Although it may not prove to the year’s best anthology, MACHINE OF DEATH certainly will carry the most street cred. For the project, editors Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo and David Malki have culled 34 original stories on one theme, paired them with 34 original illustrations, and offer the results under one (mostly) Creative Commons license, both as a standard paperback and for free download — e-book and/or audiobook.

That aforementioned theme is that technology has progressed to the point where there’s a gadget that can tell you the method by which you die — no date or anything like that, just the means. The stories sport the names of such misfortunes — i.e. “Prison Knife Fight” and “Improperly Prepared Blowfish” — but don’t always apply to the protagonist.

In Camille Alexa’s “Flaming Marshmallow,” a girl anxiously awaits her 16th birthday, making her the legal age to visit the Machine of Death and learn her fate. David Michael Wharton cleverly examines the issue of “Suicide” with a surprise ending, while John Chernega journals the testing of the machine in “Almond.” Sherri Jacobsen’s “Love Ad Nauseum” plays out via a series of personals ads, and Alexander Danner puts a twist on suburban adults playing parlor games in “Aneurysm.”

The funniest is Brian Quinlan’s “HIV Infection from Machine of Death Needle,” and it’s only one sentence long. No, I’m not telling you what that sentence is; it would ruin the joke. The most touching is James L. Sutter’s “Miscarriage.”

Not funny: There are two stories titled, inevitably, “Cancer.” Eff you, cancer!

With a little genre-hopping and excellent illustrations from the likes of Jeffrey Brown, Shannon Wheeler and Kean Soo, MACHINE OF DEATH is unlike anything you’ll read this year. That’s a good thing, people, provided it doesn’t kill you. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

“And then what happened?”

According to Neil Gaiman, those four words are the most important a reader can ask when making his or her way through a story — an absolute need to see it through to the end. Co-editing STORIES, Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio have assembled 27 all-new tales from an all-star cast of authors, most of whom manage to provoke that quartet of all-important words.

Sarrantonio is an excellent horror author, but when the guy edits a genre anthology, the end result is definitive. He’s done it for speculative fiction (REDSHIFT), he’s done it for horror (999) and he’s done it for fantasy (FLIGHTS), with the last two being among my all-time favorites. And now he’s done it for … well, just damn good yarns.

STORIES actually toes the line among several genres, without fully committing to any one in particular. It begins with Roddy Doyle’s riff on vampirism in “Blood,” before moving on to Joyce Carol Oates’ twisted take on twins, in “Fossil-Figures.” Gaiman himself stuffs an epic fantasy into less than 25 pages in “The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains.”

Only slightly subdued from his norm, Joe R. Lansdale’s touching “The Stars Are Falling” tells of a man who returns from the war to find his family not as he left it, while Jodi Picoult examines a husband and wife coping with the loss of their daughter, in the rather moving “Weights and Measures.” (Does this woman write anything other than tragedies?)

The serial killer of Lawrence Block’s “Catch and Release” compares his grisly trade to the sport of fishing. Loopy as ever, Chuck Palahniuk takes a taping of THE PRICE IS RIGHT into bizarro territory with “Loser,” which is better than his last two novels. Twin sisters of Carolyn Parkhurst’s “Unwell” proves that the ties that bind families may be awfully frayed.

I never knew quite where Jeffery Deaver was going with “The Therapist.” That’s a good thing, and unpredictability in short stories is something at which he excels. With a voice from the dead, Tim Powers goes for the supernatural in “Parallel Lines,” and Sarrantonio disturbs with a historical conspiracy wrought through photos in “The Cult of the Nose.”

While I appreciate what Joe Hill tries to do with “The Devil on the Staircase” — with prose broken up into stair-like patterns for visual appeal (except when it inexplicably ceases to in the middle, apparently at random) — the story is incomprehensible. That’s disappointing, since he writes some of the best stories around.

And that’s just scratching the surface. STORIES also boasts efforts from Michael Marshall Smith, Walter Mosley, Michael Swanwick, Peter Straub, Jeffrey Ford, Diana Wynne Jones, Stewart O’Nan, Gene Wolfe, Jonathan Carroll, Kurt Andersen, Michael Moorcock and Elizabeth Hand … and even that’s not all of them.

In contrast to the fast-food reads you see people at the pool burying their sunburned noses into, STORIES is a fine meal to chew slowly and savor. You’ll more than get your money’s worth out of it. Over and over, you’ll find that chill running up your spine to signify a satisfying read, and over and over, you’ll find yourself wondering … yep … “And then what happened?” —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF NEIL GAIMAN:
• ANANSI BOYS by Neil Gaiman
• BEOWULF: THE SCRIPT BOOK by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary
• BLUEBERRY GIRL by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess
• DONT PANIC: DOUGLAS ADAMS & THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY by Neil Gaiman
• FRAGILE THINGS: SHORT FICTIONS AND WONDERS by Neil Gaiman
• THE GRAVEYARD BOOK by Neil Gaiman
• ODD AND THE FROST GIANTS by Neil Gaiman

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF AL SARRANTONIO:
• FLIGHTS: EXTREME VISIONS OF FANTASY edited by Al Sarrantonio
• HALLOWEEN AND OTHER SEASONS, by Al Sarrantonio
• HALLOWEENLAND by Al Sarrantonio
• HALLOWS EVE by Al Sarrantonio
• HORRORWEEN by Al Sarrantonio
• 999: TWENTY-NINE ORIGINAL TALES OF HORROR AND SUPSENSE edited by Al Sarrantonio

When novelist Dave Eggers kick-started THE BEST AMERICAN NONREQUIRED READING anthologies in 2002, I was initially elated. Here was a kitchen-sink smattering of fiction and nonfiction culled from publications both mainstream and anything but. Exciting!

Two years later, I had given up on the annuals because of their bent toward the crushingly pretentious. While the first book had a good mix of the serious and the not-so-serious, by 2004, virtually all the contents comprised one big downer. After a breather, I returned to take a look at THE BEST AMERICAN NONREQUIRED READING 2009.

Did I like what I saw?

Yes. And no.

One good thing the annual has done in my absence is open with a section of short lists. Everyone loves lists, and these provide a shot in the arm to the reader, delivering a dose of fun right off the bat, from the year’s best bank heists and Craiglists postings to an absurd (and absurdly funny) comic about hair.

Some 50 pages later, the main feature begins. There’s a touching tribute to the late David Foster Wallace by friend Jonathan Franzen. Amelia Kahaney ponders the sex life of a temp in her office. David Grann reports on Frédéric Bourdin, a 30-year-old man who impersonated children. (It’s the book’s best piece, which shouldn’t be surprising, since it comes straight from THE NEW YORKER.)

But that’s about all I can recommend. Too many other articles take too long to get to their point, if they have one at all. Yes, these people can write, but can they make a connection to the reader? It would help if the individual contributions were labeled as fiction or nonfiction, to get us in the correct frame of mind; many times, it’s too difficult to tell, making them ever the more pretentious. For a book that prides itself on being “nonrequired,” it more often than not feels like an assignment.

In the end, NONREQUIRED READING is like that person you know who loves to hear himself or herself talk: He or she may have something interesting to say, but it gets lost in all the unnecessary fluff surrounding it. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS SERIES:
• THE BEST AMERICAN NONREQUIRED READING 2005 edited by Dave Eggers

A couple of years ago, while the mainstream world was posthumously discovering the science fiction works of Philip K. Dick (mostly through a slew of movie adaptations), the Library of America published its first collection of Dick’s work, FOUR NOVELS OF THE 1960S. It added Dick’s legacy to their roster of “America’s best and most significant writing” and solidified his reputation as an underappreciated author. And it quickly went on to become one of LOA’s biggest selling editions.

The third LOA edition, VALIS AND LATER NOVELS, collects four books mostly from a time in Dick’s career when religion and religious revelation went from being of his many secondary themes to a dominant concern in his fiction and his life. As with the previous editions, novelist Jonathan Lethem serves as editor, providing both the detailed chronology and text notes at the end.

A MAZE OF DEATH was actually published in 1970, but is included here because of its foreshadowing of the religious theme. A group of diverse misfits are either summoned or are transferred to the planet Delmak-O. They attempt to survive and colonize on the strange world, until they begin killing each other. The one common denominator among all the characters, however, is a theology of God the “Mentufacturer,” who seems to determine their fate. While this belief is discussed and argued throughout the novel, the nature of reality — Dick’s most celebrated theme — is more central to the narrative.
 
About four years later, Dick’s life altered dramatically when he experienced what he described as a series of mystical revelations, which he referred to afterward as “the events of 2-3-74.” His first fictional response to these revelations was 1981′s VALIS, possibly the strangest work in his entire canon. It begins with the recounting of protagonist Horselover Fat’s nervous breakdown. But suddenly, Dick intrudes and announces, “I am Horselover Fat, and I am writing this in the third person to gain much-needed objectivity.” (Horselover Fat is taken from the root word origins of Philip Dick).

The rest of the novel is a semi-autobiographical journey following Fat and his friends as they seek the meaning of God, religion and the “Vast Active Living Intelligence System” that sent a pink light stream of Gnostic insight into Fat’s brain. It is by turns a funny, infuriating, frightening and wholly unforgettable novel.
 
That same year, Dick published VALIS’ intended sequel, THE DEVINE INVASION. It is the story of Herb Asher, a loner on an off-world colony whose life is changed by a local alien. That alien turns out to be Yahweh, the God in the Judeo-Christian tradition, who impregnates Asher’s ailing female neighbor. Asher quickly marries the woman and returns to Earth to witness the birth of the child. And as the child grows, he becomes a threat to Earth’s dominant religious establishment.
 
Later that same year, Dick accepted an agreement from his editor to produce a mainstream and a science fiction novel. He completed the mainstream novel first, and THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER was published shortly after his death in 1982. Based on the life of Bishop Pike, Dick’s friend for several years, it was Dick’s first non-SF work in almost 20 years. It is the story of Bishop Timothy Archer of the Diocese of California, who gives up his comfortable position within the church hierarchy to search for the hidden meaning of some sacred texts of his religion. The events are recalled in the disillusioned, but affectionate first-person narration of Angel Archer, Timothy’s daughter-in-law and one of Dick’s most memorable characters.

Dick began to doubt the significance of the revelations he experienced in what was to become the final months of his life, but he never completely dismissed them. And in these four novels, especially the last three (sometimes referred to as “The VALIS Trilogy”), we experience him struggling to make sense of it and relay it all in fiction. He incorporated the various troupes of science fiction in his efforts, and then dismissed them entirely by the time of TIMOTHY ARCHER. Ironically, this reflects the love/hate relationship he had with science fiction — the genre that made his career, but always seemed somewhat second-rate in his estimation.
 
Like its two predecessors, VALIS AND LATER NOVELS is essential reading. Dick fans should buy it and retire their dog-eared copies of the original editions. And those who were introduced to his fascinating worlds via LOA should immediately follow up with this final collection.
 
One final, semi-related observation: If the publication of Dick’s work was your first encounter with the LOA editions, please explore their catalog deeper. You’ll find that in addition to those many authors who were required reading throughout middle and high school, the editors have also included several editions of note to genre fans — in particular, the collected works of such authors like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and H. P. Lovecraft, and anthologies of crime novels from the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s. They are superb bargains for the money. And think of how impressive you’ll look reading such apparently academic editions of works previously dismissed as trashy paperbacks.  —Alan Cranis

Buy it at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF PHILIP K. DICK:
• FOUR NOVELS OF THE 1960S by Philip K. Dick
• A SCANNER DARKLY by Philip K. Dick
 

Scouring out the weekly singles scene … in comics!

I’m going to assume ULTIMATUM is one of those company-wide “event” storylines that confounds all but the hardcore Marvel reader. ULTIMATUM: FANTASTIC FOUR REQUIEM #1 is a single-shot offshoot of that, and while it’s obviously tied to a slew of previous events (which it recounts in a big block of text on the first page), it does a mostly good job of standing all by its lonesome. Things within the FF are not well, starting with the death of Sue and Johnny Storm’s father. This threw me for a bit, because he looks about as old as they. Sue and Reed Richards aren’t even speaking to one another, and Ben Grimm is thinking of joining S.H.I.E.L.D. The dysfunction is appreciated, so thanks, Joe Pokaski, Robert Atkins and Mark Morales — your story about their loss is our gain.

But ULTIMATUM: X-MEN REQUIEM #1 doesn’t work so well all on its own. Lots of the X-Men are dead — like, lots — and all laid out on a field. Survivors like Kitty Pryde, Rogue and Iceman show up to pay their respects, but they’re interrupted by the villains Sabretooth, Mystique and a hulking mass known as Assemble (he’s new to me). A fight breaks out, naturally. Then the issue is padded with page after page of needless obituaries for fallen X-ers The Beast, Dazzler, Nightcrawler, Professor X, Angel, Cyclops, Wolverine and others. Ben Oliver’s art is just fine, all in a blue hue courtesy of Edgar Delgado. Perhaps Aron E. Coletite’s script makes sense in the grand scheme of things that is ULTIMATUM, but not as a standalone.

J. Michael Straczynski continues updating old Archie Comics heroes for DC with THE RED CIRCLE: INFERNO #1. One thing I liked right off the bat is how The Hangman’s physician alter ego appears at the beginning, thus linking that one-shot to this one. Inferno is a guy who wakes up in the hospital, and finds — when someone tries to kill him with machine guns — he has the power to erupt into a ball of flame, à la The Human Torch, but with the rage of The Hulk. The Hangman then appears in full costume to try to contain him. Greg Scott’s art is appropriately moody, and looks terrific in all the fiery shades of orange. The final page sets the stage for the appearance of …

… THE RED CIRCLE: THE WEB #1. Here, Straczynski introduces us to John Raymond, a wealthy heir to his father’s fortune, despite being somewhat of a screw-up. He tries to make up for that by moonlighting as spidery crimefighter The Web. His outfit is ridiculous-looking, but his modus operandi is rather unique: He takes on injustice only when told to, via victims dropping him a line on www.summontheweb.com. He takes his job a little more seriously when his hippie-ish peacenik brother is kidnapped and held for ransom. The Web makes for a nicely conflicted hero, thus overcoming the unlikability of his true identity. Roger Robinson draws him like a classic superhero.

Guess who’s 600? CAPTAIN AMERICA #600, a giant-size tribute to the star-spangled do-gooder, new and old. Anchoring the anthology issue is an Ed Brubaker-scripted story about what happened “One Year After” Cap was killed during the superhero Civil War. It looks in on a number of people, both friends and foes, to see how his passing has affected them. Roger Stern’s “In Memoriam” does the same thing, albeit with only two pals, but none of the emotional restraint; it’s a bit maudlin. Other, more effective backup stories entail a collector of Cap memorabilia, a Stan Lee tale from 1942 in which Cap and Bucky take on the Red Skull, and an Alex Ross-painted origin retelling. Joe Simon provides a brief essay on the character he co-created, and every CAPTAIN AMERICA cover is reprinted, in eye-straining thumbnails.

You can get even more Captain America in Marvel’s ALL WINNERS COMICS 70TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL #1. The period piece by Karl Kesel and Steve Uy focuses on the exploits of Cap, Bucky, The Sub-Mariner, The Human Torch, Toro, Whizzer and Miss America — a post-World War team, even if they aren’t exactly how the press portrays them. In the back half, get some vintage Cap with a 1941 prose short story by Stan Lee and illustrated by Jack Kirby; and a 1944 yarn in which Cap and Bucky take on — yes, again — the Red Skull in another wonderfully dated, action-packed adventure. A couple of old house ads round up the package, including an opportunity to become one of Cap’s Sentinels of Liberty, badge included, for only a dime. (Don’t send it in, dummy.) —Rod Lott

Someone please explain why Stark House Press, which puts out some of the best reissues in today’s market, never falters. Now it’s gone above board with TO FIND CORA / LIKE MINK LIKE MURDER / BODY AND PASSION, containing three rare and sadly forgotten Harry Whittington novels, as David Laurence Wilson explains in his very detailed and thorough history of these lost classics.

Wilson goes even further, adding Whittington’s house names he wrote under to the bibliography, making it three full pages. Wilson also relates stories about how Whittington would not even acknowledge some of his work, once it was printed, since editors would try and sex it up and change titles just to sell books.

Closing out the piece is a fantastic quote from Whittington himself which sums up the beliefs that BOOKGASM is all about: “Books do not become classics, or even great art, because of some publisher’s logo, binding, or weight of paper. The novel that touches the heart, that comes from the heart, that stirs the emotions, that satisfies and enriches and entertains the reader — this is the truly great work of art no matter where it was published.”

From 1963, TO FIND CORA was originally put out under the title CORA IS A NYMPHO to deceive the book-buying public. That title could not be further from the truth. The story deals with Joe Byars, who is desperately searching for his wife, Cora, who seems to have run out on him. He is so distraught, he goes from town to town on a fruitless search.

Joe finally believes he gets a solid lead, which leads him to a desolate farmhouse inhabited by two people living in their own homemade hell. Byars believes the woman who answers the door is his Cora … until he gets a good look at her, finding out she is a woman named Viola, who has had enough of Hall, the man she is living withl.

This being a noir story, Whittington plunges these characters through a nightmare of epic proportions, especially since the incredibly paranoid Hall is about a brick shy of a load. He is under the belief that Joe is some sort of private eye hired to track him down. The story never lets the reader breathe for a second, especially when Byars only wants to break free from this couple, but Viola sees him as her ticket out.

