New Book Review

 I reviewed Jean M. Twenge's Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents―and What They Mean for America's Future at my other site; please check it out if you are of a mind to.

Hey, wouldn't it be great if I wrote something about the Legion of Super-Heroes one of these days? It'll come.

Book Review: The Fourth Turning Is Here (Neil Howe)

 I reviewed Neil Howe's new book, The Fourth Turning Is Here, which is about generational cycles, history, and the kind of nonsense we're all currently trying to survive here, on my other website. Give it a look!

Review: Special Powers and Abilities

If you've been paying attention you may have heard about this: a slim (100-page) volume of poetry by Raymond McDaniel, all about the Legion of Super-Heroes. I ordered it almost immediately upon hearing about it, and finished reading it almost immediately after it arrived. (Go here if you want your own copy, and why wouldn't you?)

In some ways I'm the wrong audience for this material, and so might you be. Because we're so familiar with the Legion, it's hard for us to deal with this poetry on any level but the literal. McDaniel, I'm guessing, wrote this stuff because he saw the poetic potential in the Legion itself, and wanted to distil and shape it. But we know these characters so well that they aren't poetic to us; they're quotidian. It takes some effort to forget that and try to look at the Legion through new eyes, to get the full effect of the poetry. Seriously. I'm trying to imagine never having heard of the Legion before, and being introduced to it through these poems. What would it be like?

Some details before the review itself. McDaniel writes about characters and stories stretching from the Legion's Silver Age beginnings right up to the very start of the 5YL era. This is par for the course. I, being me, might like everyone to hold the reboot, threeboot, animated, and retroboot Legions in as high a regard as they do the original Legion, but the fact is that they don't, and that's that. (Plus, more people have read the original stuff, so it's a numbers game too.) Almost every Legionnaire from that period gets a little descriptive poetic summary, and many of the poems are recaps of Legion stories. If there's a theme that stretches through the book, it's Brainiac 5, his relative isolation from the rest of the Legion, and his love for Supergirl.

I eventually decided that I could best enjoy the thing if I treated it as a kind of Devil's Dictionary for the Legion: a reference guide for essences and not for facts. I mean, I already know Sun Boy's name, origin, and homeworld, but if I ever think, well, what about Sun Boy, I can crack open SP&A to get McDaniel's take on what makes him tick ("falls equally on everyone").

Anyway. I think it's good. I think it's worth your time as a Legion fan. Certainly I keep opening it up to random pages and finding things of interest. I must admit I'm not sure what to say about the thing. It wouldn't make sense to hold it to the standard of a Legion comic, because it's so very unofficial on the one hand, and apples-and-oranges on the other. But I don't know how to review poetry. At least I don't think I do. It's fun to read, it's thought-provoking, it's stylized. It seems to have been created according to some kind of poetic plan. Are those things to say about poetry? I give Special Powers and Abilities a positive but tentative recommendation.

Review in a Box: Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask

I once met Jim Munroe at Word on the Street and shot my stupid mouth off about what a big fan of his book I was, and gave him the impression that I had reviewed it on this site when I really hadn't. (Although I do make a point of recommending it whenever the subject of superhero fiction comes up.) Better late than never!

I don't know how regularly I'm going to review superhero books on here. There are lots of 'em and I'm not going to do them all. But there are a few more that I could find something interesting to say about. The '...in a Box' concept is totally stolen from Bill James.

Title: Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask

Published: 1998 HarperFlamingoCanada... but see below!

# pages: 248

Availability: Available for free as a download from www.nomediakings.org

Written By: Jim Munroe

Who Is: In addition to being a fantasy/science fiction author, Munroe is a publish-it-yourself advocate. He's self-published all of his subsequent novels (which I don't like as well as I like this one, but I know I'm going to read Angry Young Spaceman at least once more), and offered this one for free as a download. His most recent work is Therefore Repent!, a graphic novel about life after the Rapture, done with Salgood Sam.

What It's About: It's about two young people who try to use their superpowers to do good. In the end, they do, a little. Sort of. Probably.

What It's Really About: It's about, like so many other superhero novels are, what it would be like in the real world if superheroes existed. What would it be like for them? How would they operate? What sorts of things would they realistically do? It's also, partly, about the student/hipster/indie/zine culture (I imagine there's a better term but I don't know it) of late-'90s downtown Toronto.

