More Than Super-Heroes

I’m going to come clean with you right from the beginning: super-heroes are my favorite. I’ve been reading comic books and graphic novels since I was four-years-old. I’m much older than that now and I read these things professionally as well as for fun and, still, nothing speaks to me quite the way your average super-strong guy in a mask does. Why? Because they fight, of course. I don’t mean they just punch each other a lot (which is great), but rather that they are always struggling to make things better – or at least to keep things from getting worse. Read anything – humor, sports, adventure, biography – and I bet if you think about it, it’s the fight in a character (or real person) that makes him/her interesting or engaging.

So, if you know this, you can probably guess my favorite among the heroes has got to be Spider-Man. He’s the quintessential super-hero, see, because his whole life is about fight. He’s got some powers, naturally, but it’s always just a little too hard for him. The bad guy is a little too big, too strong, too fast, too mean. The situation is too dangerous, too scary, too sad. His whole story is about reaching down inside of himself and struggling to match up. Ultimate Spider-Man vol. 1: Power and Responsibility (by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley) is an excellent example of this. You probably know the story: high school outcast gets bitten by super-spider, uses powers for personal gain until tragedy strikes, then resolves to own up to his responsibility (just like Uncle Ben said). Probably though, you haven’t seen it quite like this: written so you get into these people’s heads, drawn so the characters practically burst from the page as they’re kicking each other in the teeth. And a little bit sad in the end, too. You won’t remember this one just because it had good action.

Maybe Spider-Man isn’t your favorite. Practically every super-hero in the Marvel Universe appears in Civil War (by Mark Millar and Steve McNiven). Seems that some amateur super-heroes just blew up a small town by mistake and the government has had it. Now super-heroes have to register their secret identities and work for Uncle Sam or they are considered criminals (remember X-Men 3?). One group, led by Iron Man, understands the need for registration, another group led by Captain America thinks once you let one man (or one government) tell you who to beat up, you’re not really a super-hero anymore. Who’s right? Problem is, everyone’s right. And no fight is ever as fierce as when everyone knows they’re right. You will not believe the size of the action in this one, or some of the things that guys you thought were heroes are willing to do to each other to win.

It gets bigger still. Kingdom Come (by Mark Waid and Alex Ross) is about the heroes from the other company (DC – they do Superman, Batman, Flash, etc.). It’s years in the future and the heroes we know have retired. New heroes have taken their place, except they’re as bad as the so-called “criminals” they fight. When these guys leap to the rescue, as many innocent people die as are saved. Superman can’t take it anymore. Older, less certain of himself, he returns to try to set things right. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees with his philosophy about what’s right. That includes old friends like Batman and Wonder Woman. Before you know it, pretty much everyone shows up and takes a side, including old time villains like Lex Luthor and the Joker, who work to manipulate things from behind the scenes.

Civil War and Kingdom Come are Big Ones, pretty much the final word on gigantic super-hero action with an interesting question at their centers.

Tired of super-heroes? Fair enough, even I don’t read them all the time. The truth is, there’s so much great stuff out there that isn’t about super-heroes, it’s sort of hard to stick with the flying, swinging, punching types all the time anymore.

Take sports, for instance. Any really great sports story is also a human drama at the same time. For example, The Golem’s Mighty Swing (by James Sturm, also available in the collection James Sturm’s America, along with a bunch of other excellent stories not about baseball). Back in the 1920’s, various minority groups, including African-Americans, Jews and women (not actually a minority group, but still not seen playing baseball too much) formed various teams and swung the bat in small towns throughout the country. One such Jewish team was called the Stars of David, and times were getting tough for them (less interest = smaller audience = less money = trouble). What can you do? Well, the team’s manager/captain realizes the only way to lure in the audience is to play to the mystery that surrounded minority groups at the time, and he dredges up a monster from old Jewish myth, the Golem (sort of a Jewish Incredible Hulk) to play on the team.

In a completely different genre (humor), comes The Adventures of Rabbi Harvey (by Steve Sheinkin). Elk Spring, Colorado is an Old West town without a sheriff. And instead of your run of the mill, gun-slingin’ tough guy, they wind up with Rabbi Harvey, humble and soft-spoken, but smart as a whip and awfully funny. You think the only way to stop a marauding outlaw is to shoot the gun out of his hand? You think the only way to get the best of a greedy old biddy is to haul her into the clink? Turns out some old Jewish wisdom works pretty well, too. Sounds like a strange combination, I know, but there’s more laughs per minute in this thing than in your average Judd Apatow movie. Seriously. There’s a sequel, too (Rabbi Harvey Rides Again, also by this Sheinkin guy).

