I've talked here before about Will Eisner, specifically his work on the classic comic strip The Spirit. (Of course, calling The Spirit a comic strip really isn't accurate, but it's not exactly a comic book, either . . . but I'm getting sidetracked.)TO THE HEART OF THE STORM really does deserve the name "graphic novel". Told in flashbacks as a young recruit, an artist named Willie, rides a troop train in the early days of World War II, it's the story of Eisner's own family and his childhood and adolescence growing up as an artistically talented youngster in Brooklyn and the Bronx. One of the themes is the anti-Semitism that Eisner and his family encountered, but that's hardly the whole story. This book is filled with touches that are universal to childhood: being picked on by bullies, having to care for a younger sibling, dealing with parents, etc. It's great stuff, wonderfully written and drawn, and ultimately quite moving. I highly recommend it.
The reason for the scarcity of new posts on this blog in recent days is that I haven't really done anything this week except sit in front of the computer and pound the keyboard. And since I'm one of those dinosaurs who learned to type on an actual typewriter -- and a manual one, at that -- I really do pound the keyboard. This point was brought home to me when I did some cleaning up in my studio not long ago and found the five or six keyboards I had busted over the years and neglected to throw away. They're gone now.And I didn't have any books to talk about because I've been reading the same one all week, an incredibly long novel that I wound up hating. I stuck with it because there was some good stuff in it, and then the ending just wrecked it. It's my own fault. I've been burned before by the same author, in exactly the same way. I got some pulp reprints that I'd ordered in the mail today, so I may stick with them for a while.Tonight we watched the DVD of BATMAN BEGINS. I'm a noted curmudgeon and nit-picker when it comes to movies based on comic books, but I thought this one wasn't bad. The people who made it had their hearts in the right places. There were a few things I didn't like (over and above the godawful modern-day action movie editing style), but there were enough shots that looked really right to more than make up for the problems. I do wish, though, that they'd managed to work in the "Criminals are a cowardly, superstitious lot" line. It's just not a Batman origin story without it.
I think it's just shameful the way some people are talking about Lindsey Lohan's nipples just to increase the traffic on their blogs. You won't catch me talking about Lindsey Lohan's nipples on here, no, sir. Nor will I discuss Paris Hilton's nipples, Angelina Jolie's nipples, Reese Witherspoon's nipples, or, for the sake of diversity and equality, Antonio Banderas's nipples.So there.
Some of the first comics I ever remember reading were Westerns: THE LONE RANGER, ROY ROGERS, and GENE AUTRY. Not too long after that, an early favorite of mine was KID COLT, OUTLAW. (I wouldn't mind reading some of those again, to see how they hold up.) Over the years the popularity of Western comics has certainly come and gone, but they've never really gone away completely. In recent weeks two new Western series have debuted, both from DC.Actually, only one is completely new: LOVELESS, written by Brian Azzarello, author of the excellent, mythic crime series 100 BULLETS. LOVELESS shows a strong Spaghetti Western influence, and the plot -- former Confederate soldier comes home after the war to find his land taken over by Union soldiers and brutal carpetbaggers -- is very similar to the backstory of the long-running Slocum paperback series, as well as numerous other Western novels. It's hard to tell where the story will go from that setup, though, because things barely get underway in the first issue. As usual, Azzarello writes good dialogue, but like the TV series DEADWOOD, it's heavily laced with profanity.The other new series is actually a relaunch of an old series (and another favorite of mine), JONAH HEX. Bounty hunter Jonah Hex is also a former Confederate, a brutal man who carries as many emotional scars as he does physical ones. He starred in a long-running series of his own during the Seventies and early Eighties, and I liked most of the stories quite a bit. This new series treds pretty much the same ground, following Hex's life as a bounty hunter and gun-for-hire. Unlike LOVELESS, which is intended to be an on-going storyline, the scripts for the new JONAH HEX are self-contained and well-written by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti.I've read the first issues of these new series and liked them both. In addition to the rough language in LOVELESS, both books are pretty bloody and violent, so they're not for the squeamish. The art on both series is excellent, by Marcelo Frusin on LOVELESS and Luke Ross on JONAH HEX. I plan to continue reading these comics, and I'd like to see them be successful because, well, they're Westerns, and there ought to always be Western comics in the world. In my world, anyway.Now, if anybody at Marvel wants me to write a relaunch of KID COLT, OUTLAW, I'd be more than happy to talk to them . . .
