A Few Recommendations for Summer 2022

Every now and then when it comes time for me to write a Saturday post, a large, overarching one about a single topic, I realize I don’t have one. So I’m going to provide a few recommendations of things I’m listening to, watching, or reading.

Top Gun: Maverick

Now THIS is how to do a legacy sequel. Age up the characters in real time, address the passage of time, and provide a wonderful piece of closure with a legacy co-star. Oh, and incredible action sequences. Holy cow was this a great movie. I took my wife who didn’t necessarily want to see it but she emerged very entertained. Not as entertained as I was: now I want to see this film in IMAX.

And please tell me I’m not the only one who saw the movie and kept having to slow down the car while driving home.

Def Leppard: Diamond Star Halos

Taking a page from the legacy artist idea I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, Def Leppard released their newest album last Friday. Fifteen tracks (17 if you buy from Target) of classic rock goodness. Much like the modern band, The Struts, the Joe Elliott-led five piece band wear their influences on their sleeves, and it starts with the album title.

There’s a whimsical vibe to these songs from the opening chord progression of “Take What You Want” to open the album to the last few notes of “From Here to Eternity.” Allison Krauss lends her vocals to a pair of tunes but make no mistake: this is a rock/pop/metal album just like the band used to make in their heyday.

Lyrically, the guys know their age and acknowledge it throughout the entire record. This was an album I looked forward to ever since it was announced and boy did they deliver.

And yes, we listened to Def Leppard on the way to and from seeing Top Gun: Maverick.

Obi-Wan Kenobi

The third thing released last Friday, this is a Star Wars series I’ve been eagerly anticipating since it was announced as well. In fact, I even held off reading the old Extended Universe novel.

We knew what we were going to get from the trailers: an older, wiser(?) Obi-Wan, living on Tatooine, watching over a ten-year-old Luke Skywalker. What I didn’t expect was his sister, Leia. In fact, it is her plight that propels the series.

I appreciate the slower roll, just like I did for the Mandalorian. I have zero issues with the actors on the show either (so a certain segment of the Star Wars fandom can just go home).

As big a Star Wars fan as I am, I didn’t watch the animated shows so everything in Obi-Wan Kenobi is new to me.

Oh, and so great to see Darth Vader back to being the feared force he is. But I’ll say something that might make a few of y’all look at me askance. I’m fine with James Earl Jones voicing Vader, but how about some more intense inflection, huh? I mean Vader/Anakin finally lays eyes on Kenobi after ten years and it’s like their talking over tea. The last thing Anakin yelled at Kenobi in Episode III was pure hatred. Where’s that emotion in Vader’s inflection?

No Time to Spy by Max Allan Collins and Matthew V. Clemens

If you like James Bond, might I point you in the direction of this trilogy of book by Collins and Clemens. The premise is pure fun: the main character is John Sand, a real spy who worked with Ian Fleming and the latter author based James Bond on John Sand. Sand, now outed as a spy, marries a rich Texas oil heiress. Despite his retirement, action and adventure follow Mr. and Mrs. Sand.

While I’ve not read all three books—Come Spy With Me; Live Fast, Spy Hard; To Live and Spy in Berlin—a compilation ebook is on sale *this weekend* for only $0.99. You read that correctly: for a dollar(!), you get three novels. Seriously, it’s an impulse buy at that point.

Here’s the Amazon link.

Roll With It by Jay Stringer

Jay Stringer broke the news that his latest novel is now available as an audiobook on Audible. As a person who primarily consumes books in that manner, this was great news.

But Jay went above and beyond and made available a few promo codes. These are US only—UK codes will be forthcoming—so if you haven’t had a chance to read his post from yesterday, head on over and see if any of those codes are still available.

Even if they’re not, the book is only 1 credit ($13.96 if you just want to buy it) so get on over to Audible and get a copy. Also, for you library folks out there, be sure to request your library to buy the book and help spread the word.

Batman Summer Spectacular 1978

To commemorate the end of summer 2018, let’s take a trip back forty years.

The summer of 1978 was smack dab in the middle of one of my favorite pockets of my life. You see, Star Wars had debuted the year before and it consume much of my imagination. It had awakened in me a love for all things science fiction and I sought out as much as I could, eventually discovering Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A PRINCESS OF MARS. I had discovered the rock and roll superheroes known as KISS through their albums, comics, and trading cards. And every issue of Circus or Hit Parader magazine I could find.

And, of course, there was the constant: comic books. I have memories of certain issues—where I bought them; what kind of day it was—but not all. Interestingly, as summer 2018 wound down, I was drawn to a forty-year-old comic of which I have no memory buying at the time. But I also have no memory of buying it in the years since, so it’s a logical conclusion that my ten-year-old self forked over a dollar bill for this unique issue.

