Never Meet Your Heroes

The Boys by Garth Ennis and co-created, designed, and illustrated by Darick Robertson.
Comic Book Review by Kerey McKenna.

So many superheroes these days. In comic books and theaters, on broadcast TV and now the streaming services. There are standalone heroes and hero team-ups and movies where heroes team up with other versions of themselves from parallel universes. Seemingly even some notable bombs can’t stop some superhero franchises from chugging along. You could wipe half of them from existence but they’d come roaring back the next year, in even greater numbers. Does every other movie or TV show have to be an adaptation of some sci-fi pulp fiction rag starring some model-perfect celebrity who packed on the muscle (or donned a padded suit) to get in on the craze some of you may ask? Who will save us from this legion of costumed clowns?

That’s where “The Boys” come in.

The Boys comic book series, running from 2006 to 2012, is a brutal deconstruction of comic book superheroes. With Amazon Prime’s new streaming adaptation coming this week I wanted to briefly revisit the original comics.

They are set in a world where Corporate America mass produces a glut of irresponsible and dangerous real life super-powered people in a profane combination of celebrity culture and defense spending. Very few of the “Superheroes” in the story (most of whom are clear parodies of DC and Marvel Characters) have any redeeming qualities. They are a result of the mega corporation, Vault American (think OCP from the RoboCop trilogy) either attempting to create human weapons, or covering up when they cause industrial accidents that result in some poor schmuck getting doused in chemicals and coming out the other end with superpowers. Whether grown in a vat or coming into contact with hazardous chemicals, Vaught slaps garish costumes on them, creates back stories, and makes them rich with a share of the merchandising and comic book rights. Comics are bowdlerized or outright fictionalized accounts of their “adventures.” Vaught American has the marketing down to a science, with a legion of super IP for all tastes: Teams of young “Social Justice Warrior” heroes checking off every demographic box for progressives. Jingoistic “God, Family, Country” heroes for Middle America. Vaught American doesn’t really care about either value set, just about casting the widest net possible in pursuit of profit. Many of the supers themselves are assigned their heroic identities and accompanying politics much in the way that pro wrestlers are—the costume and persona are assigned by management and it is the performers’ responsibility never to break character in public.

Meanwhile, as there is little need for actual day-to-day superheroics (battles in this world are rare but tend to be brutal, vicious, short and likely to result in collateral damage), many of the “heroes” partake in the usual vices of celebrity: sex, drugs, and all manner of irresponsibility with the assurance that their corporate masters will grease the palms to keep them out of the papers and jail. As if any jail could hold them…

Not happy about super-powered menaces with an excellent PR department running around, the US government activates “The Boys,” a small goon squad of individuals given superpowers to keep the garishly dressed supers and their corporate masters in check through blackmail, intimidation, and brutal application of lethal force:

Billy Butcher: Leader of the The Boys, this rough and tumble British bruiser has brains to match his considerable brawn. Always accompanied by his bulldog Terror, Butcher has a veneer of gallows and profane humor covering a very personal vendetta against the world’s most powerful super, The Homelander, a blond ubermensch in a star-spangled costume. Clearly a riff on Superman.

Mother’s Milk: Billy’s lancer. His mother worked in a Vaught industrial facility and exposure to chemicals passed along extra superpower imbuing nutrients when she nursed him.

The Frenchman: What’s his nationality? He’s French. Why do you think he has this outrageous accent?!

The Female (of the Species): a stoic (mostly silent) teenage waif who is ready for any excuse to fold men into pretzels and punt them into the stratosphere.

Wee Hughie: The newest member of the team and the primary audience POV character to learn about this world. Hailing from bonny Scotland, he is recruited to the team and granted superpowers after his girlfriend is brutally killed as collateral damage by a reckless super. Brought into the fold by Billy, he is our viewpoint to the ridiculous, profane, and deadly excesses of the supers and the many sins of Vaught America.

The Boys fits in with other works that violently deconstruct a superhero genre that has become inexorably entwined with the comics medium, such as 1980’s classics Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, or millennial fair like Kick-Ass and Super. This was a series that launched two years before the MCU takeover of the international box office and wrapped up the same year as Avengers delivered on the promise of a shared cinematic universe. What would it feel like to revisit this harsh take down of superheroes as they’ve started taking over the culture?

