Mount TBR 2016 discussion
Level 8: Mt. Olympus (150+)
>
Brian! Blessed!, Barsoom, And Me!
#35 - Counter-Measures: Series 4 Box Set by Mark Wright, Cavan Scott, Matt Fitton, John Dorney, Ken BentleyThe Intrusion Counter-Measures Group has been getting in deeper and deeper with their investigations, thanks to the secrets being kept by their director, Sir Toby Kinsella. But now, even as Sir Toby's secret prison is revealed, the ICMG also comes to realize that there are powerful forces arrayed against them -- not just their sworn enemy, Templeton, but a group calling themselves The Light...a group that could not only bring about the end of the ICMG, but of the United Kingdom as well. And even if the ICMG can stop the Light, can they survive the attempt?
Unfortunately, this fourth outing (and final one for this version of the ICMG) is a little on the weak side, very noisy but not the best at maintaining attention -- I had to take another pass at the conclusion to figure out what was going on (and even there it's somewhat unclear, but the gist of it seems to be that the ICMG has gone underground and is now being disavowed.)
Mod
#36 - Guardians (Guardians by Ralph TedescoA quick read, and a frippery, pretty much an outright pitch for a buddy cop comedy about a screwed-up Guardian Angel who's been off his game since he was rejected for a spot in the Seraphim due to a hellish singing voice, the rather clueless Guardians who stumble on an unholy conspiracy, and the raw recruit (a mere 237 years old) whose screw-ups result in their both being assigned to gatekeeper positions in Purgatory.
The good news is that it's a good-natured romp, goes lightly on the religious aspects, manages to be reasonably funny (although Tedesco isn't as sharp a wit as he thinks), eschews gruesome violence, and reads fast. The bad news is that it reads fast, and it's a fairly thin story with equally thin characters.
#37 - The Fifth Beatle: The Brian Epstein Story by Vivek J. Tiwary, Andrew C. Robinson, Kyle BakerA beautifully made, oversized hardcover with some beautiful artwork accompanying the story of Brian Epstein and his determination to make superstars of the Beatles (and his later successes with other artists.) The astounding part of this is that it's a highly compressed timeframe -- six years from Epstein hearing about this young group doing crap gigs at the Cavern to Epstein's death from an overdose of the pills he used to combat anxiety, insomnia, and, tragically, his homosexuality.
Though Tiwary spent two decades researching Epstein, he chooses here to move away from hagiography and instead present something more abstract, something of a fever dream that provides Epstein with a spirit guide in the form of his fictional personal assistant, Moxie, his very own Tinkerbell. We don't really see that much of his interactions with the Beatles themselves, and their story is abbreviated in a lot of ways -- though Epstein is shown interacting mainly with John, all of the acidic, nasty stuff directed at Epstein by Lennon is ignored. In the end, though, we see Epstein telling Paul (who's most likely an illusion) that the Beatles legacy is really his to carry forward, even though the cracks are starting to appear by this point -- it's remarkable that they got through three more years and three more albums before the end finally came.
Still, this is a fever dream, and it lurches from slices of reality to surreality, from the tawdry incidents to the magical (in a positive and a negative sense; his meeting with Ed Sullivan depicts Sullivan under the control of a ventriloquist dummy, while Colonel Tom Parker is depicted as a slobbering, greedy demonic entity; on the other hand, there is Moxie, and dreams of bullfighters, and his visions of what he wants to achieve.) It's meant to give the gist of the last years of Epstein's life, and what drove him, and what killed him, and if there's questions as to accuracy overall, they're quashed by the Help!-toned section (with art by Kyle Baker that goes well into the outlandish) dealing with the chaotic Philippines visit, during which the whole "The Beatles are bigger than Jesus" fiasco gets to happen (though not as it did happen.)
I expect to re-read this book at some point soon, as it really is quite excellent work, overall (even with the Kyle Baker section, which is jarring to come to.)
