A Very Ryan North Friday

Ryan North is a writer who has slowly but surely made his way into a position where, whenever his name is attached to a project, I have to have a look. Sure, I'd read Dinosaur Comics on-line and had a good laugh. But when he started writing the Adventure Time comic, and perfectly capturing the whimsy, wit, and occasional tragedy of Finn, Jake, and all their pals, I really took notice. And with the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl from Marvel, one of the most joyful (and dense) comics on the racks, I moved from impressed to enamored. So, today, I'm going to focus on a couple of North's long form projects, things I've read recently that have been a real ray of sunshine.

Over the past few years, Marvel has developed a nice program of original graphic novels. Usually stand alone and new reader friendly, some, like Avengers: Rage of Ultron, wind up being important to main continuity, while others, like Jim Starlin's most recent Thanos trilogy, are delights for old fans who get to revisit old characters and creators that don't get as much play in the main MU anymore. But the most recent,released a couple weeks ago, is a giant, standalone Squirrel Girl story too big for the regular ongoing. From the regular creators of the monthly title, Ryan North and Erica Henderson, this hardcover is entitled: The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Beats Up the Marvel Universe! And boy howdy does she ever.

For those of you who don't know Squirrel Girl from her appearances in Avengers comics, in her own series, or in my reviews, well Squirrel Girl is Doreen Green, college computer programming student and superhero. Along with her friend and roommate  Nancy Whitehead, fellow superheroes Chipmunk Hunk and Koi Boi, and her best squirrel pal, Tippy Toe, Squirrel Girl fights crime, but often stops crime without violence by talking and reasoning with her foes. Which isn't to say she can't kick some butt when she wants to. Unbeatable Squirrel Girl is a fun, all-ages series, and this graphic novel provides everything you need to know about Squirrel Girl and her crew is you haven't read anything before, but is full of fun for longtime Squirrel Girl fans.

The core conceit of the graphic novel is a simple one: after winding up in a device created by the High Evolutionary that Tony Stark was puttering around with, Squirrel Girl winds up getting duplicated. The new Squirrel Girl, named Allene (Squirrel Girl's middle name), starts out as the perfect partner for Squirrel Girl, but after a couple days, takes a darker turn as she decides that the world would be better off run by squirrels. And so, while also fighting her better half, Allene decides that she needs to beat up all the other heroes and villains, as they could be a thorn in her side. And since Doreen is the unbeatable Squirrel Girl, you know she's going to win in the end, but she's never had a tougher fight than against her own doppelganger, and there are plenty of twists and turns along the way.

It's hard to review or discuss anything Squirrel Girl without just saying, over and over again, "Its just so much fun!" That's what defines this book, the pure unbridled joy of living in this big crazy superhero world. And even in what is possibly the most dire adventure in Squirrel Girl's series to date, that joy isn't lost. You still get quips, you still get adorable squirrels, and you still get more Marvel Universe Easter Eggs than any book I can remember in recent years. When it says that Squirrel Girl beats up the Marvel Universe, she does it, because there are more characters in here than you can shake a stick at. And not just big names like Iron Man (whose fault this all is), Spider-Man (who has a thing or two to say about clones), and Thor (whose hammer is super important to the story), but characters like Lady Octopus and Mysterion (knock off Spidey villains, unite!) and the newly created Johnny Fishlips, who... has fish lips, I guess. Oh, and Deadpool pops up, and while we all love Deadpool, Deadpool in an all ages sort of story usually wouldn't work, but it does here for a fun little gag. I should point out, though, that Deadpool is a regular presence in Unbeatable Squirrel Girl thanks to Doreen having a full set of "Deadpool's Guide to Supervillains" trading cards, which she uses for background info on various villains, and there are plenty of those in here too.

So, I've talked about the fun and the excitement, but there's another thing that makes Squirrel Girl great, and that's that the character (and the book) has a huge heart. At the end of the book, a supporting character is near death's door, and instead of having a funeral for yet another supporting character in the Marvel Universe, Squirrel Girl gets the collected heroes, who have defeated Allene (I know you might think that's a spoiler, but guess what: the good guys win), to work together to save a life. With tears in her eyes, she says to Iron Man, "We have the best heroes on the planet gathered right here, and you're saying we can't save her? You shut up with that!" And then she talks to the heroes, gets them to work together, and they save a life. Because it's what heroes do. It's a noble, heart-warming moment, and in what feels like an increasingly cynical Marvel Universe, it's a breath of fresh air.

