Some non-comics books I've read recently.

Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel: The Marx Brothers' Lost Radio Show (Pantheon Books; 1988) What an unexpected treasure this book was. I forget exactly how I came across it. It was either mentioned in Noah Diamond's Gimme a Thrill: The Story of I'll Say She Is, The Lost Marx Brothers Musical, and How It Was Found (BearManor Media; 2016), or it came up in a library catalog search for Diamond's book (You'll note the titles share the words "Marx Brothers" and "lost"). 

The book consists of the scripts for the 26 episodes of a 1932-1933 radio show starring Groucho and Chico Marx entitled Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel, wherein Groucho played lawyer Waldorf T. Flywheel and Chico played his shiftless assistant, Emmanuel Ravelli (The show was originally, briefly called Beagle, Shyster, and Beagle, until a real lawyer named Beagle complained).

While radio was of course extremely popular at the time, the industry wasn't in the habit of recording each episode of each show for posterity, and so Flywheel was never recorded. Hence the show being lost. As to how it was found, the scripts were submitted to the copyright office of the Library of Congress, where they were put in storage...and apparently unearthed by this book's editor, Michael Barson. 

As to why it was just Groucho and Chico, well, Harpo's silent schtick obviously wouldn't have translated to radio very well. It's possible to imagine him in the show, I suppose, making the occasional honk on one of his horns to let the audience know he was there, but his character would have mostly been talked to and talked about, with the actor not actually having much of anything to do. (As for Zeppo, he was technically still part of the act at that point, but I guess they didn't need a regular straight man for the show.)

That means the entire show was, for the most part, like the occasional Groucho/Chico scenes from the Brothers' filmography. Lots of wise cracks and lots of puns—the latter usually followed immediately by Chico declaring "That's a some joke, eh?", preempting groans. The book may just constitute the longest and most dense example of Marx Brothers humor, certainly of the verbal variety. It's also among the densest comedies of any kind I've encountered, with almost every line of dialogue containing a joke of some kind; they are not all great jokes, mind you, but they sure are frequent. 

The basic law office premise lasts for a while, but as the show goes on, more and more often the characters find themselves in different situations and settings, some vaguely related to the legal business, others not so much (taking a walking trip vacation, going camping, stowing away on a cruise ship ala Monkey Business, etc.). 

It is thus a rather unusual sort of situation comedy, one in which the particular situation rather frequently changes, while the characters remain the same; it is the characters, after all, from which the humor emanates, rather than the particulars of the situation.

And for anyone who has seen much of the Marx Brothers' filmography, the characters here are extremely familiar. Groucho and Chico, of course, don't play Flywheel and Ravelli so much as they play Groucho and Chico, the same characters they play in all of their films. (If one hasn't seen any of their films, I wonder what they would make of the scripts in this book, as familiarity with the Marx Brothers' work makes it easy to imagine them physically in the stories of the show and to hear their voices in one's head; of course, if one wasn't a prior fan of the Marx Brothers, I'm not sure that one would even have any interest in reading this book.)

Some of the jokes will also sound awfully familiar to Marx Brothers fans. Again, the show was on the air from 1932-1933, which means after their Broadway success and their films The Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers and Monkey Business, during the same years as Horse Feathers (1932) and Duck Soup (1933) and before A Night at The Opera (1935) and A Day at the Races (1937).

Some specific jokes heard in their films, both those released before the radio show and those released after, show up, with whole sections of The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers being repurposed for the show, accounting for about two and a half whole episodes. (If you've seen those films dozens of times as I have, these episodes of the show will read somewhat tediously, although it is interesting to see the familiar routines slightly tinkered with, as with new stand-ins for the films' characters appearing, or with Chico assuming lines previously spoken by Zeppo or, more oddly still, Groucho himself.) 

The show works both ways, though. While jokes from some films are repurposed here, some of the specific gags used in the show appear in later films...and an entire film seems to have been based on the scenario of an episode of Flywheel. 

In one episode, Flywheel and Ravelli take over the management of a failing department store for one of their clients, who goes on vacation and leaves it in their care. This, of course, tracks pretty closely to the premise of 1941's The Big Store, wherein Groucho and Chico's characters are also named Flywheel and Ravelli, respectively. 

Though the Marx Brothers are, of course, immortal in the world of comedy, not all of their jokes are timeless, and this show contains some that have aged especially poorly.

The Brothers' treatment of women in their comedy is well known and, perhaps, even notorious. There's only one recurring female character in the show, Flywheel's secretary Miss Dimple, who is mostly there by necessity. When she's not serving as the occasional straight woman to bounce gags off, she's there to set the scene and move the plot along. Most shows open with her at her typewriter answering a phone; in the later episodes where the Brothers' characters are in a setting other than the office, she answers the phone and tells whoever is on the other line that they are not in, and where they are, setting up that scene.  

Almost all of the other women to appear are Margaret Dumont stand-ins (sometimes quite literally, as some of these characters take on her role from the sequences lifted from The Coconuts or Animal Crackers). They are of course subjected to barbs about being old, unattractive, overweight, lacking in intelligence or otherwise undesirable, the inherent cruelty of these jokes somewhat mitigated by the class differences between these ladies, who are inevitably rich society ladies, and the Brothers' characters, who are (here, especially) low-class, poor and even criminal (Especially Chico's Italian immigrant persona).

There are a few rather unfortunate, even ugly sections of racial humor too, of the sort that never really made it into the movies (two examples to the contrary to follow). There are two sequences that make some fun of Indian characters, and by "Indian" I mean both those from India (as in one episode where the characters are thrown off a train in their nightshirts, and are thus mistaken by a society lady as Indian spiritual leaders in their ceremonial robes) and Native Americans (as in a scene from an episode where Flywheel and Ravelli go camping and have an "Indian guide" named Chief Pain-in-da-Face). One joke in the latter scenario, a pun based on smallpox, actually shocked me.

There are also a few more fleeting racial jokes, including one about a Native American and another that refers to the yellow skin of Japanese people. 

The most interesting of them all, however, is a Groucho joke that echoes a rather notorious punchline of his from Duck Soup. 

After mentioning he may have been a little "headstrong" to another character in that film, he continues: "But I come by it honestly. My father was a little headstrong. My mother was a little arm strong. The headstrongs married the armstrongs and that's why darkies were born."

The reference to "darkies" here often comes up in discussions of the Marx Brothers' more controversial humor and whether it could be racist or not (The other scene pointed to by critics? The brief scene in 1937's A Day at the Races where they smear grease all over their faces and try to blend into a crowd of Black characters. There are certainly some other cringe-worthy moments in their oeuvre, but these two seem to be the most cited).

It's not hard to see why Groucho's reference to "darkies" would be offensive, especially coming as it does following a line about two families mixing, suggesting miscegenation. In fact, it seems the only way to read it. For years it was censored during television rebroadcasts of the film. 

The actual reference is probably lost on most people hearing it today (and long was to me until I read more about the Marx Brothers in adulthood), but Groucho was, rather nonsensically, referring to a now mostly forgotten popular 1931 song, "That's Why Darkies Were Born." That song, by the way, sure sounds pretty racist, its lyrical content evoking the problematic image of the happy slave. It was also originated in a Broadway revue where it was performed by a white singer in blackface.

The reference may still be racist, of course, but, at the time, it wasn't as completely random as it now seems.

Anyway, Groucho again makes a reference to "That's Why Darkies Were Born" in one of the Flywheel episodes. In this particular scene, Flywheel and Ravelli are acting as movie producers, and they pitch a scenario about a young woman's tragic story to a studio man named Blitzen.

CHICO: Boss, da rest of the story comes to me like a flash. Da wife, she feelsa very bad. She goes into mourning. She sits in da house all day long playing da piano. 

BLITZEN: In mourning and she plays the piano? 

CHICO: Well, she plays only on da dark keys.

GROUCHO: Certainly. That's why dark keys were born.

The joke doesn't really make any sense unless you're familiar with the song, as the radio audience of the time would have been. Today, it makes no sense, as the phrase isn't at all common. In fact, I only recognized it as a joke at all because I've read so much discussion of the Duck Soup reference. 

The Monster's Bones: The Discovery of T. Rex and How it Shook Our World (W.W. Norton and Company; 2022) As the sub-title states, David K. Randall's book is about the discovery of the first  Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons in 1900 and 1902, and naming of it in 1905. But it's a 235-page book, so it covers a lot more ground than that.