This is the other half of that Ace SF Double I was reading the other day, and like Lesser's RECRUIT FOR ANDROMEDA, this early novel by Robert Silverberg, writing as Calvin M. Knox, is pretty good. It's also a good example of taking a standard plot from one genre and transplanting it to another. In hardboiled mysteries, you've sometimes got the lone government agent out to smash the dope racket in a corrupt town. In THE PLOT AGAINST EARTH, you've got the lone Terran agent out to smash the hypnojewel racket in a corrupt galaxy. A little hokey, but Silverberg makes it work just fine and his prose is always a pleasure to read.I don't know if this story was first published in one of the SF digest magazines, but it certainly seems possible, especially given the fact that the book is dedicated to Robert A.W. Lowndes, one of the magazine editors who bought a lot of Silverberg's early fiction. I like the cover on the Ace edition, which is by Valigursky, because not only is it striking but it also depicts an actual scene from the book.
At times I've felt like the last author on the planet who didn't have his or her own domain name. Well, no more. Now you can go to www.jamesreasoner.com to read about the books I've written in the past, see the books that are currently out, order autographed books, etc. There's also plenty of information there about all of Livia's books. This is actually the same website we've had for a while, but it's newly updated. The best way to contact me is still through this blog, though.
I haven't posted much about the writing lately because there just hasn't been much to say. Yesterday was a bad day, the first one I've had in a while, and today wasn't much better until late afternoon, when I finally got up a head of steam and wound up with 25 pages for the day. I have things worked out so that I know how many pages per day I have to do in order to get everything in on time, and yesterday put me in a hole. Today's output, though, shaved off a little of the deficit, and I hope to be back on track by the time the weekend is over.A couple of weeks ago I turned down the chance to pitch for a TV tie-in novel. The series in question is one I've never watched, the advance was low, and while the deadline wasn't ridiculously short, it happened to fall when I have other books due, so I knew that even if I got the job (unlikely due to my lack of familiarity with the show), I could never deliver on time. Still, even with all that going against it, the decision to not even try for it gnawed at me for a few days. I'd really like to do more tie-in work, but this just wasn't the right job at the right time.I'm reading THE PLOT AGAINST EARTH, an early SF novel by Robert Silverberg writing as Calvin M. Knox, and hope to have a few things to say about it tomorrow.
Gideon Hawk is a dedicated and highly competent lawman until a personal tragedy starts him on the vengeance trail. Frustration with a corrupt justice system turns him into a full-fledged vigilante who deals with lawbreakers on their own level. It would be easy, based on that description of the plot, to dismiss this book as Mack Bolan in the Old West, but it’s actually much more than that. With his sure-handed prose, Peter Brandvold creates a fast-paced, action-packed novel that also has a great deal of emotional depth.It’s no coincidence that one of the characters in this novel is named DeRosso. At times in this bleak but compelling tale Brandvold almost seems to be channeling pulp and paperback author H.A. DeRosso, widely acclaimed as the master of Western noir. Brandvold has his own voice, though, influenced by comics, Spaghetti Westerns, and a strong grounding in traditional Western novels. His characters are sometimes bizarre but always well-drawn, so that even the most unsympathetic of them come across as human, and he writes great action scenes as well as having a heartbreakingly poignant touch with the quieter moments. This is a fine, fine book for readers who like their Westerns on the hardboiled side.
And here's the cover of the science-fiction digest mentioned in the previous post, with art by Malcolm Smith. Growing up, the only SF magazines I ever saw were ANALOG, AMAZING, and THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION. I never knew IMAGINATION and its companion magazine IMAGINATIVE TALES existed until Bill Crider told me about them. Since then I've been picking up issues on eBay every now and then, and I've enjoyed every one of them.
This short novel was originally published in the July 1953 issue of the science-fiction digest IMAGINATION, under the title “Voyage to Eternity”. It was reprinted six years later as half of Ace Double D-358 as RECRUIT FOR ANDROMEDA. By the way, I think the magazine title is much better than the book title.
The plot won’t contain many surprises for anybody who has read much science-fiction. Approximately every two years, a certain number of healthy young males between the ages of 21 and 26 are selected in a national lottery and drafted to serve in some top-secret project. Supposedly a system is in place to rotate these men back out of the service, but in reality they all disappear and none of them ever come back. This has led the public to dub the project the Nowhere Journey (which also would have made an okay title). Unknown to anyone in America, the Communist empire in Russia has a similar project going on. Lesser cuts back and forth between an American draftee and a Russian one, and you know they’ll wind up butting heads sooner or later. Bit by bit, the reader is let in on the secrets of the Nowhere Journey, and everything finally comes together in a slam-bang space battle.
I’ve been aware for a long time that Stephen Marlowe, the author of the Gold Medal series about hardboiled private eye Chester Drum, was really Milton Lesser and that he started off writing science-fiction. Only in recent years, though, have I actually started to read some of Lesser’s SF and found out just how much of it he really wrote. He consistently turned out smooth, entertaining prose no matter what the genre, and that’s the case in this novel. Interestingly, there’s a little story-within-the-story in this book that echoes some of Lesser’s Gold Medal work as Marlowe. Although dated and fairly predictable, RECRUIT FOR ANDROMEDA is worth reading.
The cover of the Ace edition is by Emsh.