Oh, and two important things I want to point out about reading a Squirrel Girl story by North and Henderson. There is no comic from either of the Big Two out there that is this dense, and I use that phrase in the best possible way. Most comics, I can sit down and breeze through in ten/fifteen minutes, and most original graphic novels or trades in an hour and change. A Squirrel Girl takes twice that, between how packed with dialogue and panels the pages are, and with the little text commentary at the bottom of most pages. And don't even think about skipping that text at the bottom of the pages! It's like the footnotes in a Discworld novel: a lot of the best jokes are down there.

I've talked a lot about story here, but this is a tour-de-force for artist Erica Henderson as much as for Ryan North. Henderson gets to draw everybody in her trademark style, and they all look great. Her pages are exciting and fluid, but never busy, and you can pick over them for ages looking for all the cameos she has in there. I also love how each character looks so different. It's so easy to get away with having a handful of standard faces/bodies in comic book art, but Henderson's characters are all very different and very distinct. And those different faces are all wonderfully emotive, with big eyes and open expressions that help tell the story as much as any word. It's also impressive to note that Henderson not only pencilled and inked (with an ink assist from Tom Fowler) the whole book (except for those Deadpool Villain Cards, those came from series regular colorist Rico Renzi), but she also colored it herself, and did a stellar job of it.

Oh, and before I move on, let me point out that the production backmatter is really enjoyable on this book, and you really should read to the end, even if you're usually the type of reader who isn't into that stuff. Trust me. If you've ever seen a Marvel movie, you know that things can happen after the credits.

Now speaking of Ryan North and fun, I also just finished my umpteenth journey through his choosable-path adventure book, To Be Or Not To Be. For those if us who were children of the 70s and 80s, you might remember this as Choose your Own Adventure (which is a phrase with a copyright, so to quote Groundskeeper Willy, "Shhhh, you wanna get sued?") story. But in this case, it's the story of Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, the greatest tragedy ever written, only you get to make the decisions!

Now, I know what many of you are thinking, "Aw, man, Hamlet was such a whiner. I don't want to get into his head." Well, you don't have to! First, you can make Hamlet into a man of action, which is awesome, but there are two other options as well. One you can play as Hamlet Sr., the ghost, who can go attempting to exact ghost vengeance on his crappy brother, Claudius. Or, and I can't recommend this highly enough, you can read through the path as Ophelia. And Ophelia is awesome! She's a scientist, she knows who she is and what she wants, and she's just badass. My favorite path/ending so far has been Ophelia decides that all this noise in Denmark is the pits, and so she goes off on vacation in England where she captures some terrorists and becomes this awesome spy! That's a way better ending than drowning herself!

And if all that isn't enough, there are plenty of one page illustrations that tie in to the endings form some really great comic book artists, including Noelle (Nimona, Lumberjanes) Stevenson, Becky (Demo) Cloonan, Chip (Sex Criminals, Jughead) Zdarsky, John (Bad Machinery, Giant Days) Allison, and a bunch more.

Seriously, folks, I can't recommend To Be Or Not To Be highly enough. I've written before about my love of Shakespeare (I'm going to an event in a week where I get to see an original First Folio and I'm giddy over it), and this is a great way to enjoy the world of Shakespeare even if you're not into him. It's fun, it's fresh, it's hilarious in places. You can follow along with Yorick's skull icons to follow the path of the play, or go off on whatever flights of fancy you can come up with within the book. Seriously, do yourself a favor, and go out and buy this book or get thee to a nunnery!

Both Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Beats Up the Marvel Universe and To Be Or Not To Be are available wherever books are sold, and at may finer comic book stores.

Recommended Reading for 2/26: Superman Versus the Ku Klux Klan

The title of this book and this post, if you are unfamiliar with the history of it, paints a very vivid picture. You can see Superman, the man of steel, swooping down and grabbing the white garbed members of the racist Ku Klux Klan and taking away their weapons, tying them up, and leaving them for the authorities. And while a remarkably satisfying fantasy, that is sadly not how life works in the real world, and not what this book is about. This book is non-fiction, about the dawn of comic books, the dawn of the Klan, and how they came to intersect in 1946, when the Adventures of Superman radio show aired a series of episodes aimed to teach kids about tolerance and about what was wrong about the KKK.

