Comics Old and New

Please allow me to indulge once again my fond mania for all things Jack Kirby. After reviewing Mark Evanier’s biography Kirby: King of Comics a few columns ago, I would be positively negligent in my critic’s duties if I did not point you toward The Best of Simon and Kirby (Titan Books, hardcover, $39.95, 240 pages, ISBN 978-1845769314). This stunning, oversized compilation of complete stories by Kirby and his perpetual pal and collaborator Joe Simon samples their immense output from 1940 all the way up to 1960. It features an introduction by Simon himself (still, as I write, vibrantly with us at age ninety-six!), and sectional mini-essays by Evanier.

But the main attraction, of course, is found in the art and narrative. Simon’s fertile—even febrile?—scripting brain is ably paralleled by Kirby’s dynamic drawings. The first creator produces a concept such as “telekinetic energy flinger.” His partner then illustrates loose-limbed bodies flying wildly through the air under the impetus of the aforementioned flinger. To add that the villain of this piece is a two-headed midget and the hero a “newscaster” and his juvenile assistant (Fighting American and Speedboy) is merely to add surreal icing on the cosmic cake. (All this is on display in the story titled “Assignment: Find the King of the Crime Syndicate.”)

The more than two dozen stories here are arranged by genre, from superheroes to romance, westerns to humor, giving proof of Simon and Kirby’s relentless broad professionalism and powers of invention. The remarkable compression of Simon’s plotting—sometimes leading to loony leaps of illogic—is matched by Kirby’s brawling, graceful carnality.

Which is not to say the lads could not be ironically metatextual—as in their Boy Commandos story “Satan Wears a Swastika,” where the creators themselves appear as characters—or subliminally erotic, as in “The Savage in Me!” whose Sue Storm lookalike battles her own inner passions involving a roughneck adventurer.
Great as these Golden Age stories are, they are even more valuable as a proving ground for the exemplary work that Kirby would do during the Silver Age. You read them with nine-tenths of your mind on the story, and one-tenth looking for prototypes of more famous characters. Somehow that adds up to 110 percent pleasure.

Titan Books has lavished gorgeous design concepts and color reproduction fidelity on this package. What’s even better is that at least six more volumes in this series are promised.

 

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Although Victoria Francés’s new book, Arlene’s Heart (NBM, hardcover, $24.95, 80 pages, ISBN 978-1-56163-552-8) is as hip and au courant as a song by the Dresden Dolls, whose wounded cabaret-goth sensibility it shares, this fantasy in text and pictures also reminds me, curiously, of George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind (1871). That Francés manages to convey both postmodern urban anomie and pre-modern allegorical innocence is a major achievement.

We open with the parable of orphaned, New York City dollmaker Arlene, who succumbs to breast cancer and dies, even after having a mastectomy. She reawakens in some inexplicable afterlife, transformed into a chest-scarred doll. Feeling that her heart has been ripped from her, the puppet Arlene begins a bardo odyssey through labyrinths both dreamy and nightmarish, encountering creatures and beings who alternately want to aid or destroy her.

Spanish creator Francés exhibits a flair for both prose and visuals. The story itself, although it verges at points on heavy-handedness, ultimately redeems itself from any charges of preaching by its intensity and refusal to point accusatory fingers toward either saviors or villains. But it’s Francés’s artwork that will stun and capture the reader’s sensibilities and, well, heart. With meticulous mimesis, Francés portrays the most surreal images whose cumulative effects might be likened to those produced by the films of one of her countrymen, Guillermo del Toro.

This is a journey through eerie lands both dark and beautiful.

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Your Money and Your Life

Two distinct and superior germlines flow into Alex Irvine’s newest novel, Buyout (Del Rey, trade paper, $14.00, 319 pages, ISBN 978-0-345-49433-7), making it a potent mutant literary offspring that challenges more generic and staid SF for ecosystem dominance.

On the one hand, Irvine beautifully appropriates and comes wholeheartedly to earn as his own the hip, sardonic voice and attitude of mainstream authors of social commentary like Bruce Wagner, Kurt Andersen, and Tom Wolfe. On the other hand, he embraces and extends the comic-inferno SF of Pohl and Kornbluth, Kurt Vonnegut, and Robert Sheckley.

And then, adding a third parent to the genetic mix, Irvine introduces a healthy squirt of Philip K. Dick genes, in the form of little-guy protagonist trapped in surreal, entropic circumstances revolving around the nature and value of human life. It is no accident that our hero’s surnam “Kindred,” alludes to the K in PKD.

And what is the conceptual Jell-O-mold that allows such seemingly disparate ingredients to coalesce into a tasty, well-formed treat? Exactly this scenario:

In the year 2040 (not “one hundred years from now,” as the back-cover copy bafflingly contends), heartless fiscal entrepreneurs come up with a new notion for leveraging money. Certain indisputably guilty and repugnant criminals facing life in prison without parole will be able to arrange a “buyout.” In return for voluntarily submitting to otherwise-precluded executions, the prisoners will get a huge sum of money (still only a small portion of what they would have cost the state in the long run) that can be assigned to their heirs. Everybody wins. Until the real costs of this scheme become apparent.

