Ode to a Robot

Never really invested myself in manga as much as I did in their American cousins, the comic and graphic novel, but when something special comes along, it doesn't really matter what format (or visual language) it's in. Case in point: Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka (by Urasawa). Ostensibly based on the prototypical manga and anime character Astro Boy (star of an imminent movie blockbuster, as it happens), this trades in the fun, high-energy kid-oriented adventure for a considerably more thoughtful, suspenseful and sophisticated story. Using the Astro Boy arc "the Greatest Robot on Earth" as a jumping off point, Urusawa turns this into a tense mystery and philosophical rumination on identity that is equal parts Silence of the Lambs and I, Robot.



Though only Volumes One, Two and Three of the seven volume series are available so far, we have already been injected into a near future world where robots have been assimilated into jobs as integral to everyday life as sanitation worker and policeman. Among these class of mechanical citizens are a rare breed of super-robots who have transcended their programming and have attained extraordinary levels of humanity and philosophical depth. And now, this elite breed is being hunted by something terrible and unknown, a serial killer of robots who itself appears to be robot, too. Europol Agent Gesicht, a robot detective, has been assigned to the case and in his investigation, we meet a young robot of uniquely human character, a warrior robot who yearns to break his mechanical bonds and create art, and a terrifying, broken, robot murderer who, like Hannibal Lecter, may hold the key to this new series of robot murders. At the same time, Gesicht comes up against the limits of his own robotic existence and identity and begins to uncover a solution with vast and insidious implications.

This is not a fast-moving, action-packed blow-out. But you may want to pick it up when you've had as much slam-bang Transformers actions as you can take and are looking for something with an unusual depth and power (and clean, evocative and subtle art).

If you can never get enough slam-bang action, however, there's always Green Lantern: Secret Origin (by Johns and Reis), which puts a modern spin on the classic character's history. Re-framing the tale of the fearless test pilot recruited into a galactic peace-keeping force as the story of a young hotshot's coming of age, Johns cleverly plunges the authority-averse Hal Jordan into boot camp, sticks him with a partner destined to become his greatest enemy, and throws him up against a truly ghastly enemy. The art is slick, the action is exciting and (almost) non-stop, and you even get some thoughtful characterization in the bargain. And within the story, Johns has laid the foundation for DC's huge upcoming crossover event Blackest Night. Get it while it's hot.

Motorcycle Song

What is it about Harley Davidson motorcycles? When I was at Myrtle Beach last month, Harley riders were having a spring rally. Thousands of people riding up and down the road with no mufflers or lousy mufflers. They do this every year. I'm not sure why.

I was an apprentice mechanic at a Harley shop for about six weeks when I was a teen. I saw too many wrecked bikes and people in casts. Plus, I'm a crummy mechanic. So I decided I didn't need a motorcycle.

Gary Paulsen bought a Harley when he was 56 years old. He had heart disease, and thought it was time for The Bike. He and a buddy rode from Alamagordo, New Mexico to Fairbanks, Alaska, by way of St. Paul, Minnesota. He wrote about his experience in Pilgrimage on a Steel Ride: A Memoir About Men and Motorcycles. He told some other stories, too. Guy stories, I'd say, for the most part.


If you've read Paulsen's Hatchet, you know he is a good writer. But in Pilgrimage on a Steel Ride, he tells of an incident in his life that certainly inspired part of Hatchet: "I was ... hitchhiking... I rode with a Hungarian refugee who had escaped the Russian brutality when they brought tanks and took Hungary. He was a short man with dark hair and dark glasses and was driving an old DeSoto at great speed, smiling and telling me of the wonders of living in America when a pheasant tried to clear the road, came through the windshield, hit his face and broke his neck and killed him. The car went off the road, but the shoulder was flat, as North Dakota road shoulders tend to be, and the car simply bounced and came to rest in a plowed field. He was not breathing nor could I feel his heart, and in fear I ran from there, covered with pheasant blood and guts, and an old lady picked me up and I worked for her until I took off with the carnival."

That's just one of Paulsen's stories. What a life and what a great storyteller. He raced the Iditarod twice! I have enjoyed a few of his novels, but his nonfiction keeps me coming back for more. I cannot get enough of it. This one is for more mature readers, in my opinion.