Rick Bowers book, a YA book geared for middle shcool on up, has two narratives that run separately for the first two-thirds of the book. The first is well trod territory for comic book scholars and fans: the story of Jerry Siegel, Joe, Schuster, and the creation of Superman. The story of two kids from Cleveland and how they came up with the iconic hero is a story of the American dream, but Bowers does also get into Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz, the men behind what would become DC Comics, and some of their less positive traits. There are lots of books that discuss this stuff, I've read more than one, but Bowers presents in a quick, concise form that doesn't get bogged down and gives readers who don't know these stories of the Golden Age of Comics a good entry into them (if you're interested in knowing more about this aspect of comic history, I couldn't recommend Gerard Jones's Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book highly enough).

The the narrative is the story of the Ku Klux Klan, and of Stetson Kennedy, a writer who stood against them. In case you're unfamiliar with the KKK, they are an American society dedicated to racial and religious purity; this means white, Protestant men. They wore white cloaks and hoods, and since the inception of the society in the wake of the American Civil War, have been responsible for uncountable numbers of acts of racial and religious oppression, including harassment, assault, and murder.

Stetston Kennedy was a southern writer and civil rights advocate, who worked for Roosevelt's New Deal collecting stories of workers in Florida, as well as many other writing projects over the years, usually aimed at calling out racists and bigots of all stripes. Bowers does point at the Kennedy was a shameless self-promoter, so often his own stories inflated his own roles in his stories of going undercover in organizations like the KKK, but he was still an engaging figure who did put his life on this line, and whose work with the Anti-Defamation League helped provide inside data on the KKK that was used in 1946.

In 1946, in the wake of World War II, the Adventures of Superman radio show needed new villains and a new direction, so producer Robert Maxwell decided to try to give the series a message, to make it educational: he wanted to use the radio show to talk about tolerance. And after an arc that was a success, featuring a former Nazi spy as the villain, he moved on to a more present threat: the resurgent Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Working with the Anti-Defamation League, who provided intelligence by way of Kennedy and other Klan infiltrators, "The Knights of the Burning Cross," shed light not just on the racism and ignorance of the KKK, but the avarice and disingenuous nature of its leaders.

While the material is heavy and dark, and is never handled with anything but the utmost respect, Rick Bowers prose style and is light and easy to read. While the narrative of the first two third of the book bounce back and forth between the comics business and the life and death stakes of the history of the KKK and its repeated rises and falls across the American landscape, neither narrative is lost in the other. And Bowers does his best to balance the more fantastic assertions made by Kennedy, about his sole responsibility for the intelligence, and the wonderfully sentimental but far from factual idea that Superman alone put the Klan back in its grave (if temporarily) in the late 40s.

On a personal note, there was something in the book that really impacted me. I'm a born New Jersey Jew, about as liberal as they come. I look around and I live in what I view as a predominantly blue state with many progressive people, vastly outnumbering the voices of hate. I know intellectually that isn't true, but part of what gets me through the night is thinking I live in a place that isn't all that bad. What I had sort of known, but never really read, was the KKK's largest bastion in the North during the 40s was in New Jersey, and it also headquartered the US Bund, the American wing of the Nazi Party, and that the KKK and the Bund had massive joint rallies in New Jersey before the war really broke out.

I think in the time where superheroes are big business, and a big business that seems increasingly aimed at an adult audience, we can forget the power the superhero has with kids. The story of Superman being used as a way to teach kids about accepting people for their character, and not their race or religion is something the people who produce Superman for the media should remember. To know what the Man of Steel once did, well there's some learning from history to be done here.

Superman Versus the Ku Klux Klan is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

Recommended Reading for 5/10: Wayne of Gotham

Novels based on popular comic book properties vary in quality as widely as the comics themselves. Many of them are fairly simple stories, not really trying to reinvent the wheel, and just trying to capture the feel of the comics; these can be well written, but aren't doing anything special. What I feel these writers miss is the simple fact that the novel is a different format, and thus plays by different rules. Without the visual component, a novel has to be more introspective, allowing the reader more inside the character. Also, with the novels taking place outside continuity, writers have more latitude to make changes and take characters down different paths. There have been some very successful comic book novels; Peter David's Incredible Hulk: What Savage Beast comes to mind, exploring plots I felt he had wanted to work into his comic run but would have changed the Hulk too greatly. Author Tracy Hickman's Wayne of Gotham is another interesting comic book character novel, and one I feel succeeds in the main.