What It Has to Say About Superheroes: For Ryan and Cassandra, superheroism is a form of activism. In a world that doesn't have supervillains or giant monsters or anything, it's a sensible enough approach to take for those who want to do good. Still, it makes for some unusual situations. In normal superhero stories, the heroes are reactive: a menace threatens, and the heroes deal with it. In this story, they're active: they try to think up ways in which they can help out. (The same could be said of the threeboot Legion, who are trying to change society as much as they were trying to defend it.) As Peter Coogan pointed out in his book Superhero: Secret Origin of a Genre, this is more characteristic of a supervillain. And the actions they take are easy to describe as villainous: vandalism, destruction of property, destroying policemen's guns, breaking prisoners out of police custody, even murder. Ryan and Cass have to make some tough choices, and deal with some issues that are too complicated for the traditional superheroic mindset to process. In the end, they handle things as best they can and are resolved to continue.

It's possible that Munroe actually intends us to see Ryan and Cass as villains, or at least as misguided, but I can't bring myself to do it. Maybe it's just because I like superheroes unironically. But they're so earnest and so doubting about whether they're doing the right thing that it's hard to do anything but be on their side, no matter how problematic that is. I think they are arguably doing the right things, but it's probably at least part of Munroe's point that you just can't translate superheroism directly into the real world. Which a) is fine, because that's not why we like it, and b) is also one of the lessons of Watchmen, only presented to us in a much friendlier way.

Featured Superheroes:

SSJ (Superheroes for Social Justice):
Flyboy (Ryan Slint)--can shapeshift into the form of a fly
Ms. Place (Cassandra ???)--can make objects disappear
Alien Girl (Jess ???)--can draw pictures of lost objects and their current surroundings

Superheroic Influences: Primarily Sailor Moon. Nothing else directly that I can think of.

How's the Writing: Somebody (I don't know who and I'm not interested) described this book as 'impossibilist fiction'. Gimme a break, man. Impossibilist fiction, my aunt's second best feather duster. It's a freaking superhero story, a science fiction novel. Or fantasy if you're scientifically rigorous about your definition of sf. You can take 'impossibilist fiction', roll it into a cone, and shove it up your magic realism.

My most common complaint about superhero novels is that they're underwritten. The way I figure it, superhero stories are so strongly associated with comic books that it's difficult to tell them without the visual help that comics provide. So a lot of the detail that would otherwise come across in the art of the comics ends up being summed up too quickly, or glossed over entirely, in the prose of the novel. Of course, if the author is good enough, if he or she has conceived the story as a novel in the first place, and has grounded the action in enough detail and verisimilitude, then it won't be a problem.

Flyboy Action Figure is one of the ones where it's not a problem. Munroe knows that he's primarily telling a story about a student and a waitress. They have lives and problems and friends and priorities, and their superpowers don't necessarily help with all of that. There's no way this story can be boiled down to skimpy transcribed-comic-book semiprose. Of all the superhero novels I've read, it's the best-written.

Here's an example of what I mean. Phil is one of Ryan's best friends. He seems like a decent guy. He's funny. Ryan obviously likes him too. But the way Munroe handles him, we can never be quite comfortable around him, and we're always aware of the one-sided tension between him and Ryan. Ryan's secret identity will always come between them to some extent. And Munroe doesn't let us catch him doing any of this at all.

Munroe is adept with his symbols. I never noticed until I was writing this, but Ryan and Cassandra scatter flies and disappearances around themselves all through the story, both with their powers and without.

Can I just say how much I like it that the book is set in Toronto?

One minor objection. I know of a couple of other books, at least, in which the somewhat nerdy hero ends up with an impossibly hot bisexual girlfriend. It always seems like the author is trying to pander to his audience with this stuff. I mean, I like Cass, but I would have liked her just as well if she was straight and less hot.

Recently there's been a lot of praise for Soon I Will Be Invincible. And it was fine. But this book is a lot better. If you have to choose between the two, read this instead.

Wild Cards XVIII: Inside Straight, by George R.R. Martin et al.

