Bombshells

My 2017 in Books

This year my reading fell into three broad categories: novels and short fiction, mostly in a popular vein; non-fiction; and graphic novels or collections of comics. As usual, this list doesn’t include single issues of comics, magazines, or other non-book reading (although I did read “Cat Person” like everyone else online; it was fine, but woefully short on lycanthropes). I didn’t read much in the way of new books, except for the books on Tupperware and the history of chicken as a dietary staple, both of which I borrowed from the library.

Austen

The best fiction I read this year was Pride and Prejudice: Jane Austen has been a blind spot for me for a long time, although I felt as though I knew her work by its film adaptations and by the impact her arch, slyly satiric tone has had in popular culture. The experience of reading her lived up to my expectations and confirmed a tendency to take a similar tack I have noticed in my own writing (not that I am executing anywhere near Austen’s level). I have more to read from her, but two novels in one month seemed like plenty.

Moondust

The best non-fiction I read this year was Moondust, an intriguing book by Andrew Smith detailing his attempts to track down and interview all of the remaining lunar astronauts. The questions these men had to ask themselves–“What do you do after you’ve walked on the moon?”–and the varied answers they came up with (including religion, art, teaching, business, and professional futurism) are vivid portraits of mid-life crisis and (for some of them) reinvention. Further, Smith’s quest has a personal dimension as he weaves his own memories of a space age childhood into his narration, essentially asking the same question for himself and America at large: what now? The notion that the moon race was (at least partly) a work of political theater, a brief flurry of activity that had few lasting effects (satellites and computers aside, there are no lunar colonies, no manned missions to Mars, etc.), is now commonplace, but as someone who grew up in the (relatively conservative) Space Shuttle era, it is still bracing to read these accounts of intense national purpose and the incredible drive it took to accomplish the moon launches. What sticks with me after this book, though, are the personalities (quite varied, even within the hyper-specific psychological and career profiling NASA used to choose its crews), the questions they asked themselves in the wake of their momentous voyages, and the different answers they came up with for themselves.

DCBombshells

In comics, Bombshells was a pleasant discovery: writer Marguerite Bennett and artist Marguerite Sauvage create a compelling alternate World War II, one in which the female heroes and villains of DC Comics (Wonder Woman, Batwoman, Harley Quinn, et al) are the only superhumans (so no Superman, Batman, etc.–male characters like Steve Trevor are involved, but as supporting cast). Visually drawing on pinup art, propaganda posters, and commercial art of the 1940s, Bombshells presents a colorful, almost-familiar world while getting to the essence of these characters and remixing DC lore in inventive ways. It also taps into a spirit of optimism and compassion that suits the characters and the setting. The fact that the series was created as a spinoff from a popular series of pinup-style statues of DC characters isn’t surprising–that’s the biz–but the fact that it is so well executed, as if it had been conceived as a story all along, is. (I’ve only read the first two trade collections; I decided to wait for the whole series to be collected so I can read it in one go, so no spoilers please!)

Here’s the complete list, with some additional commentary:

January
The Dark Half, Stephen King
Tekkon Kinkreet: Black & White All in One, Taiyo Matsumoto
Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History, Glen Berger (“Before something can be brilliant, it first has to be competent.”)

February
Roadshow!: The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s, Matthew Kennedy (This book led me to watch Star!, the biopic in which Julie Andrews played music hall performer Gertrude Lawrence, when it aired on TCM. Star! was one of the worst movies I watched this year.)
The Rocketeer: The Complete Adventures, Dave Stevens
Mind MGMT Volume One: The Manager, Matt Kindt
Batman: The Jiro Kuwata Batmanga Volume 1, Jiro Kuwata
The Rocketeer: Hollywood Horror, Roger Langridge and J Bone

March
Bombshells Volume 1: Enlisted, Marguerite Bennett and Marguerite Sauvage et al
Bombshells Volume 2: Allies, Marguerite Bennett and Marguerite Sauvage et al
Batman: The Jiro Kuwata Batmanga Volume 2, Jiro Kuwata
The Complete Golden Age Airboy & Valkyrie, Fred Kida et al
Gotham City Sirens, Book One, Paul Dini, Guillem March et al
Hit or Myth, Robert Asprin