On the question of the title of the book, I don't believe Brian Epstein was ever referred to as the Fifth Beatle during his lifetime, or for a long time afterward; a variety of others have been given that appellation at various times, particularly New York DJ Murray The K, who is often credited with being the man who really broke the Beatles in the US. George Martin, their producer of record on everything bar Let It Be (though from The Beatles forward, the band was handling production chores themselves) has often been referred to as the Fifth Beatle. Roadie/Bodyguard Mal Evans likewise, publicist Derek Taylor, and others.
#38 - The Supergirl Archives, Vol. 2 by Otto Binder, Jerry Siegel, Jim Mooney, et alThe second and last of this Archives series sticks to the stories in Action Comics, which were backups to the monthly Superman tales (even the exception here, the complete #285, is actually split between a Superman/Supergirl story and what amounts to a Supergirl backup.) The stories here also include some multi-part tales, continued from issue to issue (and in print well before Marvel Comics started their serial continuity.) As always, Jim Mooney's artwork is pleasant to look at , although at this point he seems to have occasionally been asleep at the drawing board as some of the work is stiff, unduly repetetive, and rather on the dull side.
On the story side, the lustre has dulled a bit, especially as Otto Binder's cheery science fiction lunacy is considerably less present -- instead, Jerry Siegel handles much of the writing by this time, and it can be quite thuddingly dull.
For all that, I did have a good time with this volume. I'm sad that there wasn't another Archives release for Supergirl, but until the Omnibus later this year, there's still the Showcase Presents books to read through.
One final note: the cover for Action Comics #285 included here isn't a restoration of the original, but a copy cobbled up from a German release that used a redrawn image. That image then had a mid-1960s Supergirl head pasted onto it, and has been in circulation ever since, with the original cover languishing in obscurity.
#39 - Showcase Presents: Supergirl, Vol. 1 by Otto Binder, Jerry Siegel, Jim Mooney, Curt Swan, Wayne Boring, Al Plastino, et alFive hundred and some pages of silver age shenanigans drawn from Action Comics, Adventure, Superman, Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane featuring Supergirl both solo and interacting with Superman, Superman's supporting cast, the Legion Of Super-Heroes, and even Superboy and the Kents.
Mod
Bev wrote: "I see that I'm soon going to be playing catch-up...I'm only one book ahead of you. We'll see if I can finish off the one I'm currently reading before you post your next one. :-)"You shouldn't have a problem there. :) It'll be a little while before I post the next one.
#40 - Blood Rites by Jim ButcherSixth of the Harry Dresden novel, and of increasing compexity in terms of its themes and its setting. Harry is hired to investigate weird events on an adult film set, and quickly finds himself up against an Entropy Curse...but that, of course, is not the worst of it. Before long he's up to his neck in intrigues with White Court vampires, fighting for his life, and getting some likely unwelcome revelations about his own origins. Also, he accidentally adopts a puppy.
This was my most recent walking-around book, performed fairly well by James Marsters. I'll certainly continue with the series, but I'm not finding myself entirely enthralled - the Dresden novels always seem that they should be twenty percent shorter than they are.
#41 - Doctor Who: A Town Called Fortune by Paul SuttonSix and Evelyn Smythe pay a visit to the Old West, only to find that the Doctor is being framed for a murder than he most assuredly didn't commit. It's up to Evelyn to sort out the various parties and unravel the mysteries before somebody ends up shot or blown up. Engagingly enough, this is one of the few times where the science fiction angle has been tossed aside in favour of a straight historical -- and a very straight western, down to the last trope (I'm surprised that no-one had a wagon wheel fall off at some point.) Quite fun.
#42 - Doctor Who: Invaders from Mars by Mark GatissAn amusing conceit that finds the Doctor and Charley Pollard in 1938, during the Halloween broadcast of Orson Welles' War Of The Worlds. This being Doctor Who, of course, there's an actual alien incursion taking place at the time, though even that isn't what it seems to be.
