From The Beginning

From The Beginning: Dr. Seuss – And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (Book 01)

November 2, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]Welcome to my “From The Beginning” read of Dr. Seuss’s entire bibliography!

And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street was the second book released by the pseudonymous Dr. Seuss, and his first written explicitly for children.

(His first publication being his not-at-all sexual The Pocket Book of Boners, which was more of a joke book.)

And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937) – Dr. Seuss

CK Says: – Borrow It

Gender Diversity: None – every single character depicted is male; one woman is mentioned

Ethnic Diversity: “Rajah” riding an elephant, a Chinese man eating with chopsticks

Challenging Language: keen, outlandish, minnows, charioteer, Rajah, fleet (adj), Alderman, confetti

Themes to Discuss: Truth vs Exaggeration, racial stereotypes

Reading Time: 5-10 minutes

Young Marco has a problem. Every day he walks to and from school, and every day his father asks him to tell him what he’s seen, but after he relates his tale his father always replies, “Your eyesight’s much too keen.”

This is a theme I can sympathize with, as EV has a keen memory of fine details. She will sometimes comment weeks after an event on a particular phrase or the color of the buttons on a shirt.

Marco’s problem is a bit different. You see, if he only notices his own feet and a horse-drawn wagon, it doesn’t seem like enough to report on to his father. Thus, the wagon is now pulled by a yellow racing zebra whipped into a frenzy by a charioteer.

I was cautious of this book on my first read. We’ve now reached the age where EV is beginning to exaggerate intentionally and we’re teaching her what it means for something to be true. I want to encourage her imagination while emphasizing the value of truth. And To Think I Saw It On Mulberry Street does exactly that – it suggests that you ought to engage every aspect of your imagination to create a fanciful tale, but that in the telling its best to relate on the truth of the matter.

The illustrations are quite tame as Dr. Seuss goes. They mostly depict only the action of one animal and its cart down the street from a fixed perspective, even if the processing behind the animal grows to be quite elaborate.

and-to-think-that-i-saw-it-on-mulberry-street-interior Also, there aren’t many fantastical things – the people are quite people-like and the animals are all real. It took me a moment to realize a pair of giraffes were just giraffes because I was so intent on figuring out how they connected to some future fanciful beast.

As with many early Seuss books, there is a casual racism employed in casting different racist tropes into obvious roles. Here were have a Rajah riding an elephant and “a Chinese man who eats with sticks.” Neither of these are caricatures or especially mean-spirited, so with some guidance on the trope I’d say they are still appropriate for modern readers.

While this book wouldn’t top my list of Dr. Seuss acquisitions, I think it has a worthy message and not too much confusing language, plus a pleasing rhyming scheme. Any kid who has spent time watching passing cars or telling you about their day will be able to relate.

I’ll be back next Wednesday with the second Dr. Seuss book, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins!

From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – Stormwatch #1-3 & 0

November 2, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]WildC.A.T.s and Stormwatch were the two halves of the WildStorm whole that Jim lee and childhood friend Brandon Choi had dreamed up over several years leading up to the formation of Image comics.

WildC.A.T.s played with the familiar “gifted one” trope of X-Men plus the alien conflict borne out in present day of Inhumans. From the start, Stormwatch was something much more nuanced even if it featured its fair share of X-TREME characters and powers and shoulder pads.

Stormwatch is ostensibly the Avengers or Justice League International of WildStorm. It wasn’t just one team, but a global, UN-sanctioned network of powered individuals governed by a central eye in the sky in the form of the all-seeing Weatherman One. Instead of focusing on a the customary holy trilogy of super-powers as both Marvel and DC’s analogues always had, Stormwatch starts as a personal story of the captain of the most-elite team – Jackson King, AKA Battalion.

The first three issues of Stormwatch are a satisfying blockbuster that compares favorably to the Claremont/Lee opening salvo on X-Men, Volume 2 in 1991. Even if it lacks the deep history of that arc, it has the same sense of scope and constant, kinetic action. The same can’t be said for #0, which is mostly filler wrapped around two or three intriguing pieces of information.

The book looked damned great under the pen of artist Scott Clark, who got plucked from the relative obscurity of producing art for the superhero RPG Champions to anchor this WildStorm co-flagship. His figures have all of the heft of Rob Liefeld’s biggest bruisers with the coherence of overblown anatomy of Jim Lee, plus detailed backgrounds. Brett Booth isn’t quite as good on the #0 issue, but he’s suffering from a too-dark set of inks and colors muddying his line work.

