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I’ve long been a fan of Chuck Dixon's work in comics - he's written approximately a million comics (only a slight exaggeration), including character such as Batman, Nightwing, the Punisher and Airboy, to name just a few.
So I was anxious to check out his newest series of novels, Bad Times.
It’s a rip-roaring love letter to science fiction, the military and blood-and-guts pulp adventures, all rolled into a fast-paced novel.
It tells the story of a secretive group of scientists who invent a sort of Time Tunnel (how I loved that TV show), but when their first exploration team goes missing, they hire a group of ex-Rangers to try a rescue.
What they find is a mind-boggling, overwhelming menace that will challenge their skills and their instinct for survival.
It’s one of those books that ends far too quickly (thank goodness the second volume is already available).
I won’t be surprised to hear that a canny film director - or videogame producer - or comics publisher - has snapped this up.
A bloody good time!
Grade: A
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I finally got a chance to read this book: Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. It's both a history of the publisher and an analysis of the events that shaped the company, as written by Sean Howe.
Several friends had read this and recommended it, and it’s obviously a topic I enjoy, so I was glad to tackle this book.
It’s actually very good, covering the company from its rough beginnings through the '40s and '50s, into the "Marvel Age of Comics" in the '60s and '70s, through the editorial turmoil in the '80s and '90s, and the behind-the-scenes struggles in the boardroom as Marvel became big business.
If there were any mistakes in fact or timeline I didn’t catch them, and there were quite a few things mentioned here that I wasn't aware of.
Of course, there are things that the author overlooked or didn’t include, but that’s not a surprise, since Marvel’s history covers more than 70 years.
The writer even gives the company's central figures, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, reasonably fair coverage, though he takes a few jabs at Stan’s love of the spotlight, and focuses on some of Jack's more over-the-top comments toward the end of his life.
I suppose my only real complaint is that the writer seems dismissive of the comics themselves - wanting to assure us, I suppose, that they’re silly stories for kids (which some of them certainly are) and not something he takes seriously.
It's a shame that he couldn’t appreciate them more as entertainment for the times in which they were written.
Still, lots of good information in here, and I enjoyed it. Recommended!
Grade: B+
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