February
22,
2009
So our next group of graphic novels is themed around World War Hulk, the Marvel Universe “event” that falls between Civil War and Secret Invasion. This is a bit different from those two, though, in that it’s smaller scale. That is, Civil War and Secret Invasion are huge, world-changing books that no title can ignore. If you’re writing a Marvel comic, you must acknowledge those, and it has to have some impact on the stories you’re writing. But World War Hulk is optional. A few titles need to be involved, but the rest can pretty much decide whether it makes sense to include a WWH tie-in or not.
Frankly, I think that works better, because it does less damage to other storylines that are going on, and makes the participating titles feel more purposeful. It also has another benefit, though, which is that the entire core story can be told in a single series. Whereas Mark Millar’s Civil War miniseries was just a skeleton on which the actual story hung, Greg Pak’s World War Hulk
is the whole story of the Hulk’s return to Earth, and his declaration of war on the heroes who sent him into interstellar exile.
This definitely works to the advantage of the story, as does Pak being a good writer. If you like space opera, you’ll want to read Pak’s Planet Hulk, and if you read that, you’ll want to read this coda.
So that’s the main story; then there are the stories written around it, which tend to fall into one of two groups: Ones that are primarily about the Hulk and ones that are primarily about other characters reacting to the Hulk. The ones that are about the Hulk are the weakest, because they’re suffering under the constraint of not being able to change anything. The Hulk is going to do what Pak wants him to do, so there’s no chance of talking him out of it or defeating him or whatever. So Frank Tieri’s World War Hulk: Gamma Corps
, for instance, feels very unnecessary and a bit pointless.
World War Hulk: X-Men
straddles the line between the two categories, due to it being a collection of a bunch of miscellaneous titles. (The original title, according to Amazon, was “World War Hulk: Marvel Universe,” which is considerably more accurate. I suspect they changed it for sales reasons.) The actual X-Men part falls into the irrelevant-battle-with-Hulk camp, as does the Iron Man part. The Initiative and Ant-Man books are mostly about those characters instead of the Hulk, but are weirdly out of context here, and should be read along with their actual serieses. (The Ant-Man one is included in the Ant-Man paperbacks, and works much, much better there.) The only story that really has a point is the Ghost Rider one. It’s a battle with the Hulk, yeah, but it’s one that has a point other than pyrotechnics, and it ends up using the Hulk to tell a story about the Ghost Rider.
And on the far side of the line, telling stories around the Hulk rather than about him, is Paul Jenkins’ World War Hulk: Front Line
. The Front Line series seems devoted to taking major events in the Marvel Universe and telling human-scale stories, and that’s what they do here, focusing on a murder mystery in the devastated and evacuated New York City. It doesn’t rise to the level of greatness, but it does add something to the World War Hulk storyline, and is recommended.
Finally, there’s Greg Pak’s Incredible Hercules
books, which have an odd relationship with the Hulk books. As I understand it, the series that was The Incredible Hulk became the Incredible Hercules, keeping its issue numbering consistent and keeping Pak on as the writer, while a different Hulk title started up after World War Hulk. It strikes me as odd, like the Browns becoming the Ravens then a new team becoming the Browns again.
But anyway, setting that aside, the first volume of Hercules is a direct WWH tie-in, with a bunch of would-be allies of the Hulk trying to help him out. It could have fallen prey to the same pointlessness as other Hulk-related tie-ins, but it ends up having something to say about the difficult friendships and the nature of heroism, so that works. From there, the assembled group of characters goes on to have more Hercules-focused (and therefore: myffic) adventures, which will go on to lead us directly into the Secret Invasion stuff, but that’s a different entry...
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February
22,
2009
So you may have noticed the part where I’ve been barely updating this site since mid-December and thought that I wasn’t reading anything. In fact, the problem is that I’ve been reading way too much, and have like forty-odd graphic novels ready for booklogging. Traditionally I’ve just done big bullet-point roundups when I get that behind, but I have a better plan here, which is to break them into separate themed posts, because they tend to fall naturally into groupings.
So, the theme of this post is: Joss Whedon.