Published in France in 1957, LIKE MINK LIKE MURDER was once believed not to have ever come out in America, since translating the story from French to English would have been a disaster. The story has been done before, with a man trying to go straight, only for his old gang to show up and drag him back into that life. But Whittington punches up those ideas with his own special twists.

Sam Baynard has been working as a milkman for a year now, just doing his job as best as he can. The owner might move him up, if he keeps his nose clean. Sam’s past was working with a group of criminals while in college, being a driver on a few jobs, with one of those jobs going horribly wrong.

Sam tries to have a relationship with Lois, whose family only sees him as not only a former criminal, but a lowly milkman. His world is in for a shock when Elva, a woman from his past, shows up. She was someone Sam never could have had since she was the Collie’s girl — Collie being the head of Sam’s old crew. Of course, the old gang turns up with a big job planned for the one place Sam wants nothing to do with. But Elva is a woman with expensive tastes, and Sam will do anything to keep her.

Add in a cop who is still trying to put Sam back in jail, and you have the makings of a true classic. Whittington’s writing is again at the breakneck pace of the previous novel, and he breathes some fresh air into some of the clichés that abound. Despite being from the late ’50s, it’s still as fresh as the milk Sam delivers.

Modern technology has made 1952′s BODY AND PASSION irrelevant. Even Wilson points out that fact, since it all could have been solved on an episode of Maury Povich. The novel deals with man who has been burned up and has no memory of who he might be. He could be Jeff Taylor, being framed for a murder that he did not commit, or he could be young assistant D.A. Ben Young, who’s not as clean as some would believe.

The two have a showdown in a cabin where the fire breaks out. Taylor’s partner and wife refer to the mystery man as “X” for the whole story. Both the Taylor and Young factions have their own reasons to lay claim to him, so our unknown lead uses each to his advantage.

Again, with the tools of modern technology, his case could be solved in no time. But Whittington uses this idea of the unknown man to its full extent. For me, this mystery was the weakest of the three. But then, after the one-two punch of CORA and MINK, it would be pretty hard to top that. Still, it’s a fine enough story to close out another great collection of novels. If only there were a way to speed up the process of getting another three collected … —Bruce Grossman

Buy it at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. #2: THE DOOMSDAY AFFAIR by Harry Whittington
• YOU’LL DIE NEXT! by Harry Whittington

Although pulp as a format may be long gone, pulp as a genre will never die … at least as long as it continues to be cared for, in good hands like those of Joe R. Lansdale and Keith Lansdale. The father/son team has a strong hold of the editing reins of Subterranean Press’ SON OF RETRO PULP TALES, a sequel to the 2006 original.

‘Tis fitting the elder Lansdale open the collection of 11 stories, covering everything from Westerns and jungle exploits to cold-blooded revengers. His “The Crawling Eye” is the weirdest — and arguably the best — of them all, with a well-armed reverend befriending a presumed half-wit kept caged in the aptly named town of Wood Tick. Involving rancid horsemeat and dimension-hopping monsters, it’s a joy to read, with dialogue as brisk as it is biting.

Christopher Golden goes soft on us — in a good way — with “Quiet Bullets,” a kindhearted ghost story (no, such a thing is not an oxymoron) about a fatherless, poor boy who finds the spirit of a cowboy haunting his home. It’s a sad tribute to how little a kid can feel in such a big, bad world.

David J. Schow’s “A Gunfight” is just that, and a tribute to Donald E. Westlake’s Parker character. It’s a post-robbery exchange of bullets in a cheap hotel, with $119,000 up for grabs. Using only two or three lines of dialogue, it’s all action, all the time, sporting a narrative simplicity that cuts right to the chase: “Some guys had tried to kill Proctor and Proctor had killed some guys.” What more motivation do you require?

From the get-go, William F. Nolan earned my good graces by giving the single mom at the crux of “The Perfect Nanny” a job at the late, great Whitman Comics — purveyor of many a dog-eared Disney comic of my childhood. Then he surpasses it by delivering an electrifying story of old-school possession that recalls the similarly fun Sam Raimi film DRAG ME TO HELL.

What to do with a box you’ve been told can never be opened, lest it have devastating consequences, and you have no idea what’s inside? I don’t know. But you’d certainly be driven mad, as those unfortunate souls in Cherie Priest’s beguiling “The Catastrophe Box” do. To her credit, she eventually shows you its mysterious contents, and the reveal is worth the wait and worry.

Keying off a real-life event in which African-American boxer Joe Louis defeated German boxer Max Schmeling in 1938, Matt Venne imagines what happened after the momentous event, in “The Brown Bomber and the Nazi Werewolves of the S.S.” As the title teases, embarrassed Nazis throw Louis into a castle’s pit, where he’s forced to fight a lycanthrope in a makeshift barbed-wire ring. Yes, it’s just as much fun as it sounds.

Trying to one-up Venne in the crazed-title department is Harlan Ellison, turning in “The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes.” As promised, its protagonist is Sarna, a prostitute on Mars, imported from Earth. Just before one of her would-be johns is murdered, he leaves Sarna a talking “alien frog-thing” known as “the Six.” The creature needs to find its five brothers; together, they comprise an all-knowing lifeform of considerable power.

As a sci-fi satire, Ellison’s story isn’t entirely successful, but its ending sure pays off, and it’s firmly entrenched in the ol’ pulp spirit. And in an anthology like this, that’s all that matters. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Subterranean Press or Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF JOE R. LANSDALE:
• BAD CHILI by Joe R. Lansdale
• LEATHER MAIDEN by Joe R. Lansdale
• MUCHO MOJO by Joe R. Lansdale
• RETRO PULP TALES edited by Joe R. Lansdale
• SANCTIFIED AND CHICKEN-FRIED: THE PORTABLE LANSDALE by Joe R. Lansdale
• SAVAGE SEASON by Joe R. Lansdale
• THE TWO-BEAR MAMBO by Joe R. Lansdale
• VANILLA RIDE by Joe R. Lansdale

With SKIN DEEP, Fantagraphics has reprinted Charles Burns’ weird, wonderful, three-tale anthology first published in book form in 1992. It’s no BLACK HOLE — how could it be? — but if you’re into him, you’re already into this.

It opens with “Dog Days,” which was the first Burns story I ever read. At first, it appears to be about two creepy boys spending the night in a fort they’ve built the backyard, but is actually about something strange they encounter: a guy who acts like a dog, meaning he digs in the dirt, barks and licks bones.

He got that way because he needed a new heart, but couldn’t afford a human one. So he opted for the much cheaper canine ticker, and now he pays for it with a severely hampered social life. Seems people don’t cotton to men who chase cats and sniff butts.

This segues into “Burn Again,” the longest and best story of the bunch. (While all three stories stand alone, the end of one loosely flows into the start of the next.) Here, Burns skewers religious nutjobs with everything he’s got, as dope addict Bliss Blister is presented as some sort of miraculous healer, due to the burn on his chest that looks like the face of Jesus. He’s not, but money talks, and he builds a temple he calls the gateway to heaven, declares the exact date the world will end, and sells tickets to his new digs.

Finally, “A Marriage Made in Hell” showcases our writer/artist at his most deviously perverse, with a parody of a melodramatic romance confessional containing one heck of a twist. I can’t spoil it, but let’s just say there’s a mighty good reason its newlywed couple isn’t destined to live happily ever after.

Needless to say, I love the streak of darkness that permeates Burns’ work. I mean that both figuratively and literally, as his one-of-a-kind illustration style is at-a-glance recognizable because of his heavy use of black ink. There are no grays in his panels — either something’s black or it’s white. That starkness emphasizes the cruel features on the faces of his characters — deep wrinkles, harsh teeth, beady eyes and unflattering noses, to say nothing of the occasional freak.

Like the look of his characters, Burns is one of a kind, and SKIN DEEP is a good introduction to the man’s singular vision — a good way to get your toe wet before diving in. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• BLACK HOLE by Charles Burns

Scouring out the weekly singles scene … in comics!

In THOR GOD-SIZE SPECIAL #1, a burly gent named Skurge the Executioner is killed in battle. Afterward, everyone — Thor included — has a different memory of him, thanks to the mind-altering doings of a trickster. Thor and his pals aim to restore his true reputation, and doing so requires fighting some giant beasts. Matt Fraction’s story is told in four parts, with each tackled by a different artist. This allows for styles that vary from painted to classic comics, but by far, Mike and Laura Allred’s unmistakable approach is the one that pops with color and life. A 1985 issue of THE MIGHTY THOR featuring Skurge fills the back half of the book, and it’s an epic fantasy as only Walter Simonson could do them.

For a buck, you can get a look of some of IDW’s upcoming slate with IDW COMING ATTRACTIONS #1, fronted by Darwyn Cooke’s acclaimed RICHARD STARK’S PARKER: THE HUNTER. It’s a multipage excerpt, but others get only one or two, or maybe just an ad, including new titles OXIDO, the zombie-centric THE LAST RESORT and WE WILL BURY YOU, the next series of Joe Hill’s LOCKE & KEY, and VITRIOL THE HUNTER, among others. On the flipside, peek into IDW’s reprint books, such as Dave Stevens’ classic ROCKETEER and Michael Kaluta’s STARSTRUCK. Many would argue previews should be free, and if this weren’t printed on super-high-quality pages, I’d agree. But you can part with 100 pennies for this one.

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #600 isn’t just a celebration of reaching a numerical milestone, but of the entire series’ characters and mythology. It’s a giant issue, and the lead story details Spidey trying to stop Doctor Octopus from destroying New York on the same day that Aunt May is due to marry J. Jonah Jameson’s father. Brace yourself for a surprise ending. There are four backup short stories, most notably a Stan Lee-penned affair in which Spider-Man visits a psychiatrist, allowing Lee to go to town poking fun at 47 years’ worth of stories. Another is Mark Waid’s Uncle Ben tale that might bring tears to your eyes. Scattered throughout are some amusing “Covers You’ll Never See!” This one’s a party, people.

A Western character from Marvel’s yesteryear is revived in KID COLT #1. The titular teenage antihero is Blaine Cole, who was forced to become an outlaw when a corrupt sheriff had his family murdered over their land. The law is looking for Cole because of a farmer he’s supposed to have shot, but he claims his innocence. A bounty hunter tells him finding an eyewitness might help his case, so that’s exactly what he tries to do. Unfortunately, everywhere he goes, people are trying to kill him or capture him. Guns a-blazin’ in this four-chapter tale — originally a webcomic — written by Tom DeFalco and drawn by Rick Burchett. Western comics aren’t exactly a dime a dozen these days, so when they do come out, you should snap them up.

Del Rey Comics’ THE TALISMAN #0 provides a peek into its eagerly awaited title — its first for the label — and one that adapts the Stephen King/Peter Straub bestseller of the ’80s, of course. Doing the duties are Robin Furth with the words, and Tony Shasteen with the pictures. But while the latter’s work comes through loud and clear, the former’s does not. I know that only 17 pages’ worth of story, it’s bound to be a tease, but I couldn’t comprehend just what was going on — and I read the book when it first came out (granted, I’ve slept since then). It involves a boy named Jack, his dad, dimension-hopping, hunting accidents and a goat monster. At least I think. Hopefully, the threads of the fantasy will make much more sense as the series gets underway in November.

Fan-favorite writer J. Michael Straczynski is updating a quartet of superheroes that were once under the Archie Comics family of the 1940s, in a series of one-shots. First up is THE RED CIRCLE: THE HANGMAN #1, and it tells the story of Dr. Dickering, who unwillingly inherits a Civil War-era curse that has him become the titular terror — a masked, immortal man who gets to decide who’s guilty and who’s innocent. If they’re innocent, he fights to protect them. If they’re not … well, that’s obviously the fun part. You can’t go wrong with vigilante justice, and Straczynski gets this reboot off to a rousing start, complemented by Tom Derenick’s pencils and Bill Sienkiewicz’s color. If you’re into THE PUNISHER, odds are you’ll like this. —Rod Lott

This column is all about setting the Wayback Machine to when I was a young teen with a voracious reading appetite, but not for the books that were meant to be read for school. No, I’m talking about the science fiction and fantasy that filled my shelves at home. Two of them are part of series I read the bulk of back in those days, while the third is based on a show I would watch whenever it would make an appearance on a UHF channel.

THIEVES’ WORLD edited by Robert Lynn Asprin — The recent passing of Asprin reminded just how much of his output I read, including most of his MYTH books and a good amount of the PHULE series. Then it clicked in my head that I had a few of the THIEVES’ WORLD titles as a teen, but I can’t remember if I read them straight through or just picked and chose certain stories. So when I came across a whole set for dirt-cheap, I grabbed it.

For those unfamiliar, the series is set in a town called Sanctuary, wherein resides nothing but crooks, con men, slave traders, brothel dwellers and killers. As explained in the prologue, the king decided to stick all of them in one town to keep an eye on them. So, in plain English, these were people not to screw with, unless you wish to have your life ended.

From 1979, the first book in the series is a bit hit-and-miss, as nothing truly stands out as a must-read, while a few stories reminded me of why I don’t read that much fantasy anymore, what with all these confusing ideas of gods and wizards. Each story does a fine job of introducing the main set of characters, explaining why they live in Sanctuary and the crosses they bear.

For instance, in John Brunner’s “Sentences of Death,” we meet Enas Yorl, a magician who lost a duel and now has to live in a castle by himself, since he can’t control the shapeshifting he is now cursed with. “The Face of Chaos” by Lynn Abbey deals with the world of magic, the temples that occupy the town, and how even religious types are none too keen to let anyone else have an upper hand in this world, with a fortune teller being used as a pawn.

In “The Secret of the Blue Star,” Marion Zimmer Bradley explains the secret of Lythande, the wizard with the star on his head. This story is actually the best of the bunch since the reveal is done in a way where you’re like, “Wait, what just happened?” and you’ll even look at these books in a new light. Asprin’s own contribution, “The Price of Doing Business,” tells of Jubal, a businessman who makes his money the old-fashioned way: by selling slaves. It’s a business venture that doesn’t work out for the best for his crew.

That is only a small smattering of the stories, but the closing essay is just terrific. In it, Asprin explains how the series came to be. These were the days before we had cell phones, e-mail and instant messaging, so just imagine trying to get all these authors to work together while a publisher is breathing down your neck. This is just a guilty-pleasure read, plain and simple — fun for people who remember the days of rolling 20-sided die.

THE STAINLESS STEEL RAT WANTS YOU! by Harry Harrison — All the blame should be pointed at 2000 AD. When I think about it, the British strips were my foray into the world of crime fiction, by way of this series. The Stainless Steel Rat books, especially the early ones, are fantastic reads about a galactic con man named James Bolivar diGriz.

See, 2000 AD adapted three of the novels into a comic series which followed the storylines pretty accurately. It was then I discovered they were actual books and devoured a good amount of them. This 1978 one is one of the few that had slipped through the cracks for me, so it was nice to come across this blast from the past in my used-bookstore travels.

It deals with Jim and his wife, Angelina, and their now fully grown sons who seem to take after their parents. Jim is forced into action with the kidnapping of his wife, only to discover that it was all a ruse for him to work again for the special corps. He has an unlikely working alliance with them — I mean, he still is a criminal at heart. The main problem is that a lunar base all of sudden just disappeared, with the last transmission mentioning a giant set of teeth, then nothing. This leads into a plot about a slug-like race bent on conquering all the planets.

The title is totally misleading, since this has nothing to do with some sort of army recruiting. It deals more with Jim and his family helping out the people who were first taken over by these creatures. Harrison’s writing has always been tongue-in-cheek, no matter the series, which is why I kept reading him over and over.

For those people who like to read series in order, there is a bit of a problem, as these books jump back and forth in Jim’s history. My suggestion is to stop after A STAINLESS STEEL RAT IS BORN, if you read them in publication order. You’ll be better off, since the later titles that came out in the ’90s don’t match up with the earlier ones’ style or substance.

THE AVENGERS #1: THE FLOATING GAME by John Garforth — THE AVENGERS is that cult classic that would show up every once in a while on my local TV — not regularly, but one week it would be on, then gone the next. Thanks to the old VHS tapes and now those DVD sets, it’s super-easy to catch. Well, here is a suggestion: Stick with the show.

This 1967 book takes a person the same amount of time as watching a better-plotted affair. It’s not that book doesn’t feel like a Avengers story, but it lost my interest over and over throughout. A mishmash of ideas comprises the plot, which deals with brainwashing, Russian spies, a gambling establishment, Emma Peel dressed like a cowgirl, Steed running for office, and, of course, more then a few attempts on Steed’s life.

All of this takes place in less than 140 pages. It gets a bit jumbled more than a few times, but Garforth tries his hardest to get Steed and Peel right, which is fine. It’s everything else he should have spent more time on. At one point, I literally had no clue who were the good guys and bad guys. What you should do is search out the other AVENGERS book I covered a long time ago. That one really captures the series; this one is not worth the time or money — especially since I saw one copy go online for $74 more than what I paid.

Next time: I bought some brand-new books. —Bruce Grossman

Buy them at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THE AVENGERS:
• THE AVENGERS: TOO MANY TARGETS by John Peel and Dave Rogers

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF HARRY HARRISON:
• MAKE ROOM! MAKE ROOM! by Harry Harrison

No, Gene O’Neill’s excellent new collection of stories from Apex Publications, TASTE OF TENDERLOIN, is not about meat. The cut of the title is a section of San Francisco populated by hookers, junkies, juice-heads and various other bits of discarded humanity.