After a quick reread I’d say my feelings are still very mixed but curious about what Amazon is going to do with the material.

First, the book revels in over the top graphic depictions of sex and violence (as do many works by co-creator Garth Ennis). Beyond the gut-churning imagery itself, what I find most disconcerting is that the series veers wildly between extreme imagery in service of realism and pathos on one page, and then in the next page pulls a 180 with the violence and sex a punchline for dark humor. The only through line connecting the extremes is a consistent drum beat of cynicism: about politics, about the genre, and about the human (and superhuman) experience.

The anger and cynicism that drips off the page (with all the blood and gore) makes the most sense if you take into account that Garth Ennis is ambivalent or even outright hostile to the superhero genre that dominates comic books. In laying out a narrative in which honest blue-collar goons can take down celebrity ubermenschen, it seems like Ennis often isn’t writing to make a grand statement about the nature of corruption of power, but rather an exercise in catharsis to violently banish the costumed clones that take up so much of his work schedule when he’d rather be writing about spies, soldiers and gunmen.

I felt the series was strongest in its earliest installments in which the two most naive members of the cast, Wee Hughie the rookie member of The Boys, and Star Light, a heroine who has just graduated to “The Seven” (A dark parody of the Justice League, led by the Homelander) still have all their preconceptions about superheroes—and themselves. As the story unfolds, they see these preconceptions cruelly undermined at every turn as they come to realize just how dark and twisted the world really is.

A lot of what the pair discover isn’t so much the dark secrets of the fictional world, but indictments of the superhero genre and comic book industry itself. Rereading this years later (very much after the superhero takeover of the mainstream) many of the most important critiques still ring true (treatment of female creators and female characters in the industry, shallow virtue/value signaling by mega corporations, and how much corporate lobbying protects big business from actual market forces). Other parts of the story (9/11, The Avengers being relatively unknown by the public when compared to The Justice League, its Stan Lee Parody) feel very much like products of their time and have not aged well at all.

As I said I’m interested in what Amazon is going to do with this so in my next installment I will binge the new show and report back whether the transition to TV and some new creators in the mix have smoothed out the rough edges.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

Magical Alt-History Tour

Once There Was a Way: What if the Beatles Stayed Together? by Bryce Zabel.
Book Review by Kerey McKenna.

This weekend, Yesterday will hit theaters, joining a club of major motion pictures that build their stories around the Beatles' song catalog. It’s a magical-realism dramedy in which a struggling musician wakes up in a world where seemingly the band The Beatles never existed. Now he has a short cut to the success bringing the world the music it didn’t know it was missing.

To coincide with this little thought experiment, I thought it would be fun to take a look at a story based on the opposite premise: not a world where The Beatles never existed, but one where they never broke up.

Once There Was a Way is a captivating contra-history, more popularly known as alternate history, written as a retrospective of the long and winding road of The Beatles...after the tumultuous year of 1970.

Now we’ve touched on works of alternate history before here at Nerds who Read, but I don’t think we’ve discussed it as a sub-genre in and of itself so I wanna hold your hand through a brief overview.

The alternate history subgenre of modern fiction is usually traced as far back as the early 1800’s (although there are examples in antiquity and into the Renaissance) with authors and historians spinning ever more elaborate stories of what might have been if history had gone awry. What if the library of Alexandria hadn’t burned? Or Columbus couldn’t get funding to sail west? What if the Nazis won World War 2? Or a famous German rocket scientist didn’t build V-2 rockets? What if half the moon was back in the USSR. Alternate history is a great jumping off point if you want to be a paperback writer. Take a point in history and just imagine if things had just played out a little differently, how there could be monumental changes. And history has already given you a cast of public domain characters.

Alternate history tends to be conjoined to science fiction/fantasy in fandom, authorship, marketing, yet slightly distanced from historical fiction (even though conventions of well-written historical fiction are what make a well-written alternate history novels). Some would even argue that certain genres such as diesel punk or my beloved steampunk usually use the pretense of existing in an alternate universe to explain their aesthetic flourishes.