Finally, maybe have a look at Houdini: The Handcuff King (by Jason Lutes and Nick Bertozzi). Houdini wasn’t exactly a super-hero, but he wasn’t exactly not a super-hero either. I mean, as far as real people go, he must have come about the closest. Catch him here as he prepares and conducts one of his greatest escapes: diving into the freezing cold Charles River, naked and handcuffed. Just seeing that stuff is pretty great, but seeing the little things that made Houdini the man he was makes this one the treasure it is.

Okay, so that’s a good beginning. Hopefully there are a couple reads here you haven’t seen or heard of yet. In the future, I’ll probably talk about just one or two books at a time, some newer, some older, plenty of super-heroes, but plenty of the other good stuff, too. Heck, I might even throw in something that isn’t a graphic novel here and there.

Thanks for stopping by and hope you enjoy.

Teaching the "language of hope and inspiration"

In a NYT Op-Ed last week, science writer Brian Greene has some thoughts on how educators teach science wrong:

But here’s the thing. The reason science really matters runs deeper still. Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable — a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional. To be able to think through and grasp explanations — for everything from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth — not because they are declared dogma but rather because they reveal patterns confirmed by experiment and observation, is one of the most precious of human experiences.

As a practicing scientist, I know this from my own work and study. But I also know that you don’t have to be a scientist for science to be transformative. I’ve seen children’s eyes light up as I’ve told them about black holes and the Big Bang. I’ve spoken with high school dropouts who’ve stumbled on popular science books about the human genome project, and then returned to school with newfound purpose. And in that letter from Iraq, the soldier told me how learning about relativity and quantum physics in the dusty and dangerous environs of greater Baghdad kept him going because it revealed a deeper reality of which we’re all a part.

It’s striking that science is still widely viewed as merely a subject one studies in the classroom or an isolated body of largely esoteric knowledge that sometimes shows up in the “real” world in the form of technological or medical advances. In reality, science is a language of hope and inspiration, providing discoveries that fire the imagination and instill a sense of connection to our lives and our world.

The "language of hope and inspiration"; have you ever read something so wonderful? Science matters; expect to find many books on science here at Guys Lit Wire.

John Carter Of Mars coming to a big screen?

Hmmm. No idea how true this rumor might be, but supposedly Andrew Stanton is writing the script for Edgar Rice Burroughs' classic seriesJohn Carter Of Mars. This is interesting for a couple of reasons, Stanton is famous for writing Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc., and other Pixar classics and John Carter...well, he is not a cartoon. Here's the publisher's description of the first John Carter book, A Princess of Mars:

Virginia gentleman John Carter, unexpectedly transported to the perilous red planet, Mars, finds himself captured by the loveless Green Men of Thark. As Carter struggles to win his freedom—and the affections of fellow captive Dejah Thoris, princess of the rival clan of Helium—the fate of the entire planet hangs in the balance: warring Martian tribes collide and the beleaguered Atmosphere Factory grinds to a suffocating halt. Ray Bradbury, reminiscing on the enduring thrill of Burroughs’s Martian adventure, writes, “I stood on the lawns of summer, raised my hands, and cried for Mars, like John Carter, to take me home. I flew to the Red Planet and never returned.”

Bradbury loves it - please don't screw this up Mr. Stanton!

If You Like Chess...

Maybe you enjoy a game of chess once in a while, or checkers or mancala. Maybe you've watched or read the Japanese series Hikaru No Go. I've got a book for you. Okay, five books:

Volume 1: Learn to Play Go: A Master's Guide to the Ultimate Game
Volume 2: Learn to Play Go: The Way of the Moving Horse
Volume 3: Learn to Play Go: The Dragon Style
Volume 4: Learn to Play Go: Battle Strategies
Volume 5: Learn to Play Go: The Palace of Memory

Go is called Wei Chi in China, where it originated over 3000 years ago. The Koreans call it Baduk. In Japan, go is the national game, and until recently most of the world's top players were Japanese. Today Korean and Chinese players are some of the dominant figures of go (or whatever you wish to call it), and there are a few westerners who play professionally. This series was translated into English by Janice Kim from the original Korean by Jeong Soo-hyun. He is a top-ranked professional go player and university professor of the game. Volume 5, however, is apparently more the work of Ms. Kim, drawing on what she learned studying in Mr. Jeong's academy. She had fifteen years of professional experience when she published this final volume in 2003.

