Magicpuncher: His punches have the power of magic!

Mmmm... Cloak of Levitation

Doctor Strange: The Last Days of Magic (2016): written by Jason Aaron, James Robinson, and Gerry Duggan; illustrated by Chris Bachalo, Mike Perkins, Leonard Romero, Danilo Beyruth, Kevin Nowlan, and many others: The five-issue build-up to The Last Days of Magic was pretty good. The Last Days of Magic itself, not so much. Chris Bachalo's artwork throughout the story is nice, magicky stuff, conjuring up images of Bachalo's work on Neil Gaiman's Death miniseries in the Sandman universe. 

And I understand what Marvel and Jason Aaron are attempting in the writing of Doctor Strange. Strange has often been a great series going back to his creation by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee in the early 1960's and continuing through such great writer/artist teams as Steve Engelhart/ Frank Brunner to Roger Stern/Marshall Rogers in the early 1980's and on to Brian K. Vaughn and Marcos Martin's terrific The Oath miniseries from a few years back.

But Doctor Strange has never been a popular character, which is why he keeps getting cancelled. Aaron writes Doctor Strange as much more fallible and self-doubting than previous efforts, making him almost into a Spider-man, with magic. It doesn't work for me because it doesn't link up with previous versions of Strange. Maybe it will be popular. But between that and the gigantic ret-cons Aaron works into the narrative, I found myself reading a Doctor Strange story that didn't seem to have Doctor Strange in it. 

And at the point that Doctor Strange first thinks and then exclaims at the villain, "I'm literally punching you with magic!"... well, that was really enough to cure me of any desire to see what Aaron and Bachalo have up their sleeves for future issues of Strange. But if you always hated Doctor Strange as written by virtually everyone who has ever written Doctor Strange, maybe you'll like this revised version. For me, not recommended.

John Constantine Hellblazer: Damnation's Flame (1993-94/reprinted 1999): written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by Steve Dillon, Peter Snejberg, Will Simpson, Glenn Fabry, and John Totleben: DC's scabrous, Liverpudlian Sorcerer Supreme John Constantine takes a nightmarish voyage through the shadow realms of the American Hell in this volume, which would now be collected in the Rake at the Gates of Hell collection (if you're looking to buy this story in a new printing). 

Garth Ennis is suitably pissy and cynical, especially once the horrifying ghosts of Abe Lincoln and JFK come into play. Ennis' long-time artistic collaborator Steve Dillon is in fine form, rendering all the horrors in his nuanced, straightforward, mostly realistic drawing style -- the clean-ness of Dillon's rendering was always a plus on Hellblazer and with Ennis also on Preacher. The horrors of Ennis' writing always needed to be undersold visually. Three nice standalone Constantine tales supplement the Damnation's Flame arc. In all, if one finds a used or remaindered copy anywhere, Damnation's Flame could almost work as an introduction to the Constantine experience. Highly recommended.

John Constantine Hellblazer: The Red Right Hand (2006-2007; collected 2007): written by Denise Mina; illustrated by Leonard Manco and Cristiano Cuchina: Novelist Denise Mina wrote 13 issues of John Constantine Hellblazer in 2006-2007. She wasn't generally well-received by Constantine fans, though I like her work. It was, however, somewhat misleading to collect her issues in two volumes (the previous volume was Empathy is the Enemy): the two volumes actually form one 12-issue, novelistic story, with one standalone fill-in issue in the middle of things. 

I like the 12-issue arc overall, but it's a John Constantine story that seems awfully padded. The concluding issues in this volume go in circles for about 60 pages before finally stumbling to an end. That the fate of the world hinges in a hilarious way on the outcome of a World Cup match involving England is probably the best moment in Mina's run. Lightly recommended.

Enigma (1993): written by Peter Milligan; illustrated by Duncan Fegredo: This wild, woolly, postmodern superhero tale from the first year of the DC Vertigo comics line's existence is a gem, albeit a somewhat padded one -- it's a tight six-issue story running at a somewhat attenuated eight issues. Duncan Fegredo's art is scratchy and scary and often intentionally confusing -- when the superhero fights comes, they're confusing and bloody, which is sort of the point. 

Peter Milligan writes an involving tale of childhood superhero fantasies and grown-up repression. And the final revelation of the narrator's identity is all sorts of funny. Enigma also seems prescient in that it deals frankly and non-stereotypically with homosexuality. In 1993! Kudos to line editor Karen Berger and DC for releasing such a book at the time. Recommended.

