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Dr. Strange, Part III: The Middle Bronze Age

Dr. Strange, Part III: The Middle Bronze Age

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After having reread Marvel’s The Defenders from issue #1 to about issue #125, my interest started to flag. The glory of The Defenders was in the rearview mirror and it didn’t feel like the weird series I’d fallen in love with before and was reintroduced to by Brian Keene and Christopher Golden’s podcast Defenders Dialog (blogged about here).

I’m enjoying the Waid and Saiz 2018 run (Doctor Strange in Space), I liked the movie (The Doctor is In), obviously loved the Ditko-Lee run (Dr. Strange Part I) and the Marvel Presents series (Dr. Strange Part II), but I was hankering to continue my progress back through the Bronze Age. Other than the first five issues of Doctor Strange, which I have as a collected edition, I hadn’t read my old Doctor Strange series in probably 20 years. It was time to go back

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New Treasures: On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden

New Treasures: On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden

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On a Sunbeam-small On a Sunbeam-back-small

I buy a lot of books. But there are so many I’m interested in — so many New Treasures, so many recommendations, so many carefully curated wish lists — that I actually keep a pretty tight budget, and most purchases are weighed and carefully planned. Sometimes I miss visits to the bookstore filled with nothing but impulse buys, and the delightful discoveries that come with unplanned readings.

On my last weekend trip to Barnes & Noble, I indulged myself with precisely one impulse buy: Tillie Walden’s massive science fiction romance On a Sunbeam, a 533-page graphic novel. It’s based on a 20-chapter web comic, and was a Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of 2018, one of The Washington Post‘s 10 Best Graphic Novels of 2018, an LA Times Festival of Books 2018 Book Prize Winner, a School Library Journal Best Book of 2018 — and a 2019 Hugo Award Nominee for Best Graphic Story. It caught my eye on a tabletop display, and after flipping through it for 60 seconds, I fell right into it.

I’ve already forgotten about the other books I brought home that day. But On a Sunbeam is at the top of my to-be-read pile for this weekend (on top of about 20 other recent comics — so it could be a great weekend. Let’s hope for rain so I get stuck indoors.) Here’s the publisher’s description, and a few samples interior pages.

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Who’s Afraid of The Fearsome Fang?

Who’s Afraid of The Fearsome Fang?

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Dr._Fang_Web_Cover_540x753356._SX360_QL80_TTD_The Fearsome Doctor Fang was published by TKO Studios in December 2018. The title only recently came to my attention on the recommendation of a fellow member of The Sax Rohmer Society. As soon as I saw the hero was named Nayland Kelly, I was sold.

Writing new Yellow Peril titles in the 21st Century is understandably a tricky business. James Bond is a rare pulp-influenced franchise to have escaped unscathed despite Dr. No becoming the first of the series to reach the silver screen. The relatively understated yellow-face performance from Joseph Wiseman in the 1962 Sean Connery film never offends audiences the same way Mickey Rooney’s broad Japanese caricature does in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Political correctness damns Rooney’s over-the-top and insensitive Mr. Yunioshi while ignoring Jerry Lewis or Vito Scotti doing virtually the same offensive vaudeville routines elsewhere in film and television in the same era. What triggers viewers or readers is often the perception of just how offensive a portrayal is; though some of course would prefer to banish all trace of Yellow Peril and yellowface as a matter of principle.

So I was immediately curious how TKO Studios approached The Fearsome Doctor Fang. I was surprised to see a white hero and heroine on the cover as mixing it up a bit racially seemed the easiest path to navigating through rocky waters. While waiting for the book to arrive, I read up on the publisher. TKO Studios is a relatively new comics publisher on the scene whose approach to distribution is akin to  television binge-watching. Multi-part titles are published digitally and in print in their entirety at once. Trade paperback and deluxe collected editions are also immediately available.

The co-creator of The Fearsome Doctor Fang is TKO Studios co-founder Tze Chun. A professional television writer/producer for series such as Gotham and Once Upon a Time and an award-winning independent filmmaker in his own right; it is likely that TKO Studios have an eye on developing their properties for other media.