The eight stories gathered here — three published for the first time — are about the people who mostly live in or stumble into this neighborhood. And in O’Neill’s competent hands, their stories include touches of the unexpected, the frightening and the fantastic.

Two of O’Neill’s Tenderloin residents are armed forces veterans. In “Lost Patrol,” we learn of the traumatic experience that caused a Vietnam veteran to become alcoholic and homeless, and of the ghosts who hauntingly call him back into duty. In “Balance,” another unstable vet believes he’s on a secret mission to kill people in the Tenderloin in order to maintain what he calls the Law of Catastrophic Isostasy. 

Other ‘loin dwellers include a former boxer in “Bruised Soul,” who returns to his resident hotel after release from a state hospital. He finds his life devoid of empathy until he meets his neighbor, a hooker who takes more than money from her johns. Then there is the drunkard of “Bushido,” who has a sudden healing transformation as an ancient prophecy embedded in the ornate tattoos covering his body comes to pass. A similar transformation happens in “The Apotheosis of Nathan McKee,” when a broken former businessman is given a strange and special ability that changes the course of his previously dead-end life.

Those who don’t live in the Tenderloin, but find themselves changed by the district, include the young advertising executive in “Magic Words,” who strikes a deal with a gypsy witch and is given the words to what becomes a wildly successful ad campaign. But then the exec is called upon to supply words to the gypsy in order to complete the bargain.
 
Also notable is “5150,” about a cop who live just outside of the district, but patrols its streets. As he approaches retirement and the reality of his broken life, he suddenly witnesses the apocalypse foretold by a local street preacher.

O’Neill infuses each story with strong descriptive details of the district’s setting without becoming heavy-handed. This persuasive reality allows the fantastic or horrific elements to slip in easily and unexpectedly. The results are consistently convincing and satisfying, often leaving us wishing the stories went on a little longer.  

What with each story taking place in the same setting, you might think it best to read only one or two per sitting to avoid redundancy. But the author’s Tenderloin tales are varied enough to enjoy all at once or sparingly. Either way, this collection reminds us of the unique reading pleasures to be found in well-told short stories.

So by all means seek out this fine TASTE OF TENDERLOIN and sign up for O’Neill’s tour into this rarely explored section of the City by the Bay. —Alan Cranis

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OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• SHADOW OF THE DARK ANGEL by Gene O’Neill

I knew that reading those classic novels in high school and college would pay off someday. Because I was able to get most of the jokes in R. Sikoryak’s MASTERPIECE COMICS collection. Although it’s not the New York-based artist’s only gig, he’s made a name for himself marrying modern-day cartoon characters to the plots of literature’s most famous works, and the result is brilliant, brainy parody.

Having read several here and there over the years, I was pleased to see them all collected in a sturdy, handsome hardback from Drawn and Quarterly. One need not have a degree in English Lit to enjoy the contents, but those with no familiarity with the books being spoofed will be unable to grant it the deep appreciation it deserves.

“Blondie” is the first target, with Dagwood Bumstead and his lovely wife recast as Adam and Eve, with Mr. Dithers playing God, in “Blond Eve.” In the book’s first true stroke of genius, the bubble-gum groaners of Bazooka Joe are reimagined into an eight-strip journey into Dante’s INFERNO.

Hell comes to Garfield, too, in “Mephistofield,” with Jim Davis’ fat cat sprouting horns and a master who studies black magic. Old fuddy duddy Mary Worth becomes “Mac Worth” in a soap-opera version of Shakespeare’s MACBETH, and Ziggy gets the Voltaire treatment in a greeting-card-ready tour of sins titled “Candiggy.”

“The Crypt of Brontë” is unearthed next, with WUTHERING HEIGHTS turned into a dead-on EC horror tale in two parts. Little Lulu becomes Hester Prynne in the most adorable adaptation of THE SCARLET LETTER ever, while Batman is the guilty party of CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, here turned into an issue of DOSTOYEVSKY COMICS. This story is perhaps the book’s masterstroke, with near-equals to follow when Charlie Brown becomes METAMORPHOSIS‘ Gregor Samsa (“Happiness is a pest-free home,” thinks Snoopy), and Superman is portrayed as THE STRANGER in a series of ACTION CAMUS covers.

No matter what the work being parodied — and on either side, book or comic — Sikoryak hits the bull’s-eye. It’s absolutely amazing how he’s able to ape each property. Not only does any given story capture its overall look and style, but the characters are dead ringers, and even the lettering is pitch-perfect. He has the fine points of parody down to an exact science.

So that’s how they look. Bonus: They read as funny as they are smart. I can imagine only the stuffiest of literature professors not finding this savage dressing-down of the classics at least amusing. Whether you love the big books or despised them, you’re apt to glean pleasure from Sikoryak’s tastefully twisted takes. —Rod Lott

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News of all the recent aviation crashes preventing you from jetting off to adventurous, faraway places? FLIGHT: VOLUME SIX will take you there from the comfort of your armchair, and for less money it takes to check a single bag.

It’s almost ridiculous how top-shelf this indie anthology series is. Every year, a new installment is released, and page after page, story after story, I’m simply astounded at its quality. Enjoyment is heightened by the sense that FLIGHT doesn’t realize the level of greatness it reaches, but it shows up pretty much every other graphic novel you’ll read in the immediate weeks before and after.

FLIGHT’s different/better/special is clear from the get-go, with Michel Gagné’s “The Saga of Rex: Soulmates.” How else would you classify 42 pages of two foxes’ wordless adventures, which unfurl and unfold into mind-blowing 2001 starchild territory? And exactly how does one follow that? By doing a ninja comedy, as J.P. Ahonen does with “The Excitingly Mundane Life of Kenneth Shuri,” which amusingly chronicles the daily doings of an unemployed warrior/family man.

Series editor Kazu Kibuishi goes lighthearted as well, with a just-for-fun ghost story in “Daisy Kutter: Phantoms,” featuring a strong female protagonist and spooks aplenty. The world’s worst viking is the subject of “Magnus the Misfit,” Graham Annable’s yellow-tinted tale of an antler-helmeted yellowbelly.

“Dead at Noon” is a nice, dialogue-free piece, in which Rodolphe Guenoden explores the ol’ high-noon showdown cliché of many a Western. Phil Craven’s brief “Epitaph” appears to be your standard, sci-fi apocalypse story until he slowly turns it on its head as the panels click by.

For “Walters,” Cory Godbey illustrates the real-life story of a man who tied a bunch of balloons to a lawn chair for a short soar through the air. With beautiful, fantastic, frightening embellishments, it plays like the dark side of Disney/Pixar’s UP. It’s followed by two more word-free stories: Andrea Offermann’s disturbing bird romance “Mate” and Rad Sechrist’s “Kidnapped,” which appropriates a SAMURAI JACK visual style and a cinematic scope to let its martial arts battle play out.

A couple wages war of a different kind in Bannister and Grimaldi’s “Cooking Duel,” in which partners lovingly race against one another to cook the perfect mushroom quiche. Similar silliness comes in the form of Justin Ridge’s just-as-it-sounds “Dead Bunny,” which for some reason reminded me a bit of one of my favorite books from the fifth grade: the vampire rabbit tale BUNNICULA.

That marks the start — whether by design or accidental — of the most kid-friendly comics in the book, with Richard Pose’s mischievous “The Z’s and the Attack of the Early Bird,” pieces starring series regulars Jellaby and Fish N Chips, by Kean Soo and Steve Hamaker, respectively; and Mike Dutton’s poignant “Long-Winded.” —Rod Lott

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OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS SERIES:
• FLIGHT EXPLORER: VOLUME 1
• FLIGHT: VOLUME ONE
• FLIGHT: VOLUME TWO
• FLIGHT: VOLUME FIVE

The backgrounds of four characters are delved into in G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA: MOVIE PREQUEL, a trade paperback collection of IDW Publishing’s comic-book one-shots. These aren’t really origin tales, but stories taking place sometime before the events of the film.

First up is Conrad “Duke” Hauser, on a routine mission — if explosion-laden counts as routine — with the Army Rangers in the jungles of Papua. Wallace “Ripcord” Weems is along for the ride, as well. This is followed by a glimpse on the evil side, with corporate slime McCullen flashing back to his youth, learning about his Destro family lineage.

Neither of these stories are all that special, but the back half of the book comes alive, starting with Baroness Anastasia DeCobray, the leggy brunette baddie who here pulls off a heist of sorts in the mansion of an Arab sheik. Finally, the ninja Snake Eyes infiltrates a terrorist takeover of a new Russian dam, and it’s the coolest of the bunch, because … well, he’s a ninja.

All the contents are written by Chuck Dixon, who’s been busy penning other comics with these characters, so he has an obvious familiarity with them. S.L. Gallant handles the art duties, and he’s solid from start to finish, lending the proceedings a grit, rather than the garish gloss that Casey Maloney brings to the official comics adaptation. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF G.I. JOE:
• G.I. JOE: ABOVE & BEYOND by Max Allan Collins
• G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA by Max Allan Collins

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF CHUCK DIXON:
• DEAN KOONTZ’S FRANKENSTEIN: PRODIGAL SON — VOLUME ONE by Chuck Dixon and Brett Booth
• A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET: BOOK ONE by Chuck Dixon and Kevin West

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF S.L. GALLANT:
• MONSTERS VS. ALIENS: THE OFFICIAL MOVIE ADAPTATION by Andy Lanning, S.L. Gallant and Alex Dalton
• TORCHWOOD: RIFT WAR by Simon Furman, Paul Grist, Ian Edginton, Brian Williamson, D’Israeli and S.L. Gallant

WOLVERINE MAGAZINE #2 offers another four stories, all but one featuring at least one of the X-Men. I’m assuming that the two-issue WOLVERINE AND THE X-MEN MAGAZINE has been absorbed into this perodical, since the titular, metal-clawed hero is absent for half of its contents.

First up is a WOLVERINE: FIRST CLASS story in which all Logan wants to do is kick back at the X-Mansion and watch the Stanley Cup finals on TV. His night of R&R, however, is upended by Kitty Pryde and two other girls bickering, not to mention activating some robot villains in the Danger Room that get loose.

A continuation of the previous issue’s WEAPON X: FIRST CLASS number is next, with Professor X again helping Wolverine probe his mind to fill in the blanks of his true origin. It’s one of those reality-benders where our hero ends up fighting an earlier version of himself.

From X-MEN/POWER PACK comes a team-up between the pint-sized super-siblings and The Beast, at the Super Bowl of science conventions — one that Mystique has dared crash. Last is the second chapter of Marvel’s adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ classic novel THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK, which I doubt the magazine’s younger-age target will appreciate, even if I do. —Rod Lott

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS SERIES:
• WOLVERINE AND THE X-MEN MAGAZINE #1
• WOLVERINE AND THE X-MEN MAGAZINE #2
• WOLVERINE MAGAZINE #1

My introduction to Henry Kuttner’s world of screwball science fiction and fantasy came when I was a kid and came across a story called “The Misguided Halo.” It was about a novice angel who delivers a halo to a man living somewhere in middle America. He didn’t deserve the damn thing. It was a heavenly screw-up. You can imagine how wearing a halo might disrupt your daily activities, but in the story, the only way to lose it would be to do something unspeakably awful, which the poor sap couldn’t do because, well, he was wearing a halo.

Kuttner wrote serious SF as well, but I suspect his heart was always with the goofy stuff. The five stories in ROBOTS HAVE NO TAILS have respectable SF premises, but the characters … eh, not so much. Our hero is Galloway Gallegher, an untrained scientific genius who can create a machine for doing just about anything you can think of. His problem is that he can do it only when he’s smashed out of his gourd and Gallegher+, his subconscious, takes over. When he sobers up again, he has no idea what the problem is the machine is supposed to address, who he built it for, or how it works.

Poor Gallegher is always waking up hung over and in trouble because he’s accepted someone’s money to solve a problem, but he has no recollection of anything he did while he was drunk. His grandfather from Maine is his drinking companion in a couple of the tales. In “The Proud Robot,” Gallegher arises to find that he’s built a mechanical man who is, to say the least, totally obnoxious. Joe the robot is narcissistic and arrogant, and would be happy to spend his days doing nothing but contemplating his own beauty.

He can even see through the outer layer of his stomach, like the Glass Cat of Oz, and is just as smug. He can’t be controlled because Gallegher has no idea why he made him. Complicating the situation is the fact that dead bodies — all of them Gallegher at different ages — keep appearing in his backyard. When the cops haul one off, it soon disappears from the morgue. Our inventor is under suspicion for murdering himself. Repeatedly.

In “The World is Mine,” Gallegher awakes to find three fuzzy Martians in his lab, hellbent on conquering the Earth. Just the three of them.

My favorite story of the set is the first one, “Time Locker,” about a regular-looking gym locker, the outside of which exists in our dimension and the inside of which exists in another one. This means you can put something in the locker and it will shrink, change shape and finally disappear. Where does it go? Somewhere in time. When? That’s the problem.

The stories were originally sold to the pulp ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION in 1942 and began appearing the next year. Kuttner fought in the war, and the last tale was published in 1948. He died at the absurdly young age of 42 in 1958.

This volume — a Planet Stories reprint of the 1952 collection — comes with two introductions, one written in ’52 by the author’s wife, science fantasy writer C.L. Moore, and the other by the creator of the Repairman Jack novels, F. Paul Wilson. The latter loves these stories for their cleverness and their humor, but he isn’t blind to their faults. “Are they some of the best SF ever written?” he asks. “Hell, no. The writing is slapdash at times, suffering from the polyadverbosis and digressions that would give Poe fits. The science is often suspect, the extrapolations occasionally sloppy. But none of that in any way diminishes the wacky inventiveness and entertainment value of these tales.”

Yeah, me, too.

And the title? Moore writes that when a publisher asked Kuttner for a title for the collection, the author couldn’t think of anything. “Call it anything you like,” he responded. “Call it ROBOTS HAVE NO TAILS if you want to.”

Good call. —Doug Bentin

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Such a brilliant image on the cover of SEX, THUGS, AND ROCK & ROLL, that X-ray shot of a man blowing his brains out, only with the expelled gray matter represented by the book’s contributing authors. Don’t agree? Then you’re better off not even attempting to digest its contents, because this one’s not for the faint of heart or easily offended.

For the rest of us, however, it’s a big ball of awesome. Edited by Todd Robinson, who’s the mastermind behind the Thuglit crime-fic website, the book holds 23 tales representing “the best of neo-noir fiction.” It’s Thuglit’s second hold-in-your-hands anthology, following last year’s HARDCORE HARDBOILED. They’re so good, I hope they become annuals.

I can think of no better story chosen to start the book than the one that does: Jason Starr’s “Double Down,” a brief bit about a guy with a gambling problem who’s hired to tail another’s cheating wife, and quickly figures out a way to increase his fee. Next is Jordan Harper’s “Like Riding a Moped,” narrated by an obese woman who works in a jewelry store, which she’s agreed to help her no-good, out-of-her-league boyfriend knock over. The power and sadness behind this one reminded me of Sidney Lumet’s tragic heist film BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD.

In “A Flood of Mexican Porn Star Tits,” the book’s most over-the-top piece — and I mean that in a good way — Justin Porter’s protagonist flees to Mexico to beat a drug charge, makes some pesos drawing porn comics, and attracts a most unwanted fan in a male prisoner. The ending equates to a terrific punchline.

Its tonal opposite can be found in “Bullets and Fire,” in which the seemingly unsuckable Joe R. Lansdale details the lengths one young man will go to for the bitter taste of revenge. Here, it entails joining a dirtier-than-dirt gang, and his initiation is beating the crap out of a little girl. That’s just for starters.

Equally poignant is “The Days When You Were Anything Else,” by Marcus Sakey. It concerns an ex-con bartender trying to right the wrongs of his past when his estranged daughter is kidnapped, and the asked-for ransom is beyond his means and will require drastic measures. Same goes for the parole officer behind Mike Sheeter’s excellent “Violated” when one of his sex-offender clients gets a little too personal.

That desperation also informs Anthony Neil Smith’s “Cramp,” only comically, as a quartet of friends rob a state-line porn shop, but things don’t go as planned because one of them has food poisoning. It’s sick as, well, shit, but also darkly, deadly funny.

Richard J. Martin Jr. has the most experimental story among the bunch in “Eulogy for a Player,” in which the narrator schools you, the reader, on all you need to know about being a pimp. Allan Guthrie takes the most liberties in terms of setting — the 12th century! — with the Viking tale “Haermund Hardaxe Was Here.” Paintball informs Hugh Lessig’s “We All Come from Splattertown,” while an act of terrorism takes center stage in the nerve-racking “Black Sun,” from Gary Carson.

Another standout comes late in the book with “Customer Service,” in which Matthew Baldwin tells what happens when a hitman is asked to cancel a gig, but refuses to waver on his no-refund policy.

With some of these stories having been published online beforehand, length is not a problem. They set out what they intend to do and get out of there before trouble brews, much like a burglar ransacking a business. Occasionally, there’s one that’s a tad too obtuse to play like the rest, but such spots are minimal and, thus, not worth singling out.

