Justice League: War (Warner-DC 2014)

Directed by Jay Oliva

Okay. This is actually my second attempt at writing a review of the latest DC Animated Movie, which reportedly sets up a prospective series of animated versions of the 2011 Reboot “New 52” Universe. My initial reaction upon viewing Justice League: War, which is based upon the opening story arc (issues #1-6) of the New 52 Justice League comic by Geoff Johns and Jim Lee, there entitled Origin, was a visceral revulsion that verged on physical sickness. Although for whatever reason I felt compelled to share my reaction and envisioned it launching a full-bore diatribe about how it exemplifies all those things I do not like about the New 52 in general, in truth, I really do not like writing negative reviews and could get nowhere over the course of several days in trying to put my feelings into words to bring those ends about. My son pointed out my reluctance to be a negativist and wondered why I was trying to do so here. He could not understand the seething rage that needed some kind of release in this case, and as I got further and further away from the experience neither did I. That was when I decided to subject myself to it again for fairness' sake, determined to be more objective. I'm glad I did so. The resulting review is, I believe, far more balanced.

Captain Midnight, Volume 1: On the Run (Dark Horse, 2014)

Collects story from Dark Horse's Free Comic Book Day 2013 offering and Captain Midnight #0 and 1-3 (2013)

I've been aware of the name “Captain Midnight” all my life. It confused me somewhat when I was a kid, but already familiar with the DC Comics Golden Age character “Doctor Midnite” from the annual Justice League/Justice Society cross-overs as well as reprints featuring the “Earth Two” heroes, that my father would occasionally make reference to “Captaaaaaiiiinnn Midniiiiiight!!!” All I knew then was that he was an old radio serial character from Daddy's youth, and until just the last few years that remained all I knew.

In my rediscovery and exploration of the wondrous world of pulps a few years ago, I found that many of those old closely-related radio serials are now available free on the Internet in various places, including iTunes. The Internet is a wonderful thing!! At the time, I was doing a lot of driving, and over the course of a few months I listened to a fair number of old shows, including Captain Midnight. I also came upon a copy of Moonstone's Captain Midnight Chronicles at a book store, a collection of modern prose short stories by various comic-book and neopulp authors, which I greatly enjoyed while observing that there are significant differences between the classic audio and modern prose stories – the latter are, I believe, more in line with Fawcett's Golden Age Captain Midnight comic-book adventures (of which I've only read a couple, although they are available for free from the Digital Comic Museum [link]); I presume the same to be true of this new series from Dark Horse Comics.

No Dawn For Men: A Novel of Ian Fleming, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Nazi Germany (2013)

By James LePore and Carlos Davis

This book has a fascinating premise – two important writers of the 20^th century meeting in October 1938 Germany under cover of a putative consultation between J. R. R. Tolkien and a prospective German publisher for his recent novel, The Hobbit, journalist Ian Fleming being there to document a meeting Tolkien would also make with an eminent medieval scholar. Of course, with the Shadow of Nazism about to descend across Europe, nothing is as it seems; Tolkien's meeting with his fellow academic has been arranged by British Intelligence – with Fleming as his MI-6 “minder” – to discover what historical secret the professor has uncovered to so embolden the Nazis. In the end, Fleming and Tolkien – with the help of a group of allies collected over the course of their adventure – thwart the unleashing of diabolical forces that would have otherwise assured Germany's quick victory in the imminent global conflagration. Moreover, having witnessed True Evil, Tolkien is wrenched from a state of depressed writer's block to a new determination to direct the clamored-for sequel to The Hobbit toward a similarly epic confrontation between Good and Evil.

The Making of Middle-earth: A New Look Inside the World of J. R. R. Tolkien (2013)

By Christopher Snyder

This is another book I finished reading a while back – actually several weeks at this point – but am just now getting around to blogging. It's much more than just a book about Tolkien himself – that's just the first section. Subsequent chapters look at each of his three major works – The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, in that, i.e. publication, order – laying great emphasis on the sources and influences in history, legend, and literature that he drew on in constructing “a mythology for England.” I found it thoroughly enthralling. But there is another dimension to this book as well, examining the enormous influence of Tolkien in many other areas, including the various media into which his stories have been adapted and the impact they have had on the whole genre of heroic fantasy. It truly is a near-comprehensive survey of the entirety of “The Tolkien Phenomenon.”

And Now For Something Completely Different....