Cigarette Burned

Tales from the Crypt Archives Volume 2: written by Al Feldstein; illustrated by Wally Wood, Jack Davis, Jack Kamen, Graham Ingels, Joe Orlando, and others (1951-52; reprinted 2010): Another collection of horror stories ranging from good to great, from the days before the Comics Code Authority lobotomized American comic books.

It amazes me how fresh and enjoyable most of the stories in this volume remain. EC had the finest comic-book artists in America for much of its too-short existence. The stories, written for the most part by editor Al Feldstein, occasionally get a bit rote (the vengeance of the dead was always an EC horror staple, along with some truly atrocious puns), but many are clever short stories in their own right.

But the art, of course, is the thing. Wally Wood is a bit out of his depth here -- he was always best on science fiction and non-supernatural thrillers, and the two covers he assays are weirdly non-horrific. But when you've got 'Ghastly' Graham Ingels, Jack Davis, Jack Kamen, and Joe Orlando on the beat, everything's going to be fine. Davis, also a long-time Mad artist, is droll and blackly comic. Orlando and Kamen are fine, moody artists.

And Ingels remains one of the greatest horror artists to ever draw comic books. Many of his monsters are disturbingly malformed. He's the granddaddy of so many modern horror artists, from Bernie Wrightson through Steve Bissette and Rick Veitch. His grotesques anticipate both the distorted spaghetti monsters of films such as John Carpenter's The Thing and the human monsters of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes. Highly recommended.

John Constantine Hellblazer: Death & Cigarettes: written by Peter Milligan; illustrated by Simon Bisley, Guiseppe Camuncoli, and Stefano Landini (2012-2013; Collected 2013): 300 issues of Vertigo's John Constantine Hellblazer come to an end in this volume, so that Constantine can continue his adventures, in somewhat altered and youthfulized form, over in a title set in DC's mainstream superhero universe.

Created by Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, John Totleben, and Rick Veitch in Swamp Thing in the early 1980's as a sort of punk-attitude occult investigator from rust-belt Northern England, Constantine has had a long, varied, and distinguished career both in other people's comics and in his 25 years of his own title. He's even survived a completely screwy Keanu Reeves movie. And he's getting his own TV series this fall.

For me, the heights of John Constantine Hellblazer were reached early, with Jamie Delano writing the first 40 issues or so. Ably complemented by artists that included John Ridgway (understated and sinister), Sean Phillips and, in Delano's then-finale on the series, cover-artist Dave McKean doing an entire issue, Delano created a dense, kitchen-sink milieu of horror for Constantine.

Most of the humour in the title came from Constantine's sarcastic reaction to the horrors he faced. We were always meant to view Constantine through the lens of his own self-evaluation as a cursed punk, but we were also forced to conclude that he was indeed a very, very dark knight standing between humanity and the inimical forces of heaven and hell alike.

So we fast-forward here, to the end. I was gratified to discover that the Internet had as many problems figuring out just what the Hell the last three pages of the last issue mean. The whole thing ends on a note of ambiguity that may be entirely intended or may be sloppy story-telling. I have no idea.

Writer Peter Milligan gives us a 60-ish Constantine gifted with a super-hot 40-years-younger wife, a suddenly retconned-into-existence nephew who looks exactly like him, and a not-particularly imposing group of supernatural menaces to usher him out of his title. The art's generally so dark as to verge on inexplicable. Also, as some Internet wag noted, the main artists here seem to have forgotten that Constantine was visually modelled on Sting circa 1983, and not on Gary Busey circa 2013. The years have not been kind.

Stuff happens. There are a lot of sex scenes. Constantine's niece, once a capable presence when written by others, shows up as a traumatized shell of her former appearances. What's technically a demonic rape is played strictly for laughs. Did Constantine and his universe deserve better than this? Yeah. But we'll always have Newcastle. Spend your money on the John Constantine Hellblazer collections written by Delano, Garth Ennis, Andy Diggle, or Mike Carey instead. Not recommended.

Those Crazy Nazis

Comics:


Enemy Ace: War in Heaven, written by Garth Ennis and Robert Kanigher, illustrated by Chris Weston, Russ Heath and Joe Kubert: Hans Von Hammer, the WWI German "Enemy Ace" of 1960's DC war comics, gets a WWII send-off here, first on the Russian front and then in the Western European theatre as the Allies advance after D-Day. Ennis is fairly restrained here -- there is graphic violence, but for the most part this reads like an updated version of the Kanigher/Kubert stories from the 1960's (one of which is reprinted here). Like some members of the real Prussian military aristocracy, Von Hammer despises Hitler and the Nazi Party, but nonetheless feels obligated to fight for his country again after two decades of seclusion in his ancestral castle. There's plenty of airplane talk, not to mention a cameo from Sergeant Rock. Recommended.