Robinson’s done another bang-up job assembling this lineup. Here’s proof that the short story isn’t just alive and well, but kicking … you right in the balls. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS SERIES:
• HARDCORE HARDBOILED edited by Todd Robinson

Scouring out the weekly singles scene … in comics!

Dark Horse resurrects one of illustrated horror’s greatest franchises in CREEPY #1, a 48-page collection of mostly all-new tales. Instead of a magazine, this new CREEPY is a comic book, although the stories are still in black-and-white, as well as hosted by Uncle Creepy. The quartet concerns a man who discovers he has the power to make people do what he thinks, a greedy record store owner, a concentration-camp chemical and an extreme fat camp. There’s a two-page feature on celebs reputed to have sold their soul to Satan, and a reprint of an Alex Toth-drawn alien story from the original mag. This relaunch doesn’t quite hit the same thrill buttons (although seeing Angelo Torres contribute sure helps), but it’s got room to grow.

Tying in with the new Nickelodeon cartoon series of the same name is IRON MAN: ARMORED ADVENTURES #1. It’s a one-shot comprised of two tales, both hinging off the concept that Tony Stark is a teenaged superhero. The first has him mourning his late father while simultaneously fighting crime, and it’s kind of a streamlined origin for newbies. The second, longer story is more action-oriented, with Nick Fury dispatching young S.H.I.E.L.D. agents Hawkeye and Black Widow to find out Iron Man’s true identity. Bright and boisterous, this all-ages approach is like a breath of fresh air; one wishes the ADVENTURES wouldn’t end here.

A star-spangled hero known as The Destroyer takes control of USA COMICS 70TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL #1, another in Marvel’s continuing birthday one-shots. From John Arcudi and Steve Ellis, the story pits The Destroyer — who’s kinda like The Punisher, but in a far more Carson Kressley-friendly costume — against those pesky Nazis. Penned by Stan Lee, the backup tale from 1942 shows The Destroyer doing the same thing, and while that’s all fine and good, I got more jolts out of the meager, five-page preview of Ed Brubaker’s THE MARVELS PROJECT that’s tucked into the back.

Of all these 70th celebration issues, ALL SELECT COMICS 70TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL #1 is my favorite so far. For one thing, Marc Guggenheim and Javier Pulido’s lead story about Blonde Phantom — legal secretary by day, superhero by night — is one of the better murder mysteries I’ve read this year, which is amazing given how few pages on which the noir-ish story plays out. For another, the great Michael Kupperman gives us an absolutely insane adventure of Marvex the Super Robot as he buys socks and battles a villain made entirely of sandwich ingredients. What’s really surprisingly is that Kupperman’s approach isn’t too far removed from the real deal, as the pair of 1940 Marvex reprints in the back proves. —Rod Lott

Darren Speegle might have been born too late for speculative fiction’s “New Wave,” but reading A RHAPSODY FOR THE ETERNAL, his third short story collection, recalls the heady days of the late ’60s and ’70s, when writers like Harlan Ellison, Michael Moorcock, Robert Silverberg and several others were stretching science fiction, fantasy and horror into new, previously uncharted areas.

Like most of the work from that groundbreaking period, Speegle’s stories are impressively literate, intelligent and highly imaginative. But they can also lose sight of their narrative intention in an intoxicating whirl of sensations — again, like their New Wave predecessors.

In “The Lunatic Miss Teak,” the opening story of the collection from Raw Dog Screaming Press, an unnamed traveler in Germany happens upon an oddities shop and discovers a slotted doll made of teak. “You can be hers or she can be yours,” says the shop owner. And as time passes, the traveler slowly fills each of the slots in the doll with coins until it consumes his every thought and existence. Here, Speegle maintain both the eerie ambience and the plot progression throughout. Another example is “The Man in Window Three,” where a group of thieves on a futuristic space station replaces the figures of a holographic art display with their own bodies, only to then become victims of a heist themselves.

But then there are stories like “Transtexting Pose,” which starts out solid enough with the sale of a piece of ordinary-looking art hung on a household wall. But as the image of the art changes, the story itself dissolves into an endless stream of poetic descriptions. It’s all very intriguing until we discover that we’ve lost sight of the story’s narrator and any idea of what happens. Similar problems are found in stories like “The Tiptoeing Monk,” “Glitzing with the Big Delicious” and “Disapparency.” They all begin with alluring premises — often in some far, near-apocalyptic future — and then get lost in their hallucinogenic prose.

Things seem more on solid ground in the open scenes of “The Third Stanza,” where an author of a popular but controversial book about an evangelical army of the future is approached by representatives of that army to write the script for their staged second coming of Christ. But then the story is left behind near the end as the narrator contemplates the meaning of a poem read by the Christ figure.

Speegle’s stories are likely to divide readers into two camps: those who are highly impressed with his inconclusive conclusions and are more than willing to read each story numerous times to discover their meaning, and those who get frustrated after so many promising beginnings drift into elaborate but empty endings.

Oddly enough, both camps are right. And that is reason enough for you to seek out this alluring collection, read it and decide for yourself. —Alan Cranis

Buy it at Amazon.

Some books are easy to call. If you’re not into heavy metal music, you won’t be into PRECIOUS METAL: DECIBEL PRESENTS THE STORIES BEHIND 25 EXTREME METAL MASTERPIECES. Edited by Albert Mudrian, who also fronts DECIBEL magazine, which I’m unaware existed, the book does exactly what it sets out to do, telling chapter-long “making of” tales of more than two dozen albums.

While I respect Mudrian’s insistence at having contributors interview every member of the band, and the Q&A format keeps the engine chugging, I’ve never heard of these supposed hall-of-fame masterpieces, much less the groups. I know of Black Sabbath, Slayer and Monster Magnet, but who is Carcass? Eyehategod? Kyuss? Darkthrone?

With no knowledge of these acts, I have no emotional inkling to find out what went in to such-and-such CD. It reads a little insidery, with names bandied out that I don’t know, but that’s fine. Again: As a non-metalhead, I’m not who this book is trying to reach.

This is one for those guys who sat in the back of my bus in junior high school. Those guys who stepped on every morning with their sleeveless Iron Maiden T-shirts and glassy-eyed, vacant stares. This is for them, provided they read, provided they’re still alive. —Rod Lott

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In Monsterville, every day is Opposite Day. Kids are encouraged to disobey their parents, run away from home, play in the street, and throw bricks through the neighbors’ windows. But there’s one child who instead dares to act like an angel, even though his cheery disposition and curious nature get him into a different kind of trouble, all chronicled in MELVIN MONSTER, VOLUME 1: THE JOHN STANLEY LIBRARY.

This delightful collection from Drawn and Quarterly is comprised of the first three issues of Dell’s MELVIN MONSTER title from 1965, written and illustrated by the late, great Stanley. Today, his work is mostly forgotten beyond a core group of devotees, but hopefully, this book — and other planned volumes in D&Q’s series — will give that narrow audience the Opposite Day treatment.

True to his name, Melvin is green-skinned, like every good Frankenstein creation should be. He has a half-moon mouth and pointy hair, and lives in a massive, multistory haunted house with his “Mummy” and “Baddy,” as well as a pet alligator named Cleopatra. Some pet — the reptile is always attempting to hide somewhere inconspicuous, in hopes that Melvin will stumble into its hungry, open jaws.

In the misadventures on display here, often told in a style that feels freewheeling and even improvisational, he attempts to go to school, despite the efforts of the witchy teacher to boil him; gains a guardian demon; ends up in a cage as a living trophy to a rich guy; encounters untold terrors in the cellar; becomes the temporary property of monster hunters; and accidentally falls into more mischief than most “human beans” his age.

Other than this year’s Free Comic Book Day offering from D&Q, Stanley’s work has come across my mitts in woefully short supply. That’s too bad, but there’s nothing like the joy of catching up, and Stanley is one who deserves it. Put simply, these are kids’ comics at their peak: simple, but not stupid; innocent, yet not insipid; creative, without having to convince you of its cleverness; and, above all, timeless. Get one for your children … and one just for you.

As good as Stanley was at visual gags and imaginative plots that sometimes veered toward the surreal (and one wished this volume didn’t lack an introductory essay to clue readers in on his story), the success of the book isn’t completely due to him. D&Q has assembled MELVIN MONSTER into one handsome package, with covers, endpapers and assorted pages provided by renowned indie-comics giant Seth. Transitionary pages show Melvin in near-black shades against a completely black background, but with the whites of his eyes popping in stark contrast.

Yours may do the same. —Rod Lott

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Here’s another column of short story collections, with two of the books being from pretty big names in genre fiction, while the third is based around a long-running comic-strip character with a strong chin and a fetish for yellow.

SKELETON CREW by Stephen King — That one episode of TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE is the cause for me starting to reading some King. The episode was “Word Processor of the Gods,” based upon the story of the same name here, which deals with a machine that our narrator is given, made by his genius nephew. The machine is able to either delete or bring things back into the world, and the narrator figures out a way to make things better for his life before it goes kaput.

“The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands” is a reworking of the King Midas tale, but of course, with that King touch. The collection is not all horror — there is a bit of science fiction with “Beachworld,” which deals with a crashed spaceship and the dune-like planet. Then there is “Jaunt,” which is set in the future and deals with a transporter device that people need to be asleep to use. A father explains the history of the device, with the horror side of King shining through by the end.

There is even a crime tale called “The Wedding Gig,” about a band playing for a mobster’s daughter’s wedding, and then her rise of power. Then there is what has to be the most over-the-top story King has ever written. He actually admits he might have gone a bit too far with “Survivor Type,” about a doctor who ends up marooned on a desert isle. The doctor goes to great lengths to survive — maybe “extreme” is a better description. The whole story is told diary-style and the writing slowly becomes a gibberish mess by the end.

“Cain Rose Up” seems to be a sort of riff on RAGE, one of his Richard Bachman novels, since both leads take out their aggression on their fellow students the only way they know how. This 1986 collection also has one of King’s novellas of note in “The Mist,” which deals with a weird fog that engulfs a small Maine town, leaving people stranded in a local market with weird creatures attacking anyone who dares to leave. It’s pretty hard to read this one today without thinking of the movie version. Also, the ending is vastly different, being not as bleak.

I’m actually a bigger fan of King’s short story work and novellas than some of those daunting bricks he pops out like they were nothing. I read NIGHT SHIFT years ago and should probably look into reading that one again.

THE BEAST THAT SHOUTED LOVE AT THE HEART OF THE WORLD by Harlan Ellison — Forty years ago, this groundbreaking collection came out. Ellison is not only known for his writing, but also his sweet disposition. I was more familiar with the works that were based on his writing than his actual work — namely, that episode of THE OUTER LIMITS and that certain STAR TREK episode which has been discussed ad nauseam even in a pre-Internet day. I’ve always wanted to read the source material for A BOY AND HIS DOG, finally coming across it in a cheap copy of this collection.

“A Boy and His Dog” is the story of a rover named Vic and his telepathic dog, Blood. These two have a strong bond, being together these past three years and relying on each other to survive. Vic stalks a woman, rapes her, defends her against roaming scavengers, and then follows her to the underworld. Once he arrives, it’s obvious it was a trap from the start — they want to use Vic to repopulate this town, since all the men have become sterile. Vic stays down there for a week until he has had enough. He escapes with the girl in tow, only to find Blood on the edge of death, and there is only one thing Vic can do. Sure, the ending is about as chauvinistic as they come, but what do you expect from Ellison? Feminist literature?

The book actually starts out with a total mind-fuck of a read in “The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World.” It’s not a sequential story, but more an experiment, as Ellison calls it. It deals with various little threads that somehow feel like a spider web. I can’t really give a synopsis; you just have to read it for yourself.

“Along the Scenic Route” deals with traffic in the future, where cars are equipped with weapons to not only protect themselves, but also to make sure they can get the jump on others. DEATH RACE is like Hot Wheels compared to this one. But the one story that really made me laugh, although it’s a bit dated, is “Santa Claus vs. S.P.I.D.E.R.” You ever wonder what Santa does during his downtime? Well, this story portrays him as a James Bond-esque spy who faces certain political figures of the time this story was written, all of whom are working for the secret organization of the title.

I’ve only touched upon a few of the stories of this top-notch collection, which is well worth seeking out. I’m hopeful that Ellison does not come across this review, even though it’s positive, because he’d write a 20-page tirade.

DICK TRACY: THE SECRET FILES edited by Max Allan Collins and Martin H Greenberg — This anthology was published in 1990, the same year that Warren Beatty’s vision of DICK TRACY hit theaters. Collins was writing the Dick Tracy strip at the time, so no one better could have been chosen to put this together. Most of the names will be familiar to most readers of this column.

Mike Resnick’s “Origins” tells of a young comic writer named Chet, whose crime strip’s one real fan is his neighbor Nimrod. So when certain crimes read exactly like his previous strips, Chet goes to the police for help, where he meets an officer who will have a huge effect on his future. It’s a fun little story. Most readers will see where it’s going and just revel in the idea that Tracy was based on a real cop.

Rex Miller’s “The Cereal Killer” deals with a series of deaths, for which a young kid figures out a huge clue, only to find that the police themselves reached the same conclusion. “Rockabilly” by F. Paul Wilson is a fun one about the early days of rock ‘n’ roll, with the return of one of Tracy’s deadly but hard-to-understand enemies.

Ed Gorman’s “The Curse” comes off like a shoot-out from the start, only for Tracy to hear the truth from beyond the grave, thanks to a tape recording. Barbara Collins’ “Homefront” deals with Tess Trueheart and the young Tracy while Dad is not around, but showing that the kid is chip off the old block when it comes to standing up for himself. “Living Legend” by Stephen Mertz moves things to a more current time period, as Tracy takes part in a crack raid, only to find out there might be a crooked cop in the midst.

Closing out the collection is Collins’ own “Not a Creature Was Stirring,” which deals with a serial killer who might resemble a certain figure of that season, with Tracy finally getting what he really wanted for Christmas. This book is filled with some other great pieces that stick Dick Tracy into the hard-boiled world of crime. It’s well worth seeking out.

Next time: Marvel Comics said it best. —Bruce Grossman

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OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF MAX ALLAN COLLINS:
• THE BABY BLUE RIP-OFF by Max Allan Collins
• BLACK HATS by Patrick Culhane
• BYLINE: MICKEY SPILLANE edited by Max Allan Collins and Lynn F. Myers Jr.
• DEADLY BELOVED by Max Allan Collins
• DICK TRACY by Max Allan Collins
• DICK TRACY GOES TO WAR by Max Allan Collins
• THE FIRST QUARRY by Max Allan Collins
• G.I. JOE: ABOVE & BEYOND by Max Allan Collins
• THE GOLIATH BONE by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins
• A KILLING IN COMICS by Max Allan Collins
• THE LAST QUARRY by Max Allan Collins
• MY LOLITA COMPLEX AND OTHER TALES OF SEX AND VIOLENCE by Max Allan Collins and Matthew V. Clemens
• QUARRY’S LIST by Max Allan Collins
• RED SKY IN MORNING by Patrick Culhane
• ROAD TO PARADISE by Max Allan Collins
• STRIP FOR MURDER by Max Allan Collins
• TOUGH TENDER by Max Allan Collins
• THE WAR OF THE WORLDS MURDER by Max Allan Collins

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF STEPHEN KING:
• CELL by Stephen King
• THE COLORADO KID by Stephen King
• CREEPSHOWS: THE ILLUSTRATED STEPHEN KING MOVIE GUIDE by Stephen Jones
• CUJO by Stephen King
• DUMA KEY by Stephen King
• HAUNTED HEART: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF STEPHEN KING by Lisa Rogak
• JUST AFTER SUNSET by Stephen King
• THE SECRETARY OF DREAMS: VOLUME ONE by Stephen King
• STEPHEN KING GOES TO THE MOVIES by Stephen King
• STEPHEN KING: THE NON-FICTION by Rocky Wood and Justin Brooks

A question regarding the title of Michael Kupperman’s TALES DESIGNED TO THRIZZLE: VOLUME ONE: Does “thrizzle” mean “pee your pants a little from laughing so hard”? Because if so, it just about achieved its promise, but I’m a few decades away (hopefully) from incontinence yet.

I’ve long been a fan of Kupperman’s one-of-a-kind cartoons, as seen in the uproarious 2000 collection SNAKE ‘N’ BACON’S CARTOON CABARET and in the extras-laden paperback reissues of LEMONY SNICKET that I guess HarperCollins has given up on, sadly. This Fantagraphics hardcover rounds up the first four issues of Kupperman’s crazed comic book — talking pork products, sex blimps and all.

“Snake ‘n’ Bacon” slither and sizzle their way throughout, solving mysteries despite performing no actual detective work. Snake just says “SSSSS,” while Bacon only promotes his many uses, i.e. “Crumble me in a salad.” If you’ve never been exposed to Kupperman’s work before, chances are that you’re already scratching your head and saying, “Wait, what?”

Know now that his sense of humor is so absurdist, it’s beyond absurd. Non-sequiturs are the name of his twisted game, so don’t expect standard setup/punchline gags. Here, the concept is the star, and the less sense it makes, the funnier it is. Consider “The Buzz Aldrin Mysteries,” “Sherlock Holmes Versus Jungle Boy” or Albert Einstein and Mark Twain being paired up for a ’70s TV cop show.

No subject is sacred: pornographic coloring books, boy bands, barbecue restaurant mascots, senior citizens, incompetent superheroes (Underpants on His Head Man, anyone?), The Monkees, Dick Tracy — not even ham banana rolls.

