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Sunday, February 06, 2011 ( 2/06/2011 09:19:00 AM ) Bill S.  “THAT’S THE BRAVERY I WAS TALKING ABOUT!” The first of a proposed series of collections culling the highlights from the long-running story magazine, Adventure, Black Dog Books’ The Best of Adventure, Volume One, 1910-1912 is a meaty set of action yarns from the early twentieth century. For lovers of genre writing and the output of the early American fiction pulps, the first volume contains plenty of familiar names -- Talbot Mundy, Rafael Sabatini, Damon Runyon, R. Austin Freeman -- and a healthy swath of lesser known adventure fictioners.Editor and pulp historian Doug Ellis selected twenty-four tales from the magazine’s first two years, the only condition being that each author could only be represented once in the volume -- keeping prolific pros like Talbot Mundy from taking over the book. Mundy’s selection, “The Soul of A Regiment,” opens the story collection on an expectedly solid note. A Kipling-esque tale of bravery in a British regiment, the tale also features a hint of the racial condescension so familiar to the period. (The career soldier responsible for whipping an Egyptian regiment into shape first gets the “coal-black Negroes” into paying attention to him by showing his proficiency with the ol’ buck-and-wing.) This doesn’t detract from the story as much as it pretty quickly highlights for the reader that these stories' cultural attitudes are very much of their era. As Ellis himself notes in an introduction describing the years immediately preceding the Great War, “Colonialism was an accepted reality and the ‘white man’s burden’ an accepted myth, particularly for the U.S., Britain and several European countries.” While Ellis admits that the mag did occasionally publish tales with even more egregious racial stereotypes, “none were very good pieces of fiction.” It should be noted, though, that the majority of the works collected in this best-of manage to avoid racist stereotyping (though we do get an occasional Arab despot as in Bertram Atkey’s “The Hate of Ismail Bey”), focusing instead on taut tales of derring-do, western gunfights, historical swashbuckling and fierce battles against a harsh and cruel nature. A few offerings seem to really step outside the Adventure parameters: Damon Runyon’s typically wry “Pied Piper, Junior,” for instance, tells the tale of a carnie grifter who “borrows” a retired snake charmer’s python to rid a Midwestern town of rats; the comic “adventure” is frequently told from the snake Elmer’s PoV. R. Austin Freeman’s “31 New Inn” is even a squarer peg: an old-fashioned detective novella featuring Freeman’s “medical jurispractitioner,” Dr. Thorndyke. One of the earliest tales featuring this forensic ratiocinator, “Inn” moves a bit creakily in comparison to the more rousing action pieces, though detective fiction historians most likely will appreciate its inclusion. To these eyes, one of the collection’s highlights proves to be a South Seas novella, H.D. Couzens’ “Brethren of the Beach,” which follows a motley crew of hard-bitten types who discover a treasure’s worth of pearls while harvesting guano on an isolated island. The resultant rounds of one-upmanship and betrayal had me visualizing the cast of Treasure of Sierra Madre in the tropics. Another yarn, William Hope Hodgson’s “The Albatross,” which depicts a couple’s attempts to survive their time on a rat-infested derelict ship, would not have read out of place in a later horror fiction pulp like Weird Tales. Effectively creepy. The bulk of the set, though, prove quick and satisfying little actioners offering readers into worlds we now primarily see on cable doc series like Deadliest Catch or Axe Men -- rough environments where tough-as-nails men put themselves as risk on a daily basis -- or classic Hollywood adventure movies. Of all the genre types featured in the book, the one that seems to most consistently bring out a lighter narrative touch prove to be the westerns (e.g., John Lewis’ “The Prodigious Postscript,” which details the adventures of a seeming tenderfoot in an Arizona desert town.) Per the manner of the day, the voice of many of the offerings in Best of Adventure: Volume One is more formal than we are accustomed to reading in more modern action pulps, but that’s also a part of their considerable charm. These are tales where publishers still saw fit to blank out every obscenity, and the nastiest epithet that was openly used was “brute” or “swine.” Which does not, in any way, mute the sense of peril in these Gripping Yarns. (First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: pulp fiction # |Friday, February 04, 2011 ( 2/04/2011 06:48:00 AM ) Bill S.  ”I ENJOY THE DRAMA OF LOVE AND HATE FROM A SAFE VANTAGE POINT.” Once in every chapter of Ririko Tsujita’s comic manga The Secret Notes of Lady Kanoko (Tokyopop) our title heroine makes the following declaration about herself: “I am the only completely objective observer in this story.” That arrogant statement is the series’ central joke, of course. The self-styled middle school social anthropologist isn’t objective at all, but a judgmental outsider viewing the junior high world with a decidedly cynical eye. “In order to be a true observer, you can’t let yourself like or dislike any one at all,” she states, though her propensity toward putting a negative spin on everything her classmates do keeps her from recognizing genuine niceness, say, when it presents itself.To be sure, Lady K. is right more often than not: writer/artist Tsujita has a sharp eye for the status wars of school life. Each chapter, Kanoko improbably transfers to a new school and immediately starts field observing her fellow classmates. In one chapter opening, for instance, she notes how all the other girl students in the cafeteria are working to sabotage their friends’ diets. Nothing is made of this detail beyond its use to reinforce Kanoko’s belief that “girl culture is terrifying,” but there are plenty of these types of trenchant observations sprinkled through the series. Our heroine hits four schools in the first volume -- with a respite return to the first as the book’s final chapter -- but at least one other character reappears throughout the book: dreamy third year Haru Tsubaki, who works behind the scenes in one chapter to throw the spotlight on a sleazily manipulative teacher. Though Kanoko asserts repeatedly that she has no interest in the dating game, we (and Tsubaki) can glimpse the start of a bigger relationship. For now, at least, the focus remains on charting the paths of her peers: the young girl who foolishly falls for the smooth-talking teacher, the nerdy Jane who attempts to do a glamour makeover of herself as part of her “Princess Mermaid Plan,” the purported would-be artist with an incorrectly elevated view of her own talents -- all part of the heightened emotional dramedy that unfolds in Kanoko’s world. Artist Tsujita treats her material with a predominately light hand, even when the emotions are riding high -- reflecting, to a certain degree, her observer protagonist’s intentional self-distancing from the events being portrayed. She crams a lot of small visual and written jokes into her occasionally over-busy school panels, some of which most likely come off better in her native culture than they do here, though a few are universally silly enough to work for the American audience. (In one panel, for instance, the artist inserts a box alerting us that Kanoko’s “observer sense is tingling.”) It helps that her heroine is wholeheartedly herself: a smart sardonic outsider with fleeting moments of empathy that she does her best to subdue. She certainly is one of the more entertaining shojo heroines to come around in a while. (First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: sixty-minute manga # |( 2/04/2011 06:46:00 AM ) Bill S. BACK This writer was pretty damn well knocked out by sickness last weekend that kept me from mustering together the energy to sit at the computer long enough to type in a handwritten review for days. I'm back now, though. # | |
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