| On Books by Paul Di Filippo |
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In a certain sense, Jack Kirby is the Miles Davis of comics.
Now, Jack Kirby—by all accounts a gentle prince among men when not riled—had none of Davis’s nasty disposition, and was certainly to be found more toward the square end of the cultural spectrum than the hipster end. But in terms of his lasting effect on his art form, and his ability to remake the field around him, and his lateral thinking, he and Miles Davis are cut from the same cloth. Sheer talent is not enough to distinguish such a creator. Plenty of people have been as talented as Kirby or Davis on the level of sheer technical chops. It’s more the visionary uniqueness of their art, a forceful presentation that imposes itself on colleagues and audience, reshaping perceptions of what is possible, opening up whole new spheres of endeavor for others to play in. Pioneers, then.
Jack Kirby laid the groundwork for modern comics during the Golden Age, the 1940s, reconfiguring what had been a newspaper strip concept to a book concept. He invented romance comics in the 1950s. He revitalized the medium during the 1960s, in the process creating the Silver Age. Then, when he moved from Marvel to DC, he effected a lesser but real revolution with his Fourth World books.
All of this and much more you can glean from the magnificent mini-biography Kirby: King of Comics (Abrams, hardcover, $40.00, 224 pages, ISBN 978-0-8109-9447-8). Author Mark Evanier, himself a respected comics professional, knew Kirby intimately from 1969 until the elder artist’s death in 1994. That twenty-five years of intimacy comes across vividly in the text, granting the book an insightful and authoritative heft that other second-hand assessments of Kirby’s career might lack. And yet, honoring Kirby’s dedication to truthfulness, Evanier also displays an objective journalistic mien. This is no puff piece, but rather one full of historical research and carefully weighted judgments.
Evanier—who is in the process of finishing a mammoth, full-scale biography of Kirby that will constitute hundreds of pages of text alone—gives us here a condensed portrait of the unique man who invented so many famous comics icons. From Kirby’s rough-and-tumble, hardscrabble NYC youth, through his apprenticeship and journeyman days, and into his brilliant mastery and partial decline. He neither minimizes nor exaggerates the commercial injustices Kirby underwent for most of his life, thereby producing a quiet but powerful moral message about creators and the marketplace. Evanier splits his text about equally between limning Kirby the man and Kirby the artist. He discloses both shaping biographical events and secrets of Kirby’s art.
The choice illustrations go a long way toward fulfilling this latter goal. This oversized volume is a joy just to browse through, stuffed with riches. We see Kirby’s dynamic penciled work, follow the disparate results of various levels of inking and coloring by others. Seldom-reprinted work vies with the occasional necessary milestone image, such as the cover to Fantastic Four #1. And there are a fair number of photographs of Kirby and the important people in his life, from different eras.
Evanier recounts an incident where Kirby came close to stating his esthetic credo: that transcending reality through depictions of super-heroism offers more insight into existence than mere mimesis. It’s really the same credo that underlies all of fantasy and science fiction, and if our brand of literature has truly finally triumphed over naturalism today, much of the credit for that victory falls straight on the shoulders of Jack Kirby.
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My heading to this review is a trifle misleading. For although Anthony Boucher—born William Parker White—was indeed the founder and original (co-) editor of Asimov’s beloved cousin publication, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, he did not assume only that single role during his substantial but tragically abbreviated career. (Boucher died in 1968 of lung cancer complicated by other lifelong ills.) He held so many other roles as well, all of which he fulfilled to extremely high standards. Just how many others becomes apparent in Anthony Boucher: A Biobibliography (McFarland, trade paperback, $35.00, 223 pages, ISBN 978-0-7864-3320-9).
Critic and historian Jeffrey Marks, who has gone through Boucher’s archived papers and conducted other plentiful research as well, divides his material—and Boucher’s life—into four compartments. But these compartments, in turn subsectioned, are hardly watertight, no more than they would be in any creator’s life. Still, it’s a handy organizational format.
