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Wednesday, March 27, 2013 ( 3/27/2013 06:35:00 AM ) Bill S.   “THERE WAS NO RATIONAL EXPLANATION FOR WHAT HE THOUGHT HE SAW.” Mention the term “steampunk,” and the first thing that’ll come to my mind are mildly irritating cosplayers in Edwardian garb – unfortunate because as a literary sub-genre, “steampunk” has produced some damn fine entertainments. Among the acknowledged originators of the form, James P. Blaylock is one of the best-known, and his latest offering, The Aylesford Skull (Titan Books) shows him at the top of his game. Subtitled “A Tale of Langdon St. Ives,” the rousing yarn reads like something that could have been serialized in The Strand at the end of the 19th century. Not for nothing does one of its supporting characters turn out to be a young Conan Doyle.The book concerns a battle of wits between scientist/explorer Langdon St. Ives and his longtime nemesis, the loathsome hunchback Dr. Ignacio Nardondo. Narbondo has retrieved the skull of his young brother Edward, murdered by his own hands as a child, to use as an otherworldly projector. When he kidnaps St. Ives’ four-year-old son Eddie from the professor’s idyllic home in the English countryside, a chase ensues that leads to the darkest streets of London and an assassination plot designed to frame the British prime minister Gladstone. Hovering around the proceedings: the ghost of the young boy Narbondo killed, who not incidentally shares the same name as St. Ives’ son. Much of the book is devoted the search and rescue of Eddie St. Ives, the action divided between the professor and his chums (among which includes the aforementioned creator of Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger); Mother Laswell, a matronly figure who runs a nearby commune named Hereafter Farm, who shares a biological connection to both ghost and villain; and Finn Conrad, a scrappy former circus boy familiar with the Dickensian streets of London. Blaylock keeps the action – a series of near fatal encounters and escapes – diverse enough to keep you reading even if the Lovecraftian specifics surrounding the titular skull never fully gel. His period details and non-ironic use of 19th century imagineering (Is there an airship in the story? Of course there is!) prove engaging, while his straight-faced heroes and more-than-dastardly villains are colorful and distinct. Though at core a peril-packed actioner, Aylesford Skull also displays a concern with the nature of family and friendship which also provides its heart. And when young Eddie also effects his own (short-term) escape, you can’t help cheering for the little scaper.
(First published on Blogcritics.) Tuesday, March 26, 2013 ( 3/26/2013 06:33:00 AM ) Bill S. SO WHERE'VE I BEEN? After several weeks being unable to get into the Blogger template following some sort of Google apps upgrade at my ISP, I finally was able to wend my way back. Wotta pain . . . # | ( 3/26/2013 06:27:00 AM ) Bill S.   OF MAUS AND SUPERMEN Originally published in 2003 and revised to accommodate the decade since, Stephen Weiner’s Faster Than a Speeding Bullet (IDW) is a slim 74-page consideration of “The Rise of the Graphic Novel.” Written as an intro to “how the comics industry grew up, took itself seriously and made enough noise so that mainstream readers were finally forced to pay it serious attention,” Weiner’s book is bound to stimulate comebacks by the cognoscenti ever eager to pick nits or bemoan any “major” omissions.For this reader, for instance, I couldn’t help noting the absence of the noir-y Truman Era “picture novel,” It Rhymes with Lust or the later publication of underground giant R. Crumb’s Yum Yum Book in 1975 (three years before Will Eisner’s A Contract with God, typically acknowledged to be the first modern graphic novel.) Too, while Weiner discusses the role of comic strip collections in leading the way in the sixties for later trade collections of comic book material, he fails to single out Walt Kelly’s “Pogo” paperbacks – which frequently featured extended storylines every bit as “novelistic” as later superhero collections (cf. Prehysterical Pogo (In Pandemonia), which took much of the strip’s cast to a dinosaur inhabited lost world in Australia) – a glaring omission to this fan’s eyes. Still, Faster than a Speeding Bullet does capture the recognized landmarks of the modern graphic novel: Contract (less a novel, as Weiner notes, than a thematically connected quartet of short stories a la Winesberg, Ohio), Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor and much that followed. Though its title gives the impression that the book’s focus will be on superhero GN fare like Knight or Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Weiner provides a broader view of comics’ maturation as a storytelling form. If at times he comes across a bit timorous when dealing with some of the more challenging sources of graphic novels (discussing Maus, for example, he bypasses the work’s nascent version in an underground comix book), he doesn’t downplay their significance. As with too many American comics fans, Weiner is overly brief in regards to European albums and manga (perhaps a better subtitle for this book would be “Rise of the North American Graphic Novel”), but considering the book’s length this isn’t surprising. He does manage to pull in some of the extraordinary recent GNs by women artists (Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home) in this new edition. More than just speeding bullets, in other words.
(First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: comics history # | |
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