Rogue Moon

Algis Budrys Rogue Moon (1960)
I'm still waiting to find the one which squares with Budrys' reputation as your favourite science-fiction author's favourite science-fiction author, and I was beginning to think it might be this; but coming to the last page, I have doubts.

This is my fourth Budrys, including a collection of short stories. As with the others, there's something about his writing which seems to resist my attention. It's not badly written by any means, and yet the sentences have bits sticking out at awkward angles. English wasn't his first language, although I'm not sure it's that given that his prose is mostly superior to a few I could name who were born here, in a manner of speaking. His stories unfold unevenly, often revealing crucial details as no more than hints you'll probably miss first time, creating a sense of mystery which is either compelling or frustrating depending on how it catches you, all of which contributes to the atmosphere of cold war paranoia. Budrys asks vaguely existential questions concerning identity, reality and so on in a way which would foreshadow Philip K. Dick were it a bit more freewheeling. His situations and narrative constructions are complex, characterised by subtleties, and are often thought provoking; and yet at the same time he'll shoot himself in the foot with some twist so dumb that it hurts.

Who?, for example, features a protagonist trailed by the secret services. At one point our man makes a phone call from a store, and the powers that be want to know who he called. Our secret service boys ingeniously distract the store owner whilst cleverly replacing his phone directory with an identical copy. They take the original away and study every single page in search of faint impressions left by their guy's finger as he looked for the name and number he was after. In view of the opening of The Falling Torch - wherein counter revolution is planned by a bunch of old men secretly meeting in a garden shed - it somehow doesn't seem that surprising.

Rogue Moon, on the other hand, is the one which has been described as influential. It's certainly an improvement on the others, but nevertheless feels as though it should have been better. The story is that we've mastered teleportation and we're sending a guy to the moon to investigate an anomalous, seemingly philosophical structure of unknown origin. This is tricky because no teleported person has survived more than a couple of minutes, so it's a death sentence because, as Al's detailed and beautifully described theory of how teleportation might work tells us, the process pops an exact copy of the traveller out at the other end while destroying the original. Then we discover that a second copy, copied from the first copy, simultaneously exists back on Earth in telepathic communication with the version of himself on the moon - sending the rest of us scrambling back through previous pages trying to work out whether Budrys already told us this detail or whether we missed it. Also, there's a whole team of helpers already on the moon ready to escort our doomed investigator to the aforementioned anomaly, and not a word of how they got up there or why they haven't felt inclined to investigate the thing for themselves.

These questions remain unanswered, and the pseudo-psychedelic experience of our guy entering the anomaly doesn't shed much light on anything, leaving us with a novel in which men and one woman discuss the nature of being, life, death, existence, and all of that good stuff, often in the form of speeches which seem to foreshadow William Shatner's portrayal of Captain Kirk - not that that's necessarily a bad thing. I get the impression that Rogue Moon wanted to be a serious novel, and it would be but for a lack of focus - as though it keeps changing its mind. It's frustrating, but mostly because it intrigues and plays its cards close to its chest, so I guess that's a conditional thumbs up from me.

The Human Torch and the Thing

Stan Lee, Larry Leiber, Jack Kirby, Dick Ayers & others
The Human Torch and the Thing (1965)
As with the Daredevil collection I tackled back in 2022, I picked this up mainly in the name of research, and contrary to the impression given by Marvel Firsts last week, Stan and the lads hit the ground running with at least a few of the debut titles of their superhero revival. The Human Torch was apparently deemed so popular as to warrant a solo strip in the pages of Strange Tales. With half the page count of an issue of the Fantastic Four, much less juggling in terms of characters, and less pressure given that Doctor Strange was presumably held responsible for half of the sales, Johnny Storm's solo scrapes stuck to the fairly predictable formula of a succession of bank jobs and jewellery heists undertaken by traditional hoods with a few bells and whistles thrown in for the sake of the superhero theme. The heavy lifting is done by cheap gags, outrageous novelty, and the sort of peculiar twists of imagination which Bob Burden was apparently channelling in Flaming Carrot, an eighties book which I'm beginning to realise was a tribute at least as much as it was ever a parody. This was the era of Paste Pot Pete, a villain who carries a giant pot of glue around with him, a man with the power of all paste who, for example, at one point fashions a formidable pair of binoculars utilising lenses made from a special clear paste. In another issue we meet the Plantman, an individual resembling Harvey Pekar who has invented a dubious looking device with which he hopes to increase the IQ of certain plants; but the device is struck by lightning and grants him power over all plants, which he discovers when he exclaims well, fan my hide, obliging an adjacent bush to do so with its leaves. Also we have the real Sandman, a villain who turns into sand and is therefore significantly more interesting than Neil Gaiman's wispy personification of various Cure albums.

It's bollocks, but it's entertaining bollocks which gets away with it because it's for actual kids and it doesn't care, although being beautifully drawn by Jack Kirby, Dick Ayers, Bob Powell and others doesn't hurt either. Also, Strange Tales #105 brought us what I believe to be the single greatest panel of the entire sixties:

 

Just look at the fucking size of that piece of cake.

What's that you say? Johnny, who is technically still a child, has gone after the Wizard, a dangerous superpowered criminal, all on his own. Fuck him! I'm eating!

