Daredevil

Stan Lee, Wally Wood & others Daredevil (1965)
The constitution of Marvel's great innovation - that which stamped its mark firmly on the public consciousness back in the sixties - hadn't really occurred to me, nor perhaps been expressed so well, until I read Douglas Wolk's All of the Marvels. It wasn't simply the timing of the superhero revival, breaking out during a significant lull in the popularity of Superman, Batman and others. It was the blending of superheroes with other popular forms of the day, the romance, monster, humour, and horror comics - or what horror comics had become in the wake of Wertham's purge. It seems so obvious now, and I have no idea why I hadn't already seen it. Of course, it isn't that Superman's adventures had failed to incorporate elements of romance, humour, or whatever, but the emphasis seems more pronounced in those post-Fantastic Four Marvel titles where no issue passes without the necessity of secret identities causing a testosterone implosion in someone's trunks, or yet another subterranean monster whose name ends with a vowel finds his way to the surface. That said, it seems a safe bet that the shocking dynamism of Kirby and Ditko should also be considered a factor, rendering the blend all the more dramatic by having it seem to almost leap off the page.

Unfortunately, they can't all be classics, and while Daredevil doubtless went on to great things, his first steps were pretty subdued when compared to those of the Fantastic Four, Avengers, X-Men and so on. This is because Daredevil - or specifically the first eleven issues as collected here - feels very much as though, having blown everyone's mind with the Hulk and the rest rendered as a series of explosive, angular punch-ups bordering on Vorticism, the Bullpen may have been wondering if there was still any mileage left in the traditional formula, hence something which is approximately a cross between Spider-Man and Batman - neurosis, doomed romance and weird powers combined with metropolitan decay and otherwise conventional detective stories.

I guess there was some mileage, although most of 1964 and 1965 were spent messing with the formula and not quite getting it right. The art is decent, mostly great, and occasionally stunning, yet pedestrian compared to Kirby - descriptive rather than expressive; and the ideas are as wacky as you like, but suffer from the means of their communication which is excessively wordy even by Marvel standards of the time and leaves the reader wading through verbiage for relatively little reward given that most of the verbiage is describing what we can see with our own eyes.

The premise of Daredevil, namely that a man blinded by some vaguely radioactive material will develop his other senses to a superhuman degree, while no more unlikely than any other implausible Marvel origin, tends to appear more and more ludicrous the closer you look. So Daredevil's endless account of his own powers as he reads a newspaper by feeling the ink on the page or decides that it sounds like the woman who just came into the room is wearing a red coat serve to highlight the inherent absurdity of his abilities rather than leaving us awestruck, as I suspect was the intention. Additionally, the whole notion of the sightless compensated with amazing hearing or sense of smell seems a bit Ricky Gervais in 2022, but never mind.

More than its contemporaries, the early Daredevil feels a little like a throwback to strips of the previous decades, the era of bank heists and henchmen and criminal masterminds revealed to be unscrupulous city councilors; and the weirder details work against themselves, somehow serving to emphasise the conservatism of the title. That said, early Daredevil wasn't actually bad, and certainly had both charm and potential; although in 2022 is probably mainly interesting as an historical piece.

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.

The Ironic Skeletons

Colby Smith The Ironic Skeletons (2022)
Colby Smith is a writer associated with the Neo-Decadent movement, and while I remain massively sceptical of any movement which would have me as a member, there's a strong chance of Smith being the one you really need to read. I've occasionally found some of his writing inscrutable, therefore carrying the unfortunate implication that I may not actually be quite so intelligent as I'd hoped, but his meaning is so clear in The Ironic Skeletons as to border on caustic, presenting so ruthlessly efficient a dissection of psychological collapse that it's a mercy, and probably necessary, that the book should be so short in terms of page count. Paleontology, or at least the subject of paleontology, here serves as analogy to the crumbling existence of our protagonist, D.W. Lambert, and even to the crumbling of meaning itself.

People often mistake me for an archaeologist, but I work with the corpses of things that died before the first written word, before the first uttered word, before the first thought.

The Bible erred when it placed Words before the creation of the world. The word is a recent evolutionary invention. The language I write this in will become extinct some day, just like the creatures I have dedicated my life to studying.

Babel was built for naught.

I don't know why I am writing this down, or why anyone writes anything down if their memory is to dissolve with time. I do it anyway, because I must be a narcissist like everyone else.