The Best American Comics

I have this problem with Summer Reading lists that are doled out by schools. Basically, they suck. They suck the joy of reading right down to the marrow and attempt to equate vacation time with extended education. Either schools should go year-round and quit the pretense or Summer Reading lists need to lighten up. Spend the Summer returning fun the the reading quotient, there'll be plenty of time starting in September for reading the Serious, the Dry, the Meaningful to be analyzed within inches of their pulpy lives.

I've got plenty of suggestions for alternate Summer Reading but today I want to talk about comics, and specifically The Best American Comics of 2008. I've actually wanted to talk about this for months but teetered on the edge of deciding whether or not the collection is appropriate. It's that whole chicken v. egg thing of whether or not some graphic imagery and story elements are appropriate for teens or if they're already seeing them in other places (like movies and TV) and there's little harm involved in comics that do the same thing.

Murder, sex, and drugs are involved, but these are topics often touched on in Young Adult literature. The difference is that when they appear in comics there's this feeling that somehow minors are being corrupted, that "comics" equals "funny" or "humorous" and that anything more is some grand betrayal of morals.

Editor Lynda Berry mentions in her introduction that "If this book had been in my house when I was a kid, I would have found a way to read it in secret." This is exactly what I would have done as a kid, and it got me wondering if that still isn't the best way to discover a world of comics beyond superheroes and other ridiculous over-muscled, tights-wearing vigilantes. On the other hand, shouldn't we have evolved in our thinking that kids shouldn't have to discover these things in secret? Sure, the thrill of doing something forbidden is lost, as is the wonderment that comes with discovery, but comics already have a hard enough time (though it's getting better) with acceptance that maybe that secret reading should be secret no longer.

For anyone who grew up, as I did, looking forward to the comics in the alternative weekly papers, and those who have kept tabs with small press and alternative comics, there are few surprises here. Matt Groening, Nick Bertozzi, Kaz, Jaime Hernandez, Seth, Alison Bechdel, Rick Geary, Chris Ware, Derf... the line-up reads like a brief history of 80s and 90s comics history, and the fact that these folks are still around (and perhaps to some extent largely unknown) may make a larger point about comics history in America. The fact that one "mainstream" comic was chosen - a Batman: Year 100 excerpt was chosen and pulled at the last minute by its publisher makes another point about this collection: there's still a Wild West frontier in comics.

With a wide range of styles and subject matter, the comics Barry has chosen are incredibly strong. Usually with collections like this the pieces I like are outweighed by the number I don't, but here I found only two duds and a couple of marginal pieces and the rest were solid. Subjects cover everything from the opening comic where fratricide is played as a casual punchline to the horrors of the war in Iraq from a journalist to kids playing war and discovering girlie magazines while "invading" a homeless encampment. The four panel strip format flips it's wig with surreality, the Tortoise and the Hare becomes a battle between a rock-steady drummer on the one hand and a party-hearty type on the other, a pair of nocturnal ragamuffins spending the night building a tower of boxes to play hopscotch on, young woman tries to help a drug addict, a man is sanguine about losing his love to a suicidal cult, Cupid's assistant takes over for a day and has cats mating with dogs (literally) in no time... there's something for (and possibly to offend) every sensibility, though that isn't it's purpose.

To those who have felt the short story is dead, I propose that the short story is alive and well in the form of comics. Even as stand-alone excepts from larger works, these stories deliver – not so much a punchline but a promise of a satisfying resolution.

There is always that danger that one person's "best" is another person's worst, but omnibus collections like The Best American Comics series (previous editions edited by Harvey Pekar and Chris Ware) and Flight (now in it's fifth volume, edited by Kazu Kibuishi) are a great ways to sample what's out there and explore the possibilities of storytelling that don't involve nefarious villains plotting to take over the world.

Lynda Barry's advice for how to approach the book is one I wish more adults would encourage in collections. She suggests opening the book to find something of interest – as a kid she would have tried to zoom in on swear words or crazy pictures – and start reading from there. Jump around, find what interests, read in pieces, not all at once. Linear is highly overrated and constricting, not unlike a lot of educational thinking about Summer Reading.

Lighten up and enjoy the experience.