April
Gotham City Sirens, Book Two, Tony Bedard, Peter Calloway et al
Myth-ing Persons, Robert Asprin
Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78 rpm Records, Amanda Petrusich
Rejected: Tales of the Failed, Dumped, and Canceled, ed. Jon Friedman

May
Nemo Trilogy (Heart of Ice, The Roses of Berlin, River of Ghosts), Alan Moore, Kevin O’Neill et al
Wylder’s Hand, J. Sheridan LeFanu
My Life as an Explorer, Sven Anders Hedin

June
Radio Free Albemuth, Philip K. Dick
Murder in Mesopotamia, Agatha Christie
Atomic Bomb Cinema, Jerome F. Shapiro
The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy 1931-1951, Chester Gould

Maybury.cover

July
The Brides of Bellenmore, Anne Maybury
Falcon’s Shadow, Anne Maybury
Superman: The Unauthorized Biography, Glen Weldon
Life of the Party: The Remarkable Story of How Brownie Wise Built, and Lost, a Tupperware Party Empire, Bob Kealing
Tastes Like Chicken: A History of America’s Favorite Bird, Emelyn Rude

August
Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon, Craig Nelson
Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth, Andrew Smith

Vault

In September I didn’t read any complete books at all, but as I mentioned then, I read some Advanced Dungeons & Dragons adventure modules cover to cover (more thoroughly than I read all but a few even when I was actively playing the game, I must confess). After a lucky find at my local comic store, I had a complete copy of one of the most famous series of published modules, the “GDQ” series (so called because it links three adventures against Giants, against the “dark elf” Drow, and against Lolth, the “Queen of the Demon-Web Pits”); I had wanted to read through these to see how well they really flowed as a single epic campaign, but I had forgotten just how much work the Dungeon Master had to do to flesh out these printed modules in order for them to work as adventures. Like most old-school modules, the bulk of the text simply describes the characters and items found in various rooms; it’s up to the Dungeon Master and players to provide the narrative sweep. Furthermore, the motivations of many characters are either only hinted at or are contingent upon the players’ actions. As I once read, an adventure (whether published or written by the DM for his own game) is not a story, but the promise of a story: only when it is inhabited by players and their characters is it brought to life. Reading the GDQ series was an interesting exercise, and it brought back memories of playing some of these adventures as a kid, but it wasn’t quite what I remembered. (These and other classic adventure modules inspired novelizations, as I found, but I haven’t read them; maybe I will some day.)

October
Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

Drabble

November
The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws, Margaret Drabble (Like Moondust, this was another book combining historical research with memoir; Drabble’s meditations on the appeal of the mosaic, on the reuniting of fragmented pieces, of the creation of images within images, are relevant to my own writing and composition, and I was astonished to recognize myself in some passages. The book was not exactly a dynamo of forward momentum, however, and like the act of assembling a puzzle itself, reading this book was a ruminative exercise, replete with long pauses for reassessment of the larger whole.)
Trish Trash: Rollergirl of Mars 1, Jessica Abel

Pulps.Goodstone

December
The Pulps, ed. Tony Goodstone (a collection of reprints from the Golden Age, the “real stuff”)
Chilling Tales of Horror: Dark Graphic Short Stories, Pedro Rodríguez
Constellation of Genius: 1922: Modernism and All That Jazz, Kevin Jackson

In 2008 I read Brian Eno’s A Year with Swollen Appendices, a sort of diary of the year 1995, on a day-by-day basis: since A Year starts with Eno’s decision to start a diary on January 1, I began reading it at the beginning of the year and read each entry on the corresponding date, over the course of that year. Eno didn’t write an entry for every single day, but it was close enough, and with the various appendices I had something to read from him almost every day: the book became a constant companion, almost a devotional, and absorbing it slowly, over the course of that year, made more of an impression than reading it quickly might have done (and frankly even the most interesting diaries are frequently mundane and repetitive enough that I wouldn’t read them straight through anyway).