Battalion isn’t the only memorable character here. Headstrong Diva is striking with her chalk-white skin, pink one-piece swimsuit costume, and long blonde hair. She quickly emerges as Stormwatch One’s second-in-command. Fuji is more than a generic bruiser – he’s a mirthful being of pure energy contained in a bulky gray suit that gives the impression of an two-legged elephant. The pair gets only limited panel time, but they connect more meaningfully than the snoozy WildC.A.T.s team before Zealot and Grifter arrived.

In a line of unsteady books from artists turned auteurs and publishers, Stormwatch quickly distinguished itself as a title to watch.

Want the play-by-play? Keep reading for a summary of the team’s debut. Here’s the schedule for the rest of this month’s WildStorm re-read – tomorrow we’ll go solo with Deathblow #0-4!

Need the issues? Stormwatch #1-3 & 0 have never been included in a collected edition! If you see a “Vol. 1” from this run, it’s actually the first volume of Warren Ellis’s later run on the title. You’ll need to purchase single issues – try eBay (#1 & 0, 2, 3) or Amazon (#0, 1, 2, 3)
[Read more…] about From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – Stormwatch #1-3 & 0

From The Beginning: The Complete Dr. Seuss Bibliography

November 2, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]My daughter loves to read Dr. Seuss’s The Cat In The Hat.

That’s true of a lot of kids, I’m sure. It’s probably the one book that has achieved the widest amount saturation amongst American toddlers since its original publication in 1957, aside from perhaps Goodnight Moon.

I’ll admit I had forgotten most things about Cat in the Hat when I first picked it up to read to EV a little over two years ago. I recalled that it rhymed, that it involved a home-invading cat, and that he brought a pair of Things with him.

I dimly remembered a few other Seussian tales – The Grinch, of course; The Butter Battle Book, which arrived in the throes of my toddlerdom; and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, which is very clever. The only other Dr. Seuss book we owned was Oh, The Places You’ll Go!, which was the last book the good doctor saw published in his life. It missed me entirely as a child, as it was published in 1990 – over 40 years after Cat! Actually, I only know it all all via Lindsay, who read it at a cast party in college.

That’s another story entirely.

Of course, at this point OCD Godzilla began to emit a mighty rumbling from deep inside my bowels. “Perhaps there is an everything Seuss box set you could acquire,” he growled from my innards. I looked, and there were quite a few – some as big as 20 books! None were close to being an “everything collection,” which would include more than 50 Dr. Seuss books.

(He also published many books under his own name, Theodor Seuss Geisel, and other pseudonyms – though he did not tend to illustrate those himself.)

Thank goodness for the library. They had every Seussian tale in their catalog save for The Seven Lady Godivas, which as you can imagine has been since censored from his catalog, and his hilariously titled first book, The Pocket Book of Boners, which really sounds like it might have more to do with a present day sports star or politician than be written by Dr. Seuss.

(“Boner,” by the way, is an early 20th century North American slang word that is a synonym to “blunder,” referring to “a clumsy or stupid mistake” – effectively, something a bonehead would do.)

dr-seuss-ew How did Dr. Seuss go from writing on the topic of Boners to inventing one of the world’s most famous cats to writing an inspirational masterpiece like Oh, The Places You’ll Go? I intend to find out in this special edition of “From the Beginning,” in which I read the good doctor’s entire oeuvre in order.

(Also, he was not an actual Doctor.)

I’ll start later today – not with Boners, but with Seuss’s first book for children, And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. Then, each week I’ll examine another Seussian tale. That’s a whole year of Seuss(!), unless you all love this feature so much that you want me to write it even more often.

Here’s the full reading list: [Read more…] about From The Beginning: The Complete Dr. Seuss Bibliography

From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – WildCATs #0-4

November 1, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]WildC.A.T.s: Covert Action Teams was the first book released from Jim Lee’s WildStorm imprint of Image Comics, and it has remained one of the most memorable thanks to his dynamic art and enduring characters like Grifter and Voodoo.

wildcats-v01-0002 Was it any good?

My answer is a qualified, “sorta?”

At the time, there wasn’t a better-looking book on the stands, aside from perhaps Todd McFarlane’s beautiful early issues of Spawn. Plus, WildC.A.T.s came equipped with an epic, centuries-long good versus evil plot coming to a head in the modern day – a story much deeper than much of what Marvel was fielding at the time.

So why the hedging on if it was any good? Of all the many awesome aspects of WildC.A.T.s, the actual plot and script of the book aren’t especially one of them.

