Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future

Mike Higgs, compiler. Dan Dare: Operation Saturn (1989). Originally Eagle V3-47, February 1953, to V5-31, May 1954.

Granny Morgan subscribed to the Eagle for us. The cover comic on every issue was Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future. He wore a very 1950-ish uniform, he had a batman who was loveable working-class clown, and he showed proper deference to his commanding officer, a grey-mustachioed figure of probity. His sidekicks were a Yank and a Frenchman, but of course Dan the Englishman was the leader of this multi-national space force. The space ships were technically impossible. The first trip was to Venus, home of two antagonistic tribes separated by a fiery equator. All very simplistic, but it satisfied our desire for space opera.

This story begins with “black cats”, robot ships that attack and destroy inner-planet space ships. Their origin is Saturn. An evil scientist-entrepreneur offers to help the space force on their mission. He is of course a traitor who will deliver Earth to the evil emperor who wants to rule the solar system. And so on. Dare and the oppressed races who inhabit Saturn’s moons win, of course, and the would-be emperor dissolves into glittery stuff, maybe gas or maybe dust.

Rereading this story, I see what I didn’t see at the time: the jingoistic assumption that Britain would rule the space-waves, that English daring would solve all problems, that the lesser races needed the leadership of Dare, that the other powers would happily cede leadership to Britain, etc. Eagle was founded by an Anglican clergyman who wanted to counter-act the influence of Beano and other English comics, and the increasing influence of American comics. Eagle was printed on slick paper, with lots of wholesome content, such as centre-spreads illustrating and describing interesting technical achievements. Dan Dare served as the hero-model that would raise a generation of wholesome and upright English boys to wholesome and upright English manhood, ready to take their wholesome and rightful places in the post-war utopia. Or something like that.

We collected our copies. Before we came to Canada, I cut out the centre-spreads dealing with railways. I kept them for years. When the Dan Dare comics were compiled into books, my brother subscribed. This one was an extra copy that he offered to me. I was glad to have it. Rereading it triggered nostalgic memories of 11 Broad Walk, Sunday walks with our uncle and the dog, and listening to radio comedy shows with Grandpa that Granny disapproved of. The Dan Dare story is a slap-dash creation; no publisher would waste ink on it nowadays. It could have been done more carefully, with more plausible physics, fully developed characters, and aliens that were more than funny coloured humans. As it is, it was a nostalgia trip for me. **

It's a Good Life... (Seth, 2004)

 Seth (G. Gallant). It’s a Good Life, if you Don’t Weaken. (2004) A collection of stories collected into a novella. The plot is the eventually successful search for information about Kalo, a Canadian New Yorker cartoonist who seems to have disappeared from history.

Seth writes graphic novels. His drawings are essential to his story. Their elegiac ambience supports the hero’s view of life as a series of losses. He likes old things, imagining that life in the Olden Days was simpler and morally easier than now. His search for Kalo is semi-successful. He finds the rest of Kalo’s work, and discovers where and why he retired from cartooning. It’ a humdrum story of having to make a living, but in the context of Seth’s unease about his own purpose in life, humdrum takes on existential significance. The title of the story is one way to express that significance.

I liked this novella, and will likely read it again. (This was a second reading.)****

92 pages aren't enough: Debt of Honor (Star Trek graphic novel)