This is something you don't see every day, not at roughly 32degN/93degW in northwestern Louisiana.  And it was pretty much unexpected.  As late as yesterday afternoon, to my knowledge there had been no hint of it coming this way.  But snow it did, like crazy there for a while between about 6 and 8 pm.  And the reaction was about as depicted here:

The Multimedia Honorverse

Not really frequenting the rather extensive web pages and fora of author David Weber [link] except during those intermittent periods when I'm reading one of his books, I haven't really been aware that an Honorverse movie was more than remotely in the works. Then my heart leapt in my chest the other day when I was perusing the latest issue of Diamond Distribution's Previews and came upon a solicitation for this:

Actually taken from the Image Comics web site [link]; Note that the covers are in reverse order:  D, C, B, A

I am on this! Even some deterioration of the tone on Weber's message boards [link] over the past couple of days from excitement to a degree of rancor that the imagery departs fairly radically in certain ways from the textual descriptions in what has hitherto been solely a prose body of work has not cooled my excitement. I've been wanting to see the adventures of Honor Harrington in live action for the fifteen-plus years since I discovered the series, and it looks like that is indeed the endgame here, but along the way it looks like we could get so much more – a truly multimedia experience. I've never really been into role-playing games (and it's my understanding that some form of those exist already, and have for some years), but I might even check those other dimensions of this initiative out, just for the heck of it – and to show my support. It all kicks off with a comic series that debuts in only a couple of months, and will hopefully blossom from there into something truly magnificent. Only time will tell.

Target Lancer and Ask Not (The Memoirs of Nathan Heller, #15 and #16, 2012 and 2013)

By Max Allan Collins

These are the latter two acts in a trilogy that, at least at this time, bookends Collins’ most voluminous body of work, the Nathan Heller Mysteries, which began in the 1980s with “The Frank Nitti Trilogy” (set in the 1930s-1940s) and end, at least for now, with “The JFK Trilogy” (set in the early 1960s).  The opening tale of the latter-day trilogy was, of course, Bye Bye, Baby (2011).  Interestingly, the time displacement between historical setting and publication era has remained about fifty years, although the 1980s-2010s interim has seen publication of various other tales, both novels and short stories, set in more randomly ordered eras between the 1930s and the 1950s….  Collins has been spinning tales in the long career of Chicago detective Nate Heller for an equally long time; I’ve not been reading them nearly so long, only discovering them about a decade ago.  But I have thoroughly enjoyed the entirety of the series (well, except for one novel which inexplicably has remained unread on my bookshelf for several years – for some reason the opening of Damned in Paradise just hasn’t grabbed me the few times I have attempted starting it).

The Superman Files: The Story of Kal-El, Compiled by Brainiac 5

“Translated from the Original Interlac” by Matthew K. Manning (2013)

This is an interesting coffee-table book published rather late during this just-ending 75^th anniversary year of the first appearance of Superman. The simplest, most straightforward short description is that it comprises an in-DC-Universe biography of the greatest super-hero of the 21^st century compiled from the perspective of his 31st-century comrade in the Legion of Super-Heroes, Brainiac 5.* Generally speaking, it combines commentary from Brainiac 5 with documentary material from the Man of Steel's own journals, news reports, and sundry other faux “sources” to form a more-or-less cohesive narrative stretching from background on his lost homeworld of Krypton to the 2013 present. It does fall short of being a comprehensive history of the character in that virtually no account is taken of materials published before ca. 1985 when the Crisis on Infinite Earths remade the DC Universe and was followed by the 1986-1987 Man of Steel mini-series reimagining the flagship character with a stripped-down, more cohesive continuity that would prevail for approximately the next 25 years. But over the last quarter-century, as far as I can tell, most everything, every major event and story-line, is reconciled into a fairly organic whole that hangs together remarkably well. There are various contradictions intrinsic to the ongoing nature of the comic-book medium, with its serialized, continuous narrative inevitably necessitating period rewritings of the internal history along the way (termed “retcons” for “retroactive continuity”**), but even these are accounted for as far as possible via Brainiac 5's acknowledgment of the various chronal discontinuities that have become virtually a staple of DC's story-telling – with the most recent Flashpoint Event that gave birth to the current “New 52” and its sometimes radically different DC Universe that began in 2011 being frankly acknowledged in the final few pages. Even if you have read Superman continuously from the mid 1980s to the present (which I have not, mainly reading a few years from the beginning as well as the last half-dozen years or so, with scattered specific story-lines in between), I can imagine fans of the character paging through this large volume with immense enjoyment, reveling in the variety of art selected from across that period, generally presented as if photographs posted into a scrapbook, with attendant commentary and textual pieces telling the overall story as if from a variety of perspectives and viewpoints. I know that I have done so, since receiving it from my wife and son for Christmas.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)

Directed by Peter Jackson

Well, here I am for the second Hobbit movie, as late or later seeing it than I was the first last year [link]. December is just an intrinsically busy time of year what with end-of-semester duties, holiday preparations, and so forth. Plus I had a very bad cold on top of a pile of essays to read over the opening weekend. Long and short, as much as I was looking forward to it, I seem to be the last person I know who wanted to see it who has seen it!

