All of the Marvels

Douglas Wolk All of the Marvels (2021)
I nearly shat myself when I first heard of this having been published. All of the Marvels is a general summary produced by a man who sat down and read almost every Marvel comic ever published from the first issue of Fantastic Four to the present day, and I nearly shat myself because I've been working on something vaguely similar, albeit on a somewhat reduced scale and which probably won't sell shit. Thankfully it turns out that Wolk's magnum opus isn't quite the same deal as that which I've been working on; although of course I had to read it to be sure, and because it seemed like it would be worth reading.

Roughly speaking, it's a history and analysis of the Marvel Universe, the environment shared by everyone from Spider-Man to Howard the Duck, allowing them all to turn up in each others comic books without the kind of contradictions which lead to knife crime at fan gatherings. Because we're talking about a world described across more than twenty-seven thousand comic books, Wolk tends to focus on those themes and characters of the larger narrative dearer to his heart, so it's a subjective, free-wheeling analysis rather than an academic exercise, which is probably as it should be. Happily, this also means that because the Marvel Universe began life in primary colours and isn't anything like so complicated as where the rest of us live, arguments made for details tend to say a lot about the whole, notably the chapter dedicated to issues of the relatively obscure Master of Kung Fu.

While I'm sure it may seem harsh to suggest that Marvel disappeared up its own arse during the nineties and has never really recovered, this is more or less how it has felt to me. It isn't that they haven't published anything decent in the last thirty or so years, because clearly they have, but there isn't much of it that speaks to me in quite the same way as it did during the years when even the pure garbage was kind of interesting by some definition. Consequently I didn't find the second half of Wolk's journey quite as engaging or convincing, and while it's interesting to read about what became of this or that character, it hasn't inspired me to track down any back issues - possibly excepting some of the Dark Reign material which seemingly foreshadowed the Trump presidency back in 2009 with disturbing acuity.

Wolk's slightly rambling style is very readable, although I found the endless footnotes a little irritating given that most of them could surely have been woven into the main text without significant disruption; and the fifty-page introduction telling us what is about to happen seems excessive and unnecessary given that All of the Marvels isn't actually a scientific thesis proposing to unscramble some previously impenetrable mystery. I gather the introduction is intended to serve as preparation for those who've never read a Marvel comic and er… who probably aren't massively likely to want to read this either, I wouldn't have thought.

We also have the not unexpected minor instances of sneering at white heterosexual males, because how dare they etc. etc.

The only kind of gatekeepers who have any business being around comics are the ones who make sure the gate stays wide open to anyone who wants to come join the fun.

Personally I don't always have a problem with gatekeepers. They tend to keep out the wankers who only appreciate your thing once they've turned it into something completely different, and which will usually be shite. Maybe it's just me. If I'm flying from one country to another I'd rather not do it in an aircraft built by persons who were happy for just anyone to come join the aircraft construction fun.

Griping aside, if it's not the Homer's Iliad claimed by all those completely impartial comic book authors who've praised the book on the back cover, it has a lot to recommend it, throws up a whole bunch of stuff that even I didn't know - sad gatekeeping fucker that I am - and leaves one feeling surprisingly warmed by its subject, reminding us that even if the medium is essentially corporate and sales driven, that which Marvel communicated between 1963 and 2017 was nevertheless often the work of genuine nutters and visionaries.

Tik-Tok of Oz

L. Frank Baum Tik-Tok of Oz (1914)
Being absolutely and without ambiguity a children's book, this seemed perhaps a little out of my way, but what the hell, I thought, I read Adventures of the Wishing-Chair not that long ago and there's a robot on the cover. Tik-Tok isn't actually a robot, historically speaking, because the term derives from Karel Čapek's RUR which was written in 1920. Here he's referred to as a mechanical man. Mechanical men and related automata have been turning up in western literature at least since Homer's Iliad, whenever that was. Tik-Tok himself first turned up in Baum's Ozma of Oz of 1907 and his genesis probably began even further back in 1899 with the Cast-iron Man from Baum's A New Wonderland. What makes Tik-Tok interesting is that he's clearly identified as something manufactured, essentially a consumer product designed to perform with no agency of magic as was the case for at least a few of his forerunners; so he's a robot by modern standards.

I gather this probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise given Baum's attempt to revise the established tradition of children's fairy tales - excising much of the violence, the romance which he doubted held much appeal to his readers, and presenting an arguably more pragmatic take on the form than seemed traditional. Baum's narrative - at least here - is roughly a mash-up of the Brothers Grimm with some of the nonsense of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, whilst additionally being substantially more than just the sum of those two parts. From what I can tell, Baum seems to have been a politically progressive individual, which is at least how it looks from reading this one. His world and its characters - notably the likes of Dorothy and Betsy, seem removed from the sort of class hierarchy into which Carroll's Alice was firmly cemented, and his royals are judged by their actions rather than hereditary or special endorsement from God, which seems happily appropriate for an American author.

'Most noble Private Soldier, I must inform you that by the laws of our country anyone who comes through the Forbidden Tube must be tortured for nine days and ten nights and then thrown back into the Tube. But it is wise to disregard laws when they conflict with justice, and it seems that you and your followers did not disobey our laws willingly, being forced into the Tube by Ruggedo. Therefore the Nome King is alone to blame, and he alone must be punished.'

I gather Ruggedo was more or less the villain of the Oz books, and that he came back to piss everyone off time and again, so it's interesting that even he comes to his senses and says sorry at the end of this one. This dispenses with the traditional absolutes of the form wherein evil is both remote and beyond redemption, instead replacing it with something a little more realistic with which the audience can identify because no-one is really too much worse than the kid who steals your pencil, pulls your hair, and then sticks his tongue out at you; and further to the whole spirit of keeping it real, or at least vaguely rooted in the modern world, even Thomas Edison gets a mention, as does radium - as discovered in 1898; and famously, it transpires that Baum, during a moment of particularly Gernsbackian inspiration, foresaw the mobile telephone:

At first they could not understand it at all; but presently Shaggy suspected the truth, and believing that Ozma was now taking an interest in the party, he drew from his pocket a tiny instrument which he placed against his ear.