Randall bookends his novel-like non-fiction story meditations on "the monster" of the title, a prologue set at the American Museum of Natural History, and an epilogue about its place in our culture. 

Between them, is what is essentially the biography of the man who discovered those first skeletons in Wyoming, Barnum Brown, who led a big, bold life full of exciting adventures that spanned the last decades of the 19th century and most of the 20th. Travelling the world in search of dinosaur fossils and those of other prehistoric creatures, a writer could hardly ask for a better subject. 

And it also contains quite a bit of set-up, retelling the story of European science's discoveries of the true age of the Earth and of the first dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals, and the gradual grappling of such concepts as deep time and extinction after centuries of accepting the Bible's Book of Genesis as authoritative.

Thus, readers who have previously read books on the early years of the discovery of dinosaurs and early paleontology will encounter plenty of old friends within this story of Brown and the T. rex, a diverse set of historical characters that includes Mary Anning, P.T. Barnum, Edward Drinker Cope, Arthur Conan Doyle, Georges Cuvier, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, Thomas Henry Huxley, Charles Knight, Othniel Charles Marsh, Richard Owen and more...even Merian C. Cooper and Willis O'Brien, both of whom we will get to in a bit.  

While all of that is quite interesting, Randall's focus remains on the life of Brown and the discovery of the T. rex, the latter put in the context in various philanthropists and museums racing one another for bigger and better dinosaur bones to exhibit to the public, a race which initially seemed focused on the huge sauropods...until Brown found the biggest carnivore that ever lived. 

In this respect, Randall's book is both a thorough, well-written and quite readable retelling of the story of humanity's discovery of the dinosaur that is simultaneously the story of Brown and his most historic discovery.  

Quite surprising to me, as I neared the end of the book, I found that it dovetailed with something I had spent a lot of time thinking and writing about over the course of the last few years, the giant monster movie. See, for all his other accomplishments, Brown also advised "a former newspaper cartoonist turned marble cutter named Willis O'Brien." 

Today we know O'Brien for his later career, as a film special effects maestro who bought the title character and his dinosaur neighbors to life in 1933's King Kong. 

In 1914, O'Brien wrote to Brown for advice on dinosaurs, and the latter advised him on the subject, for what became O'Brien's The Ghost of Slumber Mountain, which Randall says was "the most realistic dinosaurs yet displayed on film" and was also the first time that a T. rex was "a screen villain."

O'Brien would later bring dinosaurs to life for 1925's The Lost World (in which Arthur Conan Doyle's allosaurs from the book are replaced with a T. rex) and then Kong, which famously featured the giant ape battling a T. rex. 

While Randall doesn't say so in his book, I think it's safe to say that the T. rex played an integral role in the development of the giant monster genre, given its prominent appearances in foundational films King Kong and Lost World...and, as I've read in another book during my research of giant monster in film, the T. rex also played a role in the development of the character we now consider the genre's standard-bearer. Along with the stegosaurus and the iguanodon, the bipedal T. rex, especially the upright standing one conceived and popularized artist Charles Knight, was an essential element in the creation of our old friend Godzilla. 

The Paranormal Ranger: A Navajo Investigator's Search for the Unexplained (William Morrow; 2024) In some parts of the world of paranormal investigation, a witness who has had multiple sightings or encounters can sometimes raise a red flag. After all, if creatures like Bigfoot or mysterious flying vehicles with inhuman pilots are so rarely seen, what are the chances that a single individual may do so twice, thrice or a half-dozen times?

Stanley Milford Jr., a retired Navajo Ranger who had spent over 20 years in law enforcement before writing The Paranormal Ranger, is one such individual who has had many encounters of various kinds. 

He has seen UFOs and, as a child, experienced unusual, equivocal phenomenon in his house that he attributed to the supernatural. He also saw what he believes was a skinwalker running alongside his car one night, and, years later, a strange, shadowy entity that confronted him while he was sleeping. He saw Bigfoot. An investigation into a haunted office building yielded plenty of activity, including a strange phenomenon that followed him around for years. And, most troubling to me, one night he awoke paralyzed in his bedroom to find a creature meeting the classic description of a "Grey" alien standing at the foot of his bed, apparently after it had examined him (He noticed his clothes were on inside out after the encounter).

That's...a lot, even spread out over a lifetime. But does Milford having experienced all of that himself necessarily provide reason to doubt him? Well, he was actively investigating the paranormal throughout much of his career, and if one goes looking for Bigfoot and ghosts and aliens, is it really that unusual that one will eventually find them? 

Among his other law enforcement duties, Milford and his partner Jon Dover pretty much accidentally became his department's go-to investigators of paranormal activity, a sort of real-life, southwestern Native American answer to The X-Files. 

Apparently, at one point an older woman had called the rangers regarding a Bigfoot sighting on her property—the creature apparently stepped into her sheep corral and walked off with one of her sheep in its arms—and the rookie officers sent to follow-up with her didn't treat her particularly well. She ended up filing a complaint with the department about them.

During a meeting, Milford writes that the chief stressed the proper behavior of Navajo Rangers as public servants. "From now on, reports like this are going to be investigated properly, and you two guys," he said, pointing to Milford and Dover, "are going to oversee these cases."

So this was their first investigation of the paranormal, following up with the woman, searching her property for signs of the creature and, above all else, making sure she felt heard, believed and cared for. 

Many other such investigations would follow, Milford breaking them up by subject throughout the last two-thirds or so of the book ("The San Juan River Bigfoot", "Cryptids, Curses and Cons", "The Old Man and the UFO", "The Window Rock Haunting"). 

Not all of these yielded tangible results for Milford. In fact, in some cases, he is relating the sightings or encounters of others that he investigated well after the fact, and what they did afterwards. In the case of the San Juan River Bigfoot, for example, they launched a large manhunt—er, Bigfoothunt, I guess—for the creature multiple people in the area had seen repeatedly, but no one from law enforcement managed to lay eyes on the creature, nor come up with any more compelling evidence than the same sort of incidental evidence typical of such searches. 

In the case of "The Old Man and the UFO," they mostly just listened to his amazing story, about a UFO landing near his house, and its occupants seemingly searching for something around his property. 

I'm of two minds when it comes to believing Milford, as I so often am when I am reading books about the paranormal, particular of UFOs and aliens, which, for whatever reason, have always scared the hell out of me.

Part of me wants to believe him. He certainly sounds reasonable and sincere and, after all, giving one the benefit of the doubt seems to be the polite thing to do. Besides, Milford repeatedly stresses that part of the reason he wrote this book, and part of the reason he shared his own encounters with the paranormal (particularly in the case of the being in his bedroom), is that so often people who have had such experiences feel particularly troubled and alone, feelings that are only compounded by the fact that no one seems to believe them (and/or they fear no one will believe them), and he wants to stress that this is not the case. In other words, these things really happen to people, and their experiences and feelings are valid.

Another part of me though, a selfish part, wants to dismiss the experiences of Milford and some of the witnesses (again, particularly in the case of the being in his bedroom), because I don't want such sanity-strainingly terrifying experiences to be real. I don't want anyone to have to suffer such otherworldly fear and helplessness, and the thought of it happening to me fills me with an overwhelming dread. (I confess that, for the first few nights after reading that passage about the invader in Milford's bedroom, I was a little nervous going to sleep, repeatedly opening my eyes and glancing to the foot of my bed.) 

For that reason, I sincerely hope that Milford didn't actually have that experience, and perhaps instead had been suffering from sleep paralysis accompanied by a particularly vivid scary dream (He does mention sleep paralysis in that chapter but dismisses it as an explanation for what happened to him). 

Essentially a memoir centering on his own, personal encounters with the paranormal and his professional investigations into that world, The Paranormal Ranger tells of Milford's childhood, his parents' divorce leading to him being raised in two worlds, the more heavily Navajo world of his father (with its attendant superstitions and beliefs and practices regarding the supernatural world) and the more Western world of his mother, his early interest in law enforcement and his journey to qualifying for a career in it, and then, ultimately his experience with the paranormal, much of it secondhand, some of it firsthand.

One gets the sense that Milford probably has many other stories to tell (and thus other books in him), as this book focuses on only a handful of the more colorful investigations, in several broad categories of the paranormal.

Interspersed throughout Milford's life story at regular intervals are tales from the Diné Bahaneʼ, or "Navajo Emergence", a creation story that details the people's journey through several worlds. This will take on greater relevance in the final chapter, "Theories of a Navajo Ranger", wherein Milford outlines his own, personal unified theory of the paranormal. 