The first section of the book is titled simply “The Man.” Here we get acquainted with Boucher’s ancestors, his childhood (a somewhat sickly one, leading to a focus on reading and writing over more active pursuits), his education, and his courtship of his essential helpmeet Phyllis. We get a précis of his lifetime accomplishments, but then break away for a more detailed examination of the first aspect in the second chapter, “The Author.”
Boucher began his literary career with a sale to Weird Tales at age fifteen. But that was a fluke, and it was only when he was twenty-six (1937) that he had his first real success with the publication of his initial mystery novel. We chart his mixed conquest of this field up until the year 1942, when he ceased writing mysteries. It’s now time for “The Editor.”
This third chapter covers not only Boucher’s actual editorial accomplishments, but also his SF and fantasy writing. Marks has read seemingly everything by Boucher (including, curse him, unpublished manuscripts we can’t see!), and gives sympathetic and insightful synopses that elucidate not only Boucher’s methodologies and esthetics, but also relevant autobiographical and philosophical tidbits. This is the section where we can peruse the inside scoop about the founding of F&SF and how it almost never made it through its first year.
Our final survey of a dominant aspect of Boucher’s life is “The Critic.” Boucher wrote thousands of book reviews, and was during his heyday the predominant mystery-book reviewer in the country.
This rounds out 160 pages of the study, followed by a very thorough bibliography.
As a hardcore SF partisan, I can hardly agree with Marks’s climactic conclusion that “Boucher’s most enduring legacy has been his impact on the following generation of mystery reviewers.” Wonderful as reviewers are (cough, cough), it’s a tributary art form. It seems obvious to me that Boucher’s shaping of our genre into more mature forms is where his legacy truly resides. But that’s about my only cavil with this fine and essential book.
The thing about giants like Boucher is that as the years go on, they become figures of myth and high stature, living on in the minds of the current generation on some literary Olympus occupied by big thinking and parties filled with ambrosia and witty anecdotes. This biography, revealing the human frailties of the man, and especially his constant scrabbling for a paycheck (he never made more money annually than during his radio-scripting days, which ended in 1947, twenty years before his death!), restores the true dimensions of this person, rendering his feats even more worthy of honor and awe.
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Tales Before Narnia
by Douglas A. Anderson
Del Rey,
trade paperback,
$15.00,
340 pages,
ISBN 9780345498908
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Perhaps you recall with personal fondness, or merely by reputation, the landmark Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, helmed by Lin Carter, which brought so much classic and excellent pre-modern fantasy back into print, and helped establish the burgeoning dominance of that mode of genre fiction right after the initial Tolkien explosion of the 1960s. Well, for those elders who remember, and also for the novices who never experienced those glories, editor and scholar Douglas Anderson now delivers a volume that carries a very similar charge and freight of delights. (He even explicitly references Carter and his work in one of his fine story introductions.)
Anderson’s new anthology Tales Before Narnia (Del Rey, trade paperback, $15.00, 340 pages, ISBN 978-0-345-49890-8) is a companion volume to his Tales Before Tolkien (2003). As with that previous volume and its focus on Tolkien’s literary predecessors, Anderson is out to explicate the roots of the fiction of C.S. Lewis. And in a grander fashion than even its catchy but limiting title permits, the book will also seek to uncover the forerunners of all Lewis’s fiction, not just the excursions into Narnia. Furthermore, its subtitle—“The Roots of Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction”—extends its remit even further, into that inclusive Lin Carter realm.
We start with a Longfellow poem, “Tegner’s Drapa,” which evokes Lewis’s lifelong fascination with Scandinavia. “The Aunt and Amabel,” by E. Nesbit, gives us a primal example of entry into another world via a magical wardrobe. Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” is a welcome if obvious choice, with its prefiguring of Narnia’s White Witch.