Shade the Changing Man Volume 3: Scream Time, written by Peter Milligan, illustrated by Chris Bachalo, Bryan Talbot, Mark Pennington and Rick Bryant (1990-91; collected 2010): This third collected volume of early Vertigo hero Shade, revamped from his 1970's Steve Ditko creation with way more sex and violence, finally explains where the free-floating madness-generating American Scream actually came from, while also more fully explaining Shade's origins, Kathy's personal problems, and just what exactly Shade's solid-illusion-generating M-Vest is made of. Hint: it's not polyester. Heady, enjoyable stuff if you've read the first two volumes, and Jamie Hewlett's covers are as trippy as previous cover artist Brendan MacCarthy's. Recommended.


The Life Eaters, written by David Brin, illustrated by Scott Hampton (2003): Brin's aptly titled 1980's novella "Thor Versus Captain America" is the basis for this graphic novel; neither the novella nor this book are set in the Marvel Universe. Adapted for the first part of the graphic novel, the novella posits a world where the Nazis are on the brink of conquering the entire world in the early 1960's. The Holocaust was necromancy on an industrial scale, and it succeeded -- the Nazis summoned the Norse Gods on the eve of D-Day. The Normandy Invasion failed, the Allies were defeated again and again, and now the invasion of North America is imminent -- all because the Nazis now have Odin, Thor, the other Norse gods and various other Norse mythological creatures to call upon. Only Loki of all the gods stands with the Allies, and while his purposes are mysterious and probably self-serving, he did manage to evacuate the concentration camps and ghettos of Europe before the Final Solution had been entirely carried out.

Are the Norse Gods really Norse Gods? That's one of the first questions the novel tackles, before moving on to larger philosophical issues set against an escalating series of cataclysms. Humanity's hope ultimately lies in science and technology, something the mystical and increasingly addled servants of the gods just aren't good at, along with an alliance of the various world religions that refuse to practice the blood sacrifice which summons the gods and then sustains them: on this world, the Holocaust never ends because the gods live on human death in mass quantities. Other cultures summon their own pantheons in response to the Nazi threat, and things get worse and worse once we shift to the main action of the novel, in the 1980's.

This later segment could almost be called "Hulk and Iron Man Versus All the Gods in the World", as human ingenuity and self-sacrifice and, indeed, humility finally start to turn the tide of war even as Loki's true plan -- even more horrifying than those of his man-eating brethren -- is finally revealed. There's certainly action and adventure here, all in service to quite a serious-minded premise -- can humanity outgrow its tribal-minded, bloodthirsty nature before it's too late? Highly recommended.


Books:


A Treasury of Modern Fantasy, edited by Terry Carr (1980): It's actually taken me thirty years to finish off this survey anthology that spans fantasy from the advent of fantasy-specific pulp magazine Weird Tales in the 1920's to 1979. Most of the major writers are here, though Carr's selection criteria can be pretty wonky at times (I'm not sure I'd even put "The Rats in the Walls" on a top-20 list of all the stories H.P. Lovecraft wrote, but here it is in all its clunky glory). This volume never caught on as an academic tome, even though its selection, odd as it is sometimes, is nonetheless more wide-ranging and useful than such academy-oriented anthologies as Fantastic Worlds.

The sheer scope of the work that Carr wanted to survey must have driven him bonkers at times -- it's not all that easy to cover 60 years of high fantasy, dark fantasy, light fantasy, sword and sorcery, horror and the cryptozoological in one volume, and I'm not sure why that last (represented by the solid but unspectacular "Longtooth" by Edgar Pangporn) is even included, as it's more properly science fiction, a genre not folded into this anthology. Recommended.


The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty (1971): William Friedkin's blockbuster film adaptation of Blatty's best-selling novel was remarkably faithful to the book, partially because Blatty -- a screenwriter before becoming a novelist -- wrote the screenplay. Some things were, of course, left out, though a few such scenes made their way into the 1990's Director's Cut, while others were recycled by Blatty in the sequel he both wrote and directed, 1990's underrated Exorcist III: Legion.