Alternate history typically focuses on what-if scenarios based around military history as points of divergence to create a universe and then has lots of fun coming up with new maps and flags, as well as character arcs for historical figures that may or may not align with the history of our own world. Given this obsession with refighting decades- or centuries-old military events, a book that focuses on monumental events in pop culture as its divergence point was a breath of fresh air for the genre, even winning the 2017 Side Ways Award for excellence in alternate history literature.

Committed to the conceit that this is a non-fiction book, Bryce Zabel writes in the style of a celebrity biography covering the Beatles in the tumultuous 1970’s...before their seeming permanence well into the 21st century (always tailed by rival newcomers the Rolling Stones).

No, the point of divergence isn’t a certain John Lennon skipping a gallery opening and thereby not meeting a certain avant garde artist...

Rather, the point of divergence in this tale is that the 1968 interview with John Lennon and Paul McCartney that Johnny Carson tried to arrange in real life, only to have it fall through, actually happened in this alternate universe. After their set on The Tonight Show, John and Paul join Johnny and Ed for a night on the town, where the two veteran showman provide the world-weary and feuding musicians with a bit of advice about maintaining a working relationship in show biz.

While this pep talk helps, not everything is strawberry fields forever for the boys from Liverpool. They struggle with their egos, differing artistic directions, familial pressures, and turning Apple Records from a 1960’s counterculture hangout into an actual business. I was surprised to learn how many of the stories of the chaos at Apple Records’ early days, chiefly flushing money down the toilet by a supposed wunderkind producer, as well as invasion by the Hell’s Angels biker gang, actually happened.

However, despite all the helter skelter around their new business, Paul McCartney and John Lennon took Johnny Carson’s and Ed McMahon’s advice about “showing up for each other” and the pair manage to check their egos sufficiently to overcome the challenges that come at the Fab Four, and even take on greater challenges.

Instead of cutting the album Abbey Road in 1969 and taking a quick picture of the band strolling outside of the titular London Studio, their next album is called Everest and the cover art is the band boldly strolling...onto the stage at Woodstock.

From here on the plot creates a fictional Beatles career path by using the solo individual Beatles’ careers and song books with hypothetical Beatles projects to weave a world in which Beatlemania never ended.

The personalities and tensions of the real world group are still there but moving from crisis to crisis (like working under the tender mercies of Stanley Kubrick to star in and score a Lord of the Rings adaptation, or a rough and tumble recording trip to Nigeria at the insistence of Paul) it seems that the Beatles can only get by with a little help from their friends...each other.

So if you sometimes wonder what if the Beatles didn’t just let it be with their last album and kept on writing and performing music together, check out Once there Was A Way.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

Not Your Father’s Aquaman

by Michael Isenberg.

Aquaman has long been the Rodney Dangerfield of the DC universe. He gets no respect. Born to the Queen of Atlantis, saddled with the very un-superhero-like name of “Arthur,” and raised by his human lighthouse keeper father, the goofy-looking Marine Marvel is the butt of numerous “You’re more useless than Aquaman” jokes on Family Guy, the gist of which is that the power to get fish to do stuff has little practical value.

Then in 2016, in the otherwise disastrous Batman v. Superman, we got a brief glimpse of a different Aquaman. Played by Jason Momoa (known to Game of Throne fans for his role as Khal Drogo), this buff, bearded version of the Dweller-in-the-Depths looked kind of rad.

We saw more of him last year in Justice League and discovered he’s hard-drinking and has a sense of humor. “Dress like a bat. You’re out of your mind, Bruce Wayne.” Kind of an aquatic Wolverine.

But it wasn’t until a scene early in the new Aquaman movie, which opens today across the nation, that I was truly convinced: this is not your father’s Aquaman.

It’s a fight scene, Aquaman against the father-and-son pirate team of Jesse and David Kane, aka Manta. The Kanes are attempting to steal a Russian submarine. They’ve killed the captain and many of the crew; the survivors are holed up in the torpedo room, neutralized. Aquaman bursts through a hatch, and after a quip (“Permission to come aboard”) proceeds to take the Kanes and their henchmen apart. The action ends with the crew safely evacuated and Daddy Kane trapped under a missile as water floods the compartment. “Wait!” Manta yells to Aquaman. “You can’t leave him here. Help me! Please!”