A chapter from Lewisian icon George MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858) is succeeded by two items linked to MacDonald: Friederich de la Motte Fouqué’s “Undine” and Valdemar Thisted’s “Letters from Hell: Letter III.” Another diabolical dialogue is contained in John Macgowan’s “Fastosus and Avaro.” Sir Walter Scott gives us a ghost story with “The Tapestried Chamber,” while a fragment from Dickens, “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton,” tells of a bad man reformed.
The next story is one of my favorites of Anderson’s selection, and introduces me to a writer I knew nothing of. Owen Barfield’s “The Child and the Giant” starts out marvelously—”There was once a child who, having no mother and father, lived alone with a Giant in the middle of the deep forest.”—and escalates to delirious surreal heights. Next—shades of Lin Carter’s tastes—comes some William Morris, “A King’s Lesson.” And Robert Louis Stevenson ventures far afield—to Iceland of all places—for “The Waif Woman.”
“First Whisper of The Wind in the Willows” is the fascinating prototype version of Kenneth Grahame’s classic, as told via letters to his children. Rudyard Kipling introduces us to a place where agonies can be exchanged in “The Wish House.” Then comes my second favorite piece, Charles Williams’s “Et in Sempiternum Pereant.” This story about a house of strange spirits contains a sentence that to me sums up the essence of the frissons this genre produces: “The fantasy of growing old, like the fantasy of growing up, was part of the ineffable sweetness, touched with horror, of existence, itself the lordliest fantasy of all.”
And in the home stretch we find a poem by Tolkien, “The Dragon’s Visit”; a G.K. Chesterton parable, “The Coloured Lands”; the one piece of true SF, Charles Hall’s “The Man Who Lived Backwards”; a chapter from Roger Lancelyn Green’s unpublished fantasy, “The Wood That Time Forgot”; and the brutal prison romance of William Lindsay Gresham’s “The Dream Dust Factory.”
Anderson’s taste is impeccable, his sleuthing revelatory, and his fellow-feeling for Lewis and his works deep and abiding. Even if you’re not hot off a theatrical viewing of the movie Prince Caspian, as I was when I read this (that film will probably be out on DVD when this review appears), you’ll find that this anthology makes you want to revisit the work of every Inkling who ever inkled.
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The Last Book
by Zoran Zivkoviç’s
PS Publishing,
hardcover,
$40.00,
196 pages,
ISBN 9781906301194
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A Book You Won’t Want to Read
As anyone who has perused my humble introduction to Zoran Îivkoviç’s Impossible Stories (2006) can attest, I hold this Serbian author in high regard. To me, he’s one of the fraternity of great cosmopolitan fantasists that includes Borges, Murakami, Kafka, Lem, and García Marquez, simultaneously of his native country and also of all mankind. His work features a kind of Middle European weltschmerz tempered paradoxically by a buoyant, indomitable appreciation for life and its enigmas, an attitude that holds universal appeal to sensitive readers. (And testament to this appeal comes in the fact that we might even be seeing some of Îivkoviç’s work on the big screen soon, as his novel Hidden Camera has been optioned by a U.K. company.)
His newest novel, The Last Book (PS Publishing, hardcover, $40.00, 196 pages, ISBN 978-1-906301-19-4) carries forward Îivkoviç’s typical concerns and storytelling ambiguity, but also tries something new. For this novel is more or less a pure mystery tale atop its uncanny aspects. Introducer John Grant mentions Georges Simenon as a possible model, and I concur. In pellucid prose (once more superbly translated by Alice Copple-Tosiç) arrayed in punchy short chapters full of deft, bantering dialogue, Îivkoviç leads us through a labyrinth of death and meaning. The city of the tale is unnamed, but one assumes a Middle European place of quaint charms mixed with modernity. One of the eccentrically charming places is the Papyrus Bookstore, owned by Vera Gavriloviç. But in a deviation from its staid, bookish atmosphere, the Papyrus has the misfortune of hosting three seemingly “natural” deaths among its innocent customers, in as many days—a sequence of events that naturally brings in the police, in the form of our narrator, Inspector Dejan Lukiç. His investigations begin to turn up references to a volume called “the last book.” It starts to seem as if this odd item is the cause of the deaths, the object of worship by a cult, the grail of a secret government agency—and the one thing Lukiç both fears and desires to have. As a budding romance with Vera develops, the Inspector must also worry about her safety, as dire events continue to swirl about the little shop.