Wayne of Gotham is set in the present, but casts Batman's origins firmly in a specific time, with the death of his parents happening in 1971, thus establishing this Batman as the aging crusader. This isn't the always young crusader, but an aging man who is hanging onto his quest. The novel was released early last year, shortly before The Dark Knight Rises, and I wonder how much that movie influenced the decision to publish a novel that is another last Bruce Wayne story, although it ends in a very different manner than the film. There are distinct similarities between the two: Bruce is a recluse in both pieces, having hidden from Gotham. But in Hickman's world, this is to dedicate more time to his crusade as Batman, versus Nolan's where he seems to have given up.

Hickman's Bruce Wayne is a man who has decided that the world doesn't need Bruce Wayne. He spends all his time refining his crime fighting equipment and hasn't been seen outside the Manor in years. His relationship with Alfred has grown strained as well, with Bruce feeling like the loyal retainer is more judgemental than he has right to be, and as the novel progresses this strain grows as Bruce feels that Alfred is hiding something from him. I feel like Batman's one, inviolate relationship is the one he has with Alfred, that he is Bruce's father figure, and that their trust is something that cannot break. But I realize this isn't the DC Universe, and that showing the splintering is a good indicator of how far Bruce has gone, and how much he has changed.

The highlight of the novel for me was the fact that it is as much the story of Thomas Wayne as it is of his son. The novel flashes between the present, as Batman investigates strange crimes that seem connected to his father's past, and to 1958, when a young Thomas Wayne returns to Gotham from medical school and his own crusades, as well as his relationship with Martha Kane, the girl who lives in the next mansion over. The Waynes have rarely been given much of a personality; they serve instead as an ideal in the mind of their son. The relationship between fathers and their children, and how we look at the generation before us, is one of the central themes of the novel: Bruce learning about the humanity of his father; Thomas's tenuous relationship with his father, Patrick; Lew Moxon, the young man who wants out of "the family business" and his father, Gotham mobster Julius Moxon, Alfred and his father Jarvis, and one final relationship that only becomes clear at the end of the novel.

The actual case Batman in investigating is a very interesting mystery. Hickman understands that Batman is the world's greatest detective, and provides a trail of clues and false leads for Batman to follow throughout. Respected Gotham citizens are suddenly committing crimes; the supercriminals of Gotham are acting out of character; and someone seems to know that Bruce Wayne is Batman. A mysterious woman appears on the grounds of Wayne Manor, seeming to know something about Thomas Wayne's past. It's a dizzying maze of a case that happily plays out in a logical manner.

Hickman's knowledge of the Batman universe is vast. He's either a fan on par with someone like, well, me, or did a tremendous amount of research. He uses villains as obscure as Spellbinder and Ventriloquist right next to classic foes like The Joker and Scarecrow. When he uses the Moxon's, it includes appearances by Mallory Moxon, the daughter of silver age villain Lew, who was created by Ed Brubaker in the early 00s. There are even references to Thomas Wayne's two sons, which references the apocryphal Boomerang Killer story that evolved into the twist at the end of Scott Snyder's Court of Owls storyline. The universe is an interesting combination of both comic and movie, as it does feature a Joker far more resembling Heath Ledger's take on the character, with makeup and long hair, as well as his personality as the avatar of chaos. While these are different takes on the universe, Hickman merges them into a coherent world of his own craft.

Part of the novel that gave me pause was the idea that there was more to the death of Thomas and Martha Wayne than simply a mugging gone wrong. This is an idea that has worked its way into many different incarnations of the Batman mythos, and the use of Lew Moxon, the man who hired Joe Chill to kill Thomas Wayne in pre-Crisis DC continuity immediately tosses up red flags that we're in for this sort of revision. In the "real" DC Comics universe, I prefer the killings to be just random murders; it gives Batman's quest that quixotic drive, that crime itself is what he is fighting, not one man. But here, it works and makes sense with the history that Hickman has built.

The book isn't without its flaws. Part of Hickman's interpretation of Batman is as the "gadget god" as he was described under Grant Morrison. While Batman has his gadgets, and they're an integral part of who he is and what he does, this Batman seems to rely on them as a crutch at times. The long descriptions of how his night vision, reactive armor bat suit, and sonar devices feel a bit superfluous, but that is my biggest complaint, so that's a minor quibble in a good book.

In the end, Wayne of Gotham is about Batman, his father, and his city. It's about what we leave behind, and how we must atone for what we have done in the past. It's a story that has rsonance for anyone who has ever had to learn a harsh truth about a family member you thought you knew. It's smart, well written, and embraces everything Batman.