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Books Acquired

• Astro City: Local Heroes, by Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson
• Blaze, by Richard Bachman
• Golden Apples of the Sun, by Ray Bradbury
• Lisey’s Story (paperback), by Stephen King

Books Read

• The Regulators, by Richard Bachman
• Astro City: Life in the Big City, by Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson
• Astro City: Confession, by Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson
• Astro City: Family Album, by Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson
• Freaky Friday, by Mary Rogers
• Astro City: Tarnished Angel, by Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson
• Blaze, by Richard Bachman
• Astro City: Local Heroes, by Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson
• Golden Apples of the Sun, by Ray Bradbury
• Summer Switch, by Mary Rogers
• Saga of the Swamp Thing, by Alan Moore and Stephen Bissette


Every month – except February, it seems – my reading life has been dominated by graphic novels. For two years, I have lamented that I must have run out of good, ongoing series to absorb by now, that there can’t be anything new to sink my reading teeth into. In 2007, month after month, I’ve been proven wrong. It’s gotten to the point where my goal of reading fifty books this year might sprawl far beyond that, to a place where I might up the goal to fifty prose books, and fifty graphic novels. It’s a shuddery, nervous idea, but this year is all about not backing down from challenges. Let’s see what happens.

This month, my mind has been crammed full of Astro City. As it has been with almost all my graphic novel obsessions this year, all it took was a display at the comic book store.

“Hey Shawn?” I asked my partner, as he was busy ogling the various Batwoman action figures. “Have you ever read this?”

He glanced over, distracted. “Dude, I have all those. Remember, like five years ago, Dave got them for me for my birthday? Or maybe Christmas?”

Ah yes: Dave the enabler. I know I’ve reiterated this more times than I can count, but of my Three Major Obsessions, Dave has gotten me into two of them. Stephen King was my own doing, but Dave not only recommended Springsteen’s Nebraska to me, he also supplied me with Frank Miller’s Daredevil: Born Again. Back when he gifted Shawn Astro City, all I cared about was Spider-Man and the aforementioned Daredevil. Now, years later, Dave’s cheerful first one’s free attitude has caught up with me. And man, do I love Astro City.

The premise is simplicity itself: Astro City is an analogue to Metropolis and Gotham of the DC Universe, or the fictional New York in the Marvel Universe (even though Astro City incorporates geography and architecture from many different real-world counterparts.) It’s a city where superheroes are commonplace, and where the citizenry is accustomed to megalomaniac bad guys and cosmic threats. The best thing about Astro City is that it’s all new, sprung whole from Kurt Busiek’s mind, so it’s not tied to any corporate-mandated continuity. Characters can die and not come back. Mainstays can be replaced. Less familiar characters can take the spotlight. The genius here is that in a city full of superheroes, there are thousands of stories that can be told. Like with Fables, this concept is so malleable that any character, any focus, any type of storytelling, can be the star.

Case in point: the first book, Life in the Big City, is pretty much a straight-up superhero tale. Bringing you in, getting its hooks into you, and leaving you wanting. The second, Confession, is one of the best dark mysteries I’ve ever read. It’s a Batman-type story – told from the Robin analogue’s point of view – on its surface, but there’s so much more going on underneath. And the big reveal is so blindsiding, even though all the clues were right there in plain sight. I have rarely been so impressed by a comic book.

Family Album delves deeper into the lives of superheroes we’ve been curious about from the beginning. Tarnished Angel is, above all else, a crime noir story that just happens to involve superpowered people. Local Heroes goes back to the Family Album style of storytelling, focusing on a single character for only one or two chapters and moving along. This time, it focuses on telling the tales of past heroes and lesser-known heroes we haven’t really heard much of before. More than anything, Local Heroes shows the versatility of this concept.

Well, actually, more than anything, Local Heroes does what all “most recent” trades do – has me hungering for a new volume that doesn’t exist yet. With some series, like Walking Dead and Invincible, I’ve been more than content to wait for the trade. But Astro City is just too vital. Like with Y: The Last Man, I simply can’t wait for a collection. I’m picking this one up whenever a new issue appears.

Speaking of picking things up as soon as they appear (segues are my friend, and yours!), how pumped was I when Blaze was released? Any new Stephen King release fires my pistons, but it’s always better when it’s a novel, and it’s apparently exquisite when it’s a “lost” novel, previously unpublished. The morning it was released, I was at Borders at 7:00 AM, at Starbucks at 7:20, sipping my green teal lemonade and noshing on my orange crème coffee cake, losing myself in this world I thought would be a closed door to me forever. Occasionally, when I build something up in my head this much, it’s almost a letdown when I actually experience it. Not so with Blaze, which turned out to be as exciting and involving as I’d hoped it would be.