If the notion that someone has bolted an obsession with prehistoric animals onto a map of a nervous breakdown seems arbitrary, then you really need to read the thing because my description is unlikely to do it justice; which I say having once endured a psychologically adjacent interlude - which I survived, obviously - meaning The Ironic Skeletons taps into a strain of existential horror which, for me, seems fairly fundamental and quite overpowering. References to Hallucigenia or the Permian extinction shouldn't present an obstacle to comprehension given the context and that such details are but one part of the tapestry of D.W. Lambert's struggle for purpose; but if you're alive you should know that shit anyway, quite frankly. My own reading in this field is possibly pitiful, relatively speaking, although I've apparently picked up enough to have yelped out loud at the suggestion that therapsids may have lactated - following a quick butcher's on Google to make sure this isn't one of Lambert's paleontologically themed hallucinations.

As with a few rare pieces of music, it's quite difficult to write about this one because it explores territory which itself is best described by reference to its peripheral sensations - not unlike extinct ecosystems summarised by the skeletons they've left behind, which may or may not be a deliberate parallel. Given that Colby Smith has quite clearly lived at least some of this novel, I pray that there may be many more to come because I don't think I've read anything quite like it.

Becoming a Capstone

Omotoyosi Adebayo Becoming a Capstone (2020)
I was puzzled when this emerged from Santa's wrapping paper, given its resemblance to some sort of self-help, or at least motivational tract, and therefore not traditionally my kind of thing.

'It's David's book,' my wife explained helpfully and the penny dropped. David is one of her work colleagues. We attended the naming ceremony for Heaven, his baby daughter, about a year or so ago, which was a pleasure and felt like a great honour. David came to America from Nigeria and I've yet to meet an African I didn't like.

Anyway, this is David's story, how his family came to cross the Atlantic, and how they settled here in Texas. To get it out of the way, it's obviously the work of someone for whom English is not a first language, but the grammar and pace are simply unconventional - at least to me - rather than lacking in expressive power or elegance, and David peppers his account with a wonderful, even poetic turn of phrase. This means that the narrative voice acquires an unmistakably African accent after just a few pages, and so we get some very long sentences.

Segun sat in the middle, staring at everyone and weighing his father's words over the phone in which he told him that he would have to start college from scratch once he got to America in order to acquire a certification that would make him employable after college and give him an edge over those applying to work with foreign degrees.

Under other circumstances, the grammar of Becoming a Capstone might seem a hindrance, but the story takes over and to such an extent that the page turner promised by the back cover is delivered, despite being like nothing else I have read. David's progress from Nigeria, to a listless existence sharing a house with other recent immigrants, to minor brushes with the law, to success as some sort of programming whizz has none of the predictable quality of a typical rags to riches tales, and is told without recourse to any of the usual narrative tricks or short cuts, so the sense of consequence seems very real here; with the tone dictated by our man choosing to focus on what he gets right more than the inevitable stubbed toes.

My only real criticism is that at just over a hundred pages, Becoming a Capstone is surprisingly short for the story it tells. David has a great way of capturing detail and communicating feeling without resorting to sentiment; and I could have stood to hear about life in Lagos in maybe a little more depth.

When the Sleeper Wakes

H.G. Wells When the Sleeper Wakes (1903)
This was written as a serial and published in the Graphic, whatever that was, between 1898 and 1903. I assume it's therefore different to Herbert's 1910 revision as the novel, The Sleeper Awakes, which I haven't read. I gather Wells was dissatisfied with the serial version and took the opportunity to iron out a few of the creases, which I understand because I too am dissatisfied with the serial version.

The story follows a man called Graham who sleeps for a couple of centuries, wakes to a futuristic society which has come to regard him as a near God-like figure for no immediately credible reason, and who then comes to take a dim view of the aforementioned futuristic society. It's a dystopia and is thus ancestral to more or less an entire genre, although Wells' version of the future foreshadows that of Aldous Huxley more than it does Orwell's 1984, particularly with the babble machines feeding the populace a steady diet of complete bollocks in a spirit we have come to associate with Fox News. Science-fiction has a generally poor track record for predicting the future which, to be fair, isn't always the intent so much as passing comment on emergent trends of the time in which it was written - which is the point that poor old Hugo Gernsback seemed to miss. Sleeper, unfortunately, doesn't even seem to say a whole lot about the nineteenth century aside from its characteristic obsession with aviation. Also the race thing is a little uncomfortable, with an imported black police force here serving for the brutal nightstick of the state. Nevertheless, the term savage is used just once so far as I noticed and it would be unfair to castigate Wells for having grown up in colonial Victorian society. Certainly his attitudes seem mild in comparison to Edgar Rice Burroughs dog-whistling the Klan or Lovecraft inserting the phrase let's go, Brandon into every other tale.

