Subplot Kudzu

71) Incredible Hulk 441-453 by Peter David, Angel Medina and Mike Deidato: The collapse of the once proud series continues, through a combination of unforced errors and definitely forced ones.  On the unforced error side, David is doggedly pursuing a plot arc about Hulk suffering brain damage from a grenade that Banner took right before he transformed into the hulk, leaving shrapnel in his brain. This is a revisiting of a classic Hulk plot and might well have gone somewhere but it comes across as very creaky, removes the Hulk from the supporting cast and returns the book to an "on the run from the army" plot, which I personally always found dull. Add into this the strange decision to revisit the Future Imperfect time travel plotline - which David might have been trying to link to the Troygan War plotline, which again had potential - and things get very muddled. These pale before the forced errors, which is the Marvel Editorial decision to give control of their key books to Rob Liefeld in the Heroes Reborn plot arc, yanking Hulk out of his regular plots into the stupid Onslaught crossover, then pulling out the Bruce Banner psyche, then a forced crossover with Thunderbolts. I doubt David really wanted to explore what the current Hulk is like without Banner, and the book just feels like it's a floundering mess, perhaps with some passive aggression in the writing under chafing editorial control. The inconsistency of the art team over the last two years hasn't helped either.

72) Incredible Hulk 454-460 by Peter David and Adam Kubert: the last of the artists David worked with on Hulk, Kubert is vastly more proficient than his predecessors, but stylistically the book, with an emphasis on four panel pages or three panels over two pages, doesn't quite jell. Story wise we get a moment of clarity in the Hulk chased by the Army plot that's going on, where David looks like he's setting things up for a a whole new paradigm, but it's totally thrown off by a forced crossover to the X-Men Apocalypse plotline, followed by the end of the heroes reborn plot and a return to something like normalcy. The psychological thread of this, that Banner actually killed his abusive father while working on the gamma bomb, thus giving vent to his internal anger (a pathetic back-justification as to why Banner would have been working on a bomb project given his later anti-military stance - how about "it was the freakin' Cold War, and Banner is an Oppenheimer analogue?")  and is now being haunted by his father's ghost/memory, isn't strong enough to carry it, but might have worked as a year long arc if David hadn't had to do crossover after crossover. 

73) Incredible Hulk 461-467 by Peter David and Adam Kubert: David's final 6 issues on the book show either where he might have been going with it or his graciousness in giving the new author a clean enough slate to work from - psychologically reunited, Hulk/Banner make peace with Betty, Rick (who was severely injured by the Apocalypsed out Hulk last book) and even Thunderbolt Ross, who has been restored by the Troyjans. David makes it look like he's setting up a new plot arc with Banner being employed by the government as a weapon of lat resort under Ross' direction. Then David kills Betty in a really unnecessary way that shatters the agreement and leaves the new creative team with a Bruce Banner on the run from the army with an anger-generated Hulk, basically the Hulk Status Quo Ante. He then does one last issue of Rick Jones being interviewed by Peter Parker a decade int he future that is both a psycological conclusion and a big F-You to the Marvel editorial team. It's clear that David is not leaving under good circumstances, and reading the last 27 issues it's pretty clear where the problem lies. It's a shame that the book so devolved during its last 3 years, but again, I'm not sure how much of this can be leveled at David, who had things he clearly wanted to do but was stymied in making use of the time to do them. These are perils that only exist in serial fiction. 

74) Home Fires by Gene Wolfe: New Gene Wolfe! Yea! he revisits some old themes of identity in this one, where many of the characters not only aren't who they appear to be but they're being pursued by outside forces for who they no longer are. It's well put together, not as strong as the Sorcerer's House but better than Pirate Freedom. Plus, a third person viewpoint means less unreliable narrators. 

75) The Green Hornet vol 1 by Kevin Smith, Phil Hester and Jonathan Lau: A comic series based on an unproduced screenplay of Smiths, I have to admit that Smith does a fine job of making the original Hornet/Kato team really impressive. The contemporary ones - of course Britt Reid Jr. is a wastrel and the new Kato is a hot chick - need some work, but all told it impressed me enough to start looking for the later issues. the art team is really heavily inspired by Mike Grell in his later John Sable/Longbow Hunters phase, but need some work on differentiating characters, and a lot more work on comprehensible fight layouts. 