Go is a strategy and tactics game, as is chess. But it involves capturing territory (The Chinese name for the game translates as "the surrounding game.") rather than a king, so it resembles war more than chess does. Where chess is played on an 8 X 8 grid, the go board is a grid measuring 19 X 19. So instead of 64 places pieces can occupy, there are 361. That many possibilities can overwhelm the beginner. If you are new to the game, it's a good idea to start on a smaller board. On a 9 X 9 board you can learn the rules and grasp the essence of the game. Then, with some experience, move on to the challenge of the full-size board.

Go has a handicap system, so when playing against someone more experienced, winning (or at least a respectable showing) is possible for the less-skilled player. This also helps make the game interesting and challenging for your more skilled opponent.

Reading the first book in the set is enough to get you started and volume one fortunately includes a board and playing pieces (called "stones"). The rules are simple, but the game has so many possibilities that mastering it takes years -- some would say a lifetime. Ms. Kim notes that "The first three volumes are the introductory series, designed to give the reader the most solid foundation possible for quick progress."

"As well as being an interesting amusement, go is also believed by many to develop one's brain power and even build character. One certainly must use one's intellect to play go, but one is also rewarded for awareness, a calm heart, and a sense of purpose. Even though it is not a physical sport, go is categorized as a martial art because of the aspects of self-development involved. That's why go is sometimes called 'The Way of Go' or 'The Teachings of Go.'" (From volume one, page 53)

I host a "Chess and Go" program at our public library. When I teach people to play go, I show them Janice Kim's books. Recently I played against a boy I had taught maybe six months ago. He beat me, which really surprised me. I figure he's been studying Learn to Play Go. Either that, or I teach the game better than I play it. Rats!

Before this set was published in English, Go for Beginners, by Kaoru Iwamoto, was probably the best introduction to the game. I learned the game from it and recommend it without hesitation. But Learn to Play Go is even easier for the beginner. To help the reader, the authors follow instructional chapters with "Test Yourself" sections. When I failed some of those test questions, I benefited from reviewing the material.

My one complaint is that the page layout wastes a lot of space. The series probably could have been published in two or three volumes. That said, Janice Kim has given us an excellent introduction to the game of go.

Beyond the Books

A good way to study the game of go is to replay professional games. An amazing archive of games dating from the eighteenth century to recent championship matches is available for that purpose at http://gobase.org/. As I replay them, I try to figure where the best move would be. Three of the twentieth century's top players were Kitani Minoru, Go Seigen, and Sakata Eio. I like studying their games, especially. Lee Chang Ho is one of today's best. I enjoy studying games he has played against his mentor Cho HoonHyun, and against other 9-dan (the top rank) players. Note that the family name is given first, so GoBase's alphabetical list is searched, for example, for "Sakata," not "Eio." GoBase has other useful resources, as well. It's the best website devoted to go that I've found.

Lost places remembered

BLDG Blog excerpts an interview from Ballardian with photographer Troy Paiva, author of the Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration. Here's a bit that has really stayed with me:

When I was 13 my family went on a road trip, one of many, and we somehow found ourselves bouncing down 15 miles of bad dirt road to the classic "wild west" ghost town of Bodie, arguably the most authentic ghost town in America. Today Bodie is kept in a state of "arrested decay" and is a major tourist destination. Much of the road is paved and the parking lot is filled with tour buses, and in the summer the town is crawling with thousands of tourists from around the world. But back in the early 70s you could drive right into the center of town and park. When we climbed out of the car we found we were the only ones there! I wandered that town alone for hours, slack-jawed at the thought that people would just walk away from furnished houses and businesses, a whole city, and never come back. I was hooked for life.

[Image: ‘Joshua Says GO!’ by Troy Paiva. ‘A 30s twin-tail Lockheed Electra does the big sleep at Aviation Warehouse. Night, full moon, red-gelled strobe flash. Canon 20D.’]

Eliot Asinof, Rest in Peace

From the NYT obituary:

Eliot Asinof, whose journalistic re-creation of the 1919 Black Sox scandal, “Eight Men Out,” became a classic of both baseball literature and narrative nonfiction, died Tuesday in Hudson, N.Y. He was 88 and lived in Ancramdale, N.Y.

Eight Men Out was one of the best books on sports I've ever read. It's an absolute must read for fans of baseball; this is the episode that changed the game in fundamental ways and certainly inaugerated the era of modern baseball (with all the good and bad that has brought). More from the NYT:

The book is an exhaustively reported and slightly fictionalized account of how eight members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox allowed their anger at the parsimonious team owner, Charles Comiskey, to corrupt their integrity, leading them to welcome the overtures of gamblers, who persuaded them to throw the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. A seminal event in the history of the game, it led to the appointment of the first baseball commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

Mr. Asinof spent nearly three years researching the book, including interviewing the two members of the team, Joe Jackson and Happy Feltsch, who were still alive. In the end, “Eight Men Out” was a book that made plain the connection between sport and money and between sport and the underworld. “Here is the underbelly of baseball vividly dissected,” said Fay Vincent, the former baseball commissioner.