Wells wrote some astonishing books, but I've found the ground tough going once you're past the hits. In the Days of the Comet is mostly decent, but I found The War in the Air pretty thin and The Food of the Gods borderline unreadable; and Sleeper probably isn't as good as even The Food of the Gods which at least had jokes, or tried to crack jokes. It's not terrible, but it's a bit of a chore because there's not much to be said once we're done with how the times have changed. I ended up skimming the last thirty or so pages just in case anything happened, and nothing did apart from Graham crashing his plane. Wells just about communicates his loosely socialist views along with a well founded suspicion of anything calling itself a revolution, but it's all bogged down in the humourless drone of Graham's protracted sighing about the state of the world and how everything used to be better, albeit with some justification.

I suppose I may one day take a shot at the revised version should I happen upon a copy, but I'm not in a hurry to seek it out.

Invasion!

Keith Giffen, Bill Mantlo, Todd McFarlane & others Invasion! (1989)
This was one of those massive crossover jobs which comic book publishers tend to impose on their respective casts of characters to an approximately yearly schedule, or at least they did. Perhaps wary of playing the alternative universe card every single fucking time - although if that was ever a concern it's presumably since gone flying out the window - DC here fell back on the traditional alien invasion narrative just like mother used to make, complete with Dominators, a race bearing coincidental but nevertheless effectively malevolent resemblance to the yellow perils of less enlightened times. The idea is that the Green Lantern Corps, guardians of the DC galaxy, have been nobbled by some means or other leaving the field open for an alliance of extraterrestrial bad guys to step in with a final solution to the superhero problem. Earth is an unusually fertile source of superheroes, you see, and those caped guys are forever foiling the plans of various alien warmongers. Invasion! actually does quite a nice job of accounting for why so many superheroes are from Earth, and even why an explosion in a laboratory isn't always a bad thing - probably because playing the mutant card would have seemed a bit obvious, not to mention lacking in originality.

Invasion! is therefore about as good as you will expect it to be, depending on what you've taken from the above. As with caped fare in general, there's the usual level of cheese and implausibility; but if you can work through the pain, it's surprisingly satisfying - and entertaining, and well stocked with big ideas, albeit big slightly silly ideas. It was the Independence Day of comic books, I guess, and similarly reliant on sheer scale more than it was on individual stories - as epitomised by panels of massed superheroes flying at vast spaceships, their numbers so great as to necessitate them being drawn as a huge cosmic asparagus spear in which one can faintly pick out the shapes of tiny capes. Most of the art is handled by Todd McFarlane, and while he's no Jack Kirby and his Superman is a bit too much in the direction of Basil Wolverton, he communicates sheer scale very well, so the first two issues are actually a hoot - although you should probably keep in mind that I enjoyed Independence Day.

Unfortunately the war is won by the end of the second issue, leaving the finale to focus on the human tragedy of the aftermath which is all a bit ham-fisted. Scott from the Doom Patrol pegs it as a gratuitous result of the Dominators' gene bomb, saving Grant Morrison from having to include him in his post-dadaist revision of the team chronicles; as do some other generally unpopular characters whose names I've forgotten and may not have known in the first place. Portentous vows are made at various funerals, boo hoo, and so on and so forth. It feels like an afterthought and seems disproportionately extended, presumably because it would have seemed weird had issue three dropped from eighty pages to the fifteen which were probably all it needed.

The US military was gearing up for all manner of foreign soil japes back in 1989, notably the invasion of Panama with one eye on whatever seemed to be kicking off in the Gulf, Afghanistan, and so on; and Invasion! accordingly feels somewhat like an unreconstructed appeal to the sort of patriotism which might facilitate such things, amounting to a massive three issue grunt of sometimes you just gotta do the right thing, and without too much of that pesky liberal stuff getting in the way. This doesn't make it a bad comic so much as an unintentionally amusing one, at least with the benefit of hindsight, and it at least remains a refreshing change from alternative universes killed off in a narrative following the logic of a William Burroughs novel with less emphasis on men's bottoms; which doesn't necessarily make it a good comic either, but I've read much, much worse.

Asimov's Science Fiction 392

Sheila Williams (editor) Asimov's Science Fiction 392 (2008)
I've encountered an unusual number of recurrent patterns in this issue, some to the point of irony, not least being Robert Silverberg mourning the progressive spirit of science-fiction's new wave as a casualty of the juvenile and populist, whilst mentioning in much more than just passing the publication of his own Lord Valentine's Castle, of which the looooooong excerpt I read in Fantasy & Science Fiction a while back seemed the very definition of the stuffily traditional crowd pleaser; but never mind.

