Todd Klein's Blog, page 26

Incoming: SUPERMAN BY KURT BUSIEK HC

Images © DC Comics

I first met Kurt Busiek in the early 1980s when we were both trying to sell “Tales of the Green Lantern Corps” stories to editor Ernie Colón at DC. I was on staff, he was a frequent visitor. Little did I suspect I would one day hold a massive book like this of his fine writing about DC’s primary character. I lettered his excellent miniseries with Stuart Immonen SUPERMAN: SECRET IDENTITY, one of my favorite Superman stories and included here along with lots of other fine work, 664 pages of it! Release date is set for July 16, 2024. To order, check with your comics retailer or use the Amazon link below. Congrats, Kurt!

Superman by Kurt Busiek Book One

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Rereading: THE PINTO DEER by Keith Robertson

In this 1956 novel, Robertson returns to the characters and setting of his Outlaws of the Sourland. This time teenager John Michelson is stalking a rare pinto deer in the Sourland Mountain area, trying to capture it for a private zoo. He’s also helping a new neighbors Mrs. Atkinson and her daughter Billy explore the woods and area. Mrs. Atkinson is drawing and painting ferns for a book about them, and Billy enjoys the outdoors. They also have another reason for being there which is gradually revealed.

John is also troubled by deer poachers who are active in the area, but very hard to catch, and he helps the local game warden with that when he can. One subject of his scrutiny is a reclusive man known as One-Ear Pete who he sees also stalking the pinto deer, and tracking it becomes something of a competition between them. But is Pete going to kill the deer, or is he involved with the poachers? The answers to these and many other mysteries gradually unfold in this engaging story. John gets help from Billy, who is one of Robertson’s innocent females masking a devious intelligence, and also his dog Wolf, the puppy he rescued as the only survivor of the wild dog pack in the previous book.

Recommended if you can find it.

The Pinto Deer by Keith Robertson

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Rereading: FREDDY AND THE MEN FROM MARS by Walter R. Brooks

The twenty-second in the Freddy series continues some of the space-travel themes of the twentieth book, Freddy and the Space Ship, playing on a popular interest of kids and adults when it was published in 1954. Herbert Garble, a long-time Freddy villain, has “discovered” a group of “Martians” who supposedly landed in their flying saucer, as pictured above on the book’s cover. Freddy readers will soon recognize these creatures disguised as Martians, also long-time villains in the series, but Garble convinces the Boomschmidt circus to put them on display in his side show, allowing Garble to collect barrels-full of change in payment to see them, and the attraction draws huge crowds. Freddy and his friends on the Bean Farm and in the circus know there’s trickery involved, but can’t do much to stop it without ruining the reputation of the circus.

Meanwhile, as can be seen on the endpaper design by the ever-creative Kurt Wiese, another saucer arrives with real Martians, who have come to investigate the sideshow attraction, and Freddy and his friends soon become their allies. Plans are hatched to replace Garble’s fakes with the real thing, and cutting him out of the deal, but of course Garble has other ideas.

Great fun, even as the series gets sillier, and recommended.

Freddy and the Men from Mars by Walter R Brooks

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Rereading: THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ by L. Frank Baum

Nearly everyone knows this story from the 1939 film, but have you read the original book first published in 1900? I loved the film for years before trying the book, and as a child I found it disappointing. Drama and spectacle from the film were not often here, I didn’t like the depiction of the main characters by artist W. W. Denslow, and I felt many of the additional incidents skipped by the film added nothing important to the story.

Rereading it now, I like it better, especially in this Dover paperback from 1960 that faithfully recreates all the wonderful two-color art by Denslow on nearly every page, as well as all the full color plates, which were often missing in later editions. I’m still not fond of Denslow’s depictions of the characters, I much prefer those of John R. Neill, who illustrated the rest of the Oz books by Baum, but I can now better appreciate Denslow’s skill as a designer and cartoonist.

The color plates are skillfully produced without any black ink, only magenta, cyan and yellow. Dorothy is, to my eye, too young, too short, and rather chubby. Dorothy’s three companions I now like better than when I first saw them, with the Cowardly Lion being the best in my opinion, while Toto is fine.

In the text of the book, nearly every page has beautifully designed two-color art like this, with excellent type design. Again I find the Wizard too young, short, and chubby, but that was Denslow’s style.

Reading this again, I can better appreciate the writing. Quite a few lines of dialogue reappear in the MGM film, and you can see where other elements of the movie came from, particularly Baum’s description of Dorothy’s home in Kansas as being very gray, while the land of Oz is full of color. I think the many script writers of the film added elements that improved Baum’s story, but his book is well worth reading too, and I’m glad I did. The first edition is rare and very expensive, costing many thousands of dollars today. If you can find the Dover paperback, I highly recommend it. The paper and printing of the 1960 edition are also excellent, and have held up beautifully. I suspect later editions may not have all the colorful art of this one. An Amazon search I can link to is not showing it, but if you do your own Google search you’ll find it.