Also, whereas last year the delay in seeing it meant that my only option was 3D, a format I generally do not prefer, this year my only option was 2D. Frankly, I did not miss the 3D, although I may well have opted for it if I had a choice, based on the recommendation of a couple of friends. Oh well. I don't think my enjoyment of the movie suffered in the least.

Treecat Wars (A Star Kingdom Novel, 2013)

By David Weber and Jane Lindskold

This is the third in the series ancillary and remotely prequel to David Weber's ever-expanding Honor Harrington series of interstellar war and politics. It is a more direct sequel to the second young-adult “Star Kingdom Novel,” Fire Season [link], than was the latter to the first volume, A Beautiful Friendship [link]. This will be a short post since I don't have a whole lot to say about this book that wouldn't be repeating what I said about the other two. I love virtually anything set in Weber's Honorverse, and this story continues the tale of Honor Harrington's several-centuries' great-grandmother Stephanie as she continues to grow through her 'teen years, dealing with consequences of her discovery of the treecats of her new homeworld Sphinx as well as the various issues facing any normal teen-aged girl.

The major themes introduced in the first two books continue to be worked out in this volume: 1) the continuing conflict between humans of the Manticoran Star Kingdom as well as the wider galaxy as to whether to regard the treecats simply as incredibly clever animals or as sentient beings with “human” rights – and if the latter, what should be the relationship and interaction between humans and their “more primitive” neighbors?; and 2) new conflict between treecat clans stressed to the point of crisis by the ecological catastrophe of the recent “fire season,” with autumn advancing and Sphinx's long, hard winter approaching swiftly. But this time, except for at the very beginning and the very end, the story is told in parallel narratives as Stephanie and her friend Karl are dispatched by the Sphinx Forestry Service to receive three months forestry training at the University on Manticore, a rare opportunity for interns who are not full forestry agents – but which means that Stephanie is separated by the gulf between neighboring worlds from her new boyfriend Anders … who remains on Sphinx with the group of xenoanthropologists headed by his father but finds circumstances compelling him to spend a great deal of time in the company of Stephanie's best friend Jessica with predictable (even were it not broadcast on the inside front cover text) results. Once again, it's a well-written and engaging tale that weaves another thread into the growing tapestry of Weber's fictional universe.

Cheers! – and Thanks for reading!

Shazam! (DC 2013, The New 52!)

By Geoff Johns and Gary Frank. Reprinted from Justice League #7-11, 0, 14-16, 18-21 (2012-2013)

Well, nobody's more surprised than me that I ended up buying this collection, and in hardcover to boot! From the very beginning of the New 52 version of The Hero Formerly Known As Captain Marvel, I found so many things to dislike about Geoff Johns' portrayal, mainly centering on the surly characterization he imparted to Billy Batson, which seemed very much a stereotypical obnoxious brat just like his similar and nearly simultaneous portrayal of young Bruce Wayne in Batman: Earth One. That wasn't the only aspect of the “updating” of the story that I didn't care for, to be sure. The new Dr. Sivana, bulked up and looking more like a cheap Lex Luthor knock-off, also rubbed me the wrong way. And the mess just seemed to get worse and worse as month after month of the back-up series appeared in the pages of Justice League, what with Billy and Freddy first attempting to capitalize on Billy's new powers to make money, then considering Billy's new adult appearance as a way for them to get alcohol. For someone like me, who loves the simple, almost childlike wonder and charm of the original Captain Marvel, which has, however imperfectly, informed most of DC's portrayals of the character hitherto (Dark Mary Marvel and subsequent developments being lamentable departures from that model, essentially exceptions that prove the rule), it seemed like these newest horrors were just going from bad to worse. It was heartbreaking.

And then...

The Date of Christmas Revisited

Two years ago I posted regarding what was then my new-found realization that the widely held notion that the specific day of the year upon which Our Lord was born is unknown and that the prevailing celebration of that birth on 25 December owes more to pre-Christian pagan custom is incorrect, that there is indeed solid Biblical evidence, based on the Archangel's appearance to Zachariah, that the Nativity did take place some time in what according to the current Gregorian Calendar would be late December.  As has, in my mind at least, according to good medieval thinking, become a custom ("twice makes a custom"), I re-present that post, followed by a few notes and further references.

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