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Doctor Who Classics Vol. 5 by Steve Parkhouse

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This volume had some interesting ideas that weren't really fleshed out. The idea of an alternate earth in which WWII continues well into the 1980s was interesting, as was the idea of the Doctor picking up a companion who was a soldier in that world. Unfortunately, Gus, the companion in question, isn't really fleshed out much, after he gets over his initial bogglement at finding himself in the company of a time traveller, he does standard companion-y things and eventually the Doctor takes him home. The standout stories are a rather grim first storyline in which the Doctor encounters a lost Okinawan soldier and a later, rather zany, story that pits the Doctor against an evil galactic tycoon frog. An evil galactic tycoon frog excuses a multitude of sins, but this still won't go down as one of my favorite comics volumes.



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Doctor Who Classics Volume 2 by Pat Mills


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Most of the stories in this volume are lightweight, but fun, with my favorites being one where the Doctor and Sharon tangle with aliens in 16th century China, and a short piece where they travel to a "blank dimension" and engage in a battle of wills with an alien criminal. I was a bit disappointed in the story that produced the very striking cover image of the 4th Doctor giving himself a good punch to the head - it involves the Doctor going back in time and knocking himself out in order to prevent himself from doing something that turned out to have bad consequences. There's a reason why Doctor Who has invented the Blinovitch Limitation effect, the Laws of Time, and other assorted technobabble to explain why this shouldn't be done: in storytelling terms, it's a cheap trick. That quibble aside, everything in this volume is at least good fun.

Given that these stories were written in 1979, they feel surprisingly contemporary. It's hard for me to come up with specifics, but I get a distinct feeling that these comics influenced the tone and content of New Who more than is often acknowledged. Maybe it's just that this volume features werewolves, fighting monks, Daleks, and Sontarans, and has the Doctor travelling with a contemporary Londoner. (Though one distinctly retro touch is that when it's time for Sharon to leave, she stays behind to get married to someone she's just met. Pity.)

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I found some other livejournallers who blogged the Potlatch comics panel. A couple of them took more thorough notes than I did:

src has a very thorough write-up.

And panelist Jenn Manley Lee posted her summary here.

Over on the Savage Critics website, I stumbled across a fascinating series of posts by Abhay Khosla about the now defunct comic Blue Beetle. It's really making me wish that I read more comics, because I think Khosla has a lot to say about storytelling, writing about characters of color, and writing a story that's part of a larger continuity, but I don't have the context to fully grok what he's saying.

In particular, I've never actually read Blue Beetle, though I remember chatting about it with some comics-reading friends a while back. From what I've managed to gather, it was DC's attempt to launch a new superhero book that was accessible to younger readers, featuring a teenage protagonist, a coming-of-age plot, and a storyline that wasn't supposed to require a Ph.D. in DC-universe studies to grasp. As a bonus, the protagonist was Mexican-American.

Sounds like a laudable aim, although I'm always a little bit suspicious of entertainment that tries to consciously to appeal to kids. Because real kids are almost always more complicated than adults' mental models of them. Anyway, Blue Beetle didn't make a particular success of it - it struggled through 30-odd issues of declining sales and was cancelled. Though not before attracting a dedicated, though too-small, fan base.

Khosla analyzes some of the comics failings in these essays:
Part 1: Why Do Nerdy Things Work?
Part 2: Abhay Continues to Read Blue Beetle; Episode II (Particularly interesting for its thoughts on race in comics.)
Part 3: Abhay's Third Post About Blue Beetle; Only Ninety-Three More To Go (Largely a musing on the role of larger DC continuity in Blue Beetle, and as such, nearly incomprehensible to me. And yet strangely entertaining.)
Part 4: Speaking of Turkeys, Here's Abhay's FOURTH Blue Beetle Essay

Khosla's pretty harsh on the comic, as you can probably tell from these titles, but I think it's a harshness that is tempered with sympathy for what the comic tries to accomplish.

I just clicked over to Neil Gaiman's journal and learned that Rory Root, owner of the Comic Relief comic book store, died yesterday.

During the time I lived in Berkeley, Comic Relief was my local comic bookstore. Daniel and I visited the store just about every week for several years. When we make the occasional trip up to Berkeley, we always make a point of stopping at Comic Relief, because we've yet to find a comic book store down here in San Jose that can remotely compare.

Rory believed that no matter what your tastes were, there was a comic out there that would appeal to you. He may be single-handedly responsible for my continuing to read comics after Sandman ended. He sometimes sold me graphic novels with a money-back guarantee - if I didn't like them, I could bring them back for a refund. I never took him up on it. (I wouldn't have, anyway, but more to the point, he was good enough at finding stuff that I liked that I was never tempted to.)

I'll also remember the time I stopped by the store a bit early to see if the new issue of Promethea was in, and the latest shipment of new comics hadn't been unpacked yet. Rory started opening boxes until he found the issue I wanted. I thought that was going a bit beyond the call of duty to make a $3 sale to a customer who lived practically around the corner and could easily come back later, but I'm sure Rory would have said that it was just good customer service.

Thanks, Rory. I'll miss you.

Got the tire repatched this morning. The work was covered by warranty, and thus didn't cost me a dime. Nice. We'll see how long the patch holds out.

Daniel and I did get up to Berkeley on Saturday, and I did get comics: She Hulk: Single Green Female and She Hulk: Supernatural Law. I also picked up Naomi Novik's latest in the Temeraire series, an omnibus of some of Glen Cook's Dread Empire novels, and Decalog 3 (a long out of print Doctor Who short story collection containing, among other things, Steven Moffat's rather funny story "Continuity Errors". I got it cheap at a used bookstore.)

Going to the Other Change of Hobbit reminded me, as it always does, of what a pleasure a really good specialty bookstore is. The Borders by my house in San Jose is nice, and has a pretty good selection for a big box chain store, but it's not the same.

She Hulk is my sort of superhero comic. By which I mean that it is funny, and modern, and is really about the whole idea of what it means to be a superhero, and how you go about trying to live your life if half of your identity is as a normal person, and half is as a giant green babe with superhuman strength who fights crime. Also, it has a giant green babe who fights crime.

I spent a silly amount of time yesterday watching clips of the Hornblower movies on Youtube. I'd seen the first few when they originally aired, but by the time they made the later ones, we'd given up our cable TV subscription. Good Lord, they outdo even the Sharpe movies in the Pretty Men in Napoleonic Uniform quotient. I'd've thought there'd be laws regulating that sort of thing. Maybe that's the real reason A&E stopped making them. Must get Netflix to send DVDs.

I'm currently preparing two very long documents for reviews. Not my favorite thing in the world. There are just a lot of i's to be dotted, and t's to be crossed. Dull. Still, it'll be over with soon enough.

Meanwhile, a question that I thought I'd settled weeks ago apparently wasn't settled, and emails are flying. Woohoo!

Okay, time to get back to it.