Books mentioned:

The Best American Comics 2008
edited by Lynda Barry
Houghton Mifflin

The Best American Comics 2007
edited by Chris Ware
Houghton Mifflin

The Best American Comics 2006
edited by Harvey Pekar and Anne Elizabeth Moore
Houghton Mifflin

Flight, volumes 1 through 5
edited by Kazu Kibuishi
Villard Books

Batman: Year 100
Paul Pope
DC Comics

No Fear Shakespeare SONNETS

I have a confession to make: I have gone batty for the Bard this month. Over at my blog, I've dedicated the entire month of June to posts for what I've dubbed "Brush Up Your Shakespeare Month." It should therefore come as no surprise to you that I'm talking about Shakespeare here as well. Specifically, I'm talking about Shakespeare's sonnets.

If you head to Barnes & Noble or to any number of online book sources, you can purchase your own copy of the No Fear Shakespeare SONNETS: The Poems Plus a Translation Anyone Can Understand. The book contains all 154 of Shakespeare's Sonnets. In each case, the actual text as written by Shakespeare is located on the left-hand page of the book, and the updated translation is on the right-hand side of the page.

Here's an example, using one of the most-recognized sonnets in the collection, Sonnet #18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?")

First, the original:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
   So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
   So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

The No Fear version:

Shall I compare you to a summer day? You're lovelier and milder. Rough winds shake the pretty buds of May, and summer doesn't last nearly long enough. Sometimes the sun shines too hot, and often its golden face is darkened by clouds. And everything beautiful stops being beautiful, either by accident or simply in the course of nature. But your eternal summer will never fade, nor will you lose possession of your beauty, nor shall death brag that you are wandering in the underworld, once you're captured in my eternal verses. As long as men are alive and have eyes with which to see, this poem will live and keep you alive.

As you can see, the No Fear version is not kept in verse; it does, however, render Shakespeare's poem in terms that are simpler to understand than some of Shakespeare's words. Highly recommended for anyone studying the sonnets who isn't comfortable with Elizabethan English.

Alone Across the Atlantic

Have you ever wanted to challenge yourself, to do something to see if you could do it, see if you were capable? Ever just wanted to get away from everything—REALLY get away? These questions lie at the heart of A Pearl in the Storm: How I Found My Heart in the Middle of the Ocean. Tori McClure was the first woman to row alone across the Atlantic Ocean, and this is her story.

McClure started rowing at Smith College, and had rowing mentors who had made the journey across the Atlantic. She decided to try it herself, in a 23-foot plywood rowboat she christened The American Pearl. The picture on the cover of the book, a very small boat in the middle of a vast ocean, gives you an idea of what kind of “living space” she had to work with on what was expected to be a 3-month long journey of thousands of miles. While many friends and sponsors assisted her with the building of the boat and financing for equipment, food, and other necessities, this was McClure’s journey to make alone.

McClure’s writing vividly brings forth both the day-to-day drudgery of her rowing routine, and the wonders that can be found when you find yourself alone in the middle of the ocean: being surrounded by dolphins, gazing at the night sky with no chance of light pollution to obscure the stars, coming upon a pod of whales. In describing the dangers she encountered, including a battering storm that she later found out was actually a hurricane, McClure brings to life the violence that can happen to small craft on the ocean. After reading descriptive passages about storms and what they did to her boat and her body, I was almost checking myself for bruises!


Just days after she set out, McClure lost all long-range communications, and was on her own but for a few radio transmissions with nearby boats. After her boat and her body took beatings during hurricane Danielle, she made the hard decision to set off her rescue beacon and be picked up by another boat. While she felt like a failure doing this, the months following her return to land gave her time to reflect on inner strength and what it means to face obstacles. After working for Muhammed Ali, and receiving encouragement from him, McClure made another, ultimately successful, attempt to cross the Atlantic in her rebuilt rowboat. She used what she learned from her first journey to be more prepared for her second—redundant communications systems, a lighter boat, and a padded ceiling were some of the enhancements for her second crossing.

This true story is inspirational not because it is the story of a superhuman feat, but the story of a very human one—having a goal, experiencing setbacks, and getting back on your feet and trying again. Part of being human is accepting the fact of your humanity, and defining what that means for yourself. McClure wraps the story of her finding herself into a great adventure tale. See the book’s official web site for some Q & A with McClure, videos, pictures, boat specs, and the list of books she brought along to read and listen to on her journey.