We’ve seen the scenario a million times, and the hero always rescues the trapped villain, who really doesn’t deserve it. But not this time. “Ask the sea for mercy,” Aquaman tells him. And then he leaves.

Totally. Bad. Ass.

The theft of the submarine is just the first step in a scheme by Aquaman’s half-brother, Orm, monarch of one of the seven Atlantean kingdoms. I wasn’t really sure which one; the politics of Atlantis are intricate and confusing. A clunky exposition scene tries to explain it all, but it doesn’t help much. I was reminded of the Star Wars prequels’ debates over the taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems. I’m not even sure if there really are seven kingdoms. I think some are extinct. Anyway, Orm plans to use the submarine in a false flag attack to unite however many kingdoms there are for a war against the surface dwellers. Because pollution of the oceans or something. Fortunately for him, Aquaman just abandons the still-functioning submarine after he defeats the pirates. The Russian Navy, inexplicably, makes no attempt to salvage it, thereby allowing Orm to just take it and make the movie happen.

In any case, not all Atlanteans are arming for war. The beautiful redhead Mera, daughter of the King of…one of the kingdoms, seeks out Aquaman and accosts him with a Call to Adventure: she begs him to come to Atlantis, challenge his brother for the throne, and thereby stop the war. True to the Hero’s Journey, Aquaman initially refuses. Not my circus, not my monkeys. But events conspire against him and before long he is under the sea, threatening Orm with an “ass-whooping.”

DC movies since 2005’s Batman Begins have a reputation for being grim. It even inspired a joke in rival Marvel’s Deadpool 2, in which Deadpool says to the straitlaced Cable, “You're so dark. Are you sure you're not from the DC universe?” But Aquaman has a different feel to it. Part of it is that, starting with last year’s Wonder Woman, DC is finally putting humor into its movies. For example, in one scene, Mera impulsively jumps out of an airplane—without a parachute. Seeing the shocked look of the pilot, Aquaman says, “Redheads, you gotta love them.”

But it’s not just the one-liners. Aquaman has a very different visual feel from previous entries in the DC Extended Universe. Instead of the grimy, hyper-realistic, claustrophobic urban setting of Gotham, we’re out in the open, in the vast spaces on the ocean surface—and beneath. The colors are bright. We even spend some time in a cheerful Mediterranean seaside village. The underwater CGI seascapes really dazzle.

But sadly, despite a very likable and kick-ass Aquaman, some funny one-liners, and stunning visuals, this movie isn’t that great. It's not terrible, there's no "Martha" moment. Just not great. The problem is the script. It just fails to sparkle in so many ways. I already mentioned the ponderous exposition and the plot hole concerning the submarine. The dialog is not up to par. What’s supposed to pass as witty, romantically-charged banter between Aquaman and Mera frequently falls flat. And once it is set into motion, the plot is entirely predictable. There is only one twist to speak of, and I saw it coming a mile away. I even knew exactly what the last scene was going to be long before the end.

Still, I hope Aquaman does well at the box office. Now that Jason Momoa has given the character a much-needed makeover, I’m eager to see him back in a better movie.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com

The Magnificent Six

Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse.
Movie Review by Michael Isenberg.

Regular readers of this blog already know that the Peter Parker we all know and love is not the only Spider-man. Through the years, many others have worn the mask. Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse, opening in theaters today, asks “What if a half dozen of these web-slingers joined forces?”

The pretext for this team up, in classic comic book fashion, is a lab experiment gone wrong. Wilson Fisk—the Kingpin—has lost his wife Vanessa and their son Richard in a car accident which he had some responsibility for. Desperate to see them one more time, the grieving Fisk builds a “supercollider” to open portals between dimensions in the hopes of finding their counterparts in parallel universes. But it’s a dangerous machine—every time he operates it, earthquakes shake New York; if he continues, the whole city is likely to collapse.