That said, being relatively short, the Torch's strips were at least as repetitive as old school Scooby Doo and are probably best appreciated at the rate of one a month between the years of 1961 and 1970 by persons under the age of ten. I'm unable to tick any of these boxes so I zoned out here and there, but not enough to present any sort of indictment on the ludicrous charm of these tales. Did I mention that the Beatles show up in one of the later issues?

 

No prizes for picking Ringo out of the line-up. The poor sod's hooter is so massive that it won't even fit in the second panel.

As with anything which Stan Lee claimed was bigger than the Bible, the Quran, the Torah and the complete works of Shakespeare blended into a single shining masterpiece, the solo adventures of the Human Torch don't quite live up to the hype, but this collection is still mostly great and goes some way to accounting for why Marvel took off as it did.

Marvel Firsts: the 1960s

Stan Lee, Jack Kirby & others
Marvel Firsts: the 1960s (2011)
This collects all those first issues or first appearances and is therefore where it all began, assuming we can agree on what it is. I've been engaged in an attempt to understand the evolution of caped adventures and this seemed a better gamble than collected editions of any single title, running as it does in chronological sequence from the  1961 debut of the Fantastic Four through to the first issue of the Silver Surfer in 1968, and with a lot of the stuff we've forgotten about in between.

The Marvel revolution is generally characterised as Stan Lee and Jack Kirby combining existing comic book genres into a single continuity, then having everybody turn up in everyone else's books. The existing (and failing) genres which went into the mix included romance, horror, humour, superhero, and monster comics. The first issue of the Fantastic Four pushes most of those buttons, not least the cover featuring a giant and vaguely reptilian thing smashing its way up through the asphalt, gargantuan claws reaching out to ensnare the puny surface dwellers - duplicating the cover of pretty much every issue of Tales to Astonish prior to Hank Pym discovering he could talk to ants. Inside we get super-science, rocketry, the hot-rod loving teenager, wisecracks, and the Invisible Girl ticking all of the usual chick boxes in requiring the protection of the lads.

Most surprising for me has been the realisation of just how shaky were the first stirrings of the Marvel universe, because Stan Lee telling me how the first issue of the Fantastic Four was at least on par with War and Peace to a monthly schedule apparently wormed its way into my subconscious. Unless War and Peace - which I've never read - is actually fairly ropey, in which case fair play.

Fantastic Four #1 has all sorts of wonderfully screwy things going on, but it has the rhythm of hesitant first steps with Stan and Jack - but mainly Jack - making it up as they go along, jamming disparate elements together and hoping it will work. It doesn't feel confident and lurches along much like the strips of the thirties and forties, as does the first allegedly pulse-pounding issue of the Avengers, in case anyone was wondering. This isn't really a criticism given the likelihood of anything living up to Stan's hyperbole, but it's engaging for reasons besides those promised by the cover, or at least was to me. Further clues as to the balance of the Lee and Kirby partnership may be found by comparing Lee's typewritten synopsis for Fantastic Four #1 - also included here - with what was published, and it looks a lot like Jack was doing his best to give the thing a bit of a dynamic, a quality which isn't conspicuous in Lee's vague, even apologetic stage directions.

Stranger still, the wild west comics running contemporaneous to the early superhero stuff are by far the best material in at least the first half of the collection, their obvious confidence presumably deriving from established traditional styles. However, as the years pass, we can see our caped pals catching up and cohering into something which seems to know what it's doing, and Silver Surfer #1 is legitimately a masterpiece of the form.

This has been less exciting but more educational than I expected, which is nice.

New Mutants Forever

Chris Claremont, Al Rio & Bob McLeod
New Mutants Forever (2011)
Chris Claremont had already returned to the X-Men in 2009 with X-Men Forever, a title continuing the story from which he'd been unceremoniously unplugged back in 1991 when it was discovered that some readers disliked issues in which the X-Men girls go shopping and felt there weren't sufficient stabbings. Here he does the same with the New Mutants, although there are different circumstances to the end of his original run, notably that - so far as I understand it - he simply didn't have time to keep it going given everything else he was writing at the time, and handed the keys over to Louise Simonson who was at least on his side. I'm not sure this one really needed to happen by quite the same terms as X-Men Forever, but it's mostly fun with Claremont playing to his not inconsiderable strengths.

I can see the logic of utilising the trusty crayon of Bob McLeod given his status as co-creator, but I have to admit he's never been one of my favourites; and Al Rio's art looks very much as though he attended the Bob McLeod school. There's nothing wrong with McLeod's art and, to paraphrase what somebody or other once said of Tony Hadley, that's what is wrong with his art. It's very clean and clear, and it gets the job done, but it gets the job done with a limited range of variant facial expressions and not much you could describe as dynamic. Still, the magic of Claremont is that he can worm even the most preposterous shite into your subconscious and have you swear you've been watching Citizen Kane, sidestepping the problem of clichés - of which one should probably expect a number given that New Mutants is one of those caped titles - by splashing them about regardless with just enough spin and distraction to get away with it.

Here we have the New Mutants battling Red Skull and his Nazi pals in a version of Rome which has somehow survived the last twenty thousand years in isolation in the Amazon basin. Red Skull turns Cypher into a boggle-eyed version of himself who stands around in just his y-fronts agonising about this most ludicrous of transformations; and even the swastikas resemble something from the Beano; but not once does it inspire the question of why anyone bothered. It's no Demon Bear Saga, but New Mutants was a great book and this collection effortlessly reminds us why.