76) Atomic Robo vol 5 - the Deadly Art of Science by Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegner: It's new Atomic Robo! Buy it! Read it! Love it! This one is set in 1930, showing the growth of Robo into the, er, man he would become in his maturing relationship with his dad, Nikola Tesla, his somewhat apprenticeship with a masked vigilante Jack Tarot and his first love affair with Tarot's techie daughter. It's a fun read as always. Remember how I praised Kevin Smith's work in Green Hornet on making the elder Hornet and Kato cool? Let me say that his work pales in comparison to how Clevenger and Wegener make Nikola Tesla cool - by the endgame you realize that Tesla was both insanely cool and a total badass. Much fun.

50) Boardwalk Empire - the Birth high times and corruption of Atlantic City by Nelson Johnson: some more historical non-fiction, this was wonderfully engaging. Again, good readers help, as the book was read by Joe Mantenga, who carried just the right tone for the book.  The history of the city itself - a place so uniquely grounded in the tourist industry and so wedded to organized crime - is fascinating and very much somewhere someone might want to set a game. I keep wondering what a super hero set in 1930's Atlantic City would feel like...the idea of a Batman type mired in a massively corrupt city doesn't quite work, because it's not like the locals felt terribly oppressed by the tourist-friendly crime that made the place tick. More likely a tarnished angel who looks into the crimes that everyone knows are crimes working hand in glove with the corrupt establishment. The presence of accepted crimes that _are_ truly vile, such as Mann Act violations and enforced prostitution, that are sanctioned by the government make that problematic as well. Thinking on it, however, if I wanted to run a Trail of Cthulhu game in the back half of the year 1920's-30's Atlantic City might be a good starting place. 

51) Promethea by Alan Moore and J.H. Williams III: The last of the Americas Best Comics reread, it's still beautiful and very strange. The character has the same pared down powerful simplicity as Tom Strong serving as the foundation of a much more complicated story. OK, yes, it's didactic as points, but I also found it consistently engaging. If you're not interested in Kabbalah or the Tarot or other mysticism then yes, much of this is going to be a loss. But if you are, whew, what a ride. 

41) A Downhill Lie: a Hacker's return to a ruinous sport by Carl Hiaasen: I heard the author on Wait Wait a couple months back and noted to myself that the book sounded interesting, hence my picking it up when it appeared on the library's audiobook list. It was interesting and fun, but I expect that it would have meant a lot more if I actually, ya'know, played golf. 

42) Tom Strong by Alan Moore, Chris Sprouse and others: my reread of Top Ten has of course triggered a reread of the America's Best Comics line, and I remain amazed by how good a book Tom Strong is. On one level it's nice, straightforward comic book super hero, but it's also thoughtful, endlessly inventive, respectful of comics history and a great example of super-exploration, something I wish we saw more of in both comics and gaming. Plus, the titular hero is such a great example of the strong, ethical scientist that Lester Dent mastered with Doc Savage. It's a good, solid heroic core, and I think people under-value the storytelling versatility of super-strength and modest damage resistance in supers gaming. This might be why I keep coming back to Jim Cambias' Doc Toltec as a game hook. as he's another great version of the iconic structure. I will warn people that there's a chunk of the book - much of the last quarter - which is fill in stories top get the book to 36 issues so that the final issue could coincide with the end of Promethia, and the failures of execution visible there show how the character type is much harder to get then you'd think.

43) Tom Strong's Terrific Tales by Alan Moore, Steve Moore and others: I immediately picked this 12 issue series up for a reread, and part of me wishes that the Tom Strong and Young Tom Story stores from here had been folded into the regular Tom Strong book to avoid the aforementioned filler spot in the main book, as they're all solidly done. The other component of TSTT is Jonni Future, which is Steve Moore and Art Adams doing to Adam Strange what Alan Moore had done to various other DC characters in his image days - reinventing them just enough to show you how cool they were. However, Jonni Future is mired in cheesecake wink nudge stuff which diminishes the idea (I don't mind seeing Art Adams draw hlaf naked women, but that really shouldn't be the focus of the stories). 