Essentially, he believes the universe consists of multiple dimensions occupying the same space, and that these dimensions can intersect with one another...or at least that particular entities can travel between these dimensions. 

This would explain how Bigfoot, for example, can seem to come and go without necessarily having the same sort of physical presence of other animals, or necessarily leaving the same sort of evidence behind that they do. In fact, Milford uses his own personal sighting of Bigfoot, in which the creature is unquestionably there in front of him, but then suddenly disappears, as an instance that solidified the idea for him in this chapter.

This theory is, of course, not a unique invention of Milford's, but his culture's creation story as well as his own experiences have reinforced this, and contributed to his current worldview, that, when it comes to the paranormal "there is no line," and that it's not so much a matter of belief, but of reality.

"Clearly, something in our human culture has gone wrong," he writes.

These paranormal events—UFO visitations, Bigfoot sightings, and hauntings—are happening at unprecedented rates for a reason. I have come to see them as a wake-up call for humankind—an awakening. Our planet is in crisis, multiple countries are at war, we have mass drug-overdose epidemics, and so many people are suffering. We must recognize how out of balance our world and lives are, how grotesque our treatment of the earth and one another is. And we must live better. We must do better. We must come back into balance with our environment and find clarity of purpose.  

I'm unsure to what degree I agree with this assessment, as, for the most part, it sounds like something one could have said about our planet at any time in the last century, maybe century and a half or so (Although it is true that the earth is in greater danger than ever before now, thanks to global warming and the climate crisis).

But then, I haven't had the experiences Milford has—thankfully; hopefully, I never will—and trying to find meaning in them seems to be a natural, healthy response. 

Given Milford's personal perspective, both as a Navajo and as a member of law enforcement, his take on the various phenomenon discussed in the book is particularly interesting and his book offers something of a new point-of-view not commonly written about realms of the paranormal, be they cryptozoology, ufology, ghosts or witchcraft. 

Weirdumentary: Ancient Aliens, Fallacious Prophecies, and Mysterious Monsters from 1970s Documentaries (Feral House; 2025) Well it's probably not hard to figure out what attracted me to this book. I mean, just look at that cover!  The title of the book or the subject of the book could have been just about anything, and I would have still paused to investigate given the presence of a Bigfoot-like silhouette...and that's before we even get to the old-timey UFO and the pyramids!

Writer Gary D. Rhodes tackles a very specific, but surprisingly large, genre of documentary film, that addressing some aspect of the paranormal, a genre which seemed to boom in the 1970s (And likely had a lot to do with all of the Bigfoot sightings of that decade). 

Though the credulousness of the filmmakers and the rigor with which they approach their chosen subject varies wildly from film to film, they are all essentially taking the posture of telling a "true" story. That might mean investigating or interrogating a subject, or it might seem to take the form of revealing something, but in each case, audiences were meant to at least take the possibility of the reality of something incredible like, say, aliens visiting Earth thousands of years ago to influence human development, or that there's something in the North Atlantic off the coast of Florida that endangers planes and ships, or that an unrecognized species of large, hairy humanoids might roam the wilds of North America.

Rhodes himself is not very credulous, and his writing in this sort of field guide to a particular type of film is filled with jokes about the subjects, questioning the likelihood of their reality and questioning those that may believe in them. Despite the often jocular tone, though, Rhodes is obviously a knowledgeable fan, and he's incisive in his analysis, admiringly discussing the gravitas of some celebrity hosts (Orson Welles, Rod Serling, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy), the sometimes impressive quality of the cinematography and the effectiveness of the music (In some instances, his references to a film or series' music were compelling enough that I found myself seeking taht music out online to hear it for myself).

In his introduction, Rhodes talks a bit about his thought process for what to call these movies, and how he landed on "Weirdumentary"; apparently, he had considered "Crockumentary," which, in addition to having the benefit of rhyming with the word documentary, offered an assessment of how reliable they might be, but decided it was a little too judgmental. 

The book offers a brief look at some 45 weirdumentaries, from 1970's Chariots of the Gods (based, of course, on Erich Von Daniken's book about ancient aliens) to 1981's The Man Who Saw Tomorrow (about Nostradamus and his prophecies).  

Rather than tackling the films chronologically, Rhodes breaks them into sub-genres that he explores in chapters devoted to each, including ones on prophecies, the Bermuda Triangle, monsters, speculative (often Biblical) history, ancient aliens and UFOs (And yes, those last two each get their own chapters).

Each gets a full-page illustration, of either a poster or image or images from the film, and then at least a page's worth of a write-up. 

The format thus encourages flipping-through and grazing perhaps more than reading straight-through. That, coupled with its size—it's eight-by-eleven inches—makes it a good coffee table book, or perhaps one you leave in your car or bag and turn to when you need something to read in a restaurant or on a lunch break or something.

The section I was most interested in was, of course, that on monsters. And here "monsters" just means the Himalayas' Abominable Snowman or Yeti, North America's Bigfoot or Sasquatch and Scotland's Loch Ness Monster. Other than that popular triumvirate, the only monsters mentioned in these films seem to be the Fouke Monster (which, of course, mostly sounds like a Bigfoot-type creature, save for some reports of three-toed tracks) and a couple of North American lake monsters. 

What a change from today, when cryptid creatures are apparently numerous enough and well-known enough that they can fill books, command a TV series like 2007-2010's MonsterQuest and the likes of Mothman are now pop culture icons (I think it was when Build-A-Bear started selling Mothman plush toys that I realized the West Virginia monster had officially gone mainstream).

In addition to the official weirdumentaries that account for the bulk of the page count, Rhodes begins his book with a chapter on what I guess we'd consider the proto-weirdumentary. These stretch back as far as 1923's Is Conan Doyle Right?, and include a discussion of the extremely unsavory-sounding but apparently quite lucrative 1930 pseudo-documentary Inagi, which involved a passage in which gorilla-worshipping African natives are said to sacrifice human brides to gorillas (A film which may or may not have had some influence on King Kong; it certainly seems like Inagi could have been one of the films in the back of Merian C. Cooper's mind while imaging his plot...or, perhaps, on the minds of the studio executives who greenlit Cooper's woman-imperiled-by-a-gorilla film). 

The book also includes a comic book connection that surprised me (despite, I noticed later, it being noted right there on the cover; I guess I was distracted by the Bigfoot). Weirdumentaries contains a lengthy foreword from Stephen Bissette, who is a film critic and scholar with particular affection for and expertise in weird low-budget horror films and Vermont films...although we know him best as a great comic book artist, having drawn much of Alan Moore's seminal run on Swamp Thing and created the masterful dinosaur comic Tyrant (Soon to be resurrected in an oversized collection, apparently).  

I was born in 1977 and thus missed what Rhodes dubs weirdumentaries the first time around, although I certainly saw (and was scared by) some of these in TV rebroadcasts and, curiously, played for us in grade school in the 1980s. I clearly remember the In Search Of... episode on the Loch Ness Monster, anyway (And I distinctly remember seeing something that discussed the Kecksburg UFO incident, but looking it up now, I think that might have been an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, one of the TV series that seems to be pretty directly descended from the weirdumentary).

Therefore, I was quite thankful to find this book, and to now be able to benefit from Rhodes' work. I might not have been around for the genre's boom decade, but at least now I have a catalog of sorts to guide me in pursuing its more interesting entries.    

An extremely belated review of All of The Marvels

All of The Marvels (Penguin Press; 2021) Despite practically vibrating with excitement as I read it and eager to talk to somebody about it as soon as I finished, I wasn't entirely sure if I should write about Douglas Wolk's All of the Marvels or not. 

As readers of this blog know, I generally write about everything I read or experience, especially if it's a comic book or somehow comics-related, something that, at this point, is less a vocation or a hobby and more of a habit—and, perhaps, not even necessarily a good habit.

This book, despite my initial understanding of it, turns out to be a work of literary criticism that attempts to reckon with the half-million page, 60-year mega-saga of Marvel's inter-connected comic book stories that, in Wolk's framing, are telling a single story, the biggest one ever told. As I read, I quickly realized that Wolk's book wasn't an argument for that way of looking at Marvel Comics, nor a detailing of the mad experience of reading their comics in a way that no one was ever meant to read them, nor a history of any kind (although various chapters address all of those things).