Okay, there are quite a few superhero novels around now, but for a while there it was basically just the Wild Cards series. Most of you are probably already familiar with Wild Cards; if you aren't, I suggest you become so (it's a shared-world anthology series set in a world in which an alien virus started giving people superpowers and turning them into monsters in 1946). A quick history of how the series developed:

Vol I: introductory. Covered almost forty years of history in one book and was therefore not entirely satisfactory as a story. Well, it wasn't a story. Some of the pieces were really good, though.
Vol II-III: this is where it started building up steam. There were complete stories here, and we saw just what these writers had in mind, and how great it could be.
Vol IV-VII: just as good as volumes II and III, but bigger and wilder and for higher stakes. To me, volumes VI and VII were the high points of the series... pretty much.
Vol VIII-XII: here's where it started getting a bit too dark. Still good, especially vols X and XII, but a lot of people were driven away by the extravagance of the ordeals some of these characters went through.
Vol XIII-XV: the series moved to a new publisher. Still dark. Still good in places, but not as much. The editing problems that cropped up in volume XI returned.
Vol XVI-XVII: after a long hiatus, these two books came out from still another publisher, one that has since gone out of business (I think), and while they weren't bad, they just didn't have the magic.

So when it was announced that there were three *more* books coming out, I wasn't particularly optimistic. I mean, I'm a Wild Cards fan, so much so that I'd buy the books even if I was pretty sure they were going to be terrible, but I figured that we had already seen the best, second best, and third and fourth best of this series, and that three more books would be going to the well too often.

Wrong again!

I liked it a lot. I don't say it was as good as vol III or VI or VII or X or XII, but it's not too far behind them. I can't wait for the next book, and I don't remember how long it's been since I had that feeling. Before book XIV, I guess.

One good thing about this book is that it's not too tightly woven into the previous stories that have been told. New characters, new plot elements, an easy jumping-on point. And I mostly like the new characters; some of them have got superpowers I've never even contemplated, for one thing, and that's hard to do. Now, I'm still attached to the old characters, and there are some unresolved points from previous volumes that I'd like to see addressed, if only in passing:

- whatever happened to Mod Man and Patchwork?
- did Belew survive book XV?
- Tachyon must return to Earth at some point! He still owes Jube a favour! And he's still carrying the wild card virus, right?
- what happened with Zoe trying to kill all those people? (Must be nothing, 'cause as far as I can tell they're all still alive, but what's she been doing, then?)
- I refuse to believe that Mark Meadows is stuck as the Radical forevermore. It's a terrible way to leave things.
- whatever happened to Water Lily? Haven't seen her since vol V. Is she still hiding?

But here's the thing that they really got right. One of the features of the series up to now is that it hasn't been about superheroes. It's been about ordinary people who have superpowers and monstrous deformities. Occasionally some of them do heroic things, but mostly they're behaving like people. There were thrilling movements and moving moments and tragic moments and sordid moments, but almost no inspiring moments. Not until this book. In this book the characters start acting legitimately superheroic. It's great stuff if you like that kind of thing. I like that kind of thing.

The reason why I say they got it right... I mentioned how the wild card virus was first released in 1946. Does that year mean anything to anyone? Yes, it's the year after World War II ended, but it's also the year popularly believed to be the first birthyear of the Boom generation (I go by the Strauss-and-Howe definition, in which 1943 was the first Boom birthyear). The writers of the first Wild Cards books were Boomers, mostly, and so were their characters, mostly. There were some older and younger characters, but for the most part the Wild Cards series was a Boom odyssey through the magical and self-actualizing world of superpowers. I don't mean that as a criticism! Some of these characters and their stories are among my favourites in all of fiction. But we're talking about a Boom artifact here, with everything that implies.

This latest volume, though, has Millennials, not Boomers, as its main characters, and so the story is not about the heroes finding their own mystical destinies or revisiting the Vietnam war or being dragged down by their overindulgences in sex and/or drugs or exterminating Gen X punks. It's about the heroes putting aside their personal problems and discarding pop culture BS and working as a team to do what has to be done. In other words, it's about a Hero generation, not a Prophet generation. And I can't wait for the next book.

(See this post for a little more explanation of what I'm talking about with all this generational stuff.)

Superhero ABC, by Bob McLeod

I've mentioned before how I have two little kids. One thing you do when you have little kids is that you read to them, and to read to them you need to have lots of suitable books around.

One such book is SuperHero ABC by veteran comic-book artist Bob McLeod. It's pretty neat. The art looks great, for one thing, and there's a lot of sneaky humour involved. It's an alphabet book, so for each letter there's a splash page picturing an original superhero whose name starts with that letter, with a lot of captions alliteratively featuring the same letter. Here's the page for the letter 'S', for instance:

Or here's the one for the letter 'L'. Check out her belt! Genius:

In a couple of places I've read that McLeod has some thoughts about using these characters again in other kids-related projects. That might be cool. Some of the characters obviously have such potential, like Danger Man and the Terrific Three... but the Volcano is just gross, and you can keep the Odor Officer for me. Still: superheroes! Recommended.