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Doctor Strange in Space by Mark Waid and Jesús Saiz

Doctor Strange in Space by Mark Waid and Jesús Saiz

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In 2018, Mark Waid and Jesus Saiz launched a new Doctor Strange series at Marvel. I’ve been a fan of Strange since I started comics (issue #34 was one of the first four comics I ever read). He was my gateway to Lovecraftian cosmic horror, The Defenders and Steve Ditko.

The series premise is pretty simple. Strange, the Earth’s Sorcerer Supreme, starts to have difficulty with his magic. As time goes on, his ability to perceive magic vanishes. Things like the Eye of Agamotto and the Cloak of Levitation become common objects to him, baubles of no apparently specialness. He scours the Earth for some solution, but finds none.

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Ramblings on REH (Encore Appearance)

Ramblings on REH (Encore Appearance)

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Ramblings_KullAxeDue to some difficulties, I do not have a Hither Came Conan essay ready to run today. I hope to have one next week. And, work is brutal at the moment. Also, as this post goes live, I am on day three of a four-day camping trip with my son. So I did not have time for an original Conan essay — or even a new A (Black) Gat in the Hand post, either. So, from waaay back on August 10, 2015, here’s one of the very first REH-related posts I wrote here at Black Gate. I think the first was a review of Harry Turtledove’s middling Conan of Venarium.

I was an REH neophyte at the time: I’ve learned a LOT since then. I do plan on expanding on the Howard/Hammet similarity some day. I saw that from the very beginning. Since you probably missed this post the first time around, read on!

In a way, Robert E. Howard’s career is similar to that of Dashiell Hammett. Both men had huge impacts on their genres (Howard wrote many styles, but he’s best known for his sword and sorcery tales). Both were early practitioners in said genres. Both men wrote excellent stories for about a decade. And both men ended their careers on their own.

Hammett, who seemed more interested in a dissolute lifestyle than in writing, effectively walked away from his typewriter. He wrote his last novel in 1934 (The Thin Man) but produced literally nothing for the remaining twenty-five years of his life. He could have gone back to writing the hard-boiled stories that made his career, but he voluntarily ended his writing life.

In 1936, Howard’s mother was failing in a coma. He walked outside to his car, pulled out a gun and killed himself. His writing career was more effectively finished than Hammett’s would be.

Both were supremely skilled writers who chose to deprive the world of their talent and left decades of stories unwritten. But there was a key difference between the two. From the beginning, Hammett was acclaimed and recognized as the leader in his field. Though Carroll John Daly came first (barely), there is no comparison between the two in critical view.

Howard was not critically lauded. His first Conan tale, “The Phoenix on the Sword” (a rewriting of the Kull story, “By This Axe I Rule!”), appeared in Weird Tales in December of 1932. The next two Conan tales were outright rejected!

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The Golden Age of Science Fiction: Heavy Metal

The Golden Age of Science Fiction: Heavy Metal

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January 1979 issue
January 1979 issue

May 1979 issue
May 1979 issue

July 1979 issue
July 1979 issue

In 1972, the British Fantasy Society began giving out the August Derleth Fantasy Awards for best novel as voted on by their members. In 1973, they began presenting additional British Fantasy Awards in 4 categories, including Best Comic. The first four years, that award was won by Roy Thomas and John Buscema for Conan the Barbarian and Savage Sword of Conan. The award was only presented until 1980, but in 2010 a new Best Graphic Novel award was introduced. A re-alignment in 2012 means the awards are now selected by a jury rather than the full membership of the British Fantasy Society. In 1980, the awards were presented at Fantasycon VI in Birmingham.

Heavy Metal was founded in 1977 based on and licensing materials from the French magazine Métal Hurlant.  Early issues used translations of the French magazine’s stories, which helped keep the cost down and allowed the publisher, Leonard Mogel, to print the graphic stories on glossy pages, often with full color.  From 1977 through 1986, the magazine was published on a monthly schedule.