This is rendered less than it should be by some appallingly bad accents, and I was kicked out of the thing every time the CIA was mentioned -- the CIA was actually a decade away from being brough into existence, and even the OSS wasn't operating at the time...if anything, it would have been the Army Signals Intelligence Service getting involved, although not likely that they would have. The appropriate agency to bring in here would have been the one that did look in to the War Of The Worlds situation (and Welles himself): the FBI.
#43 - The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive & the Secret History of the KGB by Christopher M. AndrewBased on the intelligence materials brought out of Russia in 1992 by former KGB operative Vasili Mitrokhin, Christopher Andrew's book sets out to provide a picture of the operations of the KGB and its predecessors from the earliest days to the fall of the Soviet Union.
This it does, in great detail, but so ponderously and in such a curiously organized manner (Andrew divides the book into theatres of operation, rather than providing the information chronologically) that it soon becomes a chore to get through -- indeed, there came a point where I thought the book had ended, but it turned out only that part one had come to a close. Andrew makes the even odder choice to close out the book with the story of Solidarity and Lech Walesa, which means it rather just peters out.
I do generally enjoy these kinds of books -- intelligence work fascinates me, especially in the divide between reality and fiction (one of the lessons inherent in this book is that the more flamboyant a spy is, the more likely he or she is to come a cropper, often spectacularly.) I might tackle this book again, but I might not. It's a shame, because the material itself is inherently fascinating.
#44 - Kitsune by John Paul Cattton#45 - Doctor Who: The Chimes of Midnight by Robert Shearman
There are actually links between these two, hence my dropping them into the same entry. The major links are Doctor Who, time travel, and bizarre mysteries -- Kitsune is part of the Time Hunter series from Telos, which began life as an entry in the Doctor Who Telos Novellas series; the protagonist of the Doctor Who: The Cabinet of Light was given his own series, in which he, a "time-sensitive", works with an amnesiac woman named Emily to troubleshoot temporal hotspots.
In this case, the hotspot is 2020 Tokyo, 73 years forward of Honore's native time, where the population appears to be under siege from Japanese fox spirits. As usually happens in Who-related stories such as this, the supernatural has a more real world source to it; in this case the Kitsune are essentially an alien species that co-inhabited ancient Japan, and their manifestation in 2020 is due to their flight from a murderous Daimyo time-jumping them into their version of Hell. Hilarity does not ensue. It's done well enough, but the Japanese aspect of the story is, if anything, actually a bit too subdued.
The Chimes Of Midnight, meanwhile, has the TARDIS materializing in a pantry in an upper-crust Edwardian house. There's soap opera drama downstairs, mostly silence from upstairs, and sudden, bizarre murder that leads to a twisted, disorienting cozy mystery in which the dead keep returning to live, people keep switching roles, and time is both fluid and static. There's a strong gothic element to the story, and the concept of time and architecture coming together to create a malevolent entity put me in mind of the Sapphire And Steel TV series. I thoroughly enjoyed this one.
#46a - Doctor Who: Black Dog by Dale SmithThe Fourth Doctor and Leela ind themselves confronted by a conceptual entity that targets Leela...resulting in a deadly battle.
#46b - Doctor Who: Little Doctors by Philip Lawrence
The Second Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe arrive on Olympos, a high-tech world run by the super-computer Zeus. It's a perfect society, but deadly dull, so the Doctor decides to try and get Zeus to open things up, and remove the societal stratification...an effort that goes weirdly wrong. Light, but also quite amusing.
#46c - Doctor Who: The King of the Dead by Ian Atkins
The Fifth Doctor is aiming for the 2012 Olympics (he does eventually get there, of course, but not until Ten is extant) but the TARDIS instead drops him, Tegan, and Nyssa into an interactive play in the 1980s. Mystery immediately ensues, and an alien menace lurks in the shadows. This is a Nyssa-centric story, but Tegan's whiny character is evoked all too often, which rather dents this tale.
