Review: Fables: The Good Prince

If you haven't been keeping up with the comic book Fables, written by Bill Willingham and illustrated by Mark Buckingham (pencils) and Steve Leialoha (inks), then you are missing out on one of the best comics being produced today. I'd rank this up there with titles like Ex Machina and Promethea (which has completed its run) for the richness of the setting, dialogue, artwork, and plot.

And it just so happens that this particular volume collects a story that you can enjoy and understand without being very familiar with what has come before. A lot of characters get introduced, but you are told most of what you need to know about them. I didn't read either of the two graphic novels in the series preceding this one and didn't have a problem keeping up.

The basic concept is that the Fables of western lore (and to a lesser degree Eastern--you do get to see them but the focus is mainly on the western fables living in America) were driven from the various faerie kingdoms by a mysterious Adversary and they ended up in New York living in disguise among the mundane population.

This particular storyline follows the adventures of a character who has played a pretty minor role up to this point in the series as far as I can tell, one Flycatcher (the Frog-Prince), who assumes his old role as Prince Ambrose and sets out on a noble quest with very interesting results. I can't say too much more without ruining some of the suspense, but suffice it to say that Willingham & Co. have developed a knack of making even conflicts that have foregone conclusions interesting to read, due to a combination of excellent visuals, some witty dialogue, and an ability to pull back now and then from the big picture view and zoom in on the specific casualties of any given struggle.

It's remarkable to me that Willingham can keep such a vast cast of characters straight and distinctive enough from each other to follow their exploits. He sketches out characters nicely with bits of dialogue, summing up small characters quickly while stretching out explorations of main characters at length. And one of the pleasures of Fables is that you never know when a seemingly minor character is going to be further developed in their own story. The Good Prince is a perfect example of that.

And I'd be remiss if I didn't credit Buckingham's excellent graphic design for helping distinguish the multitude of characters that dance across the page.

I'd only collected the first couple volumes of this series, as I have gotten out of the habit of collecting graphic novels in the past couple years, but I'm seriously reconsidering.

Blogging Milestone

So, I was glancing at the sidebar and realized that I hit 172 posts (now 173). Which means that in 2009 I have officially surpassed my blogging totals from the previous two years [17 posts] by a factor of ten.

I leave it to the blogosphere and the Internet in general to determine is that is a Good Thing or not.

Review: Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld

This new young adult steampunk novel by Scott Westerfeld imagines an alternate World War I that pits British Darwinists--who have mastered the science of extracting and blending "life threads" to genetically engineer organisms--against German Clankers--who have engineered mechanical walking machines in all shapes and sizes.

It's a clever background. The Germans and their Austro-Hungarian allies have basically assembled a collection of steam-operated mecha, ranging in size from small one-man scouts to large, multi-legged land cruisers equipped with naval cannon. The Brits and their allies have aquatic and aerial navies assisted by their biotech. The wet navy has ships accompanied by giant Kraken-like "companions", while the latest airships used by the flyers are big floating ecosystems based on the greatly enlarged framework of whales.

These various creatures and creations are nicely illustrated in black and white pieces by artist Keith Thompson, scattered throughout the book.

The story starts out telling the parallel stories of two teens from very different sides of the tracks. Aleksander is the son of Archduke Ferdinand, on the run from would-be assassins following the political murder of his mother and father. Accompanied by some loyal house retainers, he helps pilot a walking talk (the Cyklop Stormwalker) to a hideout in the Alps. Deryn Sharp is a young girl determined to make her dream of becoming a member of the Royal Air Corps a reality (in memory of her late airman father), despite the fact that the military has a strict no girls policy. So she disguises herself as a boy with her older brother's help and assumes the role of midshipman Dylan Sharp.

The book alternates chapters in each character's story, until the narratives intersect about halfway through as strange events throw the unlikely pair together on an isolated glacier. Each teen has to adapt to new circumstances and plays a key role in helping their respective sides through a tough scrape. At this stage of their stories, at least, there is a friendship but only the barest hint of romance.

The book clearly demands a sequel, as we're left halfway through the story, though not really on a cliffhanger. And the afterword makes it clear that a sequel is in the works.