  Chris Claremont et al.  Debt of Honor A Star Trek graphic novel. It begins with a flashback, apparently a grievous memory of Capt. Kirk’s. Then we switch to the present: he’s on a boat with Dr Taylor, a nubile 20th century woman who’s helping re-establish dolphins in Earth’s seas. The following story involves tracking down some nasty not-quite-bug-eyed arthropodic monsters who’ve arrived in the neighbourhood via a “rift” in space-time. The old Enterprise crew, all somewhat greyer and wrinklier, assemble on the new Enterprise. There’s more flashbacks to explain the relationship between Kirk and T’cel, a Vulcan-Romulan woman from his past. Klingons also participate: this story explains the eventual rapprochement between Klingons and Humans. Everything ends well, of course, with a hint of future adventures when T’cel decides to go exploring on her own. Oh, and Kirk ends up back on the boat with Dr Taylor.
     The book is confused and confusing. If you know enough about the Star Trek universe, you can piece together a reasonable time-line, and the central plot is well enough told that its hokiness (as you should expect) doesn’t intrude.
     But the flashbacks aren’t well handled. I’m one of those people who expects clear demarcations within a graphic novel, either chapter headings or subheadings, or noticeable shifts in graphic style, or both. I also like a good deal more character development than this book offers. I want to a few more insights into Scotty or Spock, for example, not just allusions to past events. So as a story, this book is merely average.
     The graphics are also somewhat lacking. Faces aren’t consistent enough. There’s sometimes far too much text. IMO, if you need words to clarify what’s happening, the story is either not suited for graphic treatment, or the story-boarding was skimped. Or, and I think this the underlying issue here, the story is too large and complex for the 92 pages allowed for it. To put it another way: as a text novel, there would be plenty of room to develop all the plots, past and present, and to interlace them clearly.
     For all these reasons, I assign **.

Angel Catbird: To Castle Catula

     Margaret Atwood, Johnnie Christmas, Tamra Bonvillain. Angel Catbird: To Castle Catula (2017) The second instalment of the Angel Catbird saga, as nicely done as the first. Angel and his friends travel to Castle Catula, picking up owls as allies along the way, and adopting an orphan kitten. A couple of goddesses also join the alliance against Dr Muroid and his rats. His evil will of course implode in the finale, since he doesn’t understand that his power depends not on control but on leadership. A couple of female white rats will no doubt figure in his defeat. I expect Volume 3 before Christmas. Recommended. ****

Manga Hamlet

    Emma Vicelei (illustration) & Richard Appignanesi (text). Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet (2007) Hamlet is one of my favourite plays. This version’s not a script, it’s meant for reading. The adapters have cut the text severely, the effect is a focus on the essence of story and character. The graphics convey what on stage is done with voice and movement. The setting in a post-climate-collapse cyberworld works: almost everything takes place inside a climate-protected, wholly artificial complex. It makes for a claustrophobic ambience that expresses Hamlet’s dilemma.
     The black and white manga style annoys me, though. The opening pages use delicate colour, it would improve the work immeasurably to use the same pallette throughout. Colour makes imagery more readable.
     Nevertheless, for me, this version was a page turner. Well done. ***

Cats versus Rats

    Margaret Atwood, Johnnie Christmas, Tamara Bonvillain. Angel Catbird (2016) Well done pulp comic book fiction printed on nice book-weight glossy paper, including making-of material such as Christmas’s trial sketches of the main character, Strig Feleedus. He’s a nerdy biologist trying to perfect a genetic splicing drug.  Dr Mucoid, his evil villain boss, who want it to create a half-rat army, does a hit’n’run on him, which breaks the vial with the drug, which gets into his blood, along with some blood from his cat and an unfortunate owl. Hence Angel Catbird, a half-cat human with a dash of owl. A lovely succession of riffs on super-hero comics ensues. It'a all about cats versus rats. The script was written by Atwood, drawn by Christmas, and coloured by Bonvillain.
     Recommended. This is volume 1. Look for Volume 2 in February, and read it too. The book was shelved a Young Adult in our local library, which it’s not. ****

Henry Sampson, ed. The Dumpy Book of Veterans of Road, Rail, Sea and Air (1960)

     Henry Sampson, ed. The Dumpy Book of Veterans of Road, Rail, Sea and Air (1960) Sampson may be a partner in the publishers of this little book, which represents state of the art printing for 1960. It looks like offset printing was used; there is almost no visible screen on the pictures, and the blacks tend block out detail. Anyhow, the content is exactly what the title says, except of course that the sample is heavily weighted towards English subjects. Road and rail are done in many small pictures, with short captions. The ships and planes are given extended captions with more or less complete histories. Still of interest today. But I have no way of gauging the accuracy of the information. **½ (2006)