#47 - Dark Shadows: Bloodlust - Volume 1 by Alan Flanagan, Joseph Lidster, et alOne more trip to Collinsport, Maine, home of much dark doing in the dead of night (and the mist of day.) Characters old and new converge on the town, in search of one thing or another, but will the newcomers be ready for the revelations that await them? And will those who have been here all along, or have roots deep in the town, be prepared for the confrontation that's coming?
For me, this is very much a throwback to the original series, which is in many ways a good thing, but the energy really doesn't seem to be there...the older characters have been put through their routines so many times by this point that they're a little tired. The cliffhanger at the end of this volume, though, promises some enthusiastic mayhem, so there's hope yet.
#48 - Dark Shadows: Bloodlust - Volume 2 by Alan Flanagan, Will Howells & Joseph LidsterThe conclusion to the story finds Angelique, Barnabas, and Quentin embroiled in the growing horrors of Collinsport, with several unexpected enemies facing them and preying on the town itself. Again, very much old-school DS, and like the original it does have its flaws on show here, including a rather limp conclusion.
Mod
I'm hoping to hit #50 by the end of April. It should be possible, especially with me get out and about a bit more lately -- easier to work through the walking-around books that way! I'm making good progress on Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum.I'm in that odd place, once again, of ploughing through long books. Hilariously, I've started none of the few I listed in the first entry in this thread. Must address that!
Mod
#49 - Doctor Who: Seasons of Fear by Paul Cornell and Caroline ThorndykeThe 8th Doctor finally gets Charley Pollard to her destination in Singapore, after rescuing her from the crash of the R101 airship in 1931, only to discover that there is a man by the name of Sebastian Grayle waiting there for him...a man who not only claims to be immortal, but that the reality they're in is a construct, and that he killed the Doctor decades ago. For the Doctor, this is a first meeting; for Grayle, the last of many.
Naturally, the Doctor doesn't take this lying down. The result is a rollicking ride through time, as the Doctor and Charley first track Grayle to his beginnings, start to discover who is actually pulling Grayle's strings, and then track him to the time of Edward the Confessor (where the Doctor's occasional habit of almost marrying soon-to-be-Queens comes to light) and then to the Hellfire Club. It's full of twists and turns, this being a Paul Cornell story, and much time-bending ensues...and, as we find out, when the story is over, the story really isn't over. The Doctor broke the rules of time, and there are gathering consequences....
#50 - Doctor Who: Embrace the Darkness by Nicholas BriggsWhile trying to solve the mystery of the disappearing Cimmerian System sun, Eight and Charley are pulled into a fight for their lives on a lightless world where mysterious creatures have somehow blinded the crew of a research station -- causing the station's defense system, ROSM, to activate. Much running around ensues in this fairly typical base under siege story, but everything does end up explained. Overall it's okay, but nothing outstanding or unusually good (aside from Charley giving the Doctor hell for his tendency towards trying to martyr himself.)
#51 - Doctor Who: The Cold Equations by Simon GuerrierThe First Doctor is stuck in the TARDIS and companions Stephen and Oliver are trapped in a shattered space station in orbit around a far-future dead Earth. It's going to take a lot of hard work and hard science to get them out of this...and then there's the matter of Oliver's secret, something that drove him to join the Doctor and Stephen and escape the 1960s and the memory of his terrible crime....
Which, as it turns out, is cause for Steven to break down in gales of laughter before seriousness returns. Oliver's crime? He fell in love with another man.
Overall a solid story, if a little by the numbers. It does a neat job of flipping Tom Godwin's original "The Cold Equations" on its head, too.
#51a - Doctor Who: The Way of the Empty Hand by Julian Richards
Two, Jamie, and Zoe find themselves on Combatia, a war world. Zoe is forced into a menial role while the Doctor must find a way to survive arena combat and Jamie leads a revolution among the gladiators. A lightweight story that leans hard on the comedy button; fortunately it's shorter than the usual Short Trip entry.
Mod
I should be lurching upward a couple more notches soon, as I have a Louis L'Amour half done, among others. I took a side trip today to finish a couple of library books, however.