44) Alan Moore's run on Awesome Comics: Alan Moore also did some work for Rob Leifeld's Awesome Comics, specifically a run on Supreme, Leifield's pathetic Superman rip-off, which produced one of the best runs of Superman ever, and Judgement Day, which performed the alchemy in turning the dross of the Awesome Comics universe into gold. I'm not sure how much Leifield realized that Moore was deconstructing and, well, shredding, every story that Lefield had produced in the script of Judgement Day, which writes off the needless dark violence of the 90's comic market with some ideas about the nature of comic book stories that he explores in much greater depth in Promethia. Plus, going from Chris Sprouse's work on Tom Strong and Supreme to Leifield's work on Judgement Day and we learn the important fact that Leifield can't draw for crap.

36) Freakonomics  by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner: more in my commute audiobooks, it was interesting to listen to this one so soon after The Tipping Point as the pair give different explanations for the falling crime rate in the 1990s in NYC - Gladwell argues that the changes in police tactics were what tipped the scales in New York, where rates fell more and faster than other places, while Levitt argues that the legalization of abortion decades earlier removed a large enough percentage of the population whose socio-economic standing would have pre-disposed it to crime. As with all competing theories I'm not sure how much weight to put on either theory - chaotic systems tend to have lots of inputs after all - but Levitt doesn't do himself any favors by stressing the poor life performance of, among other factors, single parent children in the section on crime rates and then stating unequivocally that being in a single parent household has no effect on school performance. I know the two are not identical, but they'd seem to have enough points of commonality that it makes it feel like Levitt is changing which metrics to stress in his book based on which support his theory de jure. 

37) The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: How in the high heavens had I not read this prior to now?!?! This was freakin' wonderful - pure Falkenstein bait! Much as I like using the Captain Fasaad framing decide to do exploration stories I really would like to do a soup to nuts expedition to somewhere strange game. 

29) The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion: This was luminous. Wonderful. And very much makes you grateful for what and who you have.

30) The Disappearing Spoon and other true takes of madness, love and the history of the world from the periodic table of the elements by Sam Kean: Rachel and I were commenting that science books feel like they've been getting a lot more interesting in the last decade. Sam Kean's book was no exception to this - a good, fun romp through chemistry and physics, stuffed with both science and personality told in a very amiable, informative voice. The only thing that kept me from reading even more of it aloud to Rachel was her desire to read it herself. 

31) Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout by Lauren Redniss: this was... odd. Not bad, just odd. A mini-bio of the Curies, Marie in particular (only logical since she long outlived her husband) filtered around and through Redniss' peculiar artwork. I'm not sure I'd recommend it, but it was a quick read. 

32) The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell: I got turned on to Gladwell from his appearances on Radiolab, and this was an interesting book. I was also interested how some of his ideas, or ideas that paralleled his, were taken up by both William Gibson and Connie Willis in Pattern Recognition and Bellweather respectively. I was irritated upon finishing it to discover that it was an abridged-for-audiobook copy. 

22) The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clark: a collection of short fairy stories that are ostensibly set in the world of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, though only two of the stories contain direct links to those events or characters. The title story of the collection is, to my mind, the weakest of the works, but otherwise the collection is delightful. For those of you that couldn't get into her previous book due to reasons unrelated to her writing style I strongly recommend this as an entry into her work. 