Ozma, observing this action in her Magic Picture, at once caught up a similar instrument from a table beside her and held it to her own ear. The two instruments recorded the same delicate vibrations of sound and formed a wireless telephone, an invention of the Wizard. Those separated by any distance were thus enabled to converse together with perfect ease and without any wire connection.

I could probably get carried away and speculate as to whether any of Tik-Tok of Oz was informed by then ominous warlike rumblings across Europe, but I suspect any points made which may seem related with hindsight were probably more general. Further to the theme of not letting ourselves get too carried away, it struck me that at least some of Baum's narrative seems woven from the same broad thrust of ominous surrealism which informs Germanic or Slavik folk tales - the sort of thing involving huts strolling around on chicken legs; which leads us to his gnomes, or rather nomes. My knowledge is somewhat sketchy at this point but there seems to be some vaguely anti-Semitic implication to those races of little subterranean men hoarding their gold and precious metals, and then we come to the expulsion of Ruggedo, king of the Nomes:

'Again I beg to differ with Your Majesty,' said Quox. 'The great Jinjin commands you to depart instantly from this Kingdom and seek the earth's surface, where you will wander for all time to come, without a home or country, without a friend or follower, and without any more riches than you can carry with you in your pockets.'

I suspect this was simply Baum borrowing from the folk myth of the Wandering Jew rather than anything approaching any kind of racial allusion, given that the same would contradict the generous spirit of the book as a whole. Baum's only noted posthumously contentious observations on any matter of race seem to have been a couple of editorials written for the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer which appear unusually harsh and written from a position of substantial ignorance, but which are difficult to characterise as directly racist in any meaningful sense; not that this has much bearing on Tik-Tok.

So, you may be wondering, did I actually like the fucking thing?

The prose is of a kind written so as to leave behind as few children as possible, and I suppose lacks the poetry of Alice; and the story is fairly thin, the usual deal with a whole bunch of people going off to do something or other whilst accumulating increasingly weird pals on the way, but then if you're reading this expecting anything else, you're probably a bit of an idiot. The point of Tik-Tok of Oz, at least besides the conduction of any low-level lessons in morality, is to entertain small children with a bewildering array of bizarre characters, corny jokes, and general insanity; and it does this extremely well, and without quite pandering as Enid Blyton did from time to time. Personally I could have done with a little more Tik-Tok given that his name appears in the title, and I occasionally had a vague sensation of this having been but number eight to roll off the L. Frank Baum assembly line, but otherwise it seems a good-natured little tome and it's hard to find fault with it. I would have liked a little more description, or at least enough to keep me from visualising that guy out of Insane Clown Posse every time Shaggy Man gets a mention, but that's hardly Baum's fault.

Phoned-In Adventures from the DC Universe

Alan Moore etc. Phoned-In Adventures from the DC Universe (2011)
What the fuck, I thought, it's Alan Moore - how bad could it be?, and so here we are again. I wondered about those issues of Green Lantern, Vigilante and other historically unremarkable DC titles written by the lad with the beard, having failed to notice them in their day. Specifically I wondered about them a little later by which time I was approaching thirty and somehow still young enough to be able to read X-Men spin-offs without wincing. Had I picked up the material collected here when it was new, I probably would have thought it amazing, but in 2016 I am no longer quite so comfortable extending the benefit of the doubt because a bloke in a cape is fighting crime.

DC Universe - to give the book its actual but arguably less descriptive title - collects old issues of Batman, Superman, Secret Origins and everything else Moore ever wrote for DC comics which wasn't Swamp Thing. There's nothing I'd call genuinely terrible. On the other hand there's a limit to how much you can reasonably expect from a comic about a vigilante who fights crime, drug dealers, drug dealing pimps, drug dealers who sell drugs to the kids on the street, and who calls himself Vigilante; and his superpower is that he has a gun with which he shoots drug dealers who commit crime, I suppose. You can tell that Moore is making the best of it, struggling to work with what is essentially crappy material, but you can also tell that while his heart wasn't really in it, that lecky bill wasn't going to pay itself. Even with generally great art, most of this is roughly as good as a decent run of Tharg's Future Shocks in 2000AD. I've read the Superman strips before in a black and white eighties collection called The Man of Tomorrow, and they're decent for what they are, but what they are now seems underwhelming even given that I'm about four decades past the reading age of the target audience.

The second half of the book derives from comics originally published by companies which were ultimately assimilated by the great DC Comics Borg Cube - much to Alan Moore's public displeasure - mostly relating to Jim Lee's WildCATS about which I know next to nothing. Surprisingly I found this stuff a little more engaging, which I suppose may be down to the less familiar territory and Moore having been granted license to do the sort of thing he does best. Voodoo, centred around some WildCATS character of the same name, is fairly enjoyable as yer typically brainy mainstream Moore fare, although it probably helps if you can pretend it isn't a story about murdered strippers drawn by someone with a massive collection of Bratz dolls. Then there's Deathblow which is incomprehensible and more or less bereft of dialogue, but is nevertheless justified by Jim Baikie's wonderful moody artwork.

Even when he's phoning it in, Alan Moore still makes most of the competition look like wankers. DC Universe is a reasonably enjoyable exercise in barrel scraping which should under no circumstances be mistaken for Homer's Odyssey just because author of Watchmans, V of the Vendettas blah blah blah...