Rather, this was Wolk writing about the comics themselves (at least thousands of the tens of thousands he read), which, of course, meant that writing about All of the Marvels would mean that I would be writing about someone writing about people writing comics (And by "writing comics," I guess I actually mean creating them). 

Obviously, the book should and has been reviewed in various places, but I felt a little weird about doing so myself, as criticism of criticism seemed like a weird, more academic sort of ouroboros writing than any I've ever really engaged in before. 

Still, be it a bad habit or not, I'm going to proceed, urged on by, if nothing else, a desire to let any of my readers who haven't already read All of the Marvels know exactly what it is, and to recommend that they take the time to read it. 

Instead of a more formally organized piece, I'm just going to share a few random things about the book below, and I'll try my hardest to be brief (Which isn't easy for me, given the limitless space of the Internet and my lack of an editor). 

•So what took me so long to read this particular book, aside from the usual forces of procrastination, too many comics competing for my attention and my tendency to prioritize reading stuff I can get paid to write about versus reading stuff for fun...?

Well, two things. 

First, as you can tell by scanning any month or so of EDILW, I'm a DC Comics partisan (Though I read a handful of Marvel comics earlier and a stack of trades later, my time as a Marvel reader was basically 2000-2015 or so, and my familiarity with the publisher's 20th century comics limited to what I was drawn to in the Essential collections, which tended to be the 1970s monstrous superhero stuff, as opposed to the more straightforward superhero stuff). 

This book's claim that the stories of the Marvel Universe shared setting represented the biggest story ever told felt immediately, obviously wrong to me. Because, obviously, the DC Universe is far, far older, however one wishes to date the creation of the two settings. (By the debut of the character or feature these settings would grow out of? Superman debuted in 1938, the Fantastic Four in 1961...and, if one would prefer to start the Marvel Universe back to the debut of the original Human Torch, that's still a year after Superman. By the point at which the characters began crossing over on a regular basis? DC's Justice League of America debuted in in 1960...not only is that about a year earlier than the FF, but Stan Lee has repeatedly explained that he creation of the FF was in direct response to the success of DC's JLoA...I just recently read a version of his telling of this story in his introduction to the 2008 trade paperback collection of JLA/Avengers).  

I've heard the argument made (not by Wolk, but by others), that the DC mega-saga doesn't really "count" in the way that the Marvel mega-saga does because of DC's occasional attempts to reboot their own story, most dramatically in what we call the post-Crisis period of 1986 or so and the New 52 publishing initiative of 2011 (and probably a good half a dozen other times as well). But of course, those reboots are themselves part of the story, as each follows some big cosmic event where god-like entities meddle with the fabric of time and space, rewriting the fictional reality. There's never been a hard DC reboot that wasn't the result of a story; in those examples I just mentioned, these were Crisis on Infinite Earths (there had to be a crisis for there to be a post-Crisis, naturally) and Flashpoint, respectively. 

That said, Wolk addresses the existence of the DC Universe almost immediately in his book:

That sense of shared experience, of seeing dozens of historical threads and dozens of creators' separate contributions being woven together, is a particular joy of following the Marvel Universe (with a capital U), as both the company and the readers like to call it. The Marvel story is not the first or only one that works like that—DC Comics, Marvel's largest competitor, and other comics publishers have adopted the "universe" template too—but it's the largest of its kind.

A footnote then explains that DC was "slow to integrate" their comics into a coherent fictional world, and mentions the reboots. I am not necessarily convinced by this argument, and there are better ones to be made, like the fact that, since 1961, Marvel has been more deliberate about their shared setting, or that it's smaller, tighter-knit group of creators gave it a more distinct vision, or that Marvel's current pop culture cache makes it the more important universe at this point. That said, Wolk's book isn't really written for people like me, and I think that paragraph and attached footnote does the job of explaining why he wrote a book about Marvel's super-story rather than DC's. 

Also, I confess that, when I first heard about the book, I kind of assumed it was one of what I usually think of as "stunt memoirs," where a writer does something rather crazy for a year or so and then writes about the experience. Think A.J. Jacobs' 2007 The Year of Living Biblically and its ilk. 

I thought this, of course, because reading all of Marvel's comics is insane...maybe even more so than trying to follow the various laws of the Bible literally in the modern world. Wolk notes that, when he would talk about the project with others, more than one person brought up Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot character, whose origin involved reading 5,000 comics in a single sitting to win a bet and going crazy in the process.

•So if it's not what I assumed, what is All of the Marvels? Well, after a few chapters explaining what makes Marvel Comics such an unusual and worthy epic, the particulars of Wolk's methodology and pre-answering questions readers not already steeped in the comics medium and superhero genre might have, the book takes shape.

Wolk breaks out various threads of the overarching Marvel story and devotes a chapter to each. Within  those chapters he details their salient aspects, major themes, cultural significance, impact on the publisher and industry and medium. He does so with a keen eye and imaginative (but convincing, even compelling) readings that make a sort of sense of these improvised mega-stories that were never intended to make sense.

So, for example, in his chapter on Spider-Man, he defines its particular literary mode ("It's a bildungsroman, the story of how a youth becomes an adult"), and makes sense of it as a repeating cycle, in which Spider-Man Peter Parker achieves a form of adulthood or resolution to his lifelong conflicts, only to be knocked down again and have to start all over (And yes, Wolk does reference the Itsy-Bitsy Spider here). 

One might think of the real, true story of Spider-Man ending with, say Steve Ditko's departure from Amazing Spider-Man, or perhaps Stan Lee's, but Wolk manages to make it all make sense as a cohesive story, up until where he left off reading it (I should note that the Spider-Man story did reboot itself in the manner of any post-Crisis DC comic in the "Brand New Day" period, discarding a swathe of its own continuity). 

In addition to Spider-Man, which is the second such chapter of the book, Wolk tackles, in order, The Fantastic Four, Master of Kung Fu, The X-Men, Thor, Black Panther, the "Dark Reign" period, Jonathan Hickman's Avengers/New Avengers/Secret Wars storyline and, finally, Ms. Marvel Kamala Khan and The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. 

Why those particular threads of the Marvel story? It seems to be a mixture of their importance to the overall narrative and what Wolk liked the best or thought the best-made. (He admits as much in the chapter on Master of Kung Fu). Pop cultural significance doesn't seem to have had much to do with it. (You'll note the lack of Marvel Cinematic Universe important comics and characters like Iron Man, Captain America or The Guardians of the Galaxy, for example, or Deadpool or, most notably, The Avengers, who are only represented in that one specific writer's particular iteration of them.) 

The Hulk is perhaps the most conspicuous in his absence, given how long the character has been around and how relatively popular he has been at various points. One supposes that, had Wolk a bigger page count, we might have seen chapters on The Hulk or Daredevil.

In between those chapters are shorter interludes, devoted to such things as Lee, Kirby and Ditko and their working relationships or timelines of monsters, U.S. presidents and pop music in Marvel Comics. One particularly interesting such interlude temporarily reorients the entire Marvel saga around a single character, Linda Carter, who first appeared in 1961's Linda Carter, Student Nurse by Stan Lee and Al Hartley, and would go on to star in 1972's Night Nurse and, later, appear as a superhero ally in the 21st century. 

The book ends with a 23-page appendix entitled "Marvel Comics: A Summary," which essentially summarizes the entirety of the Marvel mega-saga. It's basically a smart comics critic's all-prose version of the old Marvel Saga, or, perhaps, Mark Waid and Javier Rodriguez's 2019 History of the Marvel Universe. It's great. 

•One extremely useful term Wolk uses throughout, which I have been struggling not to use myself as I wrote about his book until I could get to this point, is "sequence." He uses it instead of "title" or "series" or "story" or "run," words we might see and use much more often when discussing superhero comics, all words which tend to fall short when taking a very long view of a narrative like Wolk does throughout the book.

For example, Brian Michael Bendis' work on Spider-Man in the Ultimate line (which would eventually become the Ultimate Universe). It spanned multiple titles and series, and, though one could look at it as a single story, it is, obviously, composed of hundreds of individual stories. The term "sequence" is a more precise one than any of those others to describe that unit of a long Bendis-directed Spider-Man narrative.

It's especially useful when talking about, say, long-lived characters like The Fantastic Four and Spider-Man or narratives that are otherwise hard to define (like Hickman's multi-book Avengers/New Avengers/Secret Wars, or the not-really-even-a-story-per se "Dark Reign" status quo). 

