Two of my favorite reads of the year: oversized-pages division.
Welcome once again to our recurring MCC feature in which I scribble capsule reviews of everything I’ve read lately that was published in a physical format over a certain page count with a squarebound spine on it — novels, original graphic novels, trade paperbacks, infrequent nonfiction dalliances, and so on. Due to the way I structure my media-consumption time blocks, the list will always feature more graphic novels than works of prose and pure text, though I do try to diversify my literary diet as time and acquisitions permit.
Occasionally I’ll sneak in a contemporary review if I’ve gone out of my way to buy and read something brand new. Every so often I’ll borrow from my wife or from our local library. But the majority of our spotlighted works are presented years after the rest of the world already finished and moved on from them because I’m drawing from my vast unread pile that presently occupies four oversize shelves comprising thirty-three years of uncontrolled book shopping. I’ve occasionally pruned the pile, but as you can imagine, cut out one unread book and three more take its place.
I’ve previously written why I don’t do eBooks. Perhaps someday I’ll also explain why these capsules are exclusive to MCC and not shared on Amazon, Goodreads, or other sites where their authors might prefer I’d share them. In the meantime, here’s me and my recent reading results.
1. Emil Ferris, My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book Two (2024). The long-awaited conclusion to the 2017 half-epic. Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
A youngster named Karen lives in 1960s Chicago with her mom and big brother, deeply loves monster movies and magazines, and has curious notions about her idiosyncratic neighbors and family as viewed through her good-natured but often naive monster-colored vantage. Her everyday routines are rattled when the nice lady upstairs dies unexpectedly and leaves behind audiocassette narratives of her early life as a Jew in pre-WWII Europe. Between those oral memoirs and her encounters with the occasional lowlifes, Karen begins to learn the Universal monsters and other make-believe boogeymen are safe pretenders compared to the monsters lurking in our real world.
Her phantasmagorical walk of life takes her on trips to the Art Institute of Chicago with her brother, spurring radical art-style changes and numerous recreated works; into encounters with nasty bullies who probably grew up to be #MeToo convicts; and in awkward relationships with friends whose living conditions make her own tenement dwelling seem cozy in comparison. Most of these haunting 400+ pages, styled as a diary drawn in Karen’s own line-ruled notebooks, are rendered in layered, nuanced, overwhelmingly exquisite crosshatching reminiscent of ye olde “underground” comix of yesteryear, a gloriously textured unreality unmatched in any mainstream comics of the moment…
The equally thick finale (or IS IT?) delves deeper into the mystery of her dead neighbor, adds a few more supporting players from other walks of life, reveals secrets about her big brother she doesn’t want to know, and charts her changing understanding of her teenage self as reality becomes scarier than the creatures she idolizes, all of it once again rendered as a faux notebook filled from margin to margin with memories, fears, and tributes to fine art and genre fandom rendered in so much painstaking, obsessive crosshatching that it makes up for the complete disappearance of crosshatching from all other comics of recent vintage. Lovely and haunting and creepy and glorious.
2. Kelly Sue DeConnick, Phil Jimenez, Gene Ha, and Nicola Scott, Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons (2023). A supernaturally gorgeous, three-part secret origin of Queen Hippolyta, the Amazons, and all the Greek goddesses who created, ruled, and inspired them — a comprehensive sprawl across millennia of oppression and perseverance, from Mount Olympus’ heyday up to the well-known moment of Princess Diana’s oceanside birth. Even if it had much competition, it’d be the greatest summation of everything that would make Wonder Woman who she is (well, in her best runs, at least). Each chapter is an artistic triumph in its own right, but the first one by Phil Jimenez (abetted by Hi-Fi, Arif Prianto and Romulo Fajardo Jr.) sets the bar at a jaw-dropping height. His early works bore a heavy George Perez influence and would become renowned in his own right, but here he takes ornamentation and character design to another level, as if he looked at Crisis on Infinite Earths and thought, “Y’know what this needs? EVEN MORE MICROSCOPICALLY INTRICATE DETAIL. And every character gets their own costume that takes days to draw PER PANEL.” Many an artist has gone mad laboring over works that turned out one-tenth as good as the pageantry achieved here. I hate to sound like Chris Treager, but this may be literally the best-looking DC Comics story of all time.
I hate, hate, HATE how the series keeps changing format every so often and makes them an utter wreck to shelve together.
3. George R. R. Martin, ed., Wild Cards: Full House (2022). The shared-world adults-only superhero anthology continues with a collection of unconnected short stories previously available only on Tor Books’ website in years past (including one by Victor Milán, who died in 2018). The concluding volume in that publishing contract is more of a mixed bag than usual, but the standouts are Caroline Spector’s “Lies My Mother Told Me” (best hero of the recent books, a kinetic-energy absorbing powerhouse called the Amazing Bubbles, rides herd on a Mardi Gras parade gone extra wild) and Marko Kloos’ “How to Move Spheres and Influence People” (a teen girl with hemiparesis gains telekinetic powers but can only move ball-shaped objects, which spells doom for her dodgeball bullies).