In keeping with THRIZZLE’s comic-skewering concept, lots of fake ads little the pages, for such products as the foreplay robot, Baby Poop ‘N’ Tell, Indian Spirit Chewing Gum (“haunted with real dead Indian flavor”) and the Fabulous Nut Bra (“Hey Barbra! What’s Sue got that I haven’t got?” “Haven’t you noticed? Her breasts are oddly lumpy and smell like nuts!”),

If none of that puts a smile on your face, THRIZZLE’s not going to thrill you. For everyone else, Kupperman’s collection satisfies all your Fireman Octopus needs. —Rod Lott

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Nobody enjoys admitting to the passing of time, but the truth is it has been almost 25 years since Brian Lumley first introduced Harry Keogh, the Necroscope. And since that premiere, the many tales of Keogh — and his ability to communicate with the dead and travel to any point in space and time — remain the most popular of all of Lumley’s prolific creations.
 
This latest entry in the Keogh saga, NECROSCOPE: HARRY AND THE PIRATES AND OTHER TALES FROM THE LOST YEARS, is a collection of two novellas and a shorter piece published for the first time in the U.S. It falls under the same category as the previous work THE LOST YEARS. That is, they take place in that period before he finished Harry off and passed his impressive powers on to his inheritors.

Perhaps aware of the many new readers discovering the Necroscope, Lumley begins this collection with a friendly and inviting “Introducing Harry Keogh: Necroscope,” where he traces the beginning and evolution of Keogh, his possible position among the many celebrated fictional characters of the same first name, and concludes with a chronological listing of the entire books in the series.
 
“For the Dead Travel Slowly,” the first novella, finds Harry taking some time away from his Edinburgh headquarters. While visiting an old friend, Harry senses an evil presence deep in the woods of Hazeldine. It is an ancient, huge, tree-like monster that emits orders that alter emotions, but also feeds on human bodies, trapping their dead souls. Alternating between the perspective of Harry and “The Thing,” the story generates several genuine shudders as we learn of the monster’s history and powers. And added tension comes from the resistance of the local police to believe Harry’s warnings and destroy the monster.
 
The title tale, “Harry and the Pirates,” is a bit problematic. It’s basically a rousing good story of a pirate crew and a strange, alluring golden cloth that falls from the sky, related mostly to Harry by the dead spirit of the crew’s first mate. But Lumley struggles at first to directly involve Harry into the story. He is simply a listener, until he experiences an odd and painful interference. And it is this interference that eventually pulls him directly into the action, especially as the novella concludes. It comes off a bit lopsided, but is rescued by Lumley’s bravado and swaggering prose style.
 
The concluding “End Piece: Old Man with a Blade,” is a delightful oddity. Way too brief for a novella, it is — by Lumley’s own admission in his introduction — more of a vignette. After a few opening sentences, anyone can guess who and what the Old Man is. But this is perhaps the first encounter with the Necroscope from the Old Man’s point-of-view. And their relationship — “old friends” as Lumley confirms — is at last briefly and movingly expressed.
 
Lumley’s style is strong and assured throughout the entire collection. Amazingly, especially when you consider how many books the legend of Keogh has filled, with all its varying tangents and mutations, this latest addition is a very user-friendly introduction to the entire series.New readers will soon find themselves as familiar with the character as the many long-time followers.

So if this inventive, often frightening and always entertaining series hasn’t yet caught your attention, well, now’s your chance. —Alan Cranis

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In naming the collection of her work IMPORTANT COMICS, Dina L. Kelberman isn’t setting herself up for failure. Rather, she’s being self-mocking, knowing full well her cartoons aren’t “important” at all. By their very nature of being drawn — often in pencil — on the back of discarded receipts, tickets and notebook paper, they’re disposable flights of fancy.

But that doesn’t mean they lack value. They smirk, they please, they entertain. They also respect one’s time in this crazed-schedule world, able to be digested in a single sitting. So simple is it to read, I immediately read it again. Hey, catch me on a good day and I’m nice like that.

It’s almost impossible to describe the contents of IMPORTANT COMICS without seeing an example for yourself, so here goes, at right …

See? Kelberman’s comics are like anti-comics: Titles are tenuous at best; the stories aren’t stories at all; concepts veer toward the abstract; the nondescript figures look like milk cartons, mailboxes or beans. Take, for example, “Holy Shit.” Why’s it called “Holy Shit”? Why not? Across its mere two panels, what looks like a hot dog with a few wisps of hair mutters to himself (herself?), “I can’t wait to start doing chin-ups! I wonder how many I’ll actually do.” The end.

One of my favorites in the 52-pager is actually a photo — presumably torn from a Sears catalog from long ago — of a toolbox with its many drawers opened. On its opened top, Kelberman has drawn two eyes and a mouth; the toolbox says, “Feast upon my flesh,” because, well, for no other reason than it made her smile. And that makes me smile.

It’s kinda like if Andy Kaufman had worked his peculiar, polarizing brand of comedy not on the stage, but the funny pages. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Important Comics.

Just to give you an idea of how screwy Fletcher Hanks’ YOU SHALL DIE BY YOUR OWN EVIL CREATION! is, consider the collection’s first story starring Tabu, Wizard of the Jungle. He’s like Tarzan, only with mystical powers. Anyway, Tabu’s trying his damnedest to rid his land of a group of slave traders. An earthquake didn’t quite cut it, so a sudden gust of wind blows them into a slimy pool, where they’re nearly killed by giant snakes (“Did you notice the size of those constrictors?” “Did I!!”).

Leaping across a gorge — yes, a gorge — Tabu shows up (“There’s the wizard who is causing this agony”). They threaten to kill him, so he immediately “makes a quick motion,” turning himself into a gorilla (“Oh, my soul!!”). That gorilla then becomes a “jungle tree vine,” crushing the men into oblivion. Says Tabu, “It’s the justice of the jungle.”

I mean, holy. Effing. Shit.

Was Hanks insane or otherwise mentally handicapped? Dunno, but as editor Paul Karasik points out in his meaty introduction, this was a man mean enough to kick his 4-year-old son down a flight of stairs. By all accounts, he was less than kind to others, so I have no qualms criticizing his less-than-competent work.

Of course, that’s exactly the point. As with Karasik’s runaway hit I SHALL DESTROY ALL THE CIVILIZED PLANETS!, the late Hanks’ work is being celebrated because of its inherent badness. Characters are out of proportion; stories make no sense. Yet they’re mammothly entertaining, as if Hanks was completely oblivious to his considerable limitations.

Unlike PLANETS, which focused primarily on two characters — superhero Stardust and mysterious jungle woman Fantomah — CREATION opens it up to those and many more, thus completing Fantagraphics’ collection of Hanks’ entire comics output.

Lumberjack Big Red McLane, King of the North Woods, returns with many more adventures, all of which simply involve him punching people. All problems are solved with his fists, and he’s concerned with little more than a flapjack breakfast at the end. Take a drink every time he hits someone, and if you’re in a frat, your chapter will be kicked off campus. Get a load of his mouth, too: “I don’t like the way you do business, and I don’t like your face!! I can’t change your business methods, but — I can change your face!! And how!”

In one of Stardust’s more notable adventures, aliens bore a hole to the center of the Earth, into which a chemical is inserted so that rocks will rain over Chicago. And the point is …?

However, Fantomah — she of the occasional floating, flaming skull — steals the show with what may be the single most unintentionally funny two-panel sequence in comics history. It’s not about what is said, but her keen sense of timing (not to mention that head):

Other featured Hanks characters with unwieldy names: Tiger Hart of Crossbone Castle on the Planet Saturn, Whirlwind Carter of the Interplanetary Secret Service, and “Yank” Wilson Super Spy Q-4. Were these monikers generated with spins of a wheel? With foes that look like the work of Basil Wolverton (were he stripped of talent) and plots that dare not veer from Hanks’ lone story template, these works are already parodies of themselves.

You’ll love how much you hate them; you’ll hate how much you love them. —Rod Lott

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OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• I SHALL DESTROY ALL THE CIVILIZED PLANETS! edited by Paul Karasik

Scouring out the weekly singles scene … in comics!

I’m still astounded at how much coin Michael Bay’s clankety-clank-clank robots sequel is racking up, despite some of the year’s most savage reviews. I’m sure the first issue of IDW’s TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN — OFFICIAL MOVIE ADAPTATION is better: It takes less time to read, it’s quieter, and you can actually distinguish one machine from the next. (On the minus side, you still have Shia LaBeouf’s character saying, “Oh, no. No, no, NO!”) Written by Chris Furman and drawn by Jon Davis-Hunt, the adventure kicks off with the robot war continuing on Earth, destroying the Witwicky home and putting a crimp into Sam’s first week of college. Dueling cars will do that to you every time. The fights are mindless, but at least in this medium, they’re digestible.

COSMIC SIZE FANTASTIC FOUR #1 is an oversized, one-shot special issue with a Cary Bates and Bing Cansino story that picks up with Mr. Fantastic and The Thing fighting Audrey II-esque plants on an alien planet. After they jet back home, sample spores lodged between Thing’s rocky skin grow and cause havoc for the Richards family, driving a wedge between them all and turning them against one another. This being an all-ages tale, leave it to siblings Franklin and Valeria Richards to save their parents (and the proverbial day for all mankind). Good stuff, and smarter than the average kid-driven book. It’s capped with a reprint of FANTASTIC FOUR #237 from 1981, with a female alien fronting a hobo crime ring.

Marvel’s birthday celebration continues with YOUNG ALLIES 70TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL #1, and this time, the story is far more sober than the other one-shot originals. Written by Roger Stern and illustrated by Paolo Rivera, it finds Bucky taking Captain America’s place in the present day, and remembering his life back in World War II, fighting the Nazis alongside the so-called Sentinels of Liberty. Now, all but two of them are deceased, and Cap visits the survivors in the nursing home. It’s tough not to get teary at the end. The back half of the book has two Stan Lee-penned prose stories from yesteryear, as well as an adventure of the forgotten “Terry Vance, The School Boy Sleuth.”

Conversely, MARVEL MYSTERY COMICS 70TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL #1 is bug-nuts insane. Courtesy of writer Tom DeFalco and artist Chris Burnham, the 1941-set adventure begins with the Sub-Mariner, and then gradually incorporates other characters into the story: Ferret, Mystery Detective; The Human Torch; Toro, the Flaming Kid; The Angel; and Electro, many of whom are introduced with exclamation points, because that’s the kind of tongue-in-cheek work this is. Two 1940 reprints close it out: The Human Torch vs. The Green Flame, and a mystery featuring Ferret, so named because of his animal companion. A flashback ad details ABC’s Saturday-morning lineup of 1983, including PAC-MAN, RUBIK THE AMAZING CUBE and, um, MENUDO. —Rod Lott

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No real theme to tie it all together this week, other than the fact that I’ve wanted to cover these books for a while. Two are novels, while the other is a collection of short stories that were originally two separate novels. So let us delve back into the worlds of Ross Thomas, Ross Macdonald and Lawrence Block. No stinkers — just prime crime writing from three major talents.

CHINAMAN’S CHANCE by Ross Thomas — Let the un-PC adventures begin in this 1978 read with the first appearances of characters Artie Wu and Quincy Durant. From the outset, they seem to be to old friends living their lives, but underneath, these two are a lot sharper than you’d expect, since Thomas is very clever in the storytelling.

Artie and Quincy come off as just laissez faire individuals, but as the story progresses, we learn their own motives and deep history. They are hired by a very rich man named Piers, whose sister-in-law Silk has gone missing. She was once part of a popular singing trio with her two sisters, Ivory and Lace. After the group broke up, the girls all went their separate ways. Ivory died of a drug overdose; Lace is married to Piers, living the life of leisure; and Silk became an actress whose last boyfriend, a congressman, was killed.

Why Piers picks these two men to help might seem like a chance encounter, but Thomas has a few cards up his sleeve for the readers. But that is only one little problem for our men. Artie and Quincy are also hot on the trail of $2 million that is thought to have been buried in Saigon as the war was ending. Throw in gangsters, a former CIA spook, plenty of dry humor and a fantastic death-by-camper sequence, and you have a fun ride through the seedy side of life.

I can’t really go into particulars on a larger scale, since it would ruin the various twists along the way. But for those who have read all of Elmore Leonard and need another fix, I’ll highly suggest picking up this one. It has that type of atmosphere. Plus, there is no way a book could be titled CHINAMAN’S CHANCE in this day and age, especially since whole passages could be considered insensitive, which just makes it only better, in my opinion. One little note: As great as the cover is, that never happens in the book.

THE ARCHER FILES by Ross Macdonald — This 2007 collection makes the two previous Lew Archer anthologies obsolete. This one not only has all the short stories from those two books, but a plethora of case notes, which for me, sadly, should be dubbed “What Could Have Been.” That section features the starts of Lew Archer stories that Macdonald never finished — usually the first chapter and that was it. It’s really nice that all these lost works are included, but also frustrating since I would love to have just one more new Archer novel to come out. Guess we’ll just have to make do with the 18 he did write.

The book starts out with a very clever piece by editor Tom Nolan, in which he details the life of Archer using information from the books and stories themselves, building a whole backstory to this complex character, from his time in the military and police department to his eventual life as a P.I. After that, we are treated to 12 stories printed in chronological order. Just like in the novels, you see Macdonald’s style grow as he progresses, breaking free from the comparisons to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

It is really nice is to see how Macdonald took two of his short stories, “Strangers in Town” and “Gone Girl,” and used them as frameworks for one of his novels, THE IVORY GRIN. Not all the stories included originally starred Archer. “Find the Woman” and “Death by Water” had a different lead, but were reworked to feature Archer. The stories are quick bursts of Macdonald’s talent, showing that even with a small page count, Archer was not someone who could easily be fooled.

WHEN THE SACRED GINMILL CLOSES by Lawrence Block — Matthew Scudder looks back at a point in his life when the bottle was his best friend in this booze-soaked adventure from 1986. The story deals with Scudder helping out some of his drinking buddies where he was very much under the influence at all times.

The time is the mid-’70s, before New York City became gentrified, when after-hour bars were the norm, and payoffs to cops were regular business. Scudder gets involved with two cases, one of which is the murder of a friend’s wife by two robbers who claim their innocence. There also is a robbery involving one of the bars he frequents. No one is really sure how much was taken from the cash-only business, but there are plenty of rumors, and these are not the type of guys you should rip off.

GINMILL is unlike previous Scudder novels, since it’s more a hazy walk through his past. There is not a page that goes by where Scudder and his pals are not tipping the bottle just to get through the day. This is not a straight-up crime tale, per se, since most of the actions take a back seat to Scudder’s life in general, especially when the story returns to the present, when he admits that he would have done a lot of things differently if he were sober at that time. This novel actually came out a few years after his last Scudder story. The reader gets the sense that, reportedly like Block, the character struggled in his past and is now better off. Even though the book comes in the middle of the series, it’s actually a great introduction to Scudder, and is considered a fan favorite.

Next time: A brick, a prick and a Dick. —Bruce Grossman

Buy them at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF LAWRENCE BLOCK:
• THE BURGLAR IN THE LIBRARY by Lawrence Block
• THE BURGLAR IN THE RYE by Lawrence Block
• THE BURGLAR WHO THOUGHT HE WAS BOGART by Lawrence Block
• THE CANCELED CZECH by Lawrence Block
• A DANCE AT THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE by Lawrence Block
• A DIET OF TREACLE by Lawrence Block
• THE GIRL WITH THE LONG GREEN HEART by Lawrence Block
• GRIFTER’S GAME by Lawrence Block
• HIT AND RUN by Lawrence Block
• HIT PARADE by Lawrence Block
• LUCKY AT CARDS by Lawrence Block
• MANHATTAN NOIR 2: THE CLASSICS edited by Lawrence Block
• ME TANNER, YOU JANE by Lawrence Block
• ONE NIGHT STANDS AND LOST WEEKENDS by Lawrence Block
• THE SCORELESS THAI by Lawrence Block
• TANNER ON ICE by Lawrence Block
• TANNER’S TIGER by Lawrence Block
• TANNER’S TWELVE SWINGERS by Lawrence Block
• TANNER’S VIRGIN by Lawrence Block
• THE THIEF WHO COULDN’T SLEEP by Lawrence Block

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF ROSS MACDONALD:
• THE ARCHER FILES by Ross Macdonald
• BLACK MONEY by Ross Macdonald
• BLUE CITY by Ross Macdonald
• THE BLUE HAMMER by Ross Macdonald
• THE DARK TUNNEL by Ross Macdonald
• THE DOOMSTERS by Ross Macdonald
• THE GALTON CASE by Ross Macdonald
• THE INSTANT ENEMY by Ross Macdonald
• THE MOVING TARGET by Ross Macdonald
• THE WAY SOME PEOPLE DIE by Ross Macdonald

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF ROSS THOMAS:
• THE BRASS GO-BETWEEN by Ross Thomas
• THE PROCANE CHRONICLE by Ross Thomas

Horror indie outfit Darkhouse Publishing gets off to an auspicious start with MIDNIGHT WALK, an anthology containing 14 “original tales of terror and suspense.” As editor Lisa Morton makes clear, its theme is not readily apparent, but all the authors hail from Western or Midwestern America. Their stories, however, are not about that region of the United States. Rather, they’re pretty global, encompassing countries and cultures from all over the globe. After all, knowing no boundaries, horror lurks everywhere.