As Westerfeld says in his Afterword, "Leviathan is as much about possible futures as alternate pasts. It looks ahead to when machines will look like living creatures, and living creatures can be fabricated like machines." The book interlaces this futuristic element with bits of social issues, such as aristocracy and the role of women in society, that are rooted in its turn-of-the-century millieu. As such, it's a good example of steampunk.

I'm not normally a big reader of YA titles, and this book didn't amaze me or anything, but it's full of clever ideas and likable characters and I think it would be a very good read for a kid interested in exploring the genre.

Review: BPRD The Warning

Most of the BPRD graphic novels to date have worked relatively well as stand-alone stories, with certain character revelations being introduced but the plots being decipherable (well, as much as they ever are) without a lot of familiarity with the earlier collections. Not so with this 10th collection in the series, which announces itself as the first book in the Scorched Earth trilogy.

The Warning tries to bring people up to speed, but I think it would be pretty confusing for those who haven't read several of the earlier graphic novels, such as Plague of Frogs or Garden of Souls. You've got legions of evil frog-beasts, strange devolved hominids building vast machines in the bowels of the Earth, visions of Cthuluesque monstrosities taking over the world, mysterious sorcerers appearing and disappearing in astral form, portents of a big destiny for Liz Sherman that belies her seemingly humble origins, and cryptic messages from the spirit of Lobster Johnston.

The city of Munich gets largely obliterated, the BPRD troops get some more serious gear, Liz gets kidnapped again by occult entities, and Abe Sapien starts acting exactly like Hellboy. Seriously, I don't know if the authors realize this, but in this storyline the personality transformation that began in Garden of Souls seems to be pretty much complete. Abe is talking and acting just as gung-ho, aggressive, and careless as Hellboy here. Still fun to read, but it just made me miss Hellboy actually taking part in these stories. I liked Abe more when they had more differences.

Overall, another good graphic novel, setting up a story arc that looks to deal out tremendous mayhem to Earth as ancient powers seek to reclaim their power and transform the planet into their playground. I'd be surprised if Hellboy himself doesn't make an appearance of sorts at some point in the process.

Review: Turn Coat by Jim Butcher

This is the lastest novel in the Dresden Files series featuring the wizard private eye Harry Dresden. More so than some of the other books in this series, this one is aimed at people who have been keeping up with the series, thought you could still enjoy it if you aren't as familiar with all the characters here and their relationships.

It starts out with a bang and keeps the momentum going. As I've said before, Butcher does a good job of keeping the tension building in these books. The Warden Morgan, who has been a long-time thorn in Dresden's side, shows up on Dresden's doorstep asking for shelter and help in clearing his name. Morgan has been accused of murdering a senior member of the White Council, the big collective of wizards that set and enforce the rules about magical behavior that mortals must follow.

In keeping with his character but struggling against his personal feelings toward Morgan, Dresden agrees to help out. And because lately Butcher feels compelled to throw everything and the kitchen sink from his setting into each story, the novel brings in the White Court of the vampires in addition to involving the White Council. And Butcher shows that his monster-building chops are still sharp by bringing a really scary skinwalker into the story. This isn't a Navajo witch-style skinwalker so much as it is one of the ancestral, supernatural beings that inspired such creatures.

The novel brings about some significant changes for Dresden's relationship with Warden Morgan and Warden Anastasia Luccio, as well as a potentially big transformation for Dresden's vampire half-brother Thomas. Dresden also establishes a sort of psychic bond with an unexpected entity, perhaps filling the void left behind by the fragment of a fallen angel with whom he shared his consciousness for a couple books.

Dresden's police detective buddy Karin Murphy isn't in the book much. We get some more insight into the different senior members of the White Council and more hints, though pretty vague ones, about the supposed Black Council conspiracy that Dresden has been trying to convince people about for the past few books. At least he gets some people to agree with him this time around.

I admit that at times Butcher's tendency to bring all the various factions together in a single place for major battle royales gets a little familiar. It's as though he's a action-film director whose movie budgets keep increasing, letting him stage bigger and bigger blockbuster finales. There is a good shapechanging duel in this clash, however.

Another book that I felt compelled to finish in a few days. Not a good place for those new to the series to jump in, but a good mix of action and character development. If it is formulaic in places, it is a reliable formula.