Officially issue fifteen of the DC SPECIAL SERIES, the 1978 Batman Spectacular boasted of 68 pages of content and no ads. In reality, you get to 68 pages by using both interior covers. This issue is a true gem of my favorite era of Batman’s history: the Bronze Age. More or less, the Bronze Age of comics ran from 1970 to 1985. For Batman, the Bronze Age started with the pairing of writer Dennis O’Neil and artist Neal Adams in the early 70s to the publication of Frank Miller’s seminal THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. In the 1970s, Bruce Wayne moved out of Wayne Manor and the Batcave and took up residence in the Wayne Foundation building. He was a detective, a creature of the night, and, most importantly, still a man. He could be hurt, both emotionally and physically, and he was, including this book.

The Batman Spectacular features three tales. The first, “Hang the Batman,” was written by David V. Reed and pencilled by Mike Nasser. The story centers on the death, by suicide, of a famous author, Archer Beaumont. But Beaumont believed it was possible to communicate from beyond the grave, a belief given new relevance when various signs start popping up around Gotham City. A cryptic note admonishes the Dark Knight Detective to solve Beaumont’s murder or Batman himself will meet death. He investigates, gets into fisticuffs, and, no spoiler here, solves the case.

Reed’s writing is crisp, fast-paced, and typical of the type of story from the 1970s. He provides all the clues the reader needs to solve the crime along with Batman. But it is the visual way Nasser (now Netzer) drew the panels that really set this story apart. His Batman is lithe yet muscular. He rarely treats a single page with traditional panels and borders. He visualizes the entire page as a canvas, seeking out new ways to tell the story. And he gives you interesting angles. I read this tale twice in a row I was so enthralled by his art.

The second story is by Dennis O’Neil and drawn by Michael Golden. It features Batman’s (likely) best nemesis, Ra’s Al Ghul, and Batman’s unwitting and unwanted marriage to Talia, Ra’s’s daughter. O’Neil co-created Ra’s with Neal Adams and this is a perfectly serviceable story, but it seems rather small. Ra’s is best when he’s trying to take over the world or do something for which he sees as right. Here, he’s just trying to steal some diamonds—in a manner fitting a James Bond villain. Golden’s art is as realistic as you could get from art in the 1970s, and helps elevate this story.

O’Neil redeemed himself with the third tale of this issue. Advertised as “Something New..Something Bold!”, “Death Strikes at Midnight and Three” is a Batman story told in prose by O’Neil and illustrated by the great Marshall Rogers. All three artists are fantastic at creating interesting visual storytelling. Rogers drew a series with writer Steve Engelhart many consider to be among the best Batman stories every told. The scenes he draws for O’Neil’s story are, like Nasser’s very visually interesting and almost minimal despite the exquisite detail.

But that’s okay, because the real stars here are O’Neil’s words. Free from a traditional comic book story, O’Neil’s prose is lavish in detail and is spun like a magician. And the details provided give a glimpse of a Batman rarely seen on comic pages. In one scene, Batman confronts a brute who thinks he can best the Caped Crusader. “The Batman shrugged. ‘Take your best shot.’” I loved the noncommittal nature of Batman here, the hero who knows he’ll win, the hero who has confronted countless thugs who think they’ll be the one to take down Batman.

As a writer, I especially appreciated how O’Neil didn’t always conform to proper grammar to paint his pictures with words. “The footfalls stopped. Snick of lighter. Odor of tobacco.” That’s it. Sure, you could write a paragraph, but why when a short few words will do the trick. The way he describes Gotham City is also splendid.

It is a monster sprawled along 25 miles of eastern seaboard, stirring and seething and ever-restless. Eight million human beings live on streets that, if laid end-to-end, would stretch all the way to Tokyo, crammed into thousands of neighborhood from the fire-gutted tenements of Chancreville, where rats nestle in babies’ bedclothes and grandmothers forage in garbage cans,to the penthouses of Manor row, where the cost of a single meal served by liveried servants would support an immigrant family for a year. It is countless chambers and crannies and corners in bars, boats, houses, hotels, elevators, offices, theaters, shacks, tunnels, depots, junkyards, cemeteries, buses, cars, trains, terms, bridges, docks, sewers, parks, jails, mortuaries—the shelters of living and dead, millionaires and bums, fiends and saints.

Napoleon’s armies could search for a lifetime and leave places unseen.

An exceptionally energetic investigator could visit the likely ones in a month.

The Batman had less than sixty minutes.

Come on! You can see that as clear as any artist. O’Neil’s love of old pulp fiction, especially The Shadow, bleeds off the page. And how’s this description of Batman emerging to take on a couple of crooks in front of a movie screen: “The Batman, stark and implacable against the expanse of white, a grim figure congealing from the shadows.” So, so good.

I highly encourage you to seek out this issue. The entire thing has not been republished elsewhere. The Ra’s tale you can find in Tales of the Demon. The prose story is reprinted in The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told, Legends of the Dark Knight: Marshall Rogers and in Batmam: The Greatest Stories Ever Told.