We’ll start off with Joss Whedon and Brett Matthew’s Serenity: Better Days
, the second Serenity comic, taking place between the series and the movie. The interstitial nature of it hurts, because it means that nothing can really change, and episodic stories where everything goes back to just how it was before are only of limited interest. I mean, in a real sense, much of Whedon’s greatness as a TV writer was his ability to break out of that static episode rut, so seeing that in a Whedon work is unfortunately retrograde. The overall feel is lightly competent Firefly fanfic.
Next up is Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men, vol. 4: Unstoppable
, which concludes his run. I read the series from the start so that I wouldn’t be confused about what was going on, and I think that was a wonderful idea. It turns out this is a tightly-plotted and carefully foreshadowed series that takes a number of surprising turns, and if you don’t remember stuff between installments, you’ll lose a lot.
And that’d be a shame, because this is also an extremely well-written set of books, with all the virtues that traditional superhero comics are capable of having, but don’t exhibit with the kind of consistency that you might wish. This is definitely a superhero comic through and through, and if you aren’t at least passingly familiar with the X-Men, you probably won’t enjoy it very much; but if you are, this is one of the best X-Men arcs ever.
And finally, there’s Brian K. Vaughan and Joss Whedon’s Runaways
. Don’t be confused by the way I’m summarizing that; they’re not co-writing. Vaughan originated the series about a handful of superpowered teens, and wrote the first seven volumes (three of which I’m booklogging here) and then handed it off to Joss for the next volume. The series is never super-great, but... well, let’s just say that the volume Joss wrote felt like it was written by Joss, but at the same time wasn’t appreciably better than the writing on the series to date. It’s consistently very good, and possibly worth reading even if you’re not hepped up on standard Marvel heroes; while the protagonists do interact with the Marvel Universe characters and events, they’re mostly on their own and have no whompin’ huge backstory.
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February
22,
2009
Contained within the pages of
Hobby Games: The 100 Best, edited by James Lowder, is a hundred 3-5 page write-ups and analyses of significant hobby games (which here pretty much means board games, war games, RPGs, and the like). Basically, they went to a hundred significant gaming figures — publishers, designers, writers, whatever and told them to pick a game they loved and write about it.
At worst, the essays devolve into recapping the game rules and saying how much fun it is — which frankly isn’t all that bad in my book, since reading Bruce Shelley (designer of the Age of Empires computer games) tell you that Sid Sackon’s Acquire is a great game is interesting and useful in its own right. At its best, though, the essays give you a little portrait of a particular era in gaming and the historical significance of their chosen game, which is just absolutely fascinating.
About the only criticism I have with the book is the title. There’s no way these are really the “100 best” games, they’re just the favorite games of 100 different people, and I don’t think there’s a single person alive who’d actually defend this as a real top 100 list. But that’s fine (good, really; the Internets are better at putting list together than books are), and the title is probably snappier than any more descriptive alternative, so hey.
If you’re interested enough in this topic to read a book about it, this is a good one to read.
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February
22,
2009
After reading David Weber’s Off Armageddon Reef and By Schism Rent Asunder
, I realize that I was both unfair and misguided to ascribe the flaws of those Weber/White collaborations to Weber. It’s clear in retrospect that Steve White must be the guy who wrote 90% of those books. Because, right, Weber writes unrealistic characters, but they are at least interesting; and he maybe isn’t a brilliant stylist, but his writing is far, far better than the hacktacular hackathon that was those books.
But for all that, he’s still Dave Weber, which means that these books start off with a giant spaceship battle between humans and implacable aliens. Interestingly, though, that’s just a framing device, and without giving too much away, the actual action happens in a low-tech planet isolated from galactic goings-on. So, whereas the ‘onor ‘arrington novels feature Napoleonic ship combat in space, this one features... Napoleonic ship combat at sea.
Yes, really. One of the nations in this book is explicitly described as being at a tech level similar to that of England in the 18th century. Which just goes to prove that no matter where you are in the galaxy or what year it is, it’s always time for some good ol’-fashioned Napoleonic combat. The three inevitable things in David Weber’s universes are death, taxes, and broadsides.
At any rate, though, if you’d enjoy reading a SFnal treatment of the Age of Fighting Sail, one focused on the development and deployment of military technologies and featuring a superhuman omnicompetent protagonist, well, these are your books. (As a warning, they are part of an ongoing series that is not completed, but they’re reasonably satisfying to read standalone; about on par with the ‘arrington books that way.)
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