July
31,
2007
So a while back, I ended up reading a romance novel recommended by Kate Nepveu to prove a point about how men could very well like romance novels. And since (of course) I was right, I ended up liking the book, and bought another off Kate’s list of recommendations, Mary Balogh’s A Summer to Remember
, which I’ve just gotten to reading now.
At the beginning, I was afraid this was going to be horrid. Set in Regency London, a roguish rake makes a bet that he can be married (which I take from context to mean “engaged”) to a prim and proper lady inside of a few weeks. It’s a contrived setup, and it features the would-be protagonists acting like jerks and suckers, so I was afraid this was going to be a book where I’m rooting for horrid unlikable people to get together for no earthly reason.
But no. It turns out that this is just a prologue-y bit to get things started. Apologies are tendered, the action moves to the country, and the characters stop acting like cardboard plot tokens and start acting like people — somewhat idealized people to be sure, but still people. Even better, there’s enough actual character development and familial relationship plot stuff that the rest of the book doesn’t feel like a series of contrived excuses to keep Our Heroes from realizing that they love each other; the relationship develops organically, and the ultimate resolution is satisfying.
Good stuff — I think better than the Quinn novel — and well worth reading if you’re not afraid of getting girl cooties.
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July
31,
2007
Warren Ellis’ Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E., vol. 2: I Kick Your Face
will pretty much appeal to you in direct correlation to the level of awesomeness you ascribe to that subtitle. Like the previous volume, it’s doing highly amusing things with the Marvel Universe, and the writing and art are both sharp. This continues to be highly recommended, if you’re the sort of person who likes funny things.
Meanwhile, Mike Carey’s Ultimate Fantastic Four, vol. 8: Devils
continues to be a solid superhero comic that’s just a little better-written than it needs to be. Recommended to fans of superhero comics, but this isn’t a genre-busting thing like Carey’s Lucifer.
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July
31,
2007
So, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
. I don’t really need to say anything about this, but just for posterity: It was a fairly weak finish to a good-to-mediocre series, one that ended things up inartfully and clumsily... but still managed to be fast-reading enough for me to plow through the book in a day. If you’ve read the others, you might as well read this one. If you haven’t read any of them, well, no point starting now.
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July
31,
2007
Jim C. Hines’ Goblin Quest
is pretty much your standard D&D adventure, told from the perspective of a goblin, Jig, who lives in the goblin camp on the first level of the dungeon, and gets caught up with a party of adventurers. This could be incredibly facile, but Hines adds enough depth to the characters to make up for the unsurprising inversion of the deliberate cliches. Nothing great, but good light summer paperback reading.
Hines’ Goblin Hero
, the sequel, is more muddled. The problem is it focuses on two protagonists: The goblin from the first book, who’s now a hero and needs to become more than just a hero; and a wannabe-wizard goblin, who’s aching to follow the Hero’s Path (outlined for her in a book by “Josca,” in a way that should thrill devotees of Joseph Campbell — I’m looking at you, George Lucas and John Novak). Both of these protagonists have a story in them, but they’re not the same story, yet here they are, thrust together in the same plot. It ends up whipsawing back and forth between two fundamentally different things and never quite settles down. On the plus side, it is less cliched than the first book. I didn’t love it, but I’m interested enough to buy the sequel when it comes out.
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July
29,
2007
Over on the left-hand navigation, you’ll see two new choices, which will let you browse my archives by author or by “tag” (which is mostly genre or medium right now, but could be pretty much anything I feel like using in the future). So if you’ve been wanting to look for my comments on a particular book, or on programming books or graphic novels, well, hey, you can.
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July
18,
2007
Man, comic books. Okay, I tried to do this all nice, but it’s round-up time:
-
Reginald Hudlin’s Black Panther: Who is the Black Panther?, Black Panther: Bad Mutha, and The Bride
in conjunction with Reginald Hudlin and Peter Milligan’s X-Men/Black Panther: Wild Kingdom
and Eric Jerome Dickey’s Storm
combine to tell the story of the Black Panther’s search for a bride (who, it probably won’t surprise you to learn, is Storm), as well as filling in some backstory. The Storm volume is pretty disposable, but the Black Panther stuff is very solid. Not up to Priest’s superb arc, but very decent above-average superhero stuff that takes the Panther seriously as both a superhero and a black man.
-
Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men, vol. 3: Torn
is twistily plotted, well written, and just generally highly enjoyable. As with his previous work on the X-Men, Whedon isn’t transcending the genre, but (along with fellow TV-exile Straczynski) he’s turning out some of the best superhero stuff out there right now.
-
Zeb Wells’ Young Avengers and Runaways: Civil War
is both an unnecessary entry in the Civil War canon and a not-very-good Runaways story. I found it extremely confusing, and kept getting characters mixed-up. Not terribly bad, but definitely not worth buying for critical readers.