#52/53 - DC: The New Frontier, Vol. 1 and DC: The New Frontier, Vol. 2 by Darwyn Cooke (and DC: The New Frontier Justice League: Classified will be added shortly, but was just picked up.)Hearing the news that artist Darwyn Cooke was stricken with cancer (and is in palliative care, so unlikely to recover) was a major blow, given that he's produced some of my favourite work in graphic novels.
I was prompted to pull these volumes out again, after too many years of them being on the shelf. The conceit in the miniseries is to begin at the end of World War 2, and follow a version of the DC universe that proceeds through the start of the Silver Age, when the original mystery heroes are driven underground by the House Un-American Activities Committee...and a new set of heroes begins to emerge in the face of a growing threat to humanity. The fantastic art does a brilliant job of evoking the period, and the story takes some of the grittier heroic tropes and stands them on their heads. It's a wonderfully hopeful story, and has one of the best depictions of Wonder Woman I've ever seen.
#54 - Showcase Presents: Legion of Super-Heroes, Vol. 1 by Jerry Siegel, Edmond Hamilton, Curt Swan, John Forte, etcThis is a rather mixed bag, but a fun read for me as the Legion were always a favourite of mine and this goes back to even before I started reading their adventures. This volume collects their assorted original appearances, as they popped up in a variety of books (including Jimmy Olsen) before they settled into their own ongoing feature in Adventure Comics, eventually subsuming the book entirely. The stories have a tendency to be dense, hokey, and scientifically ludicrous (despite SF writer Edmond Hamilton taking over the bulk of the writing as time went on) with some storytelling that demonstrates what happens when plots have to be generated in a blinding hurry.
All the same, I'm enjoying revisiting these old adventures, so I'll be diving into the next volume shortly.
#55 - Daisy Kutter: The Last Train by Kazu KabuishiA fairly lightweight sort-of-steampunk western tale in which a reformed bank robber is forced to take a job robbing a train...for its owner, who supposedly wants to test a new security system against the best of the best...although Daisy quickly finds out there's more to it than that. Dusty western towns, six-guns, and robots abound.
#56 - Hellboy, Vol. 1: Seed of Destruction by Mike Mignola and John ByrneThe Hellboy/BPRD story has become woefully labyrinthine over the years, with Mignola turning it into an end-of-the-world story mixed with Hellboy traversing Hell itself, and a number of other tales filling in the years since Hellboy was conjured into the human world in 1944.
This book, though, is the first of them all, filling in the backstory in a rush on the way to the main story that ties into it -- the scheme put into motion by the resurrected Rasputin (oh, those Russians!!) to awaken the imprisoned Ogdru-Jahad and return them to our world -- in other words, essentially the story that formed the basis of the first Hellboy movie.
Despite the gothic horror trappings, and Mignola's chiaroscuro art (this man goes through a lot of black ink), the story itself is actually pretty much pulp noir with explosions of weirdness and oddity (as Rasputin attempts to break the Ogdru-Jahad out of their prison, we take a quick side trip to what appears to be members of Abe Sapien's species, working aboard a mix of prison guardhouse and flying saucer) and occasional side-of-the-mouth dialogue and some wisecracks. It's an entertaining read, and I'm glad I'm finally making my way to the beginning of this saga.
#57 - The Flash Archives, Vol. 1 by John Broome, Robert Kanigher, and othersThese first silver age Flash stories were a surprising amount of fun to read, silly science and all, full of energy and joy in the galloping daftness of it all. The book opens with the last story of the Golden Age Flash, then moves on to Showcase #4, the introduction of Barry Allen, police scientist (though the writers seem a bit clueless as to what a forensic scientist did in those days) and the lightning strike that turns him into the Fastest Man Alive.
The Flash series got a bit of a reputation for using science in the stories, but in these early tales the science is hilariously over the top. Grand fun, then. For those interested in checking this out, there's a new Omnibus, and a trade paperback covering the same run as this Archive.