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Rereading: AUGUST ADVENTURE by M. E. Atkinson

Illustrations and map by Harold Jones

This is the first of a series of fourteen books about the Lockett family: Oliver, Jane, and Bill, and their holiday adventures. It was written in the early 1930s, and reflects an England between two world wars. Automobiles and telephones are present, as are buses and trains, but the countryside the children travel through in their horse-drawn caravan is rural and bucolic, with some dangers and threats, but also many kind strangers willing to offer help when needed.

The three Locketts have parents who are away in India (their father is stationed there in the government), and are raised collectively by several aunts and uncles. One of the aunts is the author, who helps them tell their stories, acting as the transcriber of their accounts (or so it’s set up). As this summer adventure begins, all the aunts and uncles are going away on holidays in Europe or on cruises except for one, Aunt Lavinia, who is an artist. She agrees to take them, and they are sent to her by train, but when they arrive, the aunt is missing, and a man they don’t know is staying in her cottage. Also there’s a beautifully painted and stocked caravan (imagine a gypsy one) with a horse to pull it, and the man sends them off in the caravan to join their aunt in a town some distance away. Two more children are soon added, Anna and her little brother Robin, also related to Aunt Lavinia, and sent off by their sick grandmother to join the holiday party.

The children aren’t sure they believe the man in the cottage, but the lure of traveling in the caravan and camping along the way is too strong to resist. They decide to send telegrams to the post office where their aunt is said to be each day until they hear from her what to do next, but they never do hear from her. A few adults give them trouble about traveling alone, but Anna is tall for her age, and with her hair done right can just pass as an adult. Anna is also experienced with horses, and takes charge of Pegasus, their cart horse.

And plenty of fun and exciting adventures they have, including making friends with two wealthy children and staying in their mansion, getting caught in a heath fire, being deluged by a strong storm, taking refuge in a haunted house, and rescuing a small dog from bullies trying to drown it, then having to battle them and their friends. Always the mystery of the missing aunt is ahead of them, and as they run out of cash, things look bleak. Can they make it through?

These British holiday adventure books are not as well written as the Arthur Ransome ones beginning with “Swallows and Amazons,” but they are still a pleasure to read, and great fun. I also like the line drawings of artist Harold Jones. Recommended.

August Adventure by M E Atkinson

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Rereading: OUTLAWS OF THE SOURLAND by Keith Robertson

John Michelson and his family have a small farm in central New Jersey in the area north of Princeton known as The Sourlands, or Sourland Mountain, a last line of piled up rock before the flatlands to the south, though really more of a hill than a mountain. John’s father raises chickens, and John is raising sheep to help fund his plans for college next year. Those plans are dashed when a pack of wild dogs kills most of the lambs in his herd one night. John’s father is able to shoot and kill one of the pack, the rest get away, and John’s father falls and breaks his hip in the effort.

That also changes the plan, as John realizes he needs to stay home this coming year to work the farm until his father can get back on his feet. Meanwhile, finding and killing the wild dog pack becomes his obsession, and he gets help from his friend Allan, who has a home-built truck that can go anywhere, as well as elderly mountain man Zeke Dobble, who has seen the leader of the pack, a strong red-coated and wily beast who looks more like a wolf than a dog. John also gets help from a new friend, neighbor Professor Danville, who hires him to help explore the mountain and its wildlife he wants to write a book about.

Things become more complicated and dangerous when John finds out some of his lambs were actually stolen, and other farm animals have been too. John gets on the trail of the thief, and tracking him down becomes his second obsession, and one that puts he and Allan in far more danger.

This is a fine, action-filled adventure story, and based on a real area of my own state that I knew little about. I loved it as a young reader, and it holds up well, though the hunting and trapping John takes on don’t appeal to me now. Recommended.

Outlaws of the Sourland by Keith Robertson

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Rereading: FREDDY AND THE SPACE SHIP by Walter R. Brooks

The Bean farm in upstate New York is again a busy place. Mrs. Bean’s distant relative Mr. Bismuth and his wife and two children had moved into an abandoned house in the woods behind the farm, but they set fire to it, and are then invited to live with Mr. and Mrs. Bean. This is something Mrs. Bean felt obligated to do, but the Bismuths are soon eating everything the Beans put on the table, and taking over the house. Mr. Bismuth talks a good game, but is a liar and a thief as well, though proving it is hard, even for Freddy and his friends. Meanwhile, Mr. Bean’s brother, Uncle Ben, has a new project, he’s building a rocket ship in the back pasture and plans to fly it to Mars. The farm animals all want to go with him, but just three are chosen: Freddy, Jinx the cat, and Georgie the dog. Mrs. Peppercorn from town also insists on going. The space ship launches successfully, but goes off course in space, and when it lands, they seem to be in a burned-out landscape. Much humor is driven by the facts of where they really are, and Freddy and his friends must also figure out how to get rid of the Bismuths before they bankrupt the Beans.