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Hither Came Conan: Woelf Dietrich on “Wolves Beyond the Border”

Hither Came Conan: Woelf Dietrich on “Wolves Beyond the Border”

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Hither_Wolves1EDITEDAnd with only four stories remaining, Hither Came Conan is winding down. Of course, this series has featured a different leading Robert E. Howard expert each week, examining one of the original Conan stories each week, highlighting what’s best in it. Author Woelf Dietrich looks at the ‘most complete, incomplete’ Conan tale from Howards, “Wolves Beyond the Border.” Read on!

I am to provide proof that “Wolves Beyond the Border” is the greatest Conan story ever told by Robert E. Howard. Except that Conan never appears in the story apart from a mention or two and Howard never completed the story nor was it published in his lifetime. L. Sprague de Camp finished the fragment relying on a one-page outline discovered with the unfinished manuscript that Howard had written in the 1930s. Lancer Books published it in 1967 along with three other stories in Conan the Usurper.

So, as you can see, I find myself in a peculiar situation. A potential dilemma given the awesome essays published so far in this series. The competition for the best Conan story is a fierce one. How, then, do I convince you that this story is the best despite the absence of Conan?

Let us start with the plot, shall we?

Plot

We are introduced to “Wolves Beyond the Border” with a mini-prologue:

“The revolution progresses with hurricane speed. While knights and sergeants in gleaming mail clash in charge and counter-charge on the Aquilonian plains, civil war rages along the Pictish frontier between the partisans of Conan and those of Numedides. The Picts, naturally, see their opportunity. Here is a tale of some of the events of that strife-torn land, as told by one of the survivors of the conflict; for the Hyborian Age was a time of stirring events in many times and places, not merely those in which Conan was present.’

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Horror + Hulk = The Immortal Hulk

Horror + Hulk = The Immortal Hulk

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Marvel’s jacket copy of The Immortal Hulk goes like this: “Horror has a name. You’d never notice the man. He doesn’t like to be noticed. He’s quiet. Calm. Never complains. If someone were to walk up and shoot him in the head… all he’d do is die. Until night falls. And someone else gets up again. The man’s name is Banner. The horror is The Immortal Hulk.”

Marvel’s The Incredible Hulk has had a lot of incarnations. His original incarnation by Lee and Kirby was a Jekyll and Hyde story with a scientist turning into a gray-skinned monster each night. They found that gray-skinned monster blended into the gray night-time scenes so the Hulk soon became green and more of a science fictional anti-superhero who fought high-science communist threats and briefly joined the Avengers.

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The Triumphant Return of Fantomas

The Triumphant Return of Fantomas

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The Wrath Of Fantomas-smallThe Wrath of Fantomas is a book I approached with extreme prejudice. It’s a graphic novel that seeks to present a new version of Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain’s Fantomas series, which proved so successful when it was introduced a scant 108 years ago. As a rule, I dislike the concept of rebooting a series.

When first discovering a book series as a kid, continuity was key. It made a property more meaningful if there were numerous volumes to find and devour. Scouring used bookstores for dogeared copies of the missing pieces in the narrative puzzle made such books far more valuable to me. It seemed there were always a half dozen series I was working on completing in those decades long before the internet. They form some of the happiest memories of my formative years.

The entire concept of rebooting a series as a jumping-on point for new readers (or viewers, in the case of films) is distasteful to me. It devalues the worth of the original works. It suggests a series can be boiled down to its lowest common denominator and elements juggled so that a name and basic concept are enough to move forward with renewed sense of purpose.

Generally, in these overly sensitive times of ours, it also means elements that are no longer fashionable or politically acceptable will be whitewashed, bowdlerized, and otherwise made acceptable for Stalin, Mao, or whomever else has the clout to say censorship is required when the past inconveniently reminds us people were always flawed, unfair, uncouth, or sometimes just bluntly honest.

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