Fade to Blonde -- Max Phillips Hard Case Crime, #2

Joining the Hard Case Crime book club was the best $6-a-month investment I made last year. (It was also the only one I made, but I'm confident that if there'd been others, it would still be on top.) Sometimes the books are reprints with awesome new covers, sometimes they're original publications, some of them are stronger pieces of writing than others, but they've all been entertaining. They make me happy. If you enjoy the crime genre and aren't offended by the un-PC (especially in regards to how the ladies are treated), they're well worth a read.

Since I jumped in somewhere in the late-40's, I have, of course, been worrying about what I missed. So I decided to go back to the beginning and read their releases in order. Or as close to in order as I can.

Fade to Blonde was a Hard Case original, and it won the 2005 Shamus Award for Best Paperback of the Year. It's a pretty familiar setup, with a more-striking-than-classically-beautiful woman approaching the narrator and spinning a story about being in danger and needing help, leading him to an underworld of drugs, gangsters, prostitution and pornography. The tension, for me, came from never being quite sure how it would all play out -- Ray Corson is aware from minute one that Rebecca isn't telling him everything, but are her omissions (or are they just flat-out lies?) going to get him killed?

While this book got what looks to be stellar reviews across the board, my feelings were a little more mixed. For the first half-to-three-quarters of the book, I had a hard time believing that Ray Corson would've gotten as involved as he did -- I never believed that he cared much for Rebecca, though I think I was supposed to, and even if his motivation was different (say, simple curiosity), I felt that he was too smart to stick around. There were moments when his temper took over, when he made a decision to do something even though he knew that it would come back to slap him, but those moments were different. They worked for me. There was a distinct turning point where my issues dissolved and it finally made sense to me for him to go all-in, but that was so far into the story -- there had been so many moments that I felt he would have just walked away -- that I felt it was still a problem.

What really worked for me was his voice. Ray Corson was bright and likable and great with the one-liners and literary references (he's an aspiring-but-pretty-much-failed screenwriter) without laying them on too thick:

His suit was what mine wanted to be when it grew up. My suit was kidding itself.

By the time I got there, the bartender had another gimlet waiting. I'd be doing well to get home that night with my liver still attached.

I laid them out in a row and started noodling names and facts and connecting them with arrows and generally smoking my meerschaum and playing my violin.

If you want more, there's a sample chapter up at Hard Case's site.

I also really enjoyed, for the most part, the secondary characters -- Mattie and L. R. Bellinger, especially. And the Hollywood setting was great. Even with the aspects I found problematic, I found myself thinking quite often of Chinatown, actually. Which is in no way a bad thing.

________________________________________________________________

Previously:

1. Grifter's Game, Lawrence Block
3. Top of the Heap, Erle Stanley Gardner

________________________________________________________________

(cross-posted at Bookshelves of Doom)

Review- The Vast Fields of Ordinary by Nick Burd

The Vast Fields of Ordinary by Nick Burd
"It’s Dade’s last summer at home. He has a crappy job at Food World, a “boyfriend” who won’t publicly acknowledge his existence (maybe because Pablo also has a girlfriend), and parents on the verge of a divorce. College is Dade’s shining beacon of possibility, a horizon to keep him from floating away. Then he meets the mysterious Alex Kincaid. Falling in real love finally lets Dade come out of the closet—and, ironically, ignites a ruthless passion in Pablo. But just when true happiness has set in, tragedy shatters the dreamy curtain of summer, and Dade will use every ounce of strength he’s gained to break from his past and start fresh with the future."- summary from Amazon

This was an amazing book; Burd's debut is simply fantastic. It's so detailed, realistic, witty, emotional, pretty much everything you'd want in a novel. Dade is a relateable character and I loved reading about his adventures this summer with his friend Lucy and boyfriend Alex and other friends and enemies he meets along the way. While it is a coming out story, it doesn't feel tired like some seem to be as Burd breathes new life into this kind of story. The prose is beautifully written and compelling, which made the book difficult to put down. Highly recommended.

Summer Reads Roundup

I'm on vacation as of 30 minutes from now and I haven't read anything worth recommending to Guys Lit Wire. So I'll let you know what I'm PLANNING on reading while lying on the beach. Check back next month for what panned out and what didn't.

I'm in the middle of listening to The Enemy by Lee Child which is one of the middle Jack Reacher books and one of 2 I haven't read. If you know anything about Jack Reacher it's that he can't be stopped. And the novels are the same way. I ran out and bought I copy of this one so that I can continue the story without hiatus.

