September
24,
2006
I don’t normally read books with X-Something titles, because that way lies madness and penury. But I liked Peter David’s Madrox
, and it turns out that Peter David’s X-Factor: The Longest Night
is a straight sequel to that book, with no apparent connection to any other X-titled books. Okay, that I can read.
Like Madrox, X-Factor is a noir-flavored mystery featuring Jamie Madrox, a superhero who can split into multiple versions of himself easily. Here, he teams up with a few other random mutants, with stakes that are higher than last time around. The end result is something that’s more toward the superhero team side, and less toward the noir mystery side, but is still a solid piece of work.
Which is more than can be said for Peter David’s Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, vol. 1: Derailed
. David’s take on Spider-Man is filled with all sorts of stuntish gimcrackery. Hey, look, it’s Uncle Ben, somehow alive again! Only, wait, it turns out he’s from an alternate reality and has been pulled here by a bad guy for... um, I forget the reason, but I assume it wasn’t very good anyway. As soon as time travel and alternate realities get in the picture, you’ve got story trouble on your hands, and this is no exception. Mostly distasteful, and occasionally forgettable.
Continuing on the Spider-Man theme, we come to
Spider-Man Visonaries: Kurt Busiek
, which is a thoroughly unnecessary piece of work. It seems that Busiek wanted to write tales of Spider-Man back when he was in high school. Since it’s impossible to fuck around with continuity enough to make this plausible in any current sense, he resorted to writing interstitial comics, ones that take place between long-ago issues. Which means that no characters can ever change, and that nothing significant can ever happen. Yeah, that really ups the ante of me giving a damn. The only time prequels and interstitials work is when they’re taking place on a periphery that was never explored in the original work; when they focus on the original work’s protagonist, they are doomed and uninteresting. This is no exception.
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September
24,
2006
So a bunch of people told me to read Warren Ellis’ Planetary (vols 1-3), which I did. They were decent enough, with an interesting mishmash of milieus and a twisty plot. On the downside, Ellis pulled the same thing Grant Morrison did with The New X-Men: Skip over connective tissue, so you force people to make assumptions, then later reveal that their assumptions were wrong. It’s effective if you don’t notice it, but feels cheap if you do. Anyway, though, decent stuff, but not world-shakingly awesome.
World-shakingly awesome is, however, the phrase I might use to describe Warren Ellis’ Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E., vol. 1: This Is What They Want
. Although perhaps “incredibly hilarious” would be a better phrase. Like Planetary, this comic features a team of superheroes confronting a random assortment of weirdness; or as the summary box from the first issue puts it, “Nextwave is a superhero comic about five people who have just minutes to prevent a town from being eaten by a giant lizard monster in purple underpants.”
The writing in Nextwave is superb, with perfect comic flair. I don’t laugh out loud very often, but I did a bunch of times while reading this. About the only criticism I have is that Marvel bleeped out all the swear words, which steps on more than a few lines. Stupid kid-friendly Marvel.
Upshot is, read Planetary if you want, but read Nextwave if you’ve ever enjoyed anything of Warren Ellis’, or have a sense of humor.
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September
12,
2006
Over on her booklog, Kate Nepveu asked why Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora
wasn’t being compared to Brust’s Taltos novels. This is the sort of question that makes me immediately place an order at Amazon, and only later reflect that “should be compared to” doesn’t mean “is as good as.” Fortunately, though, Lynch’s novel turns out to be very good.
It also is nothing like the Taltos books. I mean, okay, I can see where the comparison comes from. Both Lamora and Taltos are charismatic criminals, leading a small gang as part of a larger crime organization; both of them end up dealing with problems larger and more magical than their normal criminal operations are intended to deal with; and both of them are operating in an ancient, magical city. But they’re really not the same — the tone is completely different, the plotting is completely different, and even the genre feels different. Lynch is writing relatively standard Civilized Fantasy, whereas Brust’s books are really like nothing else out there.
But not being as original as Steven Brust is not a sin in a fantasy novel; and a reasonably original novel that’s plotted well, that’s got a whole bunch of fun characters, that’s got a solidly pacey story (after some initial slowness caused by an awkward interleaving-timelines structure), and that’s just generally full of exuberance and flair, well, that’s something worth reading for any fantasy reader.
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