#58 - Riders of the Dawn by Louis L'AmourA tough, taciturn cowboy with a hard past finds himself with a new love as well as new problems as a potential range war begins to brew. One of L'Amour's earlier works, originally published as a serial, and later revisited and revised for book publication. It's fast and tight, if nothing special.
I am amazed at the pace you gobble up books! Great job!!!
I'm actually behind on Mount TBR again, though...ahead on the annual goal, meanwhile.I can actually go a lot faster. :)
#59 - Doctor Who: Kingdom of Silver by James SwallowThe Seventh Doctor visits a planet that has a dangerous secret buried beneath the surface...one that a would-be dictator is about to release accidentally: the Cybermen. Takes more than a few cues from "The Tomb Of The Cybermen" and doesn't do much of anything interesting with them.
#60 - Stealing the General: The Great Locomotive Chase and the First Medal of Honor by Russell S. BondsThis has been my at-bedtime book for a while, so relatively slow going unless I'm struggling with insomnia (as I was last night, hence finishing this off.)
The book is ostensibly about the title event during the US Civil War, but it's really only the thread -- being relatively minor -- that allows Bonds to look at the Civil War and its aftermath from multiple perspectives, throwing some light on the odder corners of the war and providing him the chance to point out that the South wasn't as monolithic an entity as people often think (there was a great deal of pro-Union sentiment.) The Medal Of Honor comes in well towards the end, with many a sour note sounded as to the outcome of that.
It's an interesting read, and the choice of Bronson Pinchot as the audiobook reader serves the narrative well. About the only time things get sluggish is in the epilogue section, although even that has its share of oddities among the begats.
#61 - Doctor Who: The Bride of Peladon by Barnaby EdwardsA middle of the road Fifth Doctor story, with Peri and Erimem as companions (Erimem for the last time.) The big elements here are crossing over elements from the Third Doctor (Peladon) and the Fourth (the Osirans) and tying those to Erimem and her choice here to depart. Other than that, it's a mystery involving murder and revenge and a secret buried for millennia, along with a lot of running around, secret tunnels, and a Doctorish deus ex machina at the finish line.
#62 - Supergirl: Candor by Joe Kelly, Greg Rucka, etcI have maintained a fondness for Supergirl through her various iterations, but I have to admit that this iteration, developed by Jeph Loeb and further redirected by editorial fiat, sorely tried my affection, thanks to her characterization being routinely unstable and her storylines ridiculously jumbled -- as this volume demonstrates. The central story is "Candor," which starts with both Supergirl and Power Girl in a corrupted version of the bottle city of Kandor, with no explanation as to how they got there, or what they're doing there. The villains, meanwhile, are not just from different timelines, but different dimensions, yet supposedly related. After three installments, the story...just ends. After which Kara is found dressing like a trust fund hippie, hanging out with Captain Boomerang's son, and smoking.
Making this worse is that many of the contents of this volume are excerpted from stories from outside of the main title, and are linked with the Infinite Crisis event. I'm familiar with that event and its crossovers, and I was getting lost here.
I'm running well behind here, even with a number of things actually in progress; I'm hoping I can catch up soon, but a lot of that may depend on whether or not I start work on the next of the ArtLab albums -- ArtLab1 has had me hyperfocused. Now that it's done...back to reading.
#63 - Supergirl: Identity by Joe Kelly, et alA larger volume than most, with a slightly more coherent story -- only slightly, though. This covers Kelly's last year on the title, and he does his best to make the rounds of the various hanging plot threads, failing to draw them into a cohesive story as he goes -- even the main story thread, about Kara's supposed mission to kill Kal-El, ends up coming to nothing after an enormous amount of sturm und drang; Kelly can't even get the time frame organized (Kara turns up aged around sixteen Earth years; two years have passed in continuity...Kara is still sixteen.)
#64 - Superior Iron Man, Vol. 1: Infamous by Tom Taylor and Yildray CinarI usually like Tom Taylor's work, but here he's saddled with a real problem child -- the short version: Tony Stark was affected by a morality switch in the Axis event, and figured out how to avoid being switched back. The result: Tony is now the monumental immoral prick he was destined to be...or, pretty much, Tony is the dick he always was, amped WAY up.