•Wolk is very, very nice to the creators he writes about. Given the date of publication, he was writing before a few of those mentioned were revealed to be bad people (Warren Ellis) or actual monsters (Neil Gaiman), but, even beyond that, I was impressed with how kind he was to the work of many creators, never referring to anyone as a hack (at least, not anyone he names).

Some examples? During the "Dark Reign" chapter, he mentions Alex Maleev's use of photo reference to create Secret Invasion: Dark Reign #1. He writes in a footnote that, "He apparently uses photographic models for most of his characters, which is why Namor, whose facial features are usually drawn as not exactly human, looks really wrong for most of this issue."

That instead of, say, pointing out that Namor looks like Phil Collins doing very poor Namor cosplay, or comparing and contrasting "good" use of models, like that of Alex Ross, to Maleev's use of them. (Looking at those panels again, I think I see more Robert DeNiro than Phil Collins in at least one of them...)

In that same chapter, he talks about the virtues of Mike Deodato's art, and even reprints a four-panel sequence of his Norman Osborn, who looks like Tommy Lee Jones with some sort of weird virtual reality hairstyle super-imposed onto his head (That is because, of course, Deodato was giving Osborn the hair style Ditko originally designed him with, a hair style that no one has anymore and, in fact, no one under the age of 70 is likely to have seen in real life). He talks no shit about Deodato there at all!

Or, in discussing "One More Day", the controversial storyline in which Spider-Man sold his marriage to the devil in exchange for a continuity reboot, a footnote simply reads, "As far as I can tell, nobody, including the creators, likes 'One More Day.' [J. Michael] Straczynski briefly intended to have his name removed from it." 

He didn't even use the words "dumb" or "stupid" when talking about that story...!

•As I often do when reading prose, I thought in the back of my mind a bit about my own writing while reading this. I suppose I did so more than usual, given this was writing about comics.

One thing that struck me is the fact that I, and, I think, most of the people who write about comics regularly online, tend to concentrate on comics as single units (either single issues or, in my case now, trade paperback collections), and to write about them as they're coming out.

This makes sense, of course. Timeliness has always been an important factor in what gets written about, and at least part of the point of a review is to help guide a work's potential audience, to either encourage them to read or watch or play something (if it's good), or to warn them away from doing so (if it's bad).

Certainly, my focus on EDILW has long been on covering new comics (even if, in some cases, they are just new to me), something I imagine comes from the fact that I started writing for newspapers, with film reviews accounting for much of my writing. 

Wolk's book, though, offers a pretty strong argument for waiting a few years (or decades) before writing about monthly comics, as such a long-view allows one to see things in them that one can't if they're occupied with covering them as they whiz by every week or month or year. 

I know some folks do cover comics in this way, of course (Tegan O'Neil comes to mind, for example), but it seems a relative rarity.

Of course, the vast majority of comics criticism takes place on the Internet (I think there's still a little in magazines and newspapers, at least those few magazines and newspapers that still exist), which certainly lends it to dealing with what's most timely, rather than, say, what was coming out in 1965. 

Perhaps the best way to look at 20 or 30 or 40 or 50-year-old comics are in books like Wolk's (Um, are there other books like Wolk's...?), but it certainly gave me something to think about in terms of comics criticism.

An extremely belated book review of Betty and Veronica: The Leading Ladies of Riverdale

Betty and Veronica: The Leading Ladies of Riverdale (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020) After writing a series of histories on the most prominent female comic book characters—2014's Wonder Woman Unbound, 2016's Investigating Lois Lane and 2017's The Many Lives of Catwoman—author Tim Hanley next turned his attention to the Archie Comics' Betty Cooper and Veronica Lodge. Originally published in 2020, it was presumably a pretty timely book, as the characters were probably at or near the zenith of their popularity and overall pop cultural reach, thanks to the success of the TV show Riverdale.  

A book on the history of these characters necessarily means it will also be a book on Archie Comics, their creators, their comics and their other characters (and, to a lesser degree, to the comics industry itself, given that the publisher has been around since the Golden Age). Which led to a question that hovered in the back of my mind the entire time I was reading the book: Why center the book on Betty and Veronica in particular, rather than the publisher's biggest star (and namesake), Archie Andrews himself...?

I suppose part of the answer is obvious. Female comic book characters are the "beat" that Hanley has established for himself through his past work (And were one making a list of the most prominent female comics characters, Betty and Veronica would almost definitely be the next to follow those Hanley has already covered).

Another part? Betty and Veronica are just a bit more interesting than the character of Archie Andrews (who has become increasingly dull and anodyne as the decades rolled on), or any of the other, often one-dimensional male characters in the franchise, like Jughead or Reggie. 

Archie, as Hanely notes, wasn't that unique of a character when he debuted in 1941, teenage boys and their lives already being a source of fascination and popular entertainment, most prominently in the Andy Hardy film series (which started in 1937) and its imitators. These included other teen comedy comic strips, even one at MLJ, the Golden Age name of the publisher before it became Archie Comics. 

Additionally, although the world of Riverdale seemed to revolve around Archie, what made up that world, exactly? Chiefly, it was Betty and Veronica, and I think the argument could be rather convincingly made that the reason for the longevity and success of what we now think of as Archie Comics can be attributed to those two characters, and their unique relationship to one another.

Certainly a great deal of credit belongs to the men—and they were all men—who created Archie, Betty, Veronica, their gang and the world of Riverdale. Hanley spends some time on untangling who did what in the first chapter of the book, "The Men Behind the Girls," but, despite certain claims and the "official" version, it seemed to actually be a team effort, with contributions from publisher and editor John L. Goldwater, editor Henry Shorten, writer Vic Bloom and artist-turned-writer/artist Bob Montana...with perhaps those last two deserving the most credit, at least in Hanley's account. 

What they created together obviously had mass appeal and stood the test of time, surviving several collapses of the comics industry and proving incredible, maybe even endlessly adaptable to trends, take-offs, crossovers and mass-media adaptations. And, of course, their teen comedy outlasted all the others, to the point that when we think of that particular comics genre at all today, we think of Archie Comics. 

But there was also something special about Betty and Veronica. While Hanley notes that the former was something of a familiar type in pop culture at the time, the boy-crazy bobbysoxer, as a wealthy socialite and debutante-to-be, Veronica was already something of an anachronism by the time she was introduced, adding something unique to the strip. Their rivalry over Archie—who, at the outset, was certainly no prize, being neither good-looking, nor particularly smart, funny, noble or gifted—led to a particularly potent formula that, once employed, seemed to power so much of the publisher's increasingly Archie-centric output. 

Though the portrayals of the two girls would gradually change over the decades, making one seem more appealing to Archie (and/or readers) more so than the other in certain eras, their rivalry would endure, even after they eventually also became the best of friends. It was a unique relationship, and I found myself wondering if they were the first, or at least the earliest, most prominent, instance of what would eventually come to be known as "frenemies."

Oh, and they were also hot. That seems to have helped ensure they stick around in the strip, as well as to help the comics gain and maintain their popularity. That they were (almost) always portrayed as sexually attractive, even after the Montana-inspired, more realistic take gave way to the more cartoony, Dan DeCarlo style, may seem more than a little weird to say out loud in 2025, when the line between teenager and adult is so much more bright and solid than it was in the 1940s (Remember, young women married much, much earlier in the era). 

But the middle-aged men who created and chronicled their adventures for the majority of their existence, being men, seemed to take special delight in drawing the girls, and even since their Golden Age beginnings, the artists would regularly put them in short, tight-fitting sports gear as often as possible and, as time went on, would put them in bathing suits as often as possible. (Their beauty wasn't strictly, exclusively for the male gaze, of course; they were also often drawn in glamours, highly fashionable wardrobes, particularly in the pre-digest years). 

Hanley discusses this at some length in his chapter "The Clone Wars," where he notes the vast difference between the design of Archie's male characters and their female ones. The male characters, of course, look nothing alike, not in the lines they are drawn in, or the shapes of their figures; if you were shown silhouettes of Archie, Reggie, Jughead, Dilton or Moose, you would instantly know who was who. Not so with the girls, who have the exact same figures, the exact same faces, and are mainly distinguishable by the style and/or color of their hair (Pretty much no matter who was drawing them). This wasn't just the case with Betty and Veronica, but all the youngwomen of Riverdale, save for outliers like Big Ethel, whose size and shape was itself meant to be read as a joke.