WildC.A.T.s opens with a messy arc built on simple dual-missions – locate a newly discovered Gifted One while trying to wrest control of a powerful Orb away from their enemies, The Cabal, who are about to bring their hellish demon planet to Earth.

Jim Lee and his BFF and co-writer Brandon Choi play things very close to a Claremontian gameplan here, complete with an undefeatable warrior woman, a budding ingenue who saves the day, an indestructible boy scout, and several last-minute reversals. What makes the arc messy is no less than four total factions in the finale, which gives as much panel time to Liefield’s Youngblood as to the WildC.A.T.s.

As a result, we don’t get any real character moments – just slow moments between fight scenes. The good guys are good (if a little violent), the bad guys are bad (and also a little violent), and everyone wants the girl who can see Daemonites and the orb that crashed onto earth from space.

Luckily, some of these characters have enough cool implied that you’ll let it slide. Grifter and Zealot quickly steal the show as both the most-interesting and most visually-arresting characters – when they’re not on panel it feels like the book is running low on oxygen. This is especially true when Rob Liefeld’s Youngblood invades issues #3-4, as they’re just one big interchangeable lump of extreme costume designs.

wildcats-v01-0004 My distinct impression has always been that Choi and Lee were superior storytellers without a good story. I know that sounds contradictory. What I mean is that they clearly made up an amazing universe and some compelling characters, but when it comes to plotting them through an arc there’s not a lot that’s memorable. I feel as though if someone just told them what situation to put the characters in (as Chris Claremont would do on his arc), the book would be great.

Should you re-read this run to prepare for the WildStorm relaunch?

Despite nitpicks at the story, there’s no denying the impact of Lee’s bold artwork at the height of his early-90s powers. Plus, it’s clear that Lee and Choi have put a lot of effort into the world-building of the WildStorm Universe. That’s ultimately the saving grace of the lumpy introduction: the promise of the wider conflicts to come.

It’s terrific if you can’t get enough of Lee in his early prime, but storywise I’d say the “Killer Instinct” crossover with Cyberforce or Chris Claremont’s Huntsman arc pack more wallop.

Want the play-by-play? Keep reading for a summary of this introductory story. Here’s the schedule for the rest of this month’s WildStorm re-read – tomorrow I tackle Stormwatch #1-3 & 0

Need the issues? WildC.A.T.s #1-4 were collected way back in 1993 bagged along with #0 (so if you buy an unbagged copy, it might not include #0). Otherwise, you’ll need to purchase single issues – try eBay or Amazon (#0, 1, 2, 3, 4)

From The Beginning: Reading The Wildstorm Universe

November 1, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]DC Comics recently announced that they were bringing back the WildStorm characters as an imprint of DC curated by non other than Warren Ellis, who basically is always great and also who got his start on several WildStorm properties.

That makes this the perfect time to re-read the original WildStorm Universe! I’ll be doing that every day this month for my first ever “From The Beginning” comic read-along event – here’s the schedule, if you’d like to join in!

Not sure what WildStorm is or why this is such a great time to re-read it? I’ve got the scoop for you right here in my first ever edited video project for CK (plus, below in text).

WildStorm was Jim Lee’s imprint amongst the Image founders and WildC.A.T.s and StormWatch were his pair of flagship titles. WildC.A.T.s began in August 1992, literally in the same month as Jim Lee exited his universally acclaimed run on X-Men.

wildcats-v01-0001 Lee was one of six Image founders. The other 1992 launches were:

Spawn from Todd McFarlane Productions, owned by Todd McFarlane
Savage Dragon from Highbrow Entertainment, owned by Erik Larsen
Shadowhawk ShadowLine, owned by Jim Valentino
CyberForce from Top Cow Productions, owned by Marc Silvestri
YoungBlood from Extreme Studios, owned by Rob Liefeld

While I read a few books from each launch, it was Lee’s that stuck – probably because they were a therapeutic alternative to X-Men.

As luck would have it, news of the Warren Ellis relaunch coincided with me grabbing the last few books I need to do a complete WildStorm Reading Order binding project that includes literally every in-universe book they released from 1992 to the reboot of their continuity in 2006 (plus some TopCow, with whom WildStorm would frequently intersect).

I had been despairing about when I’d have the time or inclination to read all of those books to prep them for binding, but the announcement gave me a perfect excuse! Reading the first three years of WildStorm will be a great refresher on Lee’s original characters and concepts, plus it will give me the chance to get my comic binding maps in order.

I’ll be back later today with my first read – WildC.A.T.s #0-4!