Review: BPRD The Garden of Souls

This graphic novel, written by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi, and illustrated by Guy Davis, continues the story of the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense that began in Mignola's Hellboy comics. Hellboy hasn't appeared in the BPRD comics for a while now. Instead we get Hellboy's former compatriots, the amphibious humanoid Abe Sapien, the pyrokinetic Liz Sherman, and bodiless medium Johann Krauss.

By this point in the BPRD series (Garden of Souls is the 7th graphic novel), Captain Benjamin Daimo (a horribly scarred marine who returned from the dead in a mysterious fashion) and occult specialist Kate Corrigan are also on the team. For those keeping score, the homunculus Roger is dead at this point.

Anyway, this story involves Abe Sapien following mysterious messages about his past life as the occult dilettante Langdon Everett Caul. He brings Daimo with him to Indonesia, where he ultimately ends up at a strange little outpost of Victorian mad scientists who walk around inside these extremely cool looking robot suits (they look something like the helmet of an old diving suit, complete with portals, to which mechanical arms and legs in odd proportions are attached).

These fellows, who belong to something called the Oannes Society, are holding hostage a psychic Egyptian mummy named Panya who was apparently resurrected in the 1800s and has been walking the Earth since then. Of course the Oannes Society also has a crackpot scheme that involves triggering massive tsunamis that will kill many of the people in Southeast Asia, whose souls will then be absorbed by these artificial bodies the mad scientists have constructed for themselves, so that they will become godlike as a result.

I won't spoil the story in terms of how the bad guys get defeated or what Abe learns about his past. It's all rather confusing.

The things I liked:

• The robotic suits worn by the Victorians are really, really cool looking. Guy Davis does an amazing job of drawing in Mignola's style.
  
• The backstory of Panya the mummy is actually really interesting, at least the flashbacks to her life in the 1800s after she is brought back and becomes something of a celebrity in certain circles, only to be sequestered and then forgotten.
  
• There is some nicely creepy stuff involving a message being sent via a young girl.

The things that were less satisfying:

• I could not for the life of me figure out why a pseudo-scientific cult of Victorians whose interests seem to revolve around ancient sea gods would want to keep prisoner a mummy from a desert country who has no apparent link to the sea. At all.
  
• Supposedly this reveals how and why Abe got transformed from Caul into his fishy form. And it does. Sort of. But not in a very satisfying way. And there's a very clear disconnect between the personality of Caul and that of Abe and no real explanation as to why he's so different now.
  
• After a while all the weird occult societies and their various plots start to blur together.

Still, it's an entertaining story with some nice visual designs and solid storytelling.

Review: Midwinter by Matthew Sturges

Picked this book up on a whim on the new books shelf at one of my local libraries.

It's the first novel by Sturges. He's a comic book writer whom I hadn't heard of, though apparently he's written some stuff in the Fables line that I actually might have read but not realized Bill Willingham had a partner on. And reading the acknowledgments, it looks like Chris Roberson, whom I saw at Armadillocon this year, was one of his readers and helpers with the novel.

Anyway, Midwinter is a fantasy novel set in a Faerie Realm. A former member of Queen Titania's Royal Guard gets released from prison to carry out a secret mission, so secret that he doesn't know exactly why he is doing it. He assembles some other prisoners to help him out.

It was a good if unspectacular book. Part of the problem was that I thought a couple of the main characters were pretty flat--there's a human in the party who does next to nothing and has no significant skills, which really stands out given all the magical abilities of the others. Sturges does about as much as he can with the lead protagonist, Mauritaine, who is one of those "incredibly competent and completely bound by his code of honor" types of characters. To be honest, I would have liked the book a little better if he hadn't been the main guy.

There are some good villains and some nice twists. I like the image of Unseelie Queen Mab's floating city. And I think Sturges does a good job for the most part of presenting the Faerie Lands and their history in a very economical fashion. The plot moves ahead without too many hiccups and the story sets itself up for sequels while still bringing the main plotline that it introduces to a satisfying conclusion.

So I'd recommend this, not as something that will amaze you, but as a good first effort by a writer who can craft a solid story and clearly has a vision for an intriguing world. The Dresden Files stories, though they have a very different feel, began in a similar fashion and just got better. I suspect Sturges has that same potential.