Determined to stop the Kingpin is the Spider-man from this universe, Miles Morales, a Banksy wanna-be whose 2011 comic book debut was controversial because of his Afro-Caribbean-American ancestry. As Nerds who Read Contributing Reviewer Kerey McKenna pointed out, much of the controversy came from culture warriors who never read a comic book. Miles just wants to fit in at his straitlaced new school—a magnet school for the gifted—develop his artistic talent, and not be embarrassed by his cop dad. He never asked to be bitten by a glowing spider—I think it was robotic—and bear the great power—and great responsibility—of a super-hero.

Miles is joined by five other Spider-men Spider-persons Spider-creatures who were sucked through the interdimensional portals:

An older Peter Parker, Peter B. Parker, sadder, but not yet wiser,

Gwen Stacy (Spider-Gwen), the new girl in school, the only one of Miles’s classmates to appreciate his humor,

from the 1930s, the hard-boiled Spider-man Noir (voiced by Nicolas Cage, BTW),

the anime cutie, Peni Parker,

and strangest of all, Peter Porker, aka Spider-ham, who first appeared in 1983’s Marvel Tails alongside Hulk Bunny, Goose Rider, and Captain Americat. Yes, there was a spider-pig decades before Homer Simpson got pig tracks on the ceiling.

Together they must defeat the Kingpin while completing the seemingly conflicting tasks of getting everyone back to their own corners of the multiverse and shutting down the supercollider for good.

The artistic team combined multiple animation styles appropriate to the various characters. Then they added the handmade, colorful graffiti style of Miles’s urban neighborhood to the mix. The combined effect is visually stunning.

The movie delivers plenty of the trademark humor and one-liners we’ve come to expect from Marvel Studios. As with last year’s Lego Batman Movie, all the characters’ past incarnations are “real,” even when they’re an embarrassment.

We don’t talk about this.

And channeling Deadpool 2, there’s an end credits scene worth waiting for in which Spider-man travels back in time to confront one of those earlier incarnations.

It isn’t all fun and games, however. When I saw it, a solemn hush fell over the theater during the Stan Lee cameo, the first since his death last month. Very sad.

Much as I like this movie, I have to concede it drags in places. The special effects of the supercollider are overdone and go on too long. Because it doubles as an origin story for Miles Morales, this Spider-man movie takes a while to start Spider-manning. And it faces the same problem as Suicide Squad in that it needs to introduce a large number of characters that most of the public (unlike fans of Nerds who Read) aren’t familiar with.

As is often the case with ensemble casts, some of the characters get short shrift. I would have liked to see more of Spider-man Noir, thanks to Kerey’s recent review of that character. Peni Parker, sadly, gets hardly any screen time at all. And Kingpin does little more than show up, look menacing, and sometimes beat people to death. The Vanessa/Richard back story is told in a very brief flashback. This is quite a contrast to Netflix’s Daredevil, where the complexity of his character, especially his seemingly out-of-character devotion to Vanessa, is the dramatic linchpin of the series. I would have liked to see that developed in Into the Spider-verse as well.

Still, it says something that my biggest complaint about a movie is I didn’t get enough of some things. Overall, Into the Spider-verse is immensely funny and hugely entertaining, in my opinion the best movie of the Christmas season (so far, at least). Go see it.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com

Urb-ivores

The Mortal Engines Quartet by Philip Reeve. Audiobooks narrated by Barnaby Edwards.
Book review by Kerey McKenna.

“It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.”

It starts with one of the most intriguing opening lines in science fiction fantasy. The Predator Cities Series—also called The Mortal Engines Quartet after the first book—is a saga that always seems in motion with grand oversized set pieces.