-
Brian Bendis, Warren Ellis, Paul Jenkins, and Dan Slott’s Civil War: Marvel Universe
is sort of a miscellaneous collection of odds ‘n’ ends from the Civil War timeframe. Decent enough, but since a major part of the book is the She-Hulk story, I felt a little irritated when I picked up Dan Slott’s She-Hulk, vol. 4: Laws of Attraction
and found out that a) the story was included in there too, and b) it was in the middle of the volume, so I’d initially read the story out of context. Buy the She-Hulk, skip the Marvel Universe.
-
Brian K. Vaughan’s Doctor Strange: The Oath
takes the mystical Sorceror Supreme and puts him into a this-worldly mystery story. It’s nothing that’ll blow you away, but it’s solid enough.
- That’s also the sort of non-committal comment I’ll make about Brian Reed’s Ms. Marvel: Best of the Best
, in which second-tier hero Ms. Marvel (tip to comic novices: female versions of male heroes are pretty much second-tier by default) decides that she should be totally fucking awesome and quit piggling around. Clever conceit, but wasted on standard comic book plots.
-
J. Michael Stracynzki’s Bullet Points
may as well have been called What If... Steve Rogers Didn’t Receive The Super-Soldier Serum?, and it’s a very traditional What If...? story, tracing a chain of events that occur from one small shift in the Marvel Universe and which end up creating a world that’s totally different from the “real” one. I’m a sucker for well-done Marvel Universe alt-history, and this was well done.
-
Ed Brubaker’s Coward
is a non-superhero crime story. I don’t really love crime stories, but this one ends up being almost a caper story, and I ended up liking it quite a bit. If you like this kind of thing, you’ll love this thing; if not, you may still like it.
And that clears up that backlog...
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July
1,
2007
Hey, remember Neil Gaiman’s kinda-okay 1602
? No? Forgot it already? Well, let Peter David’s Marvel 1602: Fantastick Four
refresh your memory. Or, y’know, not, because it turns out that Peter David can’t do much more with that Elizabethan superhero thing than Gaiman did. This is a decent enough storylet, but nothing particularly special. As alternate takes on the Fantastic Four go, it’s better than that Unstable Molecules tripe, but not as good as the Ultimate Fantastic Four. I will say, though, that Pascal Alixe’s art is interestingly different, with a Mr. Fantastic who borders on the creepy.
Peter David’s X-Factor: Life and Death Matters and X-Factor: Many Lives of Madrox
are very good works in the increasingly interesting X-Factor series, which continues to be focused on a ragtag bunch of mutants working as private investigators (but getting mixed up in bigger problems). The characterization and interpersonal relations of the characters are great, the plots interesting, and the puzzles intriguing. I don’t know that “superhero mystery” is really a genre, but if it is, this is a fine exemplar of the genre. Highly recommended.
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July
1,
2007
Leaving the real Marvel Universe behind, let’s take a small detour into their Ultimate Universe, with Brian Michael Bendis’ Ultimate Spider-Man, vols. 7 and 8 and Ultimate Spider-Man: Clone Saga
, the latest in the semi-long-running series. Here we have a crossover with Ultimate Moon Knight, lots of interactions with the Ultimate X-Men (including a particularly well-done romance with Kitty Pryde), the Black Cat, and a whole bunch more — including, as the title would indicate, a take on the whole clone saga thing, which is fortunately way way better than the actual nightmarish hellhole of a story in the real Marvel Universe.
Bendis has done a bunch of good work (and some bad stuff), but when it comes right down to it, Ultimate Spider-Man is probably his best writing. It combines humor, action, and real characterization in a way that takes the best elements of classic superhero stories and melds them with the best parts of modern writing. Mix the high level of these books along with the lack of back-continuity to worry about, and the Ultimate Spider-Man books could serve as a good gateway drug into the rest of Marvel’s superhero books. (In fact, this is precisely what happened to me: I was completely out of the superhero comic market until I picked up the first volume of Ultimate Spider-Man, and now look where I am...)
Also in the Ultimate Universe is Mike Carey’s Ultimate Fantastic Four, vol. 7: God War
. Unlike Ultimate Spider-Man, which found its voice right away with Bendis, the Ultimate Fantastic Four have been more unsettled. There was an uninspired first volume by Bendis and Millar that established them as generic teenagers; then Warren Ellis took a hand and made things substantially more interesting; then Millar took back over and turned them generic again, and now here we are with Mike Carey (of Lucifer fame), who makes them feel more like the Fantastic Four than they’ve felt so far. Lots of cosmic adventure, but in an appropriately unconventional and modern fashion. Good stuff.
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