I'm in the middle of reading Battle Royale by Koushun Takami. While not nearly as gripping (or well written) as The Long Walk or Hunger Games the theme of kids fighting to the death is just too good to resist. Though I suspect I know how it ends I'm looking forward to getting there.

I'm bringing along Lost City of Z by David Grann a highly recommended story of Amazon adventure, disease, madness and obsession. I don't really know any more about it than that, but really, do I need to?

Also making the trip is Against Destiny by Aleksandr Dolinin. Its about the desperate escape of Russian political prisoners from the Siberian gulag, a plot point I haven't been able to turn down since my friend Jeff Kinyon told me in elementary school about a movie called Gulag where a guy fell in a crevasse and compound fractured his leg. There are probably BETTER reasons to read a book, but this one comes highly recommended.

And I think I'll throw in Reality Check by Peter Abrahams. One, because I'm a Teen librarian and I should at least TRY to read some teen fiction while I'm away. And two, because Stephen King recommended it and I do LOVE The Long Walk. Reality Check is the story of a high school athlete with a blown out knee and a vanished girlfriend who goes looking for her at her prestigious boarding school. I'm not a huge fan of mysteries but the desperation of the protagonist and the boarding school setting pique my interest.

So that should keep my busy the week I'm away. I'll let you know what I think.

When the Tripods Came, by John Christopher

Before I even get started today, let me just say right here and right now that I am against brainwashing. No matter how good it might make you feel, being brainwashed is something you want to avoid. It’s better to be tormented by confusion but have your own ideas than to become some sort of blissed out zombie with spinning spirals for pupils under the complete control of an insidious master. I hope that’s clear.

When the Tripods Came is John Christopher’s belated prequel to the original series (which I reviewed here). The whole series, in large part, is about brainwashing, and just how bad it is. Though what it means to be brainwashed is something that seems to be open for discussion. Or it seemed to be, anyway, before the prequel existed.

The prequel was inspired, according to the preface, by critics who complained of the story being implausible. Even a few years after the publication of the books, real human technology had advanced so rapidly that fictional Tripod technology looked rather primitive and even silly by comparison. So, how would the Tripods have taken humanity over so easily?

It’s curious that Christopher felt the need to answer these critics. Juding dated science fiction on its plausibility is a little like complaining that 80s fashions looks dated in the year 2009 (oh, wait).

But the author composed an answer anyway. It turns out that the Tripods began their conquest of Earth slowly and rather unsuccessfully. When the Tripods Came opens with two boys, Laurie (short for Laurence so don’t make fun of him) and Andy (short for Andrew, duh) on a camping trip in England who witness a massive (several stories high) Tripod’s initial exploration of our planet. The Tripod mirthlessly destroys a farmhouse, abducts a man, kills a dog, and battles some tanks before jet fighters swoop in and nonchalantly demolish it. Two other Tripods are sighted elsewhere in the world and meet similar fates.

The Tripod technology, then, did look a bit silly to humanity whose long history of warfare had given them quite a few tools with which to engage an invading force. “They didn’t even have infrared!” hoots one of Andy and Laurie’s teachers in a post-invasion classroom discussion. Humans expend much energy patting themselves on the back. There’s even a television show, from America, called the Trippy Show, dedicated to satirizing the Tripods. It acheives wide international success.

It’s so successful, in fact, that a cult begins to form around it and by the time anyone realizes that the audience is being brainwashed by television (imagine that), it’s too late. Communes of TV-hypnotized “Trippies” form to welcome and defend new invasions of Tripods. The Tripods extend their mind control powers by hard-wiring human brains through the use of Caps, and soon their conquest is, more or less, over. Christopher’s answer, to his critics, is that while their weapons of mass destruction may have been primitive, the Tripods understanding of the human mind and human culture gave them what they needed to take over the planet.

Now, my review of the original trilogy gave a general, and I think, generous reading of the Tripod allegory. I claimed the Masters represented authority and that the uncapped represented free-thinking youth. In the comments that followed, A Paperback Writer proposed that the books were a kind of Cold War* propaganda, and that the Masters represented Communists. I didn’t like that reading because I find propaganda insipid by definition and I thought the Tripod series was too interesting and engaging for that.