The book makes a great first impression by leading with Armand Constantine’s “Monsoon Devil,” in which an American couple ventures to the other side of the world to perform some missionary work combatting HIV. The wife is brutally raped and killed, and the husband seeks revenge. But he also approaches a holy man with an unusual request: He wants to have all memories of his spouse wiped clean.

Rape also figures into “The Grieving Process,” by Hollywood SFX maven Mike McCarty. His protagonist has pretty much given up on life, after the incident that took his wife from him. His utter loneliness prompts him to strike up a conversation with a homeless man, leading to a surprising encounter.

“The Guixi Sisters” of Jodi Kaplan Lester’s story are three Chinese orphan girls, purposely prevented from being adopted for a year for a sinister purpose that will come in play later in their childhood. The Far East also flavors Morton’s own contribution, “Diana and the Goong-Si,” which contains a warehouse full of vampires — the hopping kind. From Asia to Africa, George Willis details “The Measure of a Man” when a young Zulu warrior has to protect his village from a ghost ship full of the undead.

ARMY OF DARKNESS actor Richard Grove presents a Halloween tale in “Silver Needle,” in which a picked-up child is forced by the neighborhood bullies to enter an abandoned house rumored to be haunted. Lisa Majewski’s “Inside Out” serves comeuppance to a vain male model (redundant) who’s just used and discarded one woman too many.

Dark Delicacies owner Del Howison makes quite an impression with “Alley Oops,” a story of a kindly old woman and the thug who dares rob her, primarily for its gut-punch ending. There’s a streak of dark comedy in R.B. Payne’s “Eddie G. at the Gates of Hell,” in which a man on a road trip with his wife and kids hears voices — like from the giant fly atop his car — telling him to kill his family. A Native American legend cleverly comes into play in “The Bear Who Swallowed the Sky” by Jason Light — full disclosure: a BOOKGASM contributor — when a printing plant worker feels wronged by management.

Other authors taking the MIDNIGHT WALK include Vince Churchill, Joey O’Bryan, Kelly Dunn and John Palisano, and you should join them. The stories may not deliver the “terror” as promised, but they are genuinely unnerving and bothersome, which is not easy to do. The collection is imperfect but impressive, immediately making Darkhouse — love the logo! — a harbinger of quality dark fiction. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Scouring out the weekly singles scene … in comics!

Continuing Marvel’s ongoing seven-decade birthday party is CAPTAIN AMERICA COMICS 70TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL #1, featuring a wonderful James Robinson/Marcos Martin story that delves into Steve Rogers’ early days of saving the country, but before he was the star-spangled superhero, and still a 98-pound weakling. In defying expectations, it soars with seemingly little effort. The second half is comprised of a Joe Simon/Jack Kirby classic from 1941, in which Cap and sidekick Bucky thwart a serial killer at a major-league baseball game, back when the game equaled patriotism.

And from Captain America, we go to Miss America — not the beauty pageant title — in MISS AMERICA COMICS 70TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL #1. If this was a real character from yesteryear, I wasn’t familiar with her before this. In Jen Van Meter and Andy MacDonald’s story, she’s like a cross between Wonder Woman and Rosie the Riveter, undercover on a shipyard during World War II, seeking German spies. She’s also engaged to be married to Whizzer, the star of two backup stories from 1943. His high-winged-head costume is as stupid as his name.

Horror novelist Jonathan Maberry certainly doesn’t flinch when it comes to scripting THE PUNISHER: NAKED KILL #1, a one-shot that more than earns its “EXPLICIT CONTENT” cover tag. When The Punisher discovers there’s a torture-porn snuff-film ring taking place near the top floor of a heavily secured tower, he kills his way through, level by level, having to improvise without his usual armory. Extreme violence and harsh language abound, and just wait until you see what the abused women do for a ladder! Maberry does a great job with Frank Castle, but Laurence Campbell’s art is a little too rough for my tastes — some fleshing out certainly wouldn’t hurt.

Batman goes to Barcelona in, um, BATMAN IN BARCELONA: DRAGON’S KNIGHT #1, written by Mark Waid and illustrated by Diego Olmos. On a tip from The Scarecrow, who’s locked up safely in Arkham Asylum, Batman flies to Spain to catch The Croc, who’s currently on a serial-killer-esque string of menace and murder. Luckily, Bruce Wayne has a secret Batcave in the country (who knew?), complete with costume, computered-out HQ and one muy fresco Batcycle. The story is thin, but the battle between the Caped Crusader and his reptilian enemy is brutal and bloody. —Rod Lott

Korean-born Byun Byung-Jun is little known in these parts, except for die-hard manga and graphic novel fans. With luck, MIJEONG, his second collection of short fiction, will change that. It should, because this impressively talented artist deserves a wider audience.

The seven stories here are mostly about young people, and are full of youthful longings, desires, frustrations and melancholy. Their common feature is the city setting, quite possibly based upon Seoul. Byung-Jun’s characters walk down urban streets and alleys, mostly crowded but sometimes deserted. And he often pulls back the focus to include wide shots of streets or entire skylines, as though shot from above. It’s a technique that emphasizes the reader’s role as observer, as well as heightens the lonely ambience of each story.

Four of the tales incorporate elements of dark fantasy, but in varying methods. “202, Villa Sinil,” for example, is a semi-autographical piece of a young, heartbroken graphic artist who finds that the cuts and other markings he makes to newspaper photos lining his drawing table are reproduced on the subjects in real life, including death. “Courage, Grandfather” surprises us about midway in, when we discover that the narrator is not at all who we first thought. And “A Short Tall Tale,” the final entry in the collection, has another Byung-Jen-based artist relaying the fantasy story he’s working on over the phone in his lonesome apartment to his girlfriend, with occasional cutaways to the story protagonist.

The other three works are notable for their poignant emotions and moody evocations. They are mostly about relationships between teens and adults, or, in the case of “Utility,” a group of young friends suddenly confronted with an unexpected death and a suicide.

Byung-Jun works for the most part in photorealistic, black-and-white images, but occasionally, his city views are soft-focus and impressionistic. Only one story, “A Song for You,” uses pastel colors and includes scenes far away from the familiar urban settings.
 
An appreciative afterword is included by Kim Nak-ho, editor of a webzine devoted to graphic novels. MIJEONG comes highly recommended, not only to fans of graphic novels, but to all interested or curious about the range and effectiveness of the young, talented artists working in this field. It’s a worthwhile introduction for those whose knowledge of illustrated fiction has not yet gone beyond comic books. Either way, you’ll be aptly rewarded for whatever effort it takes to track down this striking collection.   —Alan Cranis

Buy it at Amazon.
 

Here’s another column where I try and make some progress in my vast piles of MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE. These issues are like a treasure. Each one has some sort of lost gem from a variety of mystery authors. A few names pop up that I’ve covered in those pages before. I’ll keep going back to them for the simple reason they are just too darn good not to read. Hopefully, one day, someone will put together a collection of some of these stories into one volume.

MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE: DECEMBER 1978 — The main reason to search out this issue is that it has the first Mike Shayne story written by James Reasoner. In the previous issue, it was mentioned as coming and even attributed to Reasoner. This is odd, because all the Shayne stories are attributed to Brett Halliday.

Reasoner’s story, “Death In Xanadu,” seems to be a bit of a tribute. Any film buff out there should get the title reference. Yes, it’s Mike Shayne in a roller disco extravaganza with music by ELO! (Sorry, could not pass up that joke or image of a cognac-drinking P.I. wearing a fedora while “Mr. Blue Sky” blares away.) The story really deals with Duncan Harrison, a newspaper publisher with more money then he knows what to do with. (Sound like any movies or real people you might know?)

Reasoner points it out himself, with one of the characters explaining CITIZEN KANE to Shayne, these being the days long before VHS and the like. Attempts are made on Harrison’s life, with a long list of suspects. The author has fun in the idea of Shayne interviewing all of them, only for the reveal to end in a very bloody way. Sadly, the cover of the magazine gives away a huge plot point.

That’s only the starting of this jam-packed issue, with the other novelette from Joe R. Lansdale, whose “Long Gone Forever” deals with a detective who has to track down a missing wife, only to find that her past came back to haunt her in a big, dangerous way. He can’t face the fact of telling the whole truth to his very ill and old client, so he bends it. Plus, there are Pasadena Nazis. It’s a great little story from Lansdale, which just shows I should be reading more of his stuff.

The third of the biggies is Lawrence Block’s “The Ehrengraf Appointment,” which deals with a lawyer whose clients take responsibility for crimes they did not commit. Also included is a little con tale where the narrator is a bit too paranoid, in “Quick Change” by Craig Weeden. But the one that really made me laugh out loud was Mike Plake’s “What Really Happened in Farnsburg.” To explain what happens ruins the joke, so I’ll just say that sometimes, criminals might be too smart for their own good.

MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE: OCTOBER 1971 — I just love the cover for this issue. That’s the simple reason for its inclusion. But it also features what I think might be the first short story featuring a very short detective.

But before we get there, “The Landlord Murder Case” is typical of the Shayne stories that pop up in this magazine, in that I could not find out who the real author was. The story has all the typical Shayne motifs — namely, women who are not what them seem, and the accusations that Shayne was involved. Here, a woman who wanted his help disappears without a trace, until Mike tracks her down.

Like the title says, it deals with a dead landlord, even though it happens at a motel, involving a large cache of money and a gang of crooks who want it for themselves. Of course, people get greedy and stupid, and Mike figures it out long before the end. It’s nothing special — just a nice little story will please Shayne fans nonetheless.

Jack Ritchie’s “The Griggsby Papers” deals with a family with deep roots in the community, and the murder that happed all those years ago. A man finally uncovers the truth, but why has it been covered up for all these years is his question. Then comes “The Drop” by George C Chesboro, which may be the debut of his dwarf detective. I’m not positive, but as this story unfolds, it really feels like this is Mongo’s start, with how he talks about his detective work being nothing to brag about. Add to the fact that this is the first time he actually kills someone in his job.

Another standout is Kurt E. Johnson’s “The Cautious Killer,” about a gunman who is hired to do a job, only to find out he was not the only person hired. It’s actually reminiscent of another story I’ve covered before; I just can’t remember the title.

MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE: MARCH 1977 — On the whole, this issue is a big bunch of “meh,” with nothing to really grab you. There is one story that is a standout by Ernest Savage, dealing with a woman named Tina Marie, for whom series character Sam Train has been carrying a torch. But she has been holding a grudge for all these years, mainly dealing with a large sum of money. Throughout, Train is played for a chump, with Marie dangling a very tempting carrot in front of him, only to snatch it away at the last minute.

The Mike Shayne story “Mexican Payoff” is straight-up mystery, with a dead woman turning up at a spa deep in Mexico, where not only is Shayne on the trail of a missing person, but also has to deal with all these women who want him. Oh, did I forget to mention that one of these women is the baddie? Nothing really special, but again, I was not expecting Shakespeare.

There is an espionage-like tale, thanks to Edward D. Hoch in “The Wooden Dove.” Let’s put it this way: The gimmick did not work in MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL, so who thinks it would work in Cold War Berlin? There is an offbeat, sorta-supernatural tale in Sarah Randall’s “To Mama with Love.” On the whole, this is one of those issues you can skip and not feel as though you’re really missing out on anything. Not every one can be packed with winners.

Next time: a footlong BMT. —Bruce Grossman

Buy them at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS SERIES:
• MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE: JANUARY 1979
• MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE: MARCH 1971
• MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE: MARCH 1976
• MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE: OCTOBER 1978
• MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE: NOVEMBER 1978
• MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE: SEPTEMBER 1980

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF BRETT HALLIDAY:
• ARMED … DANGEROUS … by Brett Halliday
• BODIES ARE WHERE YOU FIND THEM by Brett Halliday
• COUNT BACKWARDS TO ZERO by Brett Halliday
• COUNTERFEIT WIFE by Brett Halliday
• FOURTH DOWN TO DEATH by Brett Halliday
• GUILTY AS HELL by Brett Halliday
• MERMAID ON THE ROCKS by Brett Halliday
• MIKE SHAYNE’S TORRID TWELVE by Brett Halliday
• NEVER KILL A CLIENT by Brett Halliday
• SHOOT THE WORKS by Brett Halliday
• TARGET: MIKE SHAYNE by Brett Halliday
• WHAT REALLY HAPPENED by Brett Halliday

Lucky number seven of MariNaomi’s ESTRUS COMICS is a grab bag of odds and ends, rather than her usual tales of loves and lovers past. Because of this, it’s not quite as enjoyable as previous issues, but remains enjoyable nonetheless.

Among its highlights involve an imaginary explosion on the subway train; helping out an ex with girlfriend troubles; a cute exchange between a couple, one of whom has tummy troubles; and the various emotions and activities of our feline friends (I’m horrified whenever someone draws a cat’s asshole in graphic detail, by the way, which is more often than you might think, dating back to the heyday of B. Kliban).

MariNaomi saves the best for last with illustrations she did for a coloring book to help kids get over their fear of needles at the doctors’ office. Here, she’s added hilarious captions like “I sure hope there aren’t any bubbles in this syringe, or you’re gonna die!” and “Robert is kind of a pussy.”

I appreciate her off-kilter sense of humor, just as much as I do her clean, bold drawings. She’s also unafraid to laugh at herself, which is what makes these indie confessional comics well worth your time and support. —Rod Lott

Buy it at MariNaomi.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• ESTRUS COMICS #5 by MariNaomi
• ESTRUS COMICS #6 by MariNaomi

BBC’s super-fun sci-fi series TORCHWOOD extends its multimedia tentacles further, with the graphic novel TORCHWOOD: RIFT WAR. The 10-chapter tale is culled from the franchise’s monthly magazine, each issue of which includes a comic feature.

The epic story begins with a rift opening in the middle of a department store, unleashing a slew of heavily armed, heavily armored and crimson-maned aliens that look like animals. Naturally, the men and women of Torchwood Institute — England’s one-of-a-kind extraterrestrial investigation agency — swoop in to save the day.

Except that’s easier said than done. Turns out the invasion of the Harrowkind was just to distract Team Torchwood from the aliens’ true goal: stealing Torchwood HQ, leaving a mostly black void in its place, and destroying it so that it can then destroy humanity without interference. The upside is the rift also allows a bald, ponytailed man named Vox through, and he pledges to help Torchwood defeat the aliens.

In each chapter, the rift presents a new challenge for Captain Jack Harkness and his crew, including a giant baby who turns into some sort of Lovecraftian creature, a horde of dinosaurs, and a shapeshifter loose in a shopping mall. The most ingenious part takes place at a Stonehenge-type site, where dual storylines set in 1918 and the present day unfold simultaneously, with characters crisscrossing from one to the other.

Even more so than the spinoff novels, RIFT WAR actually captures the TV series’ spirit, visually depicting its action-packed, tongue-in-cheek blend of fantasy and fun, only minus the horniness. Better yet, each character gets more playtime — even Torchwood’s pet pterodactyl.

With the exception of Brian Williamson’s bonus standalone story, “Jetsam,” which struggles to make sense, the writing by Simon Furman, Paul Grist and Ian Edginton is solid, as is the art by Grist, D’Israeli and SL Gallant. It’s a little weird having different artists alternate among chapters, especially since Gallant’s more realistic style looks nothing like the others’ more cartoony approach. All look great — just don’t expect cohesion (sometimes, Gwen isn’t even drawn with her trademark tooth gap).

Until the series’ abbreviated third season, CHILDREN OF EARTH, hits DVD, RIFT WAR will serve as a perfectly acceptable substitute for the real deal. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS SERIES:
• TORCHWOOD: ANOTHER LIFE by Peter Anghelides
• TORCHWOOD: BORDER PRINCES by Dan Abnett
• TORCHWOOD: THE OFFICIAL MAGAZINE YEARBOOK

Scouring out the weekly singles scene … in comics!

With Marvel Comics celebrating seven decades in business, it’s been putting out a series of one-shots focused on its earlier characters, featuring a brand-new story with yesteryear reprints in the back, all sporting its original Timely Comics shield. One of them is THE HUMAN TORCH COMICS 70TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL #1, featuring the original Torch — not Johnny Storm. Scott Snyder and Scott Wegener provide a terrific throwback tale tinged with racial overtones, while the backup story from 1940 has the Torch meeting Toro, the Flaming Torch Kid, at a circus. You can tell the story is old just from its first page, with lines like “The Torch is attracted by the gay colored tents” and “Can’t say — but it’s mighty queer!” And that’s all part of its charm.

Another in the birthday series is SUB-MARINER COMICS 70TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL #1. Roy Thomas and Mitch Breitweiser’s anchoring piece featuring Prince Namor is moody and noir-ish, while Mark Schultz and Al Williamson’s “Vergeltungswaffe!” leans more toward the character’s fantasy origins, being set underwater. Closing out the fin-footed fun is Bill Everett’s debut of the Sub-Mariner from 1939′s first issue of MARVEL COMICS. Boy, is it ever primitive, and boy, do I like it. Namor’s never been among my favorite superheroes — partly because I can’t figure out if he’s really that or a supervillain — but this is a nice little trio of tales, each very different.