During the course of his book reviews, Paul Di Filippo laments that while there have been numerous heirs to the traditions of Clarke and Heinlein, there haven't been so many following in the footsteps of that other member of the big three after which this magazine is named; and this lament occurs in the very same issue as William Barton's novella, In the Age of the Quiet Sun which revisits Asimov's tales of asteroid mining without necessarily repeating them. Barton avoids just photocopying Asimov by means of a narrative voice grounded in the immediately recognisable world of an astronaut who makes throwaway references to episodes of Land of the Lost which he saw when he was a kid, and which I didn't so I had to look it up. It could have been horribly post-modern but is handled well and is convincing, even for a story in which we discover a sophisticated extraterrestrial derelict in the vicinity of Jupiter. Indeed, the prosaic clutter of our guy's thoughts renders Barton's story all the more credible in terms which seem very much like an update of what Asimov did on his good days. In the Age of the Quiet Sun turns out to be one of the better things in the collection.

I found Horse Racing by Mary Rosenblum a little charmless. It imagines a conspiracy whereby super-rich venture capitalists buy - although sponsor might be a better word - promising children without anyone realising, assuming the good fortune of their getting to go to a better school or whatever is down to pure luck; but it isn't, because this is how said venture capitalists ensure that someone who might grow up to cure a disease or solve the issue of global warming gets to do so, which is cute, not least in seeming to support the notion that all of the worlds ills may be cured through the wonders of a free market. Maybe I just misread the thing. Maybe it was actually a parody of that which it appears to propose.

I gave up on Derek Zumsteg's Usurpers after two pages. He's a sports writer and this was his first pro-fiction, written in experimental style and so reminding me of that thing about those who run before they've learned to walk - which you would think might have been obvious to a sports writer of all people. I gather it's something athletic, and locker room high jinks ensue in loosely punctuated present tense sentences clipped so as to create impressions rather than statements.

Fifty kids fifteen to eighteen stamp their feet. Stretch. Check each other out. Hopping in place to stay loose. Bitching about the bus ride over. Vinyl benches tied up their back if they're from a poor zip. Those boys recognise King, stop him as he passes. Exchange complicated handshakes. Wish him luck and mean it. Tell him to fuck shit up and mean it.

The whole thing is written in this way and is as such unreadable, resembling the thought bubbles of persons in eighties X-Men comics which at least had a visual context to make sense of the shorthand, and I've no fucking clue what vinyl benches tied up their back is supposed to mean; but then I don't understand why sports writers even exist. I cycle twenty miles a day but not once have I felt the urge to read about cycling.

Following which, it gets better. Soldier of the Singularity by Robert R. Chase is good, or possibly efficient, with a twist ending which is at least integral to the story and doesn't just pull astonished faces at the reader. Midnight Blue by Will McIntosh pulls off a reasonable Ray Bradbury impersonation without being too obvious about it. Cut Loose the Bonds of Flesh and Bone by Ian Creasey is briefly satisfying and nicely observed.

Slug Hell by Steven Utley is set in the Paleozoic and is probably the greatest of the shorter short stories in this issue. Nothing really happens aside from a few time travelling paleontologists holding forth on the subject of prehistoric invertebrates and continental drift, but sometimes that's all you need.

The Ice War by Stephen Baxter gets the cover for obvious reasons, and while I remember it as amazing, this time around I'm troubled by details which I'm not sure I even noticed fifteen years ago. It's approximately a prequel to Anti-Ice, bringing those peculiar ice things to Earth in the eighteenth century, and specifically to the attention of Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Isaac Newton as the three of them happen to be sharing a coach journey, which all feels a bit too Doctor Who for comfort, not least because even though each of them just happens to mention their respective famous novels, as they would, only Newton seems to have a legitimate reason for his presence, in this case engaging in discussion of whether God intervenes or simply prefers to leave things running. Swift dies before he's able to finish Gulliver - for some reason - and Defoe only seems to have showed up for the sake of mentioning that he wrote Robinson Crusoe, so it all seems a bit gratuitous; but outside of this, it's still Stephen Baxter and is therefore fucking fantastic in all other respects. If anyone is still writing science-fiction in a couple of hundred years time, someone will write a novel about an alien invasion as experienced by Irvine Welsh, Stephen Hawking, and J.K. Rowling as the three of them try to enjoy a lovely day out at the seaside.

There was also some poetry but, well, you know…