The world of the Mortal Engines is a bizarre post-apocalypse filled with high swashbuckling adventure. Millennia after futuristic doomsday weapons unleashed massive cataclysms on the Earth in “The 60 Minute War,” the remnants of humanity occupy a mere fraction of their former territory. China and North America are still radioactive wastelands, oceans have risen and fallen, and the earth shakes with new seismic activity. One way communities of survivors adapted to this new hostile planet was to become mobile. Using salvaged technology, cities that survived the initial Armageddon were jury-rigged into giant vehicles. Not just vehicles that are the size of cities, but vehicles with salvaged monuments, buildings, and streets that give these cities continuity with their pre-war progenitors. For example the first and oldest mobile city, London, is topped with the iconic Saint Paul’s Cathedral. These mobile or “traction cities” trundle along land on giant caterpillar treads, skate across the thick arctic ice, or float on the oceans. However some towns turned predatory. Not content to gather and cultivate resources where they could be found, large cities like Paris, Arkangel, and London took to gobbling up smaller, weaker cities and towns, chasing them down to claim their resources, technology, and people. And the towns are quite literally gobbled up, through large mechanical “jaws” that scoop them up into a salvage yard. As the system mimics many biological phenomena, the thinkers of the great predatory cities dub this system “Municipal Darwinism” and claim that this “city eat city world” is the “great game of civilizations” distilled to its most logical and noble form.

However, to paraphrase another great tribal leader who once resided in ancient London, “The problem with gobbling up other peoples’ cities is that eventually you run out of other peoples’ cities.” With prey running short, the great predator City of London turns its hungry eyes to the Static Cities of Central Asia, a civilization of non-mobile settlements long thought safe from the predator cities due to geography and massive fortifications.

Tom Natsworthy, an awkward orphan boy of fifteen in London’s historians’ guild (who might as well have a neon sign above him blinking “Due for a Hero’s Journey”) unwittingly gets in the way of London’s machinations to reach more prey. After Tom “sees too much,” he is cast out of the mobile city of London and into the wilderness and must survive with the mysterious Hester Shaw, a girl about his age, with a disfigured face and a vendetta against one of London’s most prominent citizens. Together, Tom, Hester, and other youths in London will discover London’s plans to break into the untapped frontier of Asia and how London’s hunger could bring new disasters to the planet. In the first book, the heroes— and the reader—will meet scoundrels, scavengers, spies, and ancient cyborg super soldiers and will travel through the mobile city of London with its literally vertical society, dangerous wildernesses where pirate suburbs roam, and the amazing floating city of Air Haven.

The Mortal Engines Quartet (Mortal Engines, Predator’s Gold, Infernal Devices, and A Darkling Plain—a fifth book, Night Flights contains three short stories) are compelling adventures through a bizarre post-apocalypse, written for a young adult audience but certainly enjoyable for almost anyone. I say written for a young adult audience because of the ages of the principal protagonists in the first two books (and a good portion of the protagonists in the ensemble casts of the third and final installments), and the third person near-omniscient narration that can make the elaborate agendas and conflicts of the latter half of the quartet a lot easier to follow.

Mortal Engines is also another young adult sci-fi fantasy series that the Hollywood machine has gobbled up in hopes of making a multi-media franchise, with the first installment landing in cinemas this weekend.

I had read the first book in the series some time ago but with the movie coming out I wanted to catch up so I downloaded the audio adaptations, all narrated by Barnaby Edwards. Revisiting and catching up to the series, I was pleasantly surprised to see that while I could understand why Hollywood would bet on this as the next big YA blockbuster adaptation, the books themselves won’t lend themselves to being as predictable or bound to a formula as other YA franchises. There is no magical school that the characters must return to every year or singular villain behind every unfortunate event that befalls the heroes. Like one of the bonkers roving cities, the quartet stacks up machinations and history into a contraption that is always moving.

I haven’t seen the film adaptation, but the prospect that they have translated the spirit of the books and realized some of the grand characters and set pieces of this world makes me eager to catch the movie when it rolls into town.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

Like a Punch in the Gut

The Yankee Club (Jake & Laura Mystery Book 1) by Michael Murphy.
Book Review by Michael Isenberg.

We wrap up Noir November with a hardboiled detective drama set against the background of the Great Depression. Michael Murphy’s The Yankee Club is the epitome of noir.