Like the clown princes of comics, Scott Gray and Roger Langridge tear THE FANTASTIC FOUR‘s villainous dragon character of Fin Fang Foom a new one in the one-shot FIN FANG FOUR RETURN! #1. The pair has turned the creature into comic relief before in MARVEL MONSTERS, but here are a half-dozen more stories, also starring fellow monsters Gorgilla, Googam and Elektro. They get psychoanalyzed by Doc Samson; FFF works as a chef in a Chinese restaurant; Gorgilla gets the CURIOUS GEORGE treatment; Googam gets adopted; Elektro gets arrested; and FFF saves Christmas. Self-deprecating fun all around, and the kind of thing comics companies should do more of.

Given that THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN: THE SHORT HALLOWEEN #1 one-shot is written by none other than SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE players Bill Hader and Seth Meyers, you’d think it’d be funny, but it’s really not. Then again, it doesn’t appear to be designed to be joke-driven. But it’s certainly amusing, based upon its premise, with a drunk Halloween celebrant dressed as Spidey constantly confused for the real deal, and vice versa, on a night when The Furious Five unleashes a not-so-well-planned reign of terror. Sometimes celebrity writers are brought on just for their name value, but Hader and Meyers adequately display genuine love for the material. Kevin Maguire drew the fine art. —Rod Lott

Over in Japan, FAUST is considered a “mook” — that’s a magazine and a book — speaking to the disaffected otaku culture, with a mix of cutting-edge fiction and manga. You can see what you’re missing out on with Del Rey’s FAUST: VOLUME TWO, the sophomore edition of the translated anthology. (VOLUME ONE came out last year.)

It opens with “Magical Girl Risuka” by NISIOISIN, which is a pen name, not a brand of ramen. (Strangely, many Japanese authors hide behind these cryptic monikers; others here include VOFAN, x6suke and TAGRO.) The story is a quasi-Lovecraft tribute about a boy who witnesses four people throw themselves in front a moving subway at once, and the titular girl who has the powers to alter time.

Kouhei Kadono’s “Jagdtiger (PorscheLaufwerk)” is an odd, military tale about a new kind of robotic weapon for war, while Otsuichi provides the collection’s best piece in “Where the Wind Blows,” in which objects from years in the future — photographs, newspapers, letters, a cell phone — mysteriously show up at his home.

From Yûya Satô, “Gray-Colored Diet Coke” is a mere excerpt, but long enough for me, being a disturbing, depressing look at the life of a 19-year-old with no idea what to do with his life, beyond hearing stories from his grandfather about killing and raping in the war.

Kozy Watanabe’s “H People” is a brief fantasy about a recluse and the pizza-delivery girl who has sex with him, complete with an out-of-nowhere ending. Speaking of sex, Tatsuhiko Takimoto provides an essay about whether or not to visit a well-known, high-class brothel called Soapland, in “Tatsuhiko Takimoto’s Guru Guru Counseling Session.”

Other essays examine how otaku became big business in Japan; the ins and outs of translating fiction from Japanese into English; and the creators’ feelings of FAUST crossing the oceans to our shores.

Of more appeal to the casual reader will be FAUST’s section of manga in the back. The first three stories are little more than illustrated tone poems, until Katsuhiro Otomo and Katsuya Terada comically run down all the “Old Dudes” they’ve seen on the streets, and Ueda Hajime contributes “Iron Man Military Unit,” about a young soldier more than a little bitter at being the only virgin in his platoon.

This collection’s contents aren’t for everyone, but those with even an inkling of interest toward the Far East should give it a fair chance. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

There’s a real poignancy to the work of J.T. Yost, whose OLD MAN WINTER AND OTHER SORDID TALES has deservedly been honored with a 2009 Xeric Award. The 56-page paperback is comprised of five stories, all but one of which give a grim, but completely honest, view of humanity.

It’s anchored by the title story, the longest of the bunch, in which an elderly man occasionally ventures from his lonely apartment to interact with the few people who will give him the time of day. He’s in mourning over the death of his wife, but insists on clutching to the illusion that she still exists. In one heartbreaker of a panel, he’s shown sleeping in bed, with the ashtray she once used situated on the pillow next to him.

Free of dialogue, “All Is Forgiven …” shows the measures taken by an animal researcher when his significant other dumps him via a “Dear John” letter. In “Logging Sanjay,” both the lone humorous and autobiographical piece of the collection, Yost relates of a high school prank taken a little too far, and finally fesses up to his involvement.

“Roadtrip” is brilliant, telling a dual narrative in the life of a little girl and a small cow, with each panel illustrating the juxtaposition between them. For example, the girl is introduced as an infant, feeding at her mother’s breast; the cow, sucking on its mother’s teat. The girl is placed in the backseat of her parents’ car; the cow is forced into the back of a truck to take it to slaughter. The girl is stripped of her clothes at nighttime; the cow is stripped of its skin. And so on, until the two inevitably meet — one as meat. It’s incredibly clever and powerful, all the more so without words.

Finally, there’s another mirrored narrative story in a circus-centered bit that shows how one man and one elephant joined the circus, under entirely different circumstances. All five pieces introduce Yost as a remarkable new talent — in both story and pen — using comics to tell challenging, thoughtful tales. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Birdcage Bottom Books.

My guess is that most BOOKGASM readers have heard of The Shadow, the hero pulp crime fighter who is frequently thought of as the first of his kind — you know, rich guy who roots out evil by disguising himself and adopting an odd but catchy nom de vigilante, like … oh, say, Batman, for instance. But before The Shadow’s first magazine adventure in 1931 came Zorro’s first appearance in 1919 and The Scarlet Pimpernel’s print debut in 1905.

Which brings us to another of those pulp masked action heroes: The Spider. He was Richard Wentworth during the day, another of those indolent millionaire playboys who seemed to be two for a nickel during the Depression. His gal pal was Nita Van Sloan and together they busted more insidious crime than J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson.

Girasol Collectables, a publisher in Canada, has been producing first-rate reproductions of pulp magazines for years, but they recently got into putting out two-fers without the bells and whistles. Their Spider reprints give you two Spider novels for around 15 bucks. The books are the size of a real pulp, but unlike The Shadow and Doc Savage reprints currently on the market from Sanctum Books, contain no historical essays. They don’t even include the names of the authors or cover artists.

The novels were originally published as written by “Grant Stockbridge,” but several pulpsmiths were the real authors. Most of the books were written by Norvell Page, as were the two in this edition: THE CORPSE CARGO AND SLAVES OF THE RING.

If I’ve made The Spider sound like just another version of the same old masked, slouch-hatted, caped, .45-carrying crime buster, allow me to disabuse you of that notion. These stories are different — kinkier and far more violent than those of Wentworth’s more family-friendly rivals. Good and bad guys drop like flies in these yarns.

In 1934′s THE CORPSE CARGO, a band of land pirates led by the sadistic Captain Kidd rob trains by shooting electricity through the cars and killing everyone onboard: “Wentworth got hold of a paper and by the light of a pocket flashlight he read the shrieking black headlines. TRAIN WRECKS KILL 1,000; PENNSY FLIER CRASHES IN TUBE; 2ND SMASH IN GRAND CENTRAL; FIVE MAIL PLANES CRACK UP. ‘And the loot will run into millions,’ he said. ‘Millions—and a thousand witnesses killed. Captain Kidd—does—right—well.’”

What I like best about that paragraph is the lack of pulp-fiction exclamation points, as if The Spider is appalled at the needless slaughter, but not terribly surprised. The surprise comes when he finds out that Captain Kidd is a woman.

In 1942′s SLAVES OF THE RING, a criminal madman known only as The Brain has corrupted absolutely the political ring of a certain state — no name given. The Spider and Nita, who plays a larger than usual role in the story, have to save the lives of a crusading newspaper publisher and his daughter, convince the governor that he’ll be killed by his bosses if he doesn’t reveal their identities first, solve the murder of an honest U.S. Senator, and bust a statewide siege by the police, and all without the aid of the federal government, which is never even mentioned. The “state” is an obvious stand-in for some small European country that has been conquered by a fascist power.

Forgive me, but I enjoy The Spider stories a lot more than I do those about The Shadow. They’re wilder, goofier, more action-filled — hell, just pulpier. Plus, Nita Van Sloan is hotter than Margot Lane. —Doug Bentin

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OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THE SPIDER:
• THE SPIDER: ROBOT TITANS OF GOTHAM by Norvell Page
• THE SPIDER: THE DEVIL’S PAYMASTER by Grant Stockbridge

Nearly a year after the debut issue, SHERLOCK HOLMES MYSTERY MAGAZINE #2 is finally available, with another 130-ish pages of mostly all-new material, perfect-bound and edited by the ever-reliable Marvin Kaye.

It begins with Kim Newman’s reviews of a handful of Sherlock Holmes-oriented books, which are welcome, but many of the titles are several years old. With so many new titles published every season, it’d be nice to see those covered instead. Holmes’ landlady Mrs. Martha Hudson returns with a faux advice column that’s more annoying than anything, especially with the inclusion of recipes.

Carole Buggé follows with an essay on radio adaptations of Holmes stories. It’s certainly informative, and if I had the patience to listen to audio plays, I’d definitely use it for reference. Then we come to the meat of the mag: the fiction section.

All of the fiction is centered around mystery and detection, although not necessarily featuring the great detective himself. Darrell Schweitzer’s “The Adventure of the Hanoverian Vampires” is one that does, and it’s an amusing little tale narrated by a cat. Gary Lovisi’s “A Study in Evil” is another, in which Holmes has been arrested for murder, which he doesn’t deny. Arthur Conan Doyle is repped by another reprint, “The Musgrave Ritual.”

In “A Reputation for Murder,” M.J. Elliott certainly hits that Sherlockian spirit with her girl-detective protagonist. David Waxman’s “Tough as Diamonds” is fine enough, but there’s no real suspense or problem-solving in its story of a missing dog. Ron Goulart’s “The Mystery of the Flying Man” is a little too muddled to be effective, but Marc Bilgrey hits “You See, but You Forget” out of the proverbial park, with a story of revenge on a landlord whose negligence results in the death of an elderly tenant. Bilgrey also contributes this issue’s lone cartoon; it’d be fun to see more of these sprinkled throughout the pages, rather than the Victorian-era clip art.

On the copyright page, Wildside Press promises SHMM to be a quarterly publication. I’ll believe that when I see it, but whenever I see a third issue, I’ll welcome it. —Rod Lott

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OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF MARVIN KAYE:
• DON’T OPEN THIS BOOK! edited by Marvin Kaye
• THE FAIR FOLK edited by Marvin Kaye
• FORBIDDEN PLANETS edited by Marvin Kaye
• THE GHOST QUARTET edited by Marvin Kaye
• SHERLOCK HOLMES MYSTERY MAGAZINE #1 edited by Marvin Kaye
• THE ULTIMATE HALLOWEEN edited by Marvin Kaye

As a rule of thumb, anthropomorphic animals aren’t my thing. That’s because — much more often than not — the device is used to be cute. But anyone who’s seen the work of uni-named writer/artist Jason knows that “cute” isn’t in his vocabulary. He’s the anti-cute, and LOW MOON is the best work I’ve seen from him yet.

The Fantagraphics hardcover collects five oddball tales, all told in four-panel pages with a majority of the cast being upright-walking, English-speaking dogs. There’s no apparent point for them being canines, since their stories are all-human. Yet the work wouldn’t have nearly the same punch with mere people.

I don’t care that “Emily Says Hello” is illustrated fiction, because it deserves to be on any year-end list of 2009′s finest crime stories, no matter what the format. In it, a hitman is routinely hired by a woman to bump off guys in return for increasingly sexual favors. Before he can grab a boob or receive a blowjob, the guy must play her tape-recorded proof of each mission’s success. Each piece of aural evidence ends with the same phrase, “Emily says hello,” followed by the blam of a bullet entering — one presumes — some poor sap’s head. The ending is sudden, shocking and remarkably poetic.

The second story, “Low Moon,” is Jason’s HIGH NOON — a Western in which every cliché of the genre is deftly parodied. The town sheriff is visibly unnerved when an old enemy re-emerges, meaning a showdown is inevitable. But it doesn’t involve guns — this war is to be waged on the chessboard.

Coming in the middle is “&,” a pas de deux of sorts, with one narrative playing out on all the left-hand pages, and another playing out on all the right-hand pages, eventually intersecting on the final page. On the left, a man becomes a thief — and a rather bumbling one at that — to get $10,000 to pay for his dying mother’s operation. On the right, another man is head over heels in love with a woman engaged to another. So he kills her fiancé. And then she falls for someone else, so he offs that guy, too, and so on, and so on, until he gets his chance. It’s rather brilliant.

Similar in feel and funny is “Proto Film Noir,” which reads like a James M. Cain parody, as a wife and her lover plot to kill her husband. They do, but the bastard keeps coming back to life, so they kill and kill again.

Finally, there’s “You Are Here.” In it, a wife and mother of one is kidnapped by an alien who takes off in a rocket to outer space. Her shocked hubby vows to their only son to get her back, so he begins building a rocketship. Twenty years later, he’s still building, but a vow’s a vow. It’s more than a little heartbreaking to see the motherless boy grow into a fractured family of his own, and a lot more heartbreaking when Mom’s fate is revealed.

One and all, these are excellently told tales from a unique talent. —Rod Lott

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Akashic’s long-running city-based crime series gets back on track with PORTLAND NOIR, thanks to the fantastic picks of editor Kevin Sampsell. He’s the man behind Future Tense Books and has a bit of fun in his introduction, winning me over in the first few sentences by name-dropping Ken Kesey and Gus Van Sant when describing what people must think of his city.

Speaking of Portland, Sampsell doesn’t look at it with rose-colored glasses, and is more than willing to point out its problems, which is what makes this collection such a great read. Like previous anthologies in the series, the book is split into a few themed sections: “Bloodlines,” “Crooks & Cops” and “Desolation City.”

“Bloodlines” opens with Karen Karbo’s “The Clown and The Bard.” From the start, we know there is most likely a dead body. Our narrator tells about his pretentious ex-girlfriend, and how he made up a story of going off to Prague. It’s a humorous tale of jealousy and Eastern European mail-order brides. Luciana Lopez’s “Julia Now” tells of a couple moving into their new home where they discover a photo and strange note which drives the female lead to find out the truth about the old married couple who lived there for so long, and then can’t deal with the fact of the end results. In Ariel Gore’s “Water Under the Bridge,” a woman has to deal with an ex-girlfriend who keeps insisting to help her out because they are family. This plays so well in that we are just given one side of all the events until the reveal.

The self-explanatory “Crooks & Cops” section has some of the best stories in the collection, starting off with Jonathan Selwood’s brutal “The Wrong House,” which deals with a junkie who becomes a burglar and makes a tragic mistake of going to just one more home. Let’s just say drug dealers are none too happy when someone breaks into a stash house. “Baby, I’m Here” by Monica Drake revolves around a group of junkies, with one just getting out of a state rehab, only for old issues to arise when visiting a pal who ended up in the hospital. You see their lives will never improve and just continue in a vicious circle.

“Coffee, Black” by Bill Cameron deals with a retired cop hired to look into who is breaking Starbucks windows. The story comes off like coffee wars between all these shops, until the detective discovers the real reasons, thanks to some showboating. There is a first in this collection — a comic strip — in the lost-dog tale “Gone Doggy Gone,” while Jess Walter’s “Virgo” is about a stalker who tries to explain his side of the story.

Closing out this section is another highlight in “The Red Room” by Chris A. Bolton, which takes place in Powell’s bookstore. For those who have never been to or heard of this place, imagine a giant department store filled with nothing but floors of books. The main character is a not a detective, but someone who tries to help out the less unfortunate by answering ads on Craigslist. But this time, he gets himself way too deep when he discovers his simple payoff is a bigger hassle than expected.

As the title should suggest, the section “Desolation City” deals with the seedier element of Portland, such as at a skate park in Just Hocking’s “Burnside Forever,” where a man who lives out of a van tries to play protector to a young girl. Gigi Little’s “Shanghaied” explains that sometimes the stories you hear about the crazy homeless turn out to be more than true, with disastrous results. This, we find out when the narrator doesn’t take the advice to avoid crazy women who ask for change or pretty jewelry.

Megan Kruse gives us a character piece in “Lila,” which tells the story of a lesbian who falls for a young prostitute, who herself falls into that lifestyle so she can get closer. Finishing up the collection is “People Are Strange,” by Kimberly Warner-Cohen, dealing with a woman searching for her kidnapped sister, who was taken when they were both 4. Well, at least that is what Warner-Cohen wants you to think, until the truth is revealed.

I’m really hoping that with PORTLAND NOIR, Akashic is back into the swing of things, since it sticks to the actual themes of the series: noir and crime. Yes, you can make an argument that some stories don’t fall directly into that category, but at least this group of authors tries, with interesting results that will keep readers glued to their pieces. My suggestion to Akashic is to spend more time mining local talent, rather than trying to cover as many places as possible. There are plenty of gem writers spread across this country. —Bruce Grossman

Buy it at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS SERIES:
• BALTIMORE NOIR edited by Laura Lippman
• LAS VEGAS NOIR edited by Jarret Keene and Todd James Pierce
• MANHATTAN NOIR 2: THE CLASSICS edited by Lawrence Block
• ROME NOIR edited by Chiara Stangalino and Maxim Jakubowski
• TRINIDAD NOIR edited by Lisa Allen-Agostini and Jeanne Mason

Comics can be a good a form as any to tell a true story, and in some cases, they may be even be the ideal medium. Take the subject of bailing hay, for instance: I don’t want to read an essay on that, but illustrate it with speech balloons, and I’m game!