Îivkoviç’s work has often dealt with metatextual matters and tropes, but he always grounds these playfully abstruse and intellectual motifs in solid, sensual reality, a tactic he continues to pursue here. The personalities of Vera and Dejan are solidly naturalistic and appealing, and the other lesser characters are fully fleshed in as well. I love Dejan’s droll take on life. Consider one of his early comments to Vera: “You have greatly surpassed the average number of deaths in a bookstore.” The whole thread of their teashop meetings (a venue that plays a larger part in the mystery than you at first might suspect) lends a quotidian sensory tangibility to the tale. The end result of Îivkoviç’s sly maneuverings is a reading experience akin to a film by that master of subtle affrights, Val Lewton, specifically The Seventh Victim (1943). Enter this bookshop at your own risk!
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The Shadow Year
By Jeffrey Ford
William Morrow,
hardcover,
$25.95,
289 pages,
ISBN 9780061231520
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Insert Name of Your Home Town Here
Readers who have already enjoyed Jeffrey Ford’s subtly stunning and award-winning novella “Botch Town,” included in his last collection, The Empire of Ice Cream (2006), will instantly flock to read his expansion of the tale in the form of his latest novel, The Shadow Year (William Morrow, hardcover, $25.95, 289 pages, ISBN 978-0-06-123152-0). Others who have not previously encountered the magic of “Botch Town”—yet who know the byline of Ford as belonging to one of our best contemporary fantasists—will be automatically drawn to the book. Perhaps some readers who perked up when Ford’s The Girl in the Glass (2005) won an Edgar award will come over to this volume for its mainstream, suspense-novel packaging. But for whatever reason you might be drawn to The Shadow Year, rest assured that your rewards will be awesome. And for those who miss the book entirely—well, extend your sympathy and compassion their way, and maybe press the eventual paperback into their hands.
The novel is narrated by a young boy, middle child of a family composed of alcoholic Mom, overworked Dad, live-in grandparents, and the three kids. Yet this novel is hardly a YA book, no more than is Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Instead, it’s a retrospective examination (that backward-looking aspect of the telling is subliminally present throughout, explicitly so by the end) of a few pivotal months in the life of a sensitive youngster, and all those around him—relatives, friends, adults, townspeople in general, and one icon of evil, Mr. White. It’s a keen-eyed, compassionate, merciless examination of domesticity, morality, art and love, conformity and rebellion, by turns funny as an episode of The Simpsons or Calvin and Hobbes, and as bracingly grim as some nineteenth century Russian opus. In other words, pure Ford.
Our narrator, his big brother Jim and younger sister Mary live in a typical small town on Long Island, in the early 1960s. Their parents are working poor, and the kids are typical and believably normal in their juvenile concerns, mannerisms, and conversation. Yet they’re really not, no more than is any child. The eccentricities and peculiarities and foibles of the children—and of most of the adults—represent Ford’s big thesis: that no one is “normal,” that life is a botch we maneuver through by pratfall and improvisation, that all that sustains us is reliance on each other, and that to pretend otherwise is the Big Lie which society tries to inflict.
The main line of the plot concerns the depredations of Mr. White, evil prowler in darkness, and how the kids strive to foil him, employing their basement-confined scale model of the town as an augury of events. But the real wealth of the book lies in its evocation of a certain era in American life—the author’s own youth—and also of the universality of childhood, rich with everyday marvels and commonplace miracles. Ford’s understated tone and minute particularity and inclusion of just the perfect telling details insure that this village and the lives of its inhabitants will be as real to you as your own childhood milieu.
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Copyright
"On Books" by Paul Di Filippo, copyright © 2009, with permission of the author.
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