Hanley himself eventually offers an answer for the focus on the girls over Archie in his conclusion, writing:

It's not easy to be a teenage girl. It never has been, ever since teenagers were "invented" in the mid-1940s. Society constantly devalues young women, pulling off the bizarre feat of simultaneously infantilizing and sexualizing them. Mentally, they're treated like children, their opinions and emotions dismissed and ignored. Physically, they're objectified by adult men who should know better yet leer and harass them with near impunity. Our world is not constructed for teenage girls to thrive. These years are a gauntlet they have to survive.

Betty and Vernoica are familiar with this gauntlet. 

He goes on to write that despite the fact that most of their 80 years have been defined by middle-aged men, writing and drawing them in comedic narratives that often sought to define them as love interests and sexual objects, compelling counter-narratives also evolved, sometimes by happenstance, sometimes through market demand and sometimes by deliberate contributions from creators. 

Their friendship, and their support for one another against the patriarchy and the expectations of a male-centric Riverdale (and world) gave them an inspirational power: "Despite their spats, their friendship was ultimately more important than any boy, any dress, or any dates," Hanley concludes. "That Betty and Veronica returned to it again and again showed generations of young female readers that even if society devalues them, they should still value each other." 

The book, written in Hanely's highly readable, inviting and always reasonable sounding prose, follows the history of the characters from the founding of MLJ in 1939 to the third season of Riverdale, where Lili Reinhart's Betty and Camila Mendes' Veronica seem to represent highly evolved, "final" versions of the characters, invoking all of their strengths and virtues—and that of their friendship—in a show that Hanley calls "ludicrous"...though not as an insult (Not being much of a TV person, I've never watched the show, but everything I've ever heard about it sounds completely bonkers; indeed, just what Hanely writes about here seems like so much, from organized crime to biker gangs to cults to a serial killer based on an old MLJ hero, and that was just the third season; how batshit did things get by the seventh and final season?).

That means Hanley book about Betty and Veronica doesn't just cover the evolution of the North American comics industry, and Archie's survival of its many challenges (Helped along by the teen comedy genre being spared during the post-war superhero crash, Goldwater's role in crafting and easily adhering to the Comics Code Authority that spelled doom for then-popular comics genres like crime and horror and their embrace of the digest format as the comic book market contracted into adult male-centric specialty shops). Nor does it just cover the publisher's embrace of certain trends, which weren't always as applicable to the publisher's works (like that of the event-ification trend following DC's "Death of Superman" story).

No, the book also, obviously, follows the broad shifts in the depiction and characterization of the girls over the years, including at least one extremely weird detour that had perhaps unintended effects, like  the vilification of Veronica (That would be born-again Christian cartoonist Al Hartley's use of the characters as tools of evangelical Christianity, not strictly limited to the licensed Spire Comics, as I always thought, but also, oddly, within the pages of Archie Comics proper for a bit). 

And, of course, the book also covers the various attempts at mass media adaptation for Archie and the gang (and other Archie Comics characters like Josie and Sabrina, The Teenage Witch), which, over the decades, meant both successes and failures. You're probably familiar with all of the former, like The Monkees-esque pop music career of The Archies, the Saturday morning cartoons, that weird 1990 NBC Sunday night movie about the characters' high school reunion and, of course, Riverdale. But there were also a few radio shows, and plenty of failures, like a few other attempts at live-action television, one at a reality show and, of course, there were Hollywood hopes, of which only 2001's (excellent, for the record) Josie and The Pussycats ever came to fruition.

Thorough without ever becoming overwhelming and insightful while avoiding rabbit holes, Hanley's Betty and Veronica is really a must-read, not simply for those interested in the sociological underpinnings of female comics characters, but for fans of Betty and Veronica, Archie Comics or, indeed, comics in general.

(I just regret I waited some five and a half years to finally pluck it off my dusty to-read pile. Sorry, Tim Hanley!)

(Also, as is always the case with such histories, if one does come to them as late as I did here, I find that one may be curious about what the author would make of later updates in the subject matter. For example, I mentioned wondering what Hanley might have made of the later seasons of Riverdale, as I assume the show just got crazier and more outlandish as it went on, as is always the case of such television melodramas and, um, a lot of comic book series. Where Hanley leaves off with the comics, they are still sort of leaning into the Afterlife with Archie and Riverdale-inspired contrast between the publisher's decades-long squeaky clean image and more violent, scary or just plain unlikely subject matter, as seen in the likes of Vampironica, Jughead: The Hunger, Betty & Veronica: Vixens, Archie vs. Predator and so on, a contrast seemingly first exploited in 1994's Archie Meets the Punisher which, remarkably, is not currently available from Marvel and/or Archie. I do find myself wondering if the publisher's relative success in the direct market and trade paperback market with these efforts, as well as their 2015 "reboot", came at the cost of success in the post-Raina Telgemeier's Baby Sitter's Club world of original graphic novels produced for children, a world I spend a lot of time in as a contributor to Good Comics for Kids. Archie has produced a few works for this market, 2020's Betty & Veronica: The Bond of Friendship by Jamie Lee Rotante and Brittney Williams comes most immediately to mind, but, for the most part, the publisher doesn't seem to have made a priority of this apparently lucrative market, which would seem to be a natural audience for them, given their long appeal to young readers, boys and girls alike. They do have plenty of digests and collections in print, of course, but I read so many original graphic novels for and about middle-schoolers and teens that I'm surprised that Archie doesn't more actively chase such readers; I mean, even DC Comics seems to produce more material for this market than Archie does. I wonder if, had Hanley's book come out in 2025, if there would have been a chapter on this emergent market, and Archie Comics' efforts, or lack thereof, to introduce them to their eternal teenage characters...)

Announcing Giant Monster Movies: 100 Years of Big-Screen Behemoths

We interrupt our regular comic book talking about for breaking news: I have a book coming out in 2026. 

As you can see from the cover image above, it's entitled Giant Monster Movies: 100 Years of Big-Screen Behemoths. It will be published by McFarland. 

The book reviews the entirety of the giant monster movie genre, from 1925's The Lost World, the climax of which established a basic template that all giant monster movies followed, to 2024's Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the latest in the Warner Bros./Legendary Pictures string of "Monsterverse" blockbusters.

That's 92 films total, including the King Kong, Godzilla, Gamera and Mothra franchises, 1950s giant bug movies (Tarantula!, The Deadly Mantis, The Black Scorpion), international attempts by countries trying to create their very own Godzilla (Yongary, Reptilicus, Gorgo), some oft-overlooked oddball movies (The Giant Claw, The X From Outer Space, Gappa: The Triphibian Monster, Space Amoeba) and many more.

If you enjoy reading my reviews of things—and, given the fact that you are reading this post on my comics review blog, I suspect you might—then you should enjoy my reviewing my way through the history of the giant monster movie genre.

I will be happy to share more details when they become available—chances are, you will be quite sick of me talking about the book before too long—but for now, here's what McFarland has on their site at the moment. If you haven't yet followed me on Bluesky, please do so, as that's probably the best place to keep up to date on various Caleb-related goings-on.

And if you guys have any questions in the meantime, feel free to ask in the comments below or via email. Thank you, as always, for reading. 

Another Mothman

This week I received an early Christmas gift from my co-worker, the talented artist (and fellow cryptid enthusiast) Gillian DiPofi. 

It is, as you can see, a framed watercolor painting of our favorite cryptid, Mothman, looking somewhere between creepy and socially awkward, as the best Mothmans should.

She also gave me a smaller, more festive Mothman painting, in which the big guy looks ready for the holiday:

To see more of her work, check out her Instagram page here. 

Another Mothman

If you're reading this blog, then you are almost certainly an adult, in which case you are not the target audience for writer Heather Alexander and illustrator Sam Kalda's Haunted USA: Spine-Tingling Stories from All 50 States (Wide Eyed Editions; 2025). But if you, like me, appreciate great art and spooky stories, you will probably enjoy flipping through it and reading the entries that strike your fancy. 

As the title says, it's a collection of scary stories from each of the 50 states (plus one for Washington, DC), presented in two-page spread, a three-to-five paragraph story on one page, a gorgeous illustration of that story by Kalda on the facing page. Most of these are ghost stories, an aspect of the paranormal which I am not particularly interested in, and that includes the Ohio story (That of a "Racer Boy", a ghost said to appear on the tracks of a roller coaster at Kings Island).

 A few of the stories involve cryptids though, a subject which I am quite interested in. What grabbed my attention was the appearance of Mothman in the upper left corner of the cover. 