Novelist and former shamus Jake Donovan (not to be confused with Showtime’s Ray Donovan) skipped town when his childhood sweetheart and the love of his life, Broadway Star Laura Wilson, rejected his umpteenth proposal to get hitched. But after two years in Florida, he’s back in New York City and reconnecting with old friends. They’re a rogues' gallery of 1930’s archetypes. There's Mickey O’Brien, Donovan’s hard-drinking former partner, now flying solo in the private eye business; Danny, the bouncer at the Yankee Club speakeasy, who can’t get over that Donovan stole his bike when they were kids; Gino, Danny’s boss, a tough as nails Italian-American who doesn’t take guff from anyone—except his mother. Then there’s Laura herself, whose first appearance is described in true Raymond Chandler-style: “A woman stood in the doorway, her face hidden in the shadows…her white chiffon dress was backlit by the bright lights above the nurse’s station. I recognized her long shapely legs even before her face came into focus.” (Sadly, these Chandleresque passages get fewer and farther between as the novel progresses).

Alas, some of these reunions play out like a punch in the gut. Laura is engaged now, to one Spencer Dalrymple the Third. “You know, the Long Island Dalrymples.” Donovan is floored. “The Laura I knew used to make fun of stuffed shirts like Dalrymple.” As for Mickey, he and Donovan step out for some air and Mickey is promptly gunned down. His dying words are a cryptic plea, “The key…it’s…in the ashtray.”

When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it, and that’s what Donovan does. He owes it to Mickey. He finds the key in the ashtray. It leads him to a bus station storage locker with a bunch of newspaper clippings inside. Some of the articles are about Giuseppe Zangara, the real-life bricklayer who had recently been executed following his unsuccessful attempt to assassinate then-president-elect Franklin Roosevelt (Zangara will be familiar to fans of Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle. In that alternate history, Zangara succeeds at killing Roosevelt, the point of divergence which sets in motion a chain of events that lead to an Axis victory in World War II). But Zangara is not the only subject of the news reports in Mickey’s stash. Another article concerns a cabal of anti-New Deal bankers known as the Golden Legion, led by, of all people, Spencer Dalrymple the Third.

Were Dalrymple and the Golden Legion somehow connected to the unsuccessful attempt on the life of Franklin Roosevelt—and the successful one on Mickey O’Brien? Donovan soon finds himself enmeshed in a sinister conspiracy with America itself as the stakes. Along the way he encounters Nazi diplomats, fascist thugs, a hooker with a heart of gold, corrupt cops who want to pin the murder on him, and scores of Depression-era celebrities. The cameos reminded me of a similar device in Brad Linaweaver and J. Kent Hastings’s Anarquía, albeit the celebrities in Murphy’s love letter to the New Deal tend to lean farther left politically than those in Linaweaver and Hastings’s libertarian utopia. They include Dashiell Hammett, Ethel Merman, Babe Ruth, and Joseph Kennedy (who’s been whitewashed of his real-life anti-Semitic and pro-fascist sympathies). Donovan is on the spot when Lillian Hellman realizes The Children’s Hour would be a far more interesting play with same-sex protagonists; he’s also there when someone tells Cole Porter, “In the old days, just a glimpse of stocking was, you know, shocking.”

No doubt about it, The Yankee Club is fun. Well-researched too. I knew about the Depression-era shantytowns called Hoovervilles from my high school American history class. I didn’t know until I read The Yankee Club that there was one in Central Park.

As a mystery, however, The Yankee Club leaves something to be desired. The villains’ plot was ridiculous; there was no way it could possibly work. Also, it wasn’t hard to figure out the identity of the mastermind behind it: there was only one suspect. Further, Donovan wasn’t all that instrumental in uncovering it. It turns out there was a secret service agent, Landon Stoddard, who had been working with Mickey before Donovan arrived on the scene. Although Donovan uncovered a few key details, much of his work went into uncovering things Stoddard already knew. Donovan could have stayed in Florida, washing his fedora, and Stoddard would have gotten along fine.

At some point, I’ll probably check out the sequels to the Yankee Club: All That Glitters, Wings in the Dark, and The Big Brush-off. I do like the characters and the overall atmospherics. Combined with the right storyline, the Jake and Laura series would really have something.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Photo credit(s): Amazon

Not-so-friendly Neighborhood Spider-man

Spider-man Noir. Written by David Hine and Fabrice Sapolsky. Illustrated by Carmine Di Giandomenico.
Graphic Novel Review by Kerey McKenna.