Our protagonist is one Martin Kindred, insurance expert, assigned to be the public face of the buyout plan. As with many PKD types, he faces marital turmoil, professional hurdles, and annoyingly dissenting inner voices. (A glitch in his car’s software falls just short of a typical phildickian hectoring AI.) He starts out as a complacent cog in the system, concerned with money and misguided principles, until events jolt him fully “awake.”

As counterbalance to Martin we get his roguish pal, Charlie Rhodes, private investigator who vets every potential buyout to make sure that no embarrassing details lurk in the victim’s background that the hyper-vigilant media could use to bring down the buyout program. Charlie’s streetwise savvy is the perfect foil to Martin’s high-mindedness, and Irvine even frequently switches to Charlie’s POV, much as Dick would wander in and out of the multiple consciousnesses of his characters. Only when Irvine does this, you know it’s deliberate!

In the end, Martin’s problem is encapsulated in some dialogue he has with a taxi driver.

“I knew it,” the cabbie said. “You’re not perfect, but you try to do the right thing for the right reason”’

“Yeah, I do,” Martin said.

“Well that,’ the cabbie said, “is the road to madness. But you should still try to do it.”

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Jester Gigolo

For an author who’s previously ridden roughshod in humorous fashion over the life of Christ, in Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal (2002), the radical vivisection and Frankenstein reassemblage of the corpse of Shakespeare should be a cakewalk—if that’s not mixing up my meta-phors too much. And so we do indeed discern, in Christopher Moore’s newest, Fool (William Morrow, hardcover, $26.99, 311 pages, ISBN 978-0-06-059031-4). This novel, from one of fantastika’s finest humorists, comes off as more easygoing than acidic, formulaic rather than visionary. It’s off-the-cuff Mel Brooks or Monty Python-style humor. And while the laughs are copious, the whole affair has a certain over-familiarity to it. Easy targets glibly jabbed.

One could never say this of Moore’s best work, such as my favorite of his, Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings (2003). In the majority of his books, all featuring contemporary settings, he plumbs the weirdness of the postmodern world via relatable albeit gonzo characters. Moreover, he’s a distinctly American voice.

In his new book, a comical re-casting of King Lear (1606) from the Fool’s POV, Moore, perforce, adopts the original cast of the play, employing a British accent. So he has to make use of pre-formed characters not necessarily perfectly tuned to his sensibilities and themes (although some new folks, such as the Fool’s simple-minded assistant Drool, are introduced). And while his mastery of the language and cultural touchstones of those sceptered isles is capable and easy to accept, that distinct American voice is absent and missed. Although truthfully, I’m awfully glad for the invention of such British towns as Dog Snogging and Bonking Ewe.

Our narrator, Pocket (so called for his small size), is Lear’s famous Fool. But this is not to say he’s bound by his textual role. He’s more concerned with every other possible non-canonical event than with Lear’s tragic downfall. Self-preservation and self-aggrandizement are Pocket’s main concerns, and we watch him scampering from one self-serving situation to another, usually involving women, food, drink, or some bawdy combination of the three. He’s meant to be an utterly amoral fellow, doing good only by accident, and his ultimate ennoblement seems a bit forced and out of character. But Moore works hard to ensure that events spin along so merrily and absurdly that any questions we have about the ultimate import of all these shenanigans is outweighed by the slapstick. He even allows us to interpret events, if we wish, as some kind of post-apocalyptic recycling of history, with references to the vanished empire of “Merica,” producer of such literary masterpieces as “Green Eggs and Hamlet.”

But in general, it’s most fruitful to read this tale as pure parody on the order of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). As such, it lovingly takes the piss out of a venerable literary icon in a fashion guaranteed to entertain.

The Pro-metheus Project:
Trapped
by Douglas E. Richards

Nartea Publishing,
Trade Paper
$9.95,
139 pages
ISBN 0974876542

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YA SF 4 U

Alerted by an appeal from their author, I am happy to recommend to you two novels of recent vintage: The Pro-metheus Project: Trapped (Nartea Publishing, trade paper, $9.95, 139 pages, ISBN 0-9748765-4-2) and The Pro-metheus Project: Captured (Nartea Publishing, trade paper, $7.95, 139 pages, ISBN 1-933255-33-1). As their author, Douglas E. Richards, mentions, while fantasy YA is plentiful, genuine YA SF is more rare and to be cherished. These books, written in a spare yet cinematic style, follow the exploits of brother and sister Ryan and Regan Resnick as they seek to unriddle an alien installation discovered beneath Earth’s surface. Readers will surely be reminded of Eleanor Cameron’s Mushroom Planet series, as well as Heinlein’s Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958), and even Clarke’s 2001 (1968). A scientist and journalist by trade, Richards is rigorous about his science, yet still vividly speculative, able to capture the imagination of any teen, I think. My only complaint: aren’t those two terminal adjectives in the titles nearly identical?