Constellation.1922

After keeping an eye out for a similar book that covered a single year in the same way, I came across Constellation of Genius, a day-by-day record of events in 1922 (ranging from the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to the opening of King Tut’s tomb and the founding of the Irish Free State) and saw an opportunity to read it in the same way. So that has been an ongoing project over the past year. During that year, I’ve been looking at the cover and seeing the blurb “Brilliantly erudite and very funny” attributed to reviewer Robert Macfarlane, and I confess myself mystified. The first part I cannot deny: author Kevin Jackson has brought together a wealth of material from diverse sources, and is an excellent guide in unfamiliar territory, briefly explaining what has been forgotten or needs to be translated, choosing illustrative anecdotes to stand in for the whole and providing multiple entryways for further exploration of his subjects. But “very funny”? Jackson is a dry wit, and many of the stories he shares are humorous, but I can’t recall busting a gut while reading this; perhaps it is the haunting similarity of the political perils he describes–acts of terrorism and war, the rise of fascism and Stalinism–to those of the present. The foreboding of the interwar period tends to overshadow the lives of the artists and writers, making their heroic feats seem small in the scale of the world’s events. On the other hand, the diary format shows how life goes on, and how the larger patterns of history are frequently invisible until viewed in the hindsight of years. There are about fifty pages of “aftermath” following the December 31 entry, describing the later lives and fates of the book’s major players; if I don’t get it finished tomorrow, I expect to soon enough, and it seemed silly not to include this in my 2017 reading on a technicality.

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Kamandi Challenge no. 7

Cover by Bill Sienkiewicz

“Salvage”
Writer: Marguerite Bennett
Pencils: Dan Jurgens
Inks: Klaus Janson
Colorist: Hi-Fi
Letterer: Clem Robins
Editors: Brittany Holzherr and Dan DiDio

Note: This issue came out last week, but I was travelling, and it’s taken me a few days to get caught up. My apologies for the delay.

Kamandi, thrown from the towering heights of Mishkingrad by its former “Alpha” Grosnovo, and about to fall into the bear city’s atomic furnace, remembers that he is still holding the “cortex crown” that controls the city. Putting it on, Kamandi commands the metal around him (all parts of the great living city) to form a protective shell around him (similar to the vegetable shell Vila wove around him in no. 5) and take him to Renzi. There, he is astonished to see Renzi already surrounded by a band of female dog warriors, scavengers who periodically raid the bear city for technology and scrap metal. The dogs decide to take Kamandi along with them and throw him into a bag for transport. (They rescue Renzi as well, leaving the city of bears to collapse without Renzi’s atomic heart to power it.)

Later, Kamandi emerges from the bag to find himself on a huge dirigible, the floating headquarters of the “Bulldog Britanneks,” as the dogs call themselves. Beatrice, the leader of the Britanneks, recalls knowing Kamandi’s mother, a veteran of the “Android Wars” who designed their ship, and points Kamandi toward the last place she had seen her.

In the mean time, the dirigible floats over the forbidden wastelands of the North Pole, home to the “ice wizards.” The ice wizards (the only one we see is a polar bear) control hordes of “polar parasites,” metallic centipedes that latch onto unwilling hosts and control their minds, steering them to recruit more hosts. The ice wizards have been exiled to the wasteland and sense an opportunity to escape; for their part, the parasites are in constant search for new hosts and new territory. Directed by the ice wizard, a flying iceberg pierces the dirigible, bringing it down. One of the dog women, Sadie, rescues Kamandi from falling to his death; earlier she had flirted with him, but in this moment we sense that perhaps the attraction goes both ways.

On the ground, several of the Britanneks are overtaken by parasites, and with their minds controlled by them they begin attacking their fellows or attempting to lure them to be attacked by parasites. With their ship crashed and at the mercy of the parasites, the group retreats, but not before Kamandi finds the cortex crown among the wreckage. Since the dirigible was built from scrap looted from the bear city over the years, he reasons that the metal may still respond to the crown’s power, just as it had saved him earlier. A plan is hatched: the Britanneks lure the polar parasites and their hosts into the open, and then Kamandi, wearing the crown and driving a power-lifter-like exoskeleton made from the scrap, surprises the parasites, crushing them under the vehicle’s enormous “feet” and freeing the mind-controlled Britanneks as well. With the ice wizard captured (and disposed of off-panel?), the operation is a success.