Blatty's novel is long on dialogue at points, befitting a novel by a screenwriter, though there are also lengthy internal monologues which were essentially unfilmable. Coming to the novel after having seen the movie, one finds out more about the significance of the Iraq-set prologue of the movie, and more about the ins and outs of exorcism itself (though the latter needs to be taken with a grain of salt, actual Roman Catholic exorcisms being few and far between in the West).

Tortured, doubting priest Damien Karras comes even more to the fore in the novel, while details of the past of both possessed Regan and her actress mother explain at least some of the murkier details of the possession and its possible origins -- though ultimately the possession is less about getting Regan and more about forcing a second exorcism battle with ageing, ailing Father Merrin, played by Max Von Sydow in the movie. Some of the philosophical and theological speculation is awfully wonky at times, and the scientific aspects of the novel when the characters speculate on how the brain works are even wonkier. Still, a gripping read after all these years, though it's worth noting that the "true case" the novel is "inspired by" bears almost no resemblance to the novel. Caveat lector! Recommended.

Perfidious Albion

Comics:


Albion by Alan Moore, Leah Moore, John Reppion, Shane Oakley and George Freeman: Alan Moore plotted this revisionist 2006 6-issue miniseries about British comic-book characters of the 1960's and 1970's, with Leah Moore and John Reppion handling the writing duties. I came to this with pretty much no knowledge of indigenous British comics of the 1960's and 1970's, but the book does a pretty good job of presenting a story that's interesting on its own for someone who doesn't have the faintest idea who Kelly's Eye is (to name one character).

Alan Moore is here more in the mode of his nostalgic meta-short tale "Pictopia" than of revisionist superhero epics like Miracleman or Watchmen. A debased modern world has sought out all the old heroes and villains of British comics and either imprisoned or killed them. A couple of spunky 20-somethings with ties to some of the characters team up to get the remaining characters out of prison. The forces of oppression and repression try to stop them. Excitement and hilarity ensue.

The strangeness of these abandoned British characters obviously informs Alan Moore's interest in them -- there are no real superheroes here, but there are heroes with animated, robotic puppets; mechanical hands that make the bearer invisible; crime-fighting genies; rubbery escape artists; patriotic robots...talk about the carnivalesque! I quite enjoyed this volume, and 40 pages of "classic" reprints of the source material helped contextualize the whole thing (as did several pages of history). Recommended.


Shade the Changing Man Volume 2: Edge of Vision by Peter Milligan, Chris Bachalo, Mark Pennington, Bill Jaaska and Brendan McCarthy: Shade was originally a trippy short-lived 1970's DC comic created, written and drawn by the legendary Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-man and Dr. Strange over at Marvel. In the late 1980's and early 1990's, DC started having writers and artists reimagine various fringe, failed and forgotten titles as revisionist, adult-oriented titles. Eventually, these adult titles would become the still-existing Vertigo line in 1993. 1990 saw DC hand the task of reimagining Ditko's Shade to British writer Peter Milligan and up-and-coming artist Chris Bachalo, with British artist Brendan McCarthy providiing the wild cover art.

The result was a qualified success. Shade ran for 70 issues, nearly as many as Neil Gaiman's uber-successful Sandman series, and more than Garth Ennis's also-successful Preacher, two titles that helped define the Vertigo line. But for reasons known only to DC, most of Shade remained out-of-print until the last year, when the first two reprint volumes were finally issued. Given Milligan's great early-oughts sales success on titles like X-Force, I have no idea why DC waited so long.

Milligan keeps the bare bones of Ditko's Shade -- he's a visitor from another dimension whose 'Metavest' allows him to alter the appearance of reality around himself. Then he adds stuff both sinister (Shade is now a literal shade, his original body dead and his mind inhabiting the body of a serial killer) and kooky (Shade's reality-altering powers appear to have no limit, but Shade himself is a somewhat befuddled, virginal presence).

A reality-altering madness plague Shade dubs The American Scream threatens to suck all of reality into an unhinged nightmare world unless Shade uses his reality-altering powers to combat the Scream's reality-altering powers. So the storyline follows Shade and friends as they travel the Madness Stream across America, trying to stop the dreams and nightmares of average Americans from permanently destoying the normative. These nightmares include the reconfiguration of Dallas into a giant JFK assassination reenactment; a New York overwhelmed by garbage (!); a community in which anyone slightly abnormal is hunted down and killed; an LSD-influenced hippie paradise gone wrong; and so on, and so forth. Things are never dull. Recommended.