essential Daredevil Volume 1, written by Stan Lee, illustrated by Bill Everett, Joe Orlando, Wally Wood, Gene Colan, John Romita Sr. and others (1964-66): Of all the heroes created during the early years of Marvel Comics in the 1960's -- Iron Man, the Fantastic Four, Spider-man, Doctor Strange, Thor, the Hulk and many others -- Daredevil had the distinction of having the worst costume, and perhaps one of the worst costumes ever visited upon a hero carrying his own book. This was primarily because of the yellow/red colour scheme, though a later, very brief addition of a hood and a backpack just made things worse. Thankfully, veteran comic-book artist Wally Wood would redesign the costume about a year into Daredevil's existence, giving us the all-red, streamlined version that persists to this day with only minor modifications.

Bad costume design perhaps made sense within the book -- Daredevil is, after all, blind, relying on super-senses to "see" the world around him, senses so acute that at times his blindness seems irrelevant. Radiation both blinded Matt Murdock as a child and gave him his heightened senses; the tragic death of his boxer father at the hands of mobsters caused him to become Daredevil when he wasn't defence attorney Matt Murdock.

Daredevil burned through artists at an unprecedented rate early on -- even Wood would only stay on the book for a handful of issues -- before settling on Gene Colan for much of the late 1960's and early 1970's. The unsettled art situation actually makes this first volume sort of charming, as it goes hand-in-hand with what seems like an unsettled editorial stance on what sort of book Daredevil should be. Early Spider-man-type heroics give way to an increasingly loopy set of villains (The Matador, anyone? Stilt-Man? The Purple Man? How about The Organizer? Tri-Man?) and world-threatening scenarios that would seem to be more suited to The Avengers or The Fantastic Four, including the near-destruction of all life on Earth by a Doctor Doom knock-off and his really big Cobalt Bomb.

The overall effect of this volume reminds me most of the Flaming Carrot: this isn't a parody of super-heroes, but it is a super-hero book served up with a lot of dead-serious absurdity. The grim-and-gritty Frank Miller Daredevil, he of Elektra and the Kingpin, is still fifteen years away. Recommended.


Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters: Brave New World, written by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti, illustrated by Renato Arlem (2008): Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters are one of those great C-List superhero teams with a pedigree dating back to the 1940's, when most of them fought evil for Quality Comics long before they were acquired by DC Comics. They had their moments individually in the 1940's, as they were mostly handled by the Eisner studio, but since then they've mostly sucked, even as supporting characters. Indeed, their most memorable moment probably came in 2005-2006's Infinite Crisis crossover, when they were almost all killed by Bizarro Superman. When your roster has included the living embodiment of America, a guy who commands trained bees, and a man the size of an action figure, maybe you're always going to lack a certain amount of respect.

Writers Gray and Palmiotti revived the (mostly) new Freedom Fighters in a miniseries after Infinite Crisis, breaking the trend by having these heroes appear in something that didn't suck. That miniseries was probably the greatest Grant Morrison comic book ever not written by Grant Morrison, with the writers putting the heroes through various super-scientific threats, including giant aliens on the Moon and an evil robotic President.

Here, the team fights amongst itself and against outside threats, including corrupted member Red Bee, who's been turned into a dangerous human-insect hybrid by alien super-insects. Meanwhile, a city of doll-sized men in the basement of the Pentagon takes the Vice-President hostage, and a bunch of other crazy stuff happens. Highly recommended.


Tom Strong Volume 2, written by Alan Moore, illustrated by Chris Sprouse, Al Gordon, Paul Chadwick, Gary Gianni, Hilary Barta, Russ Heath and others (2000): Tom Strong, Alan Moore's homage to Doc Savage, pulp adventure and whatever else he feels like paying tribute to from issue to issue, is about as jolly a metafictional romp through comics and pulps as one could want. One adventure may play out like a Tintin pastiche; the next may be written and drawn like an old Mad magazine parody by Wally Wood; the third may be a two-parter harking back to the first Justice League/Justice Society crossovers of the 1960's.

Whatever the case, the series seemed to be the lighter, sunnier side of the metafictional polyglot that is Moore and Kevin O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentleman. I'm not sure how much fun this enterprise would be if you don't have much background in the comics and pulps Moore, Sprouse and company play around with in every issue, but I think it's pretty darned witty and fun. Especially the Captain Marvel Family homage, perfectly apt and ridiculously specific in its riffs on one particular Captain Marvel Family adventure from the Golden Age of Comics. Highly recommended.

Captain America and Daredevil

Captain America: The Swine by Jack Kirby, Mike Royer, Frank Giacoia and others (c. 1976): Jack Kirby's third, extraordinarily weird run on Captain America wraps up in this collection. Cap takes on an evil South American dictator (the Swine of the title), the Red Skull, freakish genetic engineer Arnim Zola (his face is on his chest, folks!), a vampiric space alien, and Magneto and a band of pretty much never-to-be-seen-again evil mutants. It's all good. Kirby's art was definitely starting to move into its later cubist stage here, which can be jarring at points, but the story-telling remains sharp and the odd and fascinating ideas continue to issue forth at about ten times the rate of most comic-book writer/artists. Zola's odd and frankly creepy design is almost worth the price of admission.


Daredevil Visionaries Frank Miller Volume 3 by Frank Miller, Klaus Janson and Terry Austin (c. 1982-83): 300 and Sin City creator Frank Miller finishes off his career-making first run on Daredevil here with a bang, as DD and the evil Ninja organization The Hand square off to determine whether or not super-assassin and former Daredevil girlfriend Elektra will be resurrected and, if so, whether she'll serve good and evil. Miller is credited as writer and 'storyteller' here, the latter indicating that he was doing very light breakdowns for the art that Klaus Janson would then draw and colour.

The collection gets off to a bit of a rocky start with the somewhat laughable "Angel Dust" storyline, but once Miller gets into the realms of more comic-booky crime, things settle down into solid standalones (the Stilt Man one-off being pretty funny) and the culmination of the Elektra/Hand/Bullseye storyline. Overall, some of the most accomplished and moodiest action-centric comic-book story-telling of the 1980's. As a bonus, two DD 'What if?' stories by Miller and an Elektra short from Marvel's B&W comics anthology Bizarre Adventures round out the proceedings. Miller's Kingpin is, as always, awesome, though little involved in the main stories of this volume except as an unlikely ally to Daredevil in his battle with The Hand. Miller also redesigns the Black Widow's costume here, though that too-close-to-Spider-man reboot wouldn't take.