Actually, this whole Bachman Books experiment has been interesting. I remember a time (as does King, apparently), when I considered Roadwork my favorite of the Bachman books. It’s the grimmest, certainly, and at sixteen, I apparently responded to that. But I’m older now, and when it comes to King – no matter which name he’s writing under – what I come for is a good, involving story, well told. I got that from The Long Walk, way back in April. I definitely got it from Thinner, whose pace is unrelenting and whose tone is very much Stephen King in the 80’s, albeit with a downbeat ending in which there are no good guys and no one really wins.

I got it from The Regulators, which, sadly for me, will always live in the awesome shadow cast by Desperation. Don’t get me wrong, I love The Regulators – you don’t often get action-movie carnage from Stephen King – but like with Roadwork, you delve deep into characters’ minds without really getting a feel for them. They’re not necessarily one-note, but they behave that way. Which, you know, is fine – I’m not sure any of us were coming to The Regulators for a nuanced character study. It’s carnage from opening to closing, terrific prose (noted King expert Stephen Spignesi considers the opening paragraph – a wistful, almost Bradburyian depiction of suburban summer – to be some of King’s best writing), and an interesting reversal of its sister book Desperation … but it just will never have that book’s depth of meaning or character for me.

Blaze may well be my second-favorite of the Bachman novels at this point – it’s like Thinner, but written by a much younger, much less sure King. It runs on nervous energy throughout the book, and the flashbacks actually propel the story rather than bogging it down. If Blaze isn’t the best book I’ve read so far this year, it’s damned close.

You know how, when you revisit books you loved as a kid, they have the tendency to fall apart under your adult eye? I ruined A Wrinkle In Time a few years ago by trying to delve back into that world I loved so, so much when I was only a decade old. Reading it at thirty revealed it to be simplistic, pedagogical, and lacking in anything like depth of story or character. I was so mad.

So it was with some reluctance that I picked up Freaky Friday, which I’d read several times in my career as a middle schooler and which Tracey gave to me for Christmas several years back. The memory of Wrinkle In Time still fresh in my head, I delved into the first few chapters, wary and nervous. And I learned a startling lesson about books for intermediate readers: sometimes shit just happens.

The story’s pretty familiar to anyone who’s seen body-switching movies: high schooler Annabel Andrews wakes up one morning and she’s in the body of her mother. Now, nearly two decades of watching movies like that (and absorbing countless other body-switching stories), I’ve been conditioned to expect certain things. Outrage, perhaps. Fear, maybe? Not so here. Annabel just wakes up and looks in the mirror and says, “Wow, I’m my Mom now. That’s weird.” And goes about her Freaky Friday.

I was reminded of that part in A Wrinkle in Time when, after months and months of being missing, the Dad just shows up. And you think it’s subterfuge or maybe someone posing as him, but no. Just him. It’s too easy, see, and that’s what it felt like here. Maybe there’s something to be said for how kids just accept stuff more readily than adults … but I’m not buying it. I know this book was written in 1972 and was likely one of the first body-switching stories out there (if not the first for a modern audience), but man if the whole thing doesn’t seem weirdly blasé about the whole thing.

Rogers improved immensely with Summer Switch (which is far less well-known, in part because there are no movies starring Jodie Foster or Jamie Leigh Curtis out there; the only Summer Switch movie I remember was an ABC Afterschool Special). Same family, different switchers – this time, it’s Annabel’s brother, Ape Face, and her Dad. Finally, here is the shock, here is the constant worry. You see things from both sides this time (Freaky Friday was only seen from Annabel’s point of view), and there’s definitely an undercurrent of concern throughout the whole books. Plus, because the body-switch goes on for nearly a month (rather than just a day), you get time to delve into both the characters’ heads, as well as their outer lives. In Friday, we got little more than sketches of Annabel’s friends, and next to nothing about her life. Here, we get to meet Ape Face’s (and Mr. Andrews’) friends and enemies, their relationships with their families, and we actually get some pretty insightful looks into the sociology of both the middle-school mindset and the corporate world of Hollywood. That’s a lot to put on a kids’ book not 200 pages long, but Rogers does it with humanity and pathos and, occasionally, laugh-out-loud hilarity. Now I’m looking forward to re-reading the third book in the series, A Billion For Boris.



(Oh, and my re-read reminded me of my middle-school obsession with CB lingo. It all started here. I’ve been an obsessed personality my whole life.)

A word on Ray Bradbury: man, is he frustrating. I have never read a novel by the man I didn’t love wholeheartedly (Something Wicked This Way Comes and Fahrenheit 451 are two of my very favorites), but his short story collections are … well, problematic at best. I freely and fully admit that the problem might be mine, and the mere fact that I’m a reader in 2007 trying to wrap my mind around stories written over fifty years ago. But that can’t be all of it.

See here: The Golden Apples of the Sun features one of the best short stories ever written: “The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl.” It’s a paranoid descent into madness I first read as a Shock SuspenStory in one of those EC comics reprints back in the 90s. It actually seems out of place here – a dark, psychological crime story amid tales of sea monsters and rocketships and nostalgic summer yarns. It would be easy for me to simply say that I just respond more to the darker side of things, and that I’ve been ruined by modern science fiction to appreciate what went before.