Which means that this series, short as it was, was about a reprehensible genius who addicted an entire city to a mutagenic virus and charged them for the privilege. And is thus attacked by people of less questionable moral character, including his own past personality inside an old suit of armor.
As far as it goes, Taylor's only way out to tell any sort of story is to include the so-called Teen Abomination, a thirteen year old monsterfied boy who turns out to be Happy Hogan's son.
Tony as depicted here was sidelined into Secret Wars and eventually beaten to death by the elderly Captain America (who was wearing a mech suit) as the universe blew up. So...there's that.
Perhaps the most pointless storyline in Iron Man's history...and there's been a few calamities.
#65 - Mai: The Psychic Girl, Book 1 by Kazuyo KudoA moderately violent story about a fourteen year old girl with what appears to be off-the-charts psychic powers that may not be what they appear to be (given that the ghost of her mother appears at one point, and that she's described as the last of a bloodline that has the destiny to protect a secluded village.) Shadowy powers want to take control of Mai, and set out to kidnap her, efforts that go terribly wrong, leading to mayhem across Japan and the unleashing of a monster.
Unfortunately, many of the elements in the story are bog standard 1980s SF conspiracy thriller tropes -- Mai is essentially a Firestarter clone -- mixed with a handful of Japanese adventure tropes (down to the Yoda-sized fighting monk and the katana-wielding old villain who dresses and acts as though he's in the 1800s.)
#66 - Doctor Who: The Time of the Daleks by Justin RichardsI suspect someone lost a bet on this one. Basically, it's a mix of an old plot idea (the construction of a time machine using mirrors and applied phlebotinum) and Daleks quoting Shakespeare. The story itself revolves around a borked timeline where Shakespeare was an unknown, and the convolutions wind up with the Doctor and the Daleks attempting to return Shakespeare to his place in the timeline. There's much running around, an overload of Dalek bellowing, and...well, never mind.
#67 - Doctor Who: Neverland by Alan BarnesThe Eighth Doctor's sins come home, as Gallifrey sends out a fleet of Battle TARDISes to bring him in, and a rogue Celestial Intervention Agency operative decides to unleash Anti-Time on the universe. Former companion Romanavortrelundar, now the Gallifreyan President, is forced into action alongside the Doctor, but all seems lost...
This is the penultimate entry in the Zagreus arc, but it would be eighteen months before the conclusion showed up. It's a complex, convoluted tale, but everyone does their best throughout, despite some over the top technobabble.
#68 - Doctor Who: The Maltese Penguin by Robert ShearmanA one-off noir comedy outing featuring Frobisher, a shapeshifter character who appeared with the Sixth Doctor in a series of comic strips. Silly frippery that tries to lampoon All The Clichés but doesn't really manage to be that funny.
#69 - Avengers/Defenders War by Roy Thomas, Steve Englehart, Sal Buscema, and othersI remember being quite a fan of the Defenders when I was younger (the Avengers, not so much.) The compiled event story, in which the two teams are tricked into going up against each other, rather fails to give an indication what prompted that -- rather poor artwork and turgid writing doom this from the start, and it's a slog to get through the whole thing. Interesting to note that the Swordsman actually kills a man, admittedly in self-defense, and nothing is ever said about it afterward.
#70 - Doctor Who: The Rapture by Joseph LidsterSeven and Ace end up in Ibiza, Spain, as Seven thinks Ace needs a break. As always, it turns out that there's something afoot locally...in this case, weird events at the Rapture, the top club in the area, which is apparently being run by a pair of angels, one of whom is described as a genius composer (the results of this genius are bits of dull techno music.) There's also a surprise waiting for Ace.
It's very shouty, and needlessly complicated in spots, and the story actually ends definitively at the three-quarter point, which means Lidster has to have one of his antagonists turn into a raving lunatic to finish things off.