23) Alex Van Helsing: Vampire Rising by Jason Henderson: I picked this up in the library out of mild interest, pleased that at least someone was killing the bloodsucking fiends rather than sleeping with them. I actually brought it home because the flyleaf mentioned that the enemy was located at Scholomance, which means Henderson had taken the extraordinary step of reading Dracula prior to writing the novel. Unfortunately the book was uninspired. Not actively bad, mind you, but exactly what you'd expect from the pitch "the great-grandson of Van Helsing starts attending an isolated boarding school." He has a circle of socially misfit but conveniently skilled friends, an English teacher who is also part of a secret Vampire Hunting Organization and some antagonistic normal fellow students to make his school life miserable. The plot moves very quickly - the events of the novel comprise no more than a week - which makes me really appreciate how Rowling knew that she had time in the book to let the characters develop. I admit to laughing out loud upon seeing that Scholomance, the devil's dread academy of evil, was re-imagined as a college campus for vampires, complete with lush lawns for students to lounge on, a cafeteria and signs up on bulletin boards requesting non-smoking roommates. Alas, I'm not sure if that was intentional tongue in cheek humor or not....

24) Invincible volume 13: Growing Pains by Robert Kirkman and Ryan Ottley: Still good. Events are clearly moving to resolution at this point, so even though there's a decent way left to go any sense that the book was floundering has been put to rest. I was struck with how nice the creator-owned market is for telling longer stories, as Kirkman has kept the book going for 75 issues now, and the artist changes have kept the visual feel of the book intact. There's a lot to be said for that. 

25) Marvel Visionaries - Daredevil Volumes 2-3 by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson: I managed to snag these this weekend, since my Miller DD collection was very spotty. These two cover all the issues where Miller was writing as well as drawing, and it's nice to have them all in one place. I remember these hitting like a bombshell in the early 80's, and rereading them nigh unto 30 years later they're still really, really good. While reading this I was reminded of the Thor Visionaries for Simonson's run and exactly how much information density comic books can pack in. There's a lot going on here. 

Book 17: Pirates of the Levant by Arturo Perez-Reverte: This is the 6th Captain Alatriste novel, and a bit of a disappointment. That's mostly because it's a bridge novel - he spent books 1-4 alluding to the events in book 5, setting things up over the long haul. Apparently having finished that are Perez-Reverte decided he wanted to write more Alatrist stories, so this book changes the locale from Spain and Flanders to the Mediterranean sea and starts laying references to another, years distant event. I don't mind, but it made this very much a bridging book. It also felt a little darker than the others, of course since this is the Spanish Empire very much in decay nothing is particularly bright.

Book 18: Book of Ballads by Charles Vess and others: this is a collection of Vess' collaborations with authors to illustrate stories based on English and Scottish Ballads. It's lovely and creepy, and full of the things Vess likes to draw (and draws very well). 

Back after a short delay - I had to read this months A&E and got sucked into re-reading all of Girl Genius.

15) The Best American Travel Writing 2010  edited by Bill Buford. I generally like the BATWs, and this one was no exception. Tom Bissels' Looking for Judas, Michael Finkel's The Hadza, Garrison Keillor's Take In the State Fair, David Owen's The Ghost Course and Simon Winchester's Take Nothing, Leave Nothing were this year's stand outs. It's nice to get a chunk of travel writing in one place so I don't have to try to keep up with it, but still get to reap the benefits.

I keep thinking I should return to a weekly posting structure, but I don't want to lose momentum on this again.

13) Curse of the Pogo Stick by Colin Cotterill: This is the fifth Dr. Siri Paiboun mystery, resolving murders and conspiracies in 1978 Laos shortly after the communist takeover. Siri is an aged revolutionary with modest connections to the fledgling (and often inept) government, the country's only coroner and also the receptacle for the spirit of an ancient Hmong shaman which lets him sometimes see spirits and experience prophetic dreams. He's got a small, eccentric staff and circle of friends who assist in various investigations. The mysteries are fun, play fair and are usually challenging enough, but the real joy is the humor of the interactions between the characters. Since Cotterill lived in Laos as part of a NGO during the time being depicted the series has a fair verisimilitude, with the hope the revolutionaries had for self government during the transition slowly being eroded by the corruption and ineptitude of a revolution that suddenly won and realized they didn't actually have a plan for governing after victory - aside from spouting approved communist party slogans. This particular book was nice in that the heroes acted, well, smart, and there were no instances of them doing dumb things just to advance the plot. Plus lots of fun watching Siri's direct boss and foil make an idiot of himself. The more I read mysteries this year the more I want to try out a Trail of Cthulhu game.