(You can't tell by looking at a picture online, but the cover has shiny silver elements on it, including the creators' names, the spots on Mothman's wings, the cat's whiskers and so on).

The story of Mothman is the West Virginia's entry in the book. Alexander's five-paragraph retelling includes the first sighting as that of the gravediggers who saw something large with wings and the most famous one, that of the Scarberrys and Mallettes in the TNT area, which lead to the newspaper report that seemingly kicked off the flap of sightings and its media coverage. 

The only mistake I noticed was in this sentence: "Some locals wondered if the Mothman was living in the nearby nuclear power plant, but police found no evidence of the creature or anyone there." West Virgina does not actually have any nuclear power plants, nor has it ever. Alexander probably meant the TNT area, a series of World War II-era concrete, igloo-like structures in which explosives were once stored. It is now the McClintic Wildlife Management Area, a locale Alexander mentions when telling the story of the Scarberry/Mallette sighting. 

But what we're most interested in here is the image of Mothman. As you can see, Kalda leans on the "moth" in the name, as so many artists do. Note the moth-like wings and the long, fuzzy antennae-like structures on its head. In this, Kalda seems to be following in the footsteps of Frank Franzetta, who painted a moth-man of a Mothman on the cover of High Times, and sculptor Bob Roach, who created the shiny statue of the cryptid that now stands in Point Pleasant.

No witnesses actually reported anything moth-like about Mothman, of course, aside from wings and nocturnal habits. Despite the spots, Kalda does get the creatures two most notorious features into his image: Big, black wings and staring red eyes (I like also the way he depicts Mothman as essentially face-less, no witness ever being able to articulate what its face might have looked like).

I also like how Kalda gives his Mothman such long, creepy fingers...and even long toes. It's a really gorgeous image.

The other handful of crytpids covered, each of which is also beautifully rendered, are Alaska's humanoid otter creatures the Kushtaka (Alexander's clever title? "Otterly Terrifying"), Massachusetts' Pukwudgies, a handful of different lake monsters from Michigan and Missouri's hairy humanoid Momo (who looks a bit like a cross between Chewbacca and Cartoon Network's Brak, I thought).

The Pukwudgie image is particularly potent, and I can imagine it scaring the hell out of me had I encountered it as a little kid, monsters scraping their claws on my bedroom windows being a particularly vivid fear of mine (elicited by the sound of utility wires creaking against the tree branches outside my window).

Perhaps also of note is Iowa's chocolate-eating ghost, star of an urban legend in which, if one leaves a candy bar on a particular bridge at a particular time, the chocolate will disappear, leaving only an empty wrapper. Though presumably a ghost, Kalda's brilliant illustration suggests a sort of red-eyed giant monster...while simultaneously looking like it might just be the shape of the trees and shadows on the bridge. 

Anyway, next time you're in the library, do take the time to check this book out. You can see more of Kalda's work on his website and his Instagram account. 

 

 

On Annie Hunter Eriksen and Lee Gatlin's marvelous comic creator biographies With Great Power and Along Came a Radioactive Spider

In 2021 and 2023, writer Annie Hunter Eriksen and artist Lee Gatlin released a pair of children's picture books through Page Street Kids, both unauthorized biographies of two of the three primary comics professionals who created what we now think of as the Marvel Universe, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko (the third, Jack Kirby, appears in both men's stories, but doesn't didn't get his own book...at least not yet).

Attracted both by Gatlin's highly idiosyncratic, cartoonistly work, which I was familiar with from his posting on social media (where he posts great drawings of The Thing and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), as well as curiosity about how a writer might go about reducing such men's complex careers into something short and simple enough for a picture book, I recently brought them both home from the library. 

As a grown-up and a long-time comics reader, I liked them both well enough, and I would certainly recommend them to anyone in that same demographic. As far as the intended audience of children goes, well, I'm afraid I can't really imagine how these would go over, as it's hard to imagine anyone young enough to be read to really being too terribly interested in Stan Lee or Steve Ditko. They do seem to be serviceable first biographies on the men, though.

The first, With Great Power: The Marvelous Stan Lee, tackles the most famous figure American comics history has ever produced, whether rightly or wrongly. With just 30 pages to work with, most of which could only support a sentence or two in addition to the images that will dominate them, Eriksen would zero in on Lee's career as a would-be novelist who stumbled into the writings of comics and then hit the big time when he wrote some heroes who were extremely popular in the 1960s, heroes who would eventually become movie stars in the 21st century.

In fact, there's a jump in time from mid-1960s to the turn in century, with an image depicting Lee walking down a red carpet, leading Spider-Man and the Avengers characters, most of whom are drawn wearing sunglasses (Except for Black Panther, whose all-black garb  wouldn't look right with them, and a tiny, too-small-for-them Ant-Man, shown running to keep up with the long strides of the regularly-sized heroes). 

The focus is mostly on Stan Lee as a youngster (appropriately enough, given the target audience), and his time working for Timely/Atlas/Marvel, until he co-created The Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, at which point Stan Lee really becomes the Stan Lee we now imagine when we think of him (For a significant portion of the book, he will be balding, his face looking naked without his signature glasses and mustache).

It's not a bad way to frame Lee's career, really, and certainly focuses on what is perhaps most significant to the broader, mainstream world beyond the comics shop.

The opening, thesis-like two-page spread is pretty great. Eriksen writes:

Stan Lee didn't have hulking strength.

Or fantastic flexibility.

Or catlike reflexes.

His superpower was creating heroes who did.

Each of these sentences is illustrated by an image of Lee as we usually imagine him now, with the shaded glasses, mustache and full head of gray hair, exhibiting one of these powers. 

So there's an image of a huge Stan Lee holding a coffee mug pinched between the fingers of a massive hand, the other one pinching the knob of a door that he's accidentally torn from its hinges. And then one of his left arm stretching into loops before returning to write on the yellow pad of paper he held in his other hand, as Mister Fantastic might be able to. And then one of him dressed in Black Panther's costume, complete with cute cat ears, the cowl open to reveal his familiar, grandfatherly face. And, finally, an image of him with his feet up on a desk, a lightbulb appearing over his head, while he raises a finger in a "Eureka!" like pose.

From there, Eriksen rewinds to his childhood: "But back when he was Stanley Lieber, a kid growing up in New York City, he didn't feel super." After a few pages on his childhood, the young protagonist lands a job in publishing: 

Luckily, a magazine called Timely Comics was hiring. With this gig Stanley could get his foot in the door in the world of writing. But for now, he would be Stanley Lieber: Errand Boy!

Eriksen doesn't mention a fact that tempers that "Luckily"; Lee's cousin was married to publisher Martin Goodman, a relationship which likely had something to do not only with his hiring as an errand boy, but also with his becoming an editor while still a teenager, after the famed comic book team Joe Simon and Jack Kirby quit Timely. 

She does detail Lee's work on that team's most famous creation, Captain America, which is when Stanley first became "Stan Lee," writing a filler story for the superhero under the pseudonym, wanting to save "Stanley Lieber" for his future great American novel. (Unfortunately, the story isn't clear that Captain America was Simon and Kirby's creation; the character just sort of exists here and is a steppingstone in Lee's transition from errand boy to writer.)

Gatlin's illustrations for the momentous occasion are pretty cool, though, with one page showing a cartoonish Captain America—none of the many Marvel heroes depicted within the book have the big, muscular, dynamic figures one would expect to see in an actual Marvel comic book—standing before a Hollywood-like chair labeled "Cap" and holding a script, saying, "Line? Line?...This is blank" in comic book dialogue balloons.

On the facing page, we see Cap and Bucky in action, battling the Red Skull and his men, while a young Stanley picks at a typewriter in the foreground.

That's soon followed by a scene in which Stan's wife Joan suggests he "finally sneak in a story he'd always wanted to tell," resulting in his "teaming up with Jack Kirby" and creating the Fantastic Four.  And then, "Stan furiously drafted while artist 'Sturdy' Steve Ditko drew the perfect design until a new face peered back at them: Peter Parker... The Amazing Spider-Man!"

After that second hit, his publisher's ask Stan, "What other superheroes do you have up your sleeves?" 

And this then leads to an image of a smug-looking Stan pulling at one of his sleeves, from which emanates a gusher of colorful stars, lightning, and Marvel ephemera (Mjolnir, pumpkin bombs, ants, Doctor Strange's cloak and so on). It's followed by a two-page spread featuring The Hulk, Thor, Silver Surfer, Iron Man and Doctor Strange. 