Porcellino writes about his Thoreau graphic novel

Over at Containing Multitudes, a blog run by the School of Amercan Studies at the University of East Anglia, John Porcellino talks about his forthcoming graphic novel about Henry David Thoreau, titled Thoreau at Walden, coming soon from the Center for Cartoon Studies. I've seen an advanced readers copy, and I can't think of a better cartoonist to depict the iconic American writer and philosopher.

If you've seen either the Houdini or Satchel Paige graphic novels from the Center for Cartoon Studies, then you know what a cool, informative, and out-of-the-ordinary series of biographies these books are. They tackle the material in ways that break out of the typical "life story" box to bring something new to the table, and really open up the lives and times of the subjects.

What's fascinating here is to see how a writer and artist approaches adapting someone elses words and ideas:

"Thoreau has been a major inspiration to me since my High School days, and to get the chance to immerse myself in his work and life, and then to try to bring that out in a way that would be accessible to contemporary readers was really a dream come true for me, pardon the cliché."

More at the link!

NYC dystopia x2

dys·to·pi·a ~noun. a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding.

Well, there's plenty of that going around in a pair of books I'm featuring today, both of them set in New York City but written 40 years apart from one another.

First up is the dead and the gone, Susan Beth Pfeffer's sequel to Life As We Knew It. As with the previous book, the events that follow occur after an asteroid has hit the moon, knocking it out of its former orbit. Where Life As We Knew It was set in rural Pennsylvania and followed closely the struggle for survival as seen from a teen girl's perspective, the dead and the gone shows us how events unraveled through the eyes of Alex Morales, a seventeen year old boy living in Manhattan.

Alex is the second-eldest of the divided Morales family; his older brother Carlos is a Marine stationed on the West Coast; his mom is a nurse on night duty when the book begins, possibly on her way home via the subway; his father is in Puerto Rico attending the funeral of Alex's grandmother; and at home, Alex's two younger sisters wait for him to return from his night job working at a pizza parlor. In the beginning the news of the asteroid's collision course is peripheral at best; most people are listening to the baseball game.

Unraveled is the best way to describe events that follow. As the shifting of the moon has profound effects on the planet's delicate ecosystem, tides flood the subways and knock out all satellite transmissions. Without his parents there to guide them Alex quickly moves into survival mode in order to protect his sisters and keep the family together. When his sisters ask about the safety of their missing parents Alex reassures them without hesitation that everything will be okay. Alex is as pragmatic as he is protective, shunting his emotions in order to assure their survival.

As things progress, Alex's attempts to keep things normal at home run counter to what's happening all around him. Yankee stadium becomes the repository for people to claim unidentified family. Alex's trip to the makeshift morgue tugs at his emotions - he'd like to know what happened to his mother, but he also doesn't want to know if she's dead. Without phone service he is unable to contact relatives in Puerto Rico to check on his father, so without proof he assumes his father is alive despite reports of the island being struck by a massive tidal wave. Alex and his sisters continue to go to school and remain as normal as possible under the circumstances, while bit by bit it becomes clear that things will never be normal again.

Where events felt more ominous in Pfeffer's previous exploration of this disaster scenario, here in New York City the events that unfold seem merely to hasten the inevitable. As the food shortages and flu epidemic spread, as stifling heat gives way to mountains of snow, as the rich get out of town and the poor are trapped on an island left for dead, New York comes to represent the ultimate failure of the urban model of living, an unsustainable wasteland. Alex casually learns to lie and steal and, in the end, manages to get himself and one of his sisters successfully out of New York and toward a promise of a new life further inland. It's a somewhat bleak ending, but it feels genuine and hopeful at the same time.

* * * * *
Recently released for its 40th anniversary, Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! gives us another version of the Big Apple in decay. The events are no less ecological, though the cause is man-made this time.

It's the future, the end of the millennium. You'll have to forgive a book written in the 1960's for getting the future of 1999 wrong, though in many ways the book does correctly understand some of the problems we're facing today. Harrison's premise was that the US was unconcerned with population control and that short-sidedness led to a planet where the people outstripped the resources. Greenhouse gases have ruined rich agricultural farmland, food and water is scarce, New York city is under a constant heat wave. As Harrison paints it, only the date of this scenario might be wrong as we may still be headed in this direction under global warming.