As I discussed back in my Luke Cage Noir review, back in 2009-2010 Marvel Comics did a little experiment in genre by publishing short runs of comics re-contextualizing their superhero characters with noir aesthetics and sensibilities. They’re among my favorite kinds of superhero stories, the kind where a creative team takes a familiar hero and their supporting cast of friends and enemies and re-interprets them through different genre aesthetics and conventions. While many of the stories, such as Luke Cage, de-emphasized the fantastical elements of the characters, other stories kept the amazing aspects but ran things through a noir lens. One such tale was Spider-man Noir.

The reader is introduced to this new version of the web-slinger in media res as police bust down the door of 1930’s newspaper man J. Jonah Jameson, apparently gunned down by a figure clad all in black, his face behind a mask that betrays no emotion.

Escaping the scene by shooting webs and leaping out the window, this dark Spider-man may be a menace, or merely caught in a frame up.

Winding things back to before the murder, the story is narrated by Ben Urich, crime reporter for the Daily Bugle in the harsh winter of 1932-1933. Ben is jaded and cynical; he would tell you his odds of dying from either the mob or the bottle are 50/50.

The trope of the hardboiled reporter has its origins in the 1930s, so Ben fits right in. But working web-slinging vigilantes or monstrous creatures like the Green Goblin into the story is a tougher sell, no matter how many fedoras you stick characters under. Unless you strain genre conventions a bit and go into the realm of Dieselpunk.

Yes, this Noir November I did want to get in a mention of Dieselpunk, a genre that is a form of retro futurism like my beloved steampunk. Just as Steampunk is retro-futurist Sci-Fi Fantasy sub-genre that takes its cues from the steam-powered technology of the Victorian era, so Dieselpunk gets its cues from the 1920’s to early 1950’s. Its heroes are pulp adventurers and grizzled detectives; the villains are mad scientists, gangsters, fascists, and Lovecraftian horrors. It’s a natural fit for most superheroes and is a good way to return to the early pulp roots of the genre like the Shadow or the Phantom.

Through the magic of Dieselpunk, the Green Goblin can be transplanted to the Great Depression—in the form of a gangster, Norman “the Goblin” Osborn. Not only is Osborn protected from prosecution by keeping all the right palms greased, he has a team of freakish bodyguards recruited from circus acts. Those who get in his way, like social reformer Ben Parker, are rubbed out. With the murder unprosecuted, Parker’s nephew Peter wants to become a reporter who can expose mafia bosses like Goblin. In a rare moments of optimism, Urich takes the teenage Peter under his wing as an apprentice.

One fateful night, while tailing the Goblin’s crew trying to catch them smuggling stolen artifacts, he has an encounter with the totem of a terrifying spider trickster god. The deity bestows “The Curse of Power” upon the young man, granting him the familiar abilities of strength, agility, spider-sense and web spinning. Donning a less familiar all-black costume, a trench coat, and his Uncle’s old service revolver from the Great War, Peter embarks on a campaign of vengeance against the Goblin and his freakish cohorts.

Unlike the Spider-man we know and love, this dark Spider-man’s desires for vengeance against criminals is not tempered by a chance of fate making him partially responsible for his own uncle’s death. This is a Peter Parker and a Spider-man of a much bleaker world. In a game of mobsters and monsters where the enemy is playing for keeps, Peter will have to decide how far he is willing to go to get revenge.

This noir version of Spider-man has been the only character of the Marvel Noir project that has been revisited, not only in comics, but also in video games, TV, and coming next month, film. Nicholas Cage will voice Spider-man Noir in Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse. Multiple web slingers from multiple parallel dimensions will team up to solve an interdimensional emergency. I covered two of these Spider-people—Miles Morales and Gwen Stacy—in my Climbing the Walls: Other Web Slingers of Marvel last year, so it seemed only fitting to give a shout out to Spider-man Noir before the big screen debut. Despite possibly being the most grim and dour take on the usually friendly neighborhood Spider-man, in his short existence he’s brought joy to a lot of fans, myself included.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.