But maybe I was fooled. While I think the generous reading is still the better one, and the one that may allow the series to remain readable and interesting into the future, its hard to argue, after considering When the Tripods Came, that Christopher did not intend the Masters to represent Communists. There are a number of passages in the novel singing the praises of “individuality” and “freedom”—obvious anti-communist code words. And the countercultural references to “Tripping” (drug use) and “Trippies” (hippies) make it difficult to imagine that Christopher had a lot of warm feelings for tie-dye wearing vegetarians who were often associated with the propagation of socailist/communist ideology in the West. The mass gatherings of Trippies also look a lot like the countercultural protest movement. (Groups that gather in large masses appear from the outside like people brainwashed by common ideology, even to those looking at them while nestled within the warmth of a large mass.)

Does that make When the Tripods Came, or the rest of the Tripod series, Cold War propaganda? Maybe. If you let yourself read it that way. You could instead focus on the things it has to say about the demise of the nuclear family, which I didn’t get into here, but which are actually rather subtle and touching. Or, you could just read it as a ripping good sci-fi saga. Which it is.

The problem, of course, with propaganda is that it’s an attempt to brainwash the reader. And, as we’ve established, brainwashing is to be avoided. So even if the propaganda is against brainwashing, it’s brainwashing that’s against brainwashing. So I’m confused. And tormented. But my mind is free.




*If you weren’t around for the Cold War, let me give you a brief summary. There was the Eastern Block (or Bloch), led by the Soviet Union, which wanted to create an empire in the name of Communism (often considered evil, but on its surface about sharing) and there were the Western countries, led by the United States, which wanted to form an empire (but claimed they didn’t) in the name of Capitalism (which is supposed to be good but on its surface is about selling things for more than they’re actually worth). The two sides really really wanted to blow each other up, but were very nervous about accidentally blowing themselves up in the process.

Crossposted at Critique de Mr Chompchomp

More Graphic Classics, now in COLOR!

I have dim childhood memories of TV shows announcing with great enthusiasm that they were now "in COLOR!" (The irony is, most TV sets at the time were only black-and-white). The latest superlative volume (number seventeen) from Graphic Classics is also their first one in color, so consider this a similar enthusiastic announcement. Subtitled Science Fiction Classics, it proves to contain exactly that, with the possible exception of a Lord Dunsany tale I don't think really qualifies as SF. But original SF gangstas H.G. Wells and Jules Verne rub shoulders with Stanley G. Weinbaum, Arthur Conan Doyle and odd-man-out E.M. Forster's (Howards End, Maurice, A Room with a View) lone SF story.

Although there's not really a weak spot quality-wise in the whole volume, two stories really stand out. One is Micah Farritor's evocative interpretation of The War of the Worlds. The public perception of the story has always been contemporary, from (Orson) Welles' radio drama to the George Pal 1953 movie and including the recent Spielberg/Cruise version. Farritor manages to show the setting as (H.G.) Wells imagined it, with troops on horseback and artillery cannons facing the Martian death machines and doing surprisingly well.

The other superlative piece is "The Disintegration Machine," one of Arthur Conan Doyle's "Professor Challenger" stories. Challenger has always been lost in the shadow of Doyle's other creation, but he's an equally vivid character: brilliant, larger-than-life, quick to fly into theatrical rages and always up for...well, a challenge. He's the hero of Doyle's dinosaur epic The Lost World (adapted in a prior Arthur Conan Doyle Graphic Classics collection), and "The Disintegration Machine" has always been one of my favorites. In it, Challenger is recruited to test the veracity of Dr. Nemor's titular device, a kind of primitive transporter of obvious value to the more aggressive nations of the world. Robert Langridge's artwork catches the perfect tone, and his glowering take on Professor Challenger is marvelous. Why has no one ever cast Brian Blessed as this character?

Weinbaum's classic "A Martian Odyssey" is given a rollicking treatment by George Sellas. Brad Teare brings a woodcut style to Dunsany's "The Bureau d'Echange de Maux," which only enhances its non-SF feel. And Ellen Lindner illustrates Forster's "The Machine Stops" in a style that emphasizes its family resemblance to Wall-E.

Each Graphic Classics volume I've had the pleasure of reviewing has done an admirable job of putting new graphic flesh onto old narrative bones, reminding us why they were considered classics in the first place. With this volume's addition of color, that effect is only intensified. Any reader of any age can connect with these stories and get a little of the thrill that the original readers experienced.