4. George R. R. Martin with Melinda M. Snodgrass, ed., Wild Cards: Pairing Up (2023). The series returns to Bantam Books, its original publisher (back when I was 15! and technically should’ve been forbidden from reading it!), with a new batch of shorts, mostly love-themed. Keepers include David Anthony Durham’s “The Wolf and the Butterfly” (in which Adesina, a former African child soldier, insect-girl, and Bubbles’ adopted daughter, is now in college and old enough to date and I CANNOT believe she grew up so fast, I’m soooo old now), Marko Kloos’ “In the Forests of the Night” (the half-tiger gangster bodyguard Khan finds love on the job…or DOES HE?), and Christopher Rowe’s “Cyrano d’Escargot”, revisiting the giant-sized, socially awkward half-snail genius billionaire who’s now overpaying a soap opera actor to help him woo a celebrity crush, with tragically funny results.
5. George R. R. Martin with Melinda M. Snodgrass, ed., Wild Cards: Sleeper Straddle (2024). This time a single plot connects all our tales, in which one of the series’ longest-running characters — Croyd Crenson, a.k.a. the Sleeper (created by Roger Zelazny, who died in 1995) — is split into six separate versions of himself that scatter and have to be tracked down in Christopher Rowe’s framing sequences. In between, the other authors gallop through the books’ 37-year history and where Croyd fit in throughout his endless metamorphoses. Best of Show candidates include Cherie Priest’s “The Hit Parade”, an early-’80s crime drama starring Leo Storgman, a ram-horned cop who’s since retired in more recent books; OG Wild Cards contributor Walter Jon Williams’ “Semiotics of the Strong Man”, featuring Golden Boy himself, formerly one of America’s favorite superheroes until the ’50s when he named names to the HUAAC (BOOOOOOO); and Max Gladstone’s “The Boy Who Would Be Croyd”, a rare spotlight for the Amazing Rubberband, the obligatory stretchy-guy. The final battle among all the reunited Sleepers seems hasty, but all the Forrest Gumpery leading up to it is a treat.
And with that, I’ve achieved my years-long goal (as charted in this very blog along the way!) of catching up to the series so I can finally start buying and reading these as they’re published…assuming someone tells me whenever new volumes are out.
Intermission for a pair of library checkouts, one of which I absentmindedly returned without taking a pic. Here’s the other in all its plastic-jacketed glare.
6. Christian Ward, Batman: City of Madness (2024). If you think Gotham City is bad, wait’ll you get a load of…Gotham Below! The Court of Owls seeks Our Hero’s assistance with an intrusion that’s basically the Upside Down from Stranger Things, which comes with warped-mirror-universe versions of a few villains and of the Dark Knight Detective himself, who looks like a rather ripped Cthulhu. Ward’s afterword certifies this is a spiritual sequel of sorts to Morrison and McKean’s classic Arkham Asylum, whose angular influence shows in many pages, particularly in the shadows. But his easily recognizable style (basic colors rendered in fierce contrasts) has a horrific, haunting life of its own.
7. Craig Groeschel, Dare to Drop the Pose (2010). An expanded reworking of a 2006 book called Confessions of a Pastor also adds the cover subheading “Ten Things Christians Think but Are Afraid to Say”. From his lofty position as the senior pastor of an online megachurch, Groeschel’s humorous yet extremely humble approach reminds me in some ways of Jon Acuff (the Stuff Christians Like guy), but has his own established voice in his frank rundown of thoughts he harbors during his weaker moments and sometimes during the Sunday routines that we all assume are The Way Things Are Supposed to Be. As a fan of deep candor who struggles with feeling like a weird outcast among fellow congregants, the chapter titles alone drew me in (“I Can’t Stand a Lot of Christians”, “Most of the time I Feel Incredibly Lonely”, “I Hate Prayer Meetings”), but found much wisdom in grappling with those discomforts, many of them illustrated by numerous personally embarrassing tales in which he was not the good guy (the best one ends with him punching Chuck E. Cheese in the face) and…suffice it to say this came along at a moment when I really needed someone above my station vulnerably vouching “It’s not just you.”
From the Department of Discounted Omnibuses Heavy Enough to Count as Deadly Weapons!
8. Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples, Saga: Compendium One (2019). I began following the universally acclaimed Image Comics series from #1 back in 2012 because Vaughan is one of the most compelling storytellers of our time, but begged off partway into the second arc due to conflict with my prudish sensibility. Twelve years later I picked up this behemothic omnibus collecting the first 54 issues, which I found at a comic-con booth that had marked it down to $20 (yes, TWENTY! for 54 issues!) because of light crinkling on the bottoms of the last forty pages. I’m a longtime comics reader and collector, not a comics investor, and braked really hard for such a bargain. I did flip past some sequences more quickly than others, but I do get the intense, award-winning fuss over the adventures of Space Pacifist Romeo and Space Soldier Juliet and their wee narrator daughter. Vaughan and Staples know how to build character in four dimensions or more, leave a reader wanting more now now now, and wound our very souls with one shocking cliffhanger after another, up to and including #54’s final splash page. The long, long wait for all involved to write, draw, publish, collect, damage and discount the next 54 issues is really gonna hurt.