Hergé: Tintin: The 7 Crystal Balls; Prisoners of the Sun

     Hergé: Tintin: The 7 Crystal Balls; Prisoners of the Sun. Seven crystal balls explode and put seven explorers into deep comas. Tintin and Capt. Haddock set out to solve the mystery, and find it in a remnant group of ancient Incas in Peru, who jealously guard the ancient religion and customs. The explorers had desecrated holy sites in the pursuit of archeological knowledge.
     Well, I didn’t like Tintin much when I was a kid, and I don’t like him much better now. Hergé allows himself the most awful errors, such as a brown bear in the middle of a Peruvian jungle. The errors show the more because Hergé otherwise includes accurate depictions of local artefacts and clothing, and flora and fauna. His characterisation is of the most primitive kind, consisting mostly of caricaturing draughtsmanship and tics of speech whose first mild charm soon begins to grate. His crude humour contrasts with his subtle wit, to the credit of neither. I think he hasn’t made up his mind whether he’s writing fantasy or adventure stories, nor is he clear about his intended audience: children (mostly boys), or adults?. He does move the story right along, so that one keeps reading just to find out what will happen next; but that sense of narrative is his only virtue. A collaborator might have helped him develop his ideas into well structured and characterised tales. But when he was writing, the graphic novel was still seen as a merely a longer comic strip. Very few people took it seriously, perhaps not even Hergé himself. *½ (2006)

Seth. It’s a Good Life if you Don’t Weaken (2004)

     Seth. It’s a Good Life if you Don’t Weaken (2004) Seth thinks in images, so that a good deal of his narrative is conveyed entirely through his drawings. The text and the pictures play against each other, so that the story told through the protagonist’s thoughts and his dialogue with others is enriched, more, is given its meaning, through the graphics. IOW, this is truly a graphic novella, and not merely an illustrated text. The hero “Seth” searches for clues about Kalo, an obscure cartoonist who sold a single panel to the New Yorker in 1951. Eventually, Seth tracks down his quarry, who left cartooning and became a successful realtor in Strathroy, a town that Seth and his family lived in for a few years.
     The tone of the story is melancholy, suffused with a yearning for the past, which is of course that of Seth’s childhood, before he had to face the realities of adult life. His drawings, not quite realistic, yet accurate enough that one can recognise landmark buildings in Toronto, for example, express Seth’s loneliness and alienation; whether in a crowd or in a forbidding winter landscape with trees like the bars of a jail cell, Seth is alone.
     His best friend Chet occasionally listens to him, and has a more sanguine outlook on life. Seth meets a girl and has a brief relationship with her; but then simply doesn’t call her again. He’s afraid, it seems, of the intimacy an adult relationship requires, an intimacy not needed for mere sex. The title quotes Seth’s mother, a dour and cool woman, who looks after Seth’s younger, gormless brother. But it isn’t a good life, despite the successful research and the pleasures of revisiting and remembering childhood places. A quibble: some of the items in the panels are generic cartoons, not observed from life, but I doubt that most readers would notice. *** (2005)

Christopher S. Claremont et al. Star Trek: Debt of Honor (1992)

     Christopher S. Claremont et al. Star Trek: Debt of Honor (1992) Graphic novel treatment of a convoluted ST tale about Kirk’s Debt of Honor to T’Cel, a part-human Vulcan woman, who saved him from an attack by bugs that have invaded the galaxy via a space-time rift. Now, he comes out of retirement and teams up with her and an Klingon frenemy to defeat those bugs. The original Enterprise was destroyed in the earlier fight with these creatures. The whole crew comes together for this final battle. Subplots involve other debts of honour. The book looks very much like a scenario, not a complete script. The style is DC Comics naturalistic, with sometimes difficult to follow dialogue balloons. The jump cuts don’t help; perhaps paradoxically, they’d be easier to follow in a movie. In fact, this story would work better as a movie, I think. Still, it was fun to read, but I’m a diehard ST fan. It ends with T’Cel departing through the space-time rift, and her daughter (who may be Kirk’s child) left on the Enterprise. Clearly To Be Continued, but I don’t know of any sequels. **½