But that’s not altogether true: there are a couple of really neat SF concepts at work in here, “The Garbage Collector” and “The Murderer” (which was as remarkably prescient about our current tech-oriented society in the way that Fahrenheit 451 was about reality TV) chief among them. There was stuff in here that reminded me, favorably, of Dandelion Wine – “The Big Black and White Game” for example, is terrific (and surprisingly brutal). I was weirdly and pleasantly surprised by the two sexual stories in here – “The Great Fire” and “En La Noche” seem racy even by today’s standards. Even some of the parables work well – especially “The Flying Machine” and “The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind” – even though it seems weird that they only really appear as ancient Asian stories.

But then there’s the troubling stuff. Last year, I was upset to discover that I really didn’t dig The Martian Chronicles all that much, which bothers me to this day. I had the same problem with the classic SF here. The title story, I imagine, was thrilling to people who had begun to barely imagine rocketships that could approach stars. After decades of Star Trek and Star Wars, even reading a story like “The Golden Apples of the Sun” as a historical artifact doesn’t do much for me. That, I think, is the basic problem with science fiction (although, for the record, Bradbury is loath to call most of his work that, preferring fantasy instead): unlike other genres like horror and romance, SF has to keep up with actual, real-world innovations. It’s called science fiction because it’s based, however tenuously, on science. I feel a little cheated because I can’t bring the same sense of wonder to “The Rocket” as my father or my grandfather could.

It’s not just that, though: maybe it’s me, maybe it’s because I don’t live in the 40s, but I have no idea what “I See You Never” is about. It obviously has something to do with race relations, and forced deportation, and all that … but I still don’t get it. At the end, the Mexican guy being deported starts screaming “I see you never!” and it doesn’t sink in to the woman who runs the boarding house until after he’s gone? What? And does the fact that this was published originally in The New Yorker have anything to do with me not getting it? I don’t know.

I suppose it’s the case with all collections of short stories – some are going to impress you, some are going to be midrange, and some are going to be disappointments. Not even Ray Bradbury can hit a home run every time.

(Oh, and a quick note about the book itself: the collection was originally published in 1953. Another collection, R Is For Rocket, came in 1962. In 1997, the two collections were combined together under the balloon title The Golden Apples of the Sun. I didn’t quite have the commitment to get through all thirty-two stories in the later volume, so I stopped right where the 1953 version stopped, after the title story. Later, when I go back, I’ll read the remainder as if I’m reading R is for Rocket. Make sense? My guilt complex is strange.)

Okay, so here we come to the troubling Alan Moore portion of the evening. Here’s the thing: I don’t really like Alan Moore. I have never liked Alan Moore. I’ve tried – oh, how I’ve tried. I’ve tried V For Vendetta and got about a quarter of the way through it before I got too bored and frustrated to go on. I tried From Hell, thinking it must be better than the book … and it wasn’t. Hell, I tried Watchmen, considered not only the critical and popular high point for Moore’s work, but for all graphic novels. And I didn’t like it.

Maybe a part of this is me, too. Maybe I needed to be cognizant of comics at a time when something like Watchmen was revolutionary. But maybe, just maybe, I just don’t like it. I’m trying to wrap my mind around whether that’s okay or not.

As it stood until about a week ago, the only Alan Moore I really liked was a short Green Arrow story that read like a Daredevil story he wrote as a backup in, I believe, Green Lantern. It was as if Mike Grell and Judd Winick merged and came up with a thrilling and interesting take on my favorite DC character. I read that last year and realized, reluctantly, that my Moore hate was not universal. Maybe I just needed to grok a concept he was in on before I got into the storytelling part.

In comes The Saga of the Swamp Thing. I don’t even remember why I was interested. Maybe my friend Brad? Maybe Drew? People who’ve been trying to get me to digest something, anything, by Alan Moore for years. Or maybe it was the distinct lack of Moore from my recent Top Ten Graphic Novels list that bothered some people.

Regardless, I borrowed Shawn's copy, and as it turns out, I was more interested than I would have guessed at the prospect of delving into Swamp Thing. And, boy, was I rewarded. To everyone who said “The Anatomy Lesson” – the first chapter of the collection – was the best breakdown of a character ever: boy, how right you were. The closest I ever got to Swamp Thing in the past was a weird PSA about littering that ran in the late 80s. I was so impressed by how deep this got – philosophical but not bogged down by it; character-based, while also telling a compelling, swift moving story; and featuring a message without resorting to soapboxing. I have a feeling that, if my trend continues, next month will be overwhelmed by talk and thoughts of Swamp Thing. Maybe there’s no such thing as running out of stories.

Oh, and speaking of next month: a little book called Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will be released just three days after my birthday. I’m already a little trembly in anticipation. Rest assured that my report on it will be spoiler-free and, hopefully, timely. Until then, keep reading.