That very item opens SYNCOPATED: AN ANTHOLOGY OF NONFICTION PICTO-ESSAYS, edited by Brendan Burford, a book full of simple pleasures under an unwieldy title. Why comics? “Why not comics?” Burford answers in the introduction, and he has a point — one which the next 150 pages will prove.

Rina Piccolo discusses the creation and evolution of the postcard, while Burford and Jim Campbell profile Boris Rose, arguably one of jazz’s all-time greatest fans and unlikely historians — a fascinating portrait. Ditto for “West Side Improvements,” Alex Holden’s chronicle of New York’s underground graffiti artists, as well as Alec Longstreth’s look at Dr. August Dvorak, who created a simplified keyboard layout that never caught on in his lifetime.

Greg Cook tackles the tricky subject of torture at Guantánamo Bay, strictly through FBI reports and silhouettes. Here’s a case where you need not see everything to get the picture. “Like Hell I Will” recounts the horrific night of the Tulsa race riot of 1921, while Dave Kiersh ponders the role of the American Indian in today’s society. Completing a race-oriented trifecta is Sarah Glidden’s moving “The Sound of Jade,” recalling her trip to China with her dad to pick up the new baby they adopted.

Burford closes out the collection with “An Encounter with Richard Peterson,” about his conversations with one of those chess experts in the park. This one happens to be more interesting than the other guys, regaling a shocked Burford with stories of scams he pulled in his criminal past.

So why not comics? Why not, indeed. —Rod Lott

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Two more excellent mysteries are told in SANDMAN MYSTERY THEATRE: THE MIST AND THE PHANTOM OF THE FAIR, the seventh collection of the rightly acclaimed Vertigo comic series from the 1990s. These are noir detective stories of the highest order, illustrated or otherwise.

Unlike the previous volumes, THE MIST actually starts off slow, taking too long to get our hero — nebbish, reclusive Wesley Dodds — into the mix. That’s soon remedied, though, as Dodds dons his gas mask and gas gun at night to find the guy who’s responsible for sinking a ship, crashing a car, downing a plane — all with a laser-beam-type invention that turns matter into mist.

The culprit’s not above testing his technology on animals and humans, too, which gives SMT the grittiness and hard edge for which it’s known. That’s doubled in THE PHANTOM OF THE FAIR, in which the 1939 New York World’s Fair is marred by the murder of several closeted homosexuals by a zipper-masked, deranged killer. It’s the nastier, nuttier and better of the two tales.

As always, Matt Wagner and Steven T. Seagle are two guys who know how to craft an honest-to-goodness mystery, steeped in suspense and rich in character. Guy Davis’ art is like the third side of that creative triangle, with a style that’s perfect for this Great Depression-set title. The only drawback is that a few characters look too much like one another, so it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish between them. It turns out not to matter; this book remains another remarkable chapter in an underappreciated series. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS SERIES:
• SANDMAN MYSTERY THEATRE: DR. DEATH AND THE NIGHT OF THE BUTCHER by Matt Wagner, Steven T. Seagle, Guy Davis and Vince Locke
• SANDMAN MYSTERY THEATRE: THE HOURMAN AND THE PYTHON by Matt Wagner, Steven T. Seagle, Guy Davis and Warren Pleece
• SANDMAN MYSTERY THEATRE: THE SCORPION by Matt Wagner, Steven T. Seagle and Guy Davis

After hearing for years and years about how great the comic-book creative team of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby was, I finally “get it.” All it took was reading the pair’s THE BEST OF SIMON AND KIRBY, a fabulous hardcover collection from Titan Books.

Sure, I’ve read their stuff plenty times before, but as a kid, I was unaware of things like “writers” and “artists.” And anything in adulthood has primarily been their superhero stuff, which as it turns out, is their least dynamic genre. This book offers several examples from that subject, as well as sci-fi, war, romance, crime, Western, horror and even humor.

Each section is prefaced by an excellent introduction by Mark Evanier, placing the stories that follow into historical context and discussing what worked and what didn’t, both creatively and commercially. These are quite helpful, pointing out nuances and nuttiness that you might not pick up on otherwise.

This being from Titan, you’d expect it not to feature any Marvel or DC material, but lo and behold, it does, with a story each featuring Captain America (their most popular creation) and The Sandman. More interesting to me were their lesser-known heroes, primarily for the reason of being comparatively unheralded, including The Fly and Stuntman. Blue Bolt also qualifies, and he’s featured in the science-fiction section, which also boasts the story with the tee-hee title of “The Tree Men of Uranus.”

But the Simon and Kirby touch really starts shining through on the third chapter, “War and Adventure.” There’s a bizarre, meta Boy Commandos story in which those characters are presumed dead, and Simon and Kirby pace around their office wondering just what the hell they’re going to do. Much more serious is “My City Is No More,” is sobering tale of nuclear apocalypse that first plays like an innocent caper before taking a hard right.

Their romance stuff is a hoot, which shouldn’t come as a surprise, since they invented the genre in its illustrated form. Pay particular attention to “The Savage in Me!” for its political incorrectness: Its blonde beauty of a protagonist is practically raped by some egotistical military guy she’s just met. Not only does she falls for him, but surrenders her identity — when she finally gives in, he calls her by name, only to be corrected: “No, Donovan — your woman!” Ah, young love!

Datedness also helps make the crime section a blast, with a chump in the proto-CSI tale “Trapping New England’s Chain Murderer” spilling all to the cops because his addiction has broken him down: “I … need a marijuana! I gotta have a reefer! Okay! I’ll talk! Only give me a smoke or I’ll go bats!!” Other crime tales tell the true stories of Ma Barker and Scarface.

Their Western stuff is wonderfully colorful, and the best of the lot here features a do-gooder character named Bulls Eye, who deserved a longer life than he got. Horror is next, with typical fright tales of the period, but it’s worth noting that Simon and Kirby generated many of theirs by adapting dreams sent in by readers. That may not be the best way to get a lucid script, but at least it’s different, and lets Kirby’s imagination run wild.

So-called “sick humor” finishes out the book, with half of the examples coming from Simon’s one-time MAD competitor, SICK. Humor clearly wasn’t their forte, although you can tell they had fun doing it. The most successful story here is a “20,000 Lugs Under the Sea” movie parody; an Archie-style “Rainy Day with House-Date Harry” story is cute, but pointless. And then there’s a spread of illustrated Lenny Bruce jokes — I hate to shoot at sacred cows, but if this represents the best Bruce gave, he’s woefully overrated.

The boys clearly brought the best out of each other, with Simon scripts that generally were economical in terms of dialogue, thus allowing Kirby to let visuals do some of the talking, thus granting the entire thing a fluidity that one rarely sees in today’s mythos-heavy, continuity-complicated illustrated fiction.

This represents the first of a series for Titan, with subsequent volumes to zero in on several of the individual genres whose surfaces are merely scratched here. Based upon that initial taste, they all look like keepers. —Rod Lott

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The more you know about H.P. Lovecraft, the more you’re apt to enjoy CTHULHU UNBOUND, a Permuted Press anthology of “genre-bending tales” involving the author’s vast mythology. Edited by Thomas Brannan and John Sunseri, the collection features 15 stories in a variety of genres, but if you don’t know your Shub-Niggurath from Nyarlathotep, I’m afraid you’ll be mostly lost.

The book’s inventiveness is evident from the start, as Linda L. Donahue’s opening story is a noir detective tale, albeit one with a protagonist who has cloven hooves. Things get more English and proper for Kevin Lauderdale’s “James and the Dark Grimoire,” in which one Aunt Agnes of the Ladies Auxiliary seeks a rare book she thinks is called something like “the Nickel Norman Chrome.”

Doug Goodman puts a Western coat on things with “Hellstone and Brimfire,” featuring a hero called the Dead Ranger, who needs to carry no guns, so long as the stars above are with him. Kim Paffenroth has one of the most clever pieces, reimagining a chapter of MOBY-DICK to include the fishmen of “Dagon.”

“The Hindenburg Manifesto” by Lee Clark Zumpe involves Nazis, the occult and one famous flaming dirigible. Another tragedy — 9/11 — informs Steven Michael Graham’s “In Our Darkest Hour,” in which scientists investigate rumors of the Eye of Eternal Night being found among the World Trade Center debris. Permuted Press regular D.L. Snell again plays around in post-apocalyptic times with “Blood Bags and Tentacles,” in which well-armed survivors encounter something with many arms.

In Ben Thomas’ “The Menagerie,” a prince wishes to acquire a Shoggoth for his collection of beasts, and C.J. Henderson delves into the disappearance of a doctor behind closed doors for a “Locked Room” mystery. I was familiar with very few of these writers, so it would have been nice for Brannan and Sunseri to allow room for author bios, not to mention an introduction to the entire volume; as is, they put no personal stamp on the contents.

All in all, UNBOUND is a mixed bag. Its enjoyment for the average reader would be heightened if the stories didn’t assume an already advanced knowledge of Lovecraft’s work. This seems to be a recurring problem with Lovecraft pastiches I have read; as a more casual fan of his stories, I’m often turned off by the fervent-fan approach many authors take. Half the time, as here, it’s enough to drive one mad — say, perhaps straight to Arkham Asylum. —Rod Lott

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After bringing the exploits of Arsène Lupin and Fantômas back from obscurity, Penguin Classics resurrects a whole slew of gentlemen thieves in THE PENGUIN BOOK OF GASLIGHT CRIME: CON ARTISTS, ROGUES, AND SCOUNDRELS FROM THE TIME OF SHERLOCK HOLMES. Anyone who enjoys a good, smart, short, literate crime caper should snatch this anthology up … but pay for it, please.

Editor Michael Sims has rounded up a dozen examples of this all-but-dead subgenre — a lineup that includes works by the likes of O. Henry, William Hope Hodgson, Edgar Wallace and Sinclair Lewis, but mostly from authors whose reps have vanished like so many objects in their stories.

Their antiheroes use the tricks of their trade to trick the rich and gullible out of jewels — the shinier, the better — and even identities, not to mention good-ol’-fashioned cash. While not household names, some of the characters do enjoy some cult followings. Raffles is hired to steal a painting in E.W. Hornung’s “Nine Points of the Law,” while the French detective Valmont investigates the theft of 500 diamonds in a mystery by Robert Barr.

Those unaccustomed to pop-lit of this era may require a slight transitionary period getting used to its language and style — markedly different from today’s crime fiction, the stories aren’t the kind of thing to dive into with abandon. (Henry’s more comic-driven entry may be the exception.) Patience and an understanding of the times — which Sims’ intro more than supplies — are key to approaching and appreciating these fine tales. —Rod Lott

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Issue number 5 of SPIDER-MAN MAGAZINE again features the same mix of heroes, only subbing Iron Man in the slot heretofore occupied by The Fantastic Four. In the first tale, Spidey humorously spars with Electro, who thinks he deserves some respect. Then the super-sibs of Power Pack find that going back to school after summer vacation isn’t easy, especially when alligator aliens attack.

It’s back to our wall-crawler for a tête-à-tête with Sandman, inside New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, before Iron Man’s origin is recounted, in a story that more or less apes the recent movie … and was already printed in another of these Marvel all-ages mags in last summer’s IRON MAN/HULK SPECIAL EDITION.

There’s nothing wrong with that story, of course, but this being the fifth issue and with the wealth of singles to draw from, it’s too early to start recycling contents. —Rod Lott

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS SERIES:
• SPIDER-MAN FEATURING THE SILVER SURFER MAGAZINE
• SPIDER-MAN (IRON MAN/HULK) MAGAZINE
• SPIDER-MAN MAGAZINE #1
• SPIDER-MAN MAGAZINE #2
• SPIDER-MAN MAGAZINE #3
• SPIDER-MAN MAGAZINE #4
• SPIDER-MAN SPECIAL EDITION

If I weren’t already intimidated by time — specifically, a lack of it — I’d subscribe to THE NEW YORKER. It has great articles, reviews and, of course, cartoons. Liza Donnelly and Michael Maslin are two providers of the latter. And not only that, but they’re married. And not only that, but they’ve put out a joint collection in CARTOON MARRIAGE: ADVENTURES IN LOVE AND MATRIMONY BY THE NEW YORKER’S CARTOONING COUPLE.

After a brief original cartoon about how they met, the book throws out nearly 300 of their previously published efforts, all centered around saying “I thee wed” and all that comes after, for better or worse. It’s cute stuff, but toothless, a little clichéd and, when taken all in one bite, awfully repetitive.

Give it a bear hug. Maybe even feel it up. But there’s no need to pledge forever to this one. —Rod Lott

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After Harvey Kurtzman left MAD, Hugh Hefner gave him TRUMP, only to fold it after two issues. But Hef being Hef, he let Kurtzman still use the office space, where Kurtzman and his stable of artists launched their next great humor magazine in HUMBUG in 1957. You remember HUMBUG, right? Right?

MAD keeps marching along, but HUMBUG died a quick death, ceasing publication after 11 issues. It’s one of those periodicals MAD fans too young the first time around have heard about for years, but have never seen. Fantagraphics rights that wrong with the complete HUMBUG, a two-box hardcover set in a slipcase.

At first glance, HUMBUG’s black-and-white-with-occasional-spot-color pages look like MAD, with the manic art of Jack Davis, Will Elder and Al Jaffee. It’s not until you read it that things appear a tad different. Kurtzman and company aimed high for a more sophisticated humor mag than the competition; sometimes that results in the joke getting lost, or the concept being stronger than the actual execution. (There’s a reason MAD avoided prose pieces.)

Movie and TV parodies — a MAD staple from the start — are here, but in comparatively short supply among all the “how-to” and “a look at”-type features. You do get good spoofs on BABY DOLL and AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS, with the latter a standout in the department of absurdity, and game shows on the tube.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, HUMBUG today is a victim of timeliness. Although its art still holds great appeal, its wit is weathered and sadly dated. Still, Fantagraphics’ package for it is bar none — handsome, sturdy and restored with great care. Sticking to the term “complete,” the set contain all the covers, contents pages, letter columns and even house ads. I was most interested in the behind-the-scenes story of HUMBUG and the creative process that went into it — not to mention doomed it — and the book’s introduction and exclusive interviews more than satisfy on that count. —Rod Lott

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Books about being dumped are a double-edged knife to the heart. On one hand, it’s always fascinating to read about one man’s heartbreak and how he dealt with it, but on the other side, in mainstream books like this, the writers — especially the celeb writers — are always pulling the politically correct card, never talking about how much they absolutely hate the women who hurt them, instead spending too much time trying to be the “nice guys” to maintain their public image. They’d rather come off like hypersensitive pussies who still want to maintain “friendships” instead of dwelling on how much they’d like to see the bitch dead, which, if you ask me, is more honest.

I call it the “Nick Hornby Syndrome” and, well, fittingly enough, he writes the intro to THINGS I’VE LEARNED FROM WOMEN WHO’VE DUMPED ME. It is such a politically correct book, it never ever finds the balls to really let loose and explore the actual pain of a woman dumping you.

The first story, Dan Vebber’s “Sex Is the Most Stressful Thing in the History of the Universe,” brutally sets the tone, as Dan not only “brags” that he never learned to masturbate until his 20s, but that he wasn’t into sex with women throughout high school and college, having to beat the ladies off with a stick while ignoring to beat off his own stick. He wants to appear as the aforementioned sensitive funny guy, but instead comes off like a creepy eunuch who hangs around mall shoe stores drinking from the same Taco Bell cup all day. It’s a tortuous read, but once you learn that Vebber has also written for AMERICAN DAD, that makes more sense.

The rest of the stories aren’t any better. Hipster comedian David Wain — who I am genuinely surprised is into women — is here, with a small dialogue that is pointless, but not as pointless as Andy Richter’s “Girls Don’t Make Passes at Boys With Fat Asses,” the one story I felt like I could have identified with, and at first did, but then it veers off in a positive, self-affirmation-type thing. The overrated Stephen Colbert wastes five pages, and, even more overrated, Dan Savage is here, proving once again why alt-weekly editors think he’s so edgy by writing a story that uses the word “cock” 459 times, mostly just to get attention.

The worst of the lot? Matt Goodman and his “Being Awkward Can Be a Prophylactic Against Dry Humping.” It reads like an SAT essay, with plenty of that teenage overwriting diarrhea that can be found in any high school literary journal, which is apropos, because this kid graduated, like, last year.

The best story, by the way, is by Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger, breaking down pop songs. It’s the only readable thing here.

So many of these comedians are just talking to hear themselves talk, They have nothing to actually say about relationships, and take three to five pages to say it. Even worse, it’s obvious that they are trying to appeal to the BUST, roller-derby crowd — all these guys seem to idolize the prototypical alt-chick with self-inflicted cuts, arms full of tats, multicolored hair and daddy issues. You deserve to fail in your relationships, assholes! Instead of trying to find a mate who is, I don’t know, a nice, sweet girl with a great personality, you go after these hipster-skanks who enjoy They Might Be Giants and an ironic love of ’70s porn more than they like you. Sorry, fatty, they’ll always choose drumming for the punk band and fashionable lesbianism over you, no matter how “funny” you are.

Yet you still want to be the “nice guy.” Edited by Ben Karlin, THINGS I’VE LEARNED is a hollow, false book that people will only pretend to relate to — a real waste of time and talent. Breaking up is hard to do, but it’s nowhere near as hard as making it though this collection. —Louis Fowler

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