WE3 BY GRANT MORRISON & FRANK QUITELY

The US Air Force is working on cybernetics, and Roseanne Berry has created a method of weaponizing domestic pets; she's turned a dog named Bandit, a cat named Tinker, and a rabbit named Pirate into a coordinated weapon with deadly abilities. But the project has moved beyond her; rats working in groups is the latest advance, and the politican behind the whole idea doesn't think he can sell turning people's pets into warriors. So WE3 are supposed to be decommisioned. But Berry has a heart, and she sets her animals free, turning them into a threat, and, away from the medication and support of the base, putting them into a situation they're unlikely to survive.

WE3 works on two levels. The more obvious is the story of animal survival, of the relationship between pets and humans, and it's not hard to see why this graphic novel was a best-seller a decade ago. It raises all the basic questions about the way humans think of and treat the animals they possess, and it appeals to the better side not only of its readers but even a few of the characters in the story.

But it's also a commentary on the callousness of our attempts to de-humanize war itself. I thought of Fred Saberhagen's Beserker series, and I thought also about our drone programs, ways of taking ourselves out of the messy business of killing for profit, power, or ideals. That raises questions about the nature of humans as pets as well.

Grant Morrison's story is, at heart, pretty simple, but it's told in a relatively challenging way by artist Frank Quitely, very much influenced by Manga. I'm tempted to say it tries to work on a non-verbal delivery as much as possible, which helps the reader identify with the nearly speechless main characters. It can be a little hard to follow, particularly in the action scenes (my 11 year old son got lost once or twice, and I had to read very carefully at times), but it is resolved deftly and with great sensitivity, whether you're a kid or adult, whether you come to it from sf novels or from children's tales about pets.

WE3 by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely
DC Vertigo, ISBN 9781401243029, $14.99

STEVE NILES AND MENTON3'S TRANSFUSION

Transfusion is a haunting post-apocalyptic tale, of a world inhabited by a few surviving humans, the giant robots they created, sort of like Fred Saberhagen's Beserkers, but who use human blood as fuel, and the vampires who need to save the humans from the robots for their own purposes. It opens with a group of humans being led to a small patch of corn, which we discover is bait, but before they can be harvested by vampires, robots attack, setting the stage for a complicated triangle of blood lust.

I say blood lust, but Steve Niles' story is really more about survival—and the art, by Menton3, emphasizes this brilliantly. Everything is washed out, in the tired shades of faded life. The bodies are skeletal, already ghost-like, as if haunted. There are elements of Weimar Germany's expressionism (think Nosferatu) and a few hints at Frank Kline's abstract expressionism too. But the way the vampires are drawn is itself unusual: their multiple needle-like teeth are less Nosferatu and more as if they were wearing some sort of Clive Barker fetish masks, they carry a real sense of desperation, almost helplessness.

The story otherwise proceeds as a learning process, whereby William, the vampire leading the humans in the opening sequence, is saved by, and needs to cooperate with, two humans in order for them all to survive. And when the major twist is revealed, and we learn why the robots are powered by blood, we realise why both humans and vampires are indeed haunted. I Transfusion reads to me like the script (and the additional material in the book includes some of Niles' script) for a particularly good episode of the Twilight Zone, and the art makes it look like a masterpiece of direction. A vampire story that's far more Twilight Zone than Twilight is nothing to sneer at these days, and Transfusion is an impressive piece of work.

t's not a happy ending, per se, but that's the point.

Transfusion

written by Steve Niles, art by Menton3 with Tony Moy

IDW $17.99 ISBN 9781613775998

LES DANIELS: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

NOTE: I wrote this obituary of Les Daniels for the Indy back in November, but it got shunted aside during the holiday season, and two months later has passed its sell-by date for the paper, so it appears here for the first time.

Les Daniels, who has died aged 68, will be remembered best as an historian of comic books, author of official histories of both Marvel and DC Comics, and some of their most famous superheroes. His most important work in the field was Comix: A History of Comic Books in America (1971). Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes (1965) is generally considered the first mainstream comics' history, and Daniels' book came after 1970's fan-based All In Color For A Dime. But Comix was the first to trace comics from their roots in pulp magazines, through the Forties' so-called Golden Age of superheroes, and their doldrums during the 1950s' censorship brought on by psychologist Frederic Wertham's attacks on the industry in his book Seduction of the Innocent (1954). Daniels was particularly telling on this, since his own favourite comics, the EC horror line, were Wertham's prime target. Daniels detailed the Sixties renaissance sparked by Marvel and stoked by the rise of underground comics, or comix. He was the first to eschew gosh-wow nostalgia in favour of a serious, but never academic, appreciation of the medium as art., and showcased artists, among them Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman, who would not achieve mainstream acclaim until years later.