So, in all, not the best.
#71 - Doctor Who: The Sandman by Simon A. ForwardThe Clutch is a huge fleet of spaceships, a nomadic fleet that never settles on a planet...because they are driven by an ancient curse. As it turns out, when the Sixth Doctor and companion Evelyn Smythe come into contact with them, it was the Doctor that set this into motion, becoming their mythological monster "The Sandman" in the process. To save a world and a recently evolved species, he may have to become that very mythological monster again....
The story plays with an aspect of the Doctor's character that's come forward on occasion -- is the Doctor, in fact, a manipulative evildoer himself? He's certainly been seen to skirt close to that at times, and he's been accused repeatedly of turning those around him into weapons, though he rarely picks up an actual weapon himself. It's an interesting philosophical point, but it's also one that gets lost in the garble of the alien characterization, which is overdone even by Big Finish standards. Still, the Sixth Doctor is riveting here.
#72 - Doctor Who: The Church and the Crown by Cavan ScottDoctor Who: No Place Like Home by Iain McLaughlin
The Fifth Doctor, Peri, and Erimem are supposedly heading for the Braxiatel Refuge to drop Erimem (and her cat) off, and instead find themselves in 17th Century Paris, where they end up embroiled in the court of King Louis and Queen Anne (who Peri turns out to resemble a bit too closely) and fighting alongside Musketeers against Cardinal Richelieu and an unexpected English invasion.
It's a rarity, in that it's a historical story from end to end, which makes it quite entertaining, especially as there seems to have been a decision to make it an outright romp (for the most part.)
"No Place Like Home" is a short story in which the Doctor and Erimem go in search of Erimem's wayward cat (which apparently doesn't like to use the litter tray) and find a megalomaniac Gallifreyan mouse that's had its intelligence advanced to human levels. It's, as you might expect, silly and surreal at the same time, especially as it mostly takes place in a TARDIS closet.
#73 - Doctor Who: Nekromanteia by Austen AtkinsonFive, Peri, and Eminem find themselves in the middle of a war between a megacorporation and a planet full of "witches" over a universe-changing artifact. The result is a story that serves to do little but abuse Five, threaten Erimem with rape, and strip Peri naked -- so, pretty much a full range of abuse of characters. The "witches" are cackling cast-offs from a school production of MacBeth and the megacorporation elements are a dire attempt to imitate Douglas Adams, qualifying this as unqualified disaster as satirical commentary on the corporate way of life.
Something tells me I won't be revisiting this one....
Mount TBR 2016
Books mentioned in this topic
Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (other topics)Hellboy, Vol. 7: The Troll Witch and Others (other topics)
Hellboy, Vol. 6: Strange Places (other topics)
Batman in the Fifties (other topics)
Batman in the Seventies (other topics)
More...
I admit it, I have a soft spot for the old Supergirl stories, as goofy as they were. Part of it might be the great Jim Mooney artwork, but part of it is the stories -- they're good-natured romps, even if Superman's a bit of a dick (that was rather his standard characterization at the time, though) and the Legion, when they show up, are a tad inflexible when Kara is accidentally aged up physically -- she's still fifteen, she just happens to look ten years older. So the Legion rejects her as she's no longer a teenager. 30th Century kids: graduates from Trump University, one and all.
If I have a quibble about the Archives restoration, it's that the recoloring sometimes goes a bit awry -- Supergirl's blue dress keeps turning into a blue top with a red skirt, which is disconcerting. Other than that, though, the art restoration is excellent, as these gorgeously made Archives volumes usually are -- they're standard trim, but that works well enough with these stories.
...actually, I do have another quibble (no, I'm not about to Spanish Inquisition you), and that's that Showcase Presents: Supergirl, Vol. 1 includes a number of stories from Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen that aren't present in either of these Archive volumes. I'm hoping that the upcoming (as I write this) Supergirl: The Silver Age Omnibus v1, which will be an oversized volume, will correct that and include them in proper placement (and correct the colouring errors while they're at it.)