The Britanneks, reunited, rebuild the remains of their dirigible into a hot-air balloon, while Kamandi, with a new lead on his missing parents, takes off separately in a hang-glider (after receiving a “first kiss” from Sadie). Gliding alone above the wasteland, Kamandi doesn’t notice one last polar parasite crawl out of his satchel, and the chapter ends with the creature biting him on the neck. Is this the end of Kamandi, or is he doomed to spend his remaining days as the host of the polar parasite?

As in other Kamandi stories, “Salvage” gets a lot of mileage out of comparing and contrasting human and animal behaviors and personality type. There are plenty of canine puns and references on hand (Kamandi “deworms” the parasite-infected Britanneks; the flying headquarters is referred to as a “doghouse” and later a “kennel,” and so on; it must have taken a lot of self-control to avoid the phrase “puppy love”). Most notably, while only Commander Beatrice is an actual bulldog, the group suggests the kind of plucky, diverse, but oh-so British commando troop one sees in movies about World War II, and Beatrice represents the typical funny animal English bulldog as a Winston Churchill stand-in: gruff, cigar-smoking, and (in this case) maternal. (“A Canterbury Tail/Calamity from the Clyde,” a two-part “Tale of the Great Disaster” printed in Weird War Tales nos. 51 and 52, makes a similar association between nationality, animal type, and character, but as we have seen that is almost de rigueur in funny animal stories, even ones like this that are darker than your average Carl Barks strip.) Naturally, the canine commandos are introduced playing poker when Kamandi is welcomed onto the dirigible.

Also striking in this story is that all the Britanneks are female, a conceit lampshaded by the engineer Mae who says of Kamandi when they meet, “You smell like you’ve met two, hm, three supporting female characters, tops–both of whom died, I’m guessing.” That sounds about right. I mostly know Marguerite Bennett, who wrote this chapter, from her work on DC Comics Bombshells, a series focused on the publisher’s female characters fighting an alternate World War II in a world without male superheroes. Although this chapter’s art (by Dan Jurgens and Klaus Janson, both of whom have been working in comics since I was reading them as a kid in the ’80s) is more old-school and less attuned to the feminine nuances of Bennett’s script than that of Bennett’s Bombshells collaborator Marguerite Sauvage, “Salvage” shows some of the same inventive remixing of wartime iconography and bantering sisterhood as her flagship series. Also, in addition to improving Kamandi’s representation stats the Britanneks have a more functional family dynamic than any group Kamandi has encountered since his abrupt expulsion from the Truman Show-esque small town in which he grew up, back in issue no. 1. Kamandi has made friends and allies, but the tough warrior women of the Britanneks are a family: they not only fight together, they care about each other, and their scenes are reminiscent of the Vuvalini in Mad Max: Fury Road.

Finally, Kamandi has traditionally been a series in which romance took a back seat to action and adventure; not exactly “no girls allowed,” but like many comics, the emphasis is on Kamandi’s status as “The Last Boy on Earth” (emphasis added). Mae commenting on the meager (and deceased) female supporting cast could easily be referring not only to this series but to Jack Kirby’s original book as well. The love of Kamandi’s life, Flower, a girl his age who could speak (in contrast to the mostly mute humans of Earth A.D.), was no sooner introduced than she was killed tragically; later Kirby, sensing a missed opportunity, introduced Flower’s twin, Spirit, but if Kamandi noticed Spirit’s hula-girl near-nakedness, he was too polite to say anything. That was for the pubescent audience. In this case, the flirtatious Sadie and her interest in Kamandi would be unexceptional were it not for the prospect of cross-species love in their relationship. Ultimately, their mutual attraction is turned into a cute joke, with Sadie slurping Kamandi’s face like any family pet. Whether a furry fantasy* or a riff on dogs’ age-old affection for man, the message is clear: even in the wastes of this post-apocalyptic world, it is love, and the possibility of finding it, that makes survival into living.

from Kamandi no. 12

*Not to downplay the degree to which Kamandi can already be seen as a furry fantasy, but as I suggested, its generally chaste approach takes the focus off questions of romance or sexuality.

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