The contributions of Kirby and Ditko (and Don Heck and Larry Lieber) aren't mentioned here.

It's a certainty a version of the creation of Marvel's most famous characters and the creation of the Marvel Universe that Stan Lee himself would have like! 

Granted, the creation and development of these characters has been something that the men who made them and the fans who loved them have contested and debated endlessly over the years and have long since been the source of high-stakes controversy. While Eriksen and Gatlin obviously include Kirby and Ditko as collaborators (at least on the FF and Spidey), reading this book, it does seem to suggest that Lee did the heavy lifting in the process. 

I don't think this is necessarily a sin on the part of the book's creators. I mean, how nuanced can we expect a book intended for a pre-literate audience to be, after all? And how much controversy should there be in a book serving as a first introduction to Lee's career? Still, adult readers (like me), are sure to notice these aspects, and to raise an eyebrow here and there. 

After the story ends—not with Lee's sad last years, nor his death, but with him standing in a crowd of cosplaying fans and declaring "'NUFF SAID!"—there's a two-page spread of mostly prose, followed by a bibiliography of sources (Not included? Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon's 2003 Stan Lee and The Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book from Chicago Review Press, which I'd personally recommend over some of those cited instead). 

There are three short sections across this spread, one on Stan Lee's cameos in Marvel movies, another on his collaborations with other creators and one on his "Stan's Soapbox" column. That second section, which appears under the heading "Friendly Neighborhood Bullpen", does mention Kirby, Ditko, Heck, Lieber and Bill Everet ("Like any good hero, Stan teamed up," Eriksen writes). 

This section also briefly details "The Marvel Method" of making comics (as opposed to the assembly line way they were mostly created previously), which allowed for greater collaboration between writer and artist...but, as an unfortunate side effect, likely contributed to the historical disagreements over who deserves credit for what (As I've understood it, artists working in "The Marvel Method" like Kirby and Ditko did with Lee are more properly understood as co-writers and artists, not just artists). 

Eriksen and Gatlin's next book, the wonderfully titled Along Came a Radioactive Spider: Strange Steve Ditko and the Creation of Spider-Man, seems to have been born, at least in part, by Eriksen's own dissatisfaction in the limited role Lee's collaborators played in the first book.

In fact, her bio on the back cover flap, begins with the fact that she 

realized while writing With Great Power: The Marvelous Stan Lee...that she, like most people, was overlooking Steve Ditko's role in the Spidey origin story, which inspired her to create the biography he deserves (even if he would totally hate the attention).

It's true that Ditko doesn't get the credit Stan Lee does for creating Spider-Man, but then, much of that is likely due to the two men's very natures. Stan Lee craved the spotlight and spent much of his career in pursuing it and then nurturing the fame his comics work brought him (I think it's safe to say that the various producers and directors didn't have to twist Stan's arm too hard to do all those movie cameos he's now so well known for). 

Ditko, on the other hand, was Lee's polar opposite. He eschewed the fame his creation brought him (as Eriksen's bio alludes to) and eventually gained a reputation for being something of a recluse.

So yeah, the late Ditko likely wouldn't have wanted to see this biography about him, as flattering as it is. That said, it's a good one, and I enjoyed it more than the Stan Lee one that it followed, probably because, unlike Lee, I've never read an actual biography of Ditko, and, in fact, couldn't tell you anything about him other than maybe rattling off a list of comics characters he created, and what I've seen of his work.

The word the Eriksen and Gatlin team attach to Ditko is the one in the sub-title, "strange," and which, given the name of his second most famous Marvel hero, naturally has something of a double meaning. 

"There was absolutely nothing strange about comic book artists Steve Ditko," Eriksen writes in the book's opening, the format of which is an identical, four-part two-page spread to that which opened With Great Power. "His life was an open book!" 

This ironic statement comes above Gatlin's drawing of an annoyed looking Ditko shouting "No comment!" and trying to close his front door while a grinning, generic-looking reporter leers around it, and various arms holding cameras, microphones and notepads are seen on the other side. 

This continues into two more similar situations, in which the prose narration contrasts with Gatlin's cartoon-like illustrations (It's worth noting that this book is a much funnier one than the first), culminating in Eriksen relenting over an image of a smiling Ditko holding a pencil and seated at a drawing table, an image of Spider-Man in one of the panels on the big piece of paper before him.

Okay...so Steve Ditko wasn't really like the rest of the artists at Marvel Comics, but the same could be said about his—yes, Steve's!—most famous creation: Spider-Man. 

The next two-page spread details the strangeness of Spider-Man, and how greatly he differed from the typical superhero, a strangeness accentuated by Gatlin's particularly thin, angular and, well, spidery version of Marvel's flagship hero which, despite adopting a variety of famous poses, looks more weird and alien than ever (Honestly? After reading this, I think Gatlin's is one of my favorite portrayals of the hero; it's easy to see how civilians would be creeped out by this Spider-Man, and how J. Jonah Jameson would viscerally recoil from the strange figure Gatlin draws here).

From there, we get a fairly linear version of Ditko's story, just as we did Lee's before. Ditko also grew up poor in the Great Depression, and he was also attracted to the fantastic, which, for him, meant comics. 

There's a great spread devoted to his work at Marvel and the difference between him and editor Stan Lee, and his reaction to a new character that Lee and Jack Kirby were cooking up (Gatlin draws a great Kirby; his sole appearance in this book looking somewhat bored as he works, a cigar clamped in his jaws). 

It wasn't strange when Stan and The King teamed up yet again for their new story: a boy, a magic ring, and a transformation into the grown-up hero named "Spiderman."

Ditko's job was to illustrated the new comic, but "Spiderman was just another repetitive brave and brawny hero!...Steve itched to break the mold in the best way he knew how—by making Spiderman strange."

We see just how wide the gulf in the two Spidermen was through Gatlin's drawing of Kirby's version, a large, muscular figure sporting a more classic costume and wielding a web gun, and Ditko's version, which we are now all familiar with (Even if the artists that followed Ditko, starting with John Romita Jr., pretty quickly transitioned the hero into a bigger, better-looking, more heroic and, well, less strange figure). 

In this book, Eriksen has Ditko do the heavy-lifting with the development of the character, not just coming up with the desigsn and elements of the secret identity, but creating the book himself: "Suddenly, Steve found himself writing and drawing Spider-Man—a comic book history first."

The book concludes with a passage in which we see Ditko retreating from his own fame, dodging young fans and, in one great illustration, questions, as Gatlin draws Ditko, a pencil behind his ear, in a leaping pose, while a half-dozen dialog balloons, each containing a single question mark, go flying and bouncing all around him. 

The final spread shows a happy Ditko at a drawing board, surrounded by a colorful collage, and a dramatically posing new but familiar character. "So he did what he did best: got to work," Eriksen writes, concluding of his latest work, "The comic was out of this world...and his most fitting work yet! Steve named him DOCTOR STRANGE."

Throughout the book—which gives a shorter, more streamlined version of Spidey that sidesteps some of the questions regarding contributions from Lee, Kirby and possible influences from past characters—Gatlin draws not only the aforementioned comics creators, but also Peter Parker, Spider-Man and some of the hero's foes (The Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, Mysterio, The Sandman and The Scorpion) but, somewhat surprisingly, Captain Marvel and Batman (as well as obscure Simon and Kirby creation Captain 3-D, and Captain Battle, who I didn't recognize*). 

As with With Great Power, this book ends with a short prose section and bibliography.  Here, that section offers a more detailed biography of Ditko, including dates and reference to some of the controversies that wouldn't really fit in a picture book, including aspects of Spider-Man's creation and Ditko's departure from the comic. 

"Steve Ditko Would Hate This Book," reads a headline-like label to one part of this feature, which briefly notes his post-Marvel career (namedropping The Question and Mr. A) and just how media-shy he was, including how few photos there are of Ditko (which did make me curious as to how Gatlin went about developing his Steve, which must have been much harder than drawing Stan Lee, whose look has at this point become almost as iconic as that of some superheroes), his dislike of the "poison sandwich" biography Blake Bell wrote of him and the "rule" imposed by Ditko upon those meeting him: You don't talk about it.

Regardless of what Ditko might think of the book, though, I liked it, and I wouldn't mind reading similar biographies from this particular pair of Kirby, Simon or other famous and influential comics creators in the future.

*Thanks to Anthony Strand for identifying him on Bluesky for me!