9. Hiroaki Samura, Blade of the Immortal Deluxe Edition Vol. 1 (2020). Fun trivia: I have read manga! It’s never been a full-time part of my reading diet, but I’ve sampled a few in my time, though admittedly nothing recent. I followed along for a short time when Dark Horse Comics was reprinting this 1993-2012 saga in monthly singles that felt like too-short installments, but it works better at length. This hardcover omnibus (another discounted convention find courtesy of Gem City Books) collects the first three Dark Horse trades’ worth of chapters about a ronin cursed with a magical worm infestation that grants him regenerative powers like Wolverine and Deadpool, but which mean he can never experience a warrior’s honorable death…though he can still suffer. It’s interesting for me to finally meet Our Antihero early on, when he’s still on his way to going full nihilist, but isn’t all the way there yet.
Fictional prose was given short shrift this year, sadly.
10. Alan Moore Illuminations (2022). Everyone knows of his impact the comics medium, but on are occasion he’ll write words without pictures, as evidenced in this short-story collection. I read the oldest, “Hypothetical Lizard”, in one of Gardner Dozois’ Year’s Best Science Fiction collections back in high school when I was too young to get it. The rest are a mix of lost tales from obscure anthologies and new works written during the pandemic. My personal favorite is among the shortest, “Not Even Legend”, in which two concurrent narratives fly in opposing timeline vectors (a sort of River Song riff), but the book’s release dominated comics-news-site headlines thanks to the novella “What We Can Know About Thunderman”, an epistemologically bent roman à clef about the comics biz and its oft-sordid history, which certain tiresome sites chose to file under the evergreen fake topic of “ALAN MOORE IS BEING MEAN TO COMICS AGAIN!” Beyond their fainting spells, it’s a fascinating if not always straightforward piece about the sometimes awful sinners behind our favorite funnybooks, though perhaps it’s for the best that we not-in-the-know never learn which horrifying tidbits are ripped from reality.
11. Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961; 2011 edition). There’re at least hundreds of classics I’ve never read, but I can finally cross this one off the list. So now I get the tragicomic story of the beleaguered bomber pilot Yossarian, the titular term that’s sometimes been used correctly in pop culture, and the scathing satires of the horrors of war and our military’s often grotesque, oblivious, or cartoonishly selfish responses to it. I was unaware of its achronological narrative, which I presume was radical at the time but is done a bit more often nowadays (as recently as the best episode of Agatha All Along), though I still had to backtrack a lot to straighten my scorecard and pick up even half the nuances at play. Now I have to decide what to watch next, Mike Nichols’ 1970 film version or the barely remembered 2019 Hulu miniseries starring the Foreigner from Kraven the Hunter.
12. Charles Soule, The Endless Vessel (2023). The third non-IP novel by the prolific lawyer-turned-comics writer is his best original so far. (I haven’t read his Star Wars: The High Republic books.) In a world stricken by a pandemic (WAIT WAIT WAIT! DON’T RUN AWAY THAT FAST! THIS IS DIFFERENT!) that inflicts the infected with a depression that effectively nullifies any will to try at anything ever again (no, it’s not Super-COVID). A variant strain with even worse side effects sparks a new worldwide cult (no, not like THAT) who think effort and aspirations are uncool and just want to watch the world burn (well, okay, that part matches our reality). An environmental scientist in Hong Kong dodges the unchecked contagion and stumbles into mysterious new tech that’s one of many breadcrumbs leading to a more secret and less nihilistic society that could save the day. It’s up to her and a famous, terminally ill rocker to follow a centuries-long trail and convince whoever’s at the end of it to come save the world. If it doesn’t feel Too Soon and you can get past the nightmarish opening in which the Louvre is the first victim to be murdered before our eyes, it’s a cerebrally action-packed page-turner with faint echoes of the better ideas in Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland minus the Randian overtones, and the ending ties everything together into a satisfying new day for humanity, depending on our choices (no, not “reduce, reuse, recycle”).
13. Charles Soule, Chronicles of the Lazarene (2023). This Kickstarter’d companion to The Endless Vessel is a bonus cornucopia of backstory regarding the titular supership’s many adventures, scientific breakthroughs, and harrowing incidents that occurred before its discovery in the main novel, which was self-contained as-is but benefits from the deeper dive. It was a generous method for Soule to share his extra world-building to this extent — not a standalone unit, but an entertaining add-on that doesn’t feel like a superfluous J.K. Rowling cash-grab addendum.
To be continued!