This twentieth book in the Freddy series is where it kind of went off the rails for me. The characters and humor are as enjoyable as ever, but the science is to be laughed at, not with. The book was first published in 1953, when real space travel was not yet a fact, but by the time I read it ten years later, I was following real space travel, and already had a good grounding in the science involved from the science fiction novels for young readers by Robert Heinlein. Fortunately the space flight only takes up a few chapters, and the rest of the story is the usual entertaining work of Brooks, where Freddy and friends must outsmart Mr. Bismuth. Recommended.

Freddy and the Space Ship by Walter R Brooks

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Incoming: WONDER WOMAN EARTH ONE Trade Paperback

Images © DC Comics

I hadn’t seen any of this new line from DC, 5.5 by 8.5 inch trade paperbacks, designed to fit in well with other trade paperbacks. The reduction in size from the original three hardcovers is about 85%, but it looks fine to me. The price of $9.99 is certainly a bargain for 376 pages of full color comics. I enjoyed lettering this story, and recommend it. Both the art and writing are excellent. Amazon lists a release date of Aug 6, 2024, but since my copies arrived last week, it might well go on sale before that. Keep an eye on the Amazon listing for updates, or check with your comics retailer.

Wonder Woman Earth One DC Compact Comics

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Rereading: THE TROUBLE WITH JENNY’S EAR by Oliver Butterworth

Jenny is six years old and lives with her two older brothers, Joe and Stan, and her parents in a rural New England town. Their Uncle Harold owns an electrical repair shop, and Joe and Stan are thrilled with all the leftover equipment he brings them to play with. Soon they have the entire house wired with microphones and speakers, and then they add closed-circuit TV to the mix. The family don’t always appreciate the boys’ ideas of fun with electronics, like loud noise early in the morning, but they do come up with a few useful ideas.

Jenny is frightened by some of their loud experiments, and then discovers one of her ears has been prompted into a different kind of hearing: she can hear people’s thoughts. At first skeptical, her family soon realizes it’s true when she tells them what they’re thinking. The family has a nice house and yard that runs down to a brook, and beyond it is the best sledding hill in the area. The owner of all that property has decided to sell to developers. But if Jenny’s new ability can be used to raise enough money, they can buy all that land and preserve it. So begins a campaign where Jenny answers questions with perfect accuracy because she can read the answers from the thoughts of the person asking. First a local spelling bee, then a local quiz show, and soon she’s invited to be on the biggest quiz show in New York City, with a grand prize big enough to buy the land she wants to save. But will the stress of the show be too much for the young girl?

This is Butterworth’s second book, following his very popular “The Enormous Egg.” I enjoyed rereading it, and the idea is clever, but not quite as interesting as his first book, and the illustrations are very simple and add nothing to the story. Recommended.

The Trouble With Jennys Ear by Oliver Butterworth

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Rereading: FISH HOOK ISLAND MYSTERY by Wendell Farmer

The actual author of this book is Lavinia R. Davis, who wrote over 40 books, most under her own name, this is one of three using the Farmer pseudonym. Davis wrote excellent books about children and animals like “Hobby Horse Hill” as well as some teenage romance titles, adult mysteries, picture books for younger readers, and short story collections. The Farmer books all came out during World War Two, have wartime elements, and fewer animals.

Three children come together with a common interest in the wild wetlands at the northern end of their peninsula on the New Jersey shore: Mose is the youngest, and loves to fish, Dorry and her mother live in a former lighthouse nearest to the small group of marshy islands called the Fish Hooks, and Chat likes to be the leader of the group as much as he loves to talk, but he does have good ideas about their secret club. They explore what seems an abandoned shack, but inside it’s been repaired and used for storing something. Chat suspects it’s being used by smugglers. After a passing hurricane nearly drowns Mose and Chat, the three find an abandoned sailboat called Wood Pigeon, and do what they can to rescue it. Two men from town are also after the boat, even though the kids believe they don’t own it, and before long there’s a dangerous competition going on to see who can possess the boat. Dorry is particularly interested in a puppy they found onboard with a collar and name tag, Scallop, who follows them everywhere. When another storm approaches, Chat and his crew make a dangerous plan to sail Wood Pigeon to his uncle’s boatyard where it will be out of danger, but can they escape the much faster motorboat of their opponents?

This book is purportedly set on the southern New Jersey coast, though the settings and map are unlike any real places here in the area where I live. Despite that, I enjoyed rereading it, there’s lots of action, and each of the three kids has moments to shine. Recommended if you can find it.

Fish Hook Island Mystery by Wendell Farmer

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