I have to break the review here to interject that this book was nothing like I had remembered it to be. I had this strange sense of double deja vu because there are familiar elements in the story that echoed both a movie adaptation of this book and the sudden realization that my disappointment was the same I felt when I first read this book as a teen. The movie was Soylent Green, and the disappointment I felt then as now was that there is no such thing as Soylent Green in the book. That is to say, if you've seen the movie and you think you know what the book is about, you don't.

Harrison tells the story of a police detective named Andy Rusch who investigates a case of murder that was nothing more than a crime of opportunity. The problem is that the corrupt politicos believe there's something deeper going on and Andy's forced to follow-through on the investigation beyond when it should have been dropped. There's a girl involved, a gangster's moll, who takes up with Andy once she's out of her meal ticket. And darting through the story is the thug on the lam who shows us the seamier underside of a New York Harbor clogged with decommissioned Liberty Ships used as emergency housing for the world's refugees.

What Harrison has done is graft a noir-ish crime story onto a New York City that has collapsed under the weight of its population. It's a dirty, ugly world with rationed water, no electricity, a black market for produce and meat, and corruption at every level of government. Where the dead and the gone gives us the quick death of NYC Make Room! Make Room! gives us the tail end of the long, slow demise. Both versions, as written, are equally plausible portraits of a metropolitan city in decay.

But in a head-to-head grudge match it's Pfeffer's book hands down as the better read. Pfeffer's book continues to draw out the disaster in diary format, one day at a time, inviting the reader to put themselves in Alex's shoes in deciding whether or not he's made the right decisions. the dead and the gone deals somewhat flatly with Alex as a protector of his sisters and there is little for him emotionally. Harrison's book has a more balanced emotional story at it's heart with Andy questioning love and what it means to live in this rotten world, but in imagining the worst aspects of his world into our future he retained some ugly racial and sexist stereotypes that, while "authentic" for a reader back in 1966, detract from the story.

the dead and the gone
by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Harcourt Children's Books 2008

Life As We Knew It
by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Harcourt Children's Books 2006

Make Room! Make Room!
by Harry Harrison
Tor Books 2008

Cory Doctorow's graphic novel for free!

From Boing Boing:

IDW have just published the collected issues of "Cory Doctorow's Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now," a six-edition series of comics adapted from my short stories by an incredibly talented crew of writers, artists, inkers and letterers...s with all of my books, this one is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial license, meaning you can copy it, share it, remix it and play with it, provided it's on a non-commercial basis. I've uploaded the full book in high resolution as a PDF and CBR file to the Internet Archive, for your downloading pleasure.

Collected in this volume are adaptations of my award-winning stories "Craphound," "Anda's Game," "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth," "After the Siege," "I, Robot" and "Nimby and the D-Hoppers."

"Anda's Game" in particular impressed the hell out of me - I couldn't believe what I was reading but some checking on the internet showed that yeah, some of the kind of flat out insanity he wrote about in that story really is true. If you want to read that story in its prose form, get a copy of the new SF anthology Starry Rift. To download the graphic novel for free, go here.

Crime, Punishment and Robert Frost

Last December a bunch of teens had a very rowdy party in poet Robert Frost's old summer house in Vermont. (It is now a museum.) There was a lot damage and the judge in the case just got creative about how the defendants are not only going to pay for what they destroyed but also learn a bit in the process. As the NYT explains in a recent editorial:

The criminal justice system in Ripton, Vt., prescribed poetry, of all things, as punishment — and we hope rehabilitation — for 25 teenagers (townies all) who broke into Frost’s old summer house in the woods last December. They trashed it during a snowy night’s bout of drinking and partying.

Skeptical at first, Mr. Parini, who teaches at nearby Middlebury College, accepted the invitation to teach the wayward teens. He did not pull any iambic punches in class last week.

One lesson was built around “The Road Not Taken,” Frost’s caution on the fateful choices that crop up in the dense woods of life. Harsher still was the choice of “Out, Out,” Frost’s account of a youth’s precious life spilling away in a sawmill accident amid the heedless glories of Vermont.

“They seemed shaken to their foundations,” said Mr. Parini, not that surprised. “A wake-up call: don’t waste your life.”

The young perpetrators must also do hours of community service, but the professor knows Frost’s words struck home best. “Poetry is about life and death and who you are as a person,” Mr. Parini explained, quoting the prose line from Frost “that really drove me towards these kids.” It’s from the essay “Education by Poetry,” in which the poet warned, “Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world.”