Appropriately, given his love of EC comics, Daniels had an equally important, if less noted, career in the horror field. Following the success of films like The Exorcist and The Omen, his 1975 book 'Living In Fear: A History of Horror In Mass Media', approached horror with the same artistic seriousness had comics. He edited a companion anthology, Dying Of Fright, and, with his sister Diane, another anthology, 13 Tales of Terror, designed for teachers.

Soon after, he became a key part of the first boom in vampire fiction, led by Fred Saberhagen's novels about an heroic Dracula, starting with The Dracula Tapes (1975) and Anne Rice's best-selling Lestat series launched in 1976. Beginning with The Black Castle (1978), set during the Spanish Inquistion, Daniels published five novels featuring the vampire Don Sebastian De Villanueva. Mixing horror and apocalyptic history, he placed Don Sebastian in situations, such as the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, or Britain's Imperial Raj in India, where humans wielded greater destructive evil than vampires.

The arc of this peripatetic career might best be ascribed to Daniels' following his own enthusiasms, an urge he traced back to his mother's throwing out his comic book collection when was he was only nine years old. He was born 27 October 1943 in Danbury, Connecticut, and grew up in nearby, rural, Redding. His father, who wrote radio adventures like Jack Armstrong All-American Boy, primed his interest in horror by giving him a collection of Ambrose Bierce's stories. He was so taken with H.P. Lovecraft's tales that he moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where he earned BA and MA dregres from Brown University, writing his master's thesis on Frankenstein. He would stay in Providence the rest of his life, and in 1970, with artist John 'Mad' Peck, create a four-panel poster of life in that city, playing ironically on streets with names like Friendship and Hope, which is still a local best-seller.

He was also a talented bluegrass banjo player, and hooked up with a Rhode Island School of Design student named Martin Mull to write and perform songs described by Bob Booth as 'a cross between the Foggy Mountain Boys and Monty Python'. They formed The Double-Standard String Band with Sam Tidwell and his bass-playing brother Marc—Tidwell went on to a career as a bluegrass virtuoso, while Mull became a successful comedian and actor in Hollywood. Mull and Daniels reunited on a 1974 album of comic folk songs called In The Soop. In 1998 Daniels and Rick Lee recorded an album called Dr Daniels and Mr Lee, new versions of his Mull collaborations , and followed it with a release of 1966 tapes of a live performance by the Double Standard band. In the Seventies he was hired by Dino DeLaurentis to write an unproduced disco-horror screenplay, and then teamed with comic Rudy Cheeks to write Comediac, about a serial killer obsessed with the Three Stooges. Sadly, it was never made. Daniels also performed in Providence clubs giving comic commentary while horror movies were played on the screen, long before such formats were used on TV.

But primarily he was devoted to his writing, whether introductions for independently-produced adaptations of Lovecraft, or producing authorised histories for the big comics companies. That the same man would be trusted to chronicle two arch-rivals like Marvel and DC speaks to his objectivity, as well as his talent for researching and ordering the chaotic back-story of an industry which never assumed itself to have any value for posterity. He did histories of Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, winning an Eisner award for the last, and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award four times. Daniels died in Providence on 5 November, of a heart attack. He is survived by his sister.

GRAVE EXPECTATIONS: THE NEW ANNOTATED DRACULA

My review of Leslie Klinger's New Annotated Dracula is up at Crime Time (here) and I've also posted it below, followed by a slightly revised version of the review, mentioned in the current piece, of Klinger's New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, also published by Norton, which I wrote for Crime Time 44, way back in 2005.

THE NEW ANNOTATED DRACULA
edited by Leslie S Klinger
Norton £28.00 ISBN 9780393064506

When I reviewed Klinger's New Annotated Sherlock Holmes (in Crime Time 44) I mentioned how, in following in the footsteps of William S Baring-Gould and treating Holmes and Watson as real people, and Doyle as merely their chronicler, Klinger managed to walk the fine line between anorak and humourist. He manages the same feat with Dracula, treating the vampire as a real being, and Stoker as his mere chronicler, heavily influenced by his undead editor. As with Holmes, Klinger follows in footsteps, in this case Leonard Wolf's 1975 Annotated Dracula, but by reprising the conceit of reality, he manages to bring a much newer approach to Dracula than he did to Holmes. I've never read Wolf's volume, but I find it interesting that it apparently contained any number of authentic recipes for dishes mentioned in the novel; Klinger follows suit, at least as far as paprika chicken is concerned.

As with his Holmes book, there are times the footnotes seem elementary, if not redundant in the extreme. Any number of basic fixtures of British life warrant exegesis, like explaining the Derby is now known as the Vodafone Derby, and is a horse race. He also explains commonly used Latin phrases like mirabile dictu and cum grano. And though it doesn't get a footnote, in one of the appendicies, about to discuss Stokes pastiches, he actually launches into an explanation of 'pastiche' itself. I'm still wondering why he would annotate 'dusty miller' if he couldn't actually explain what it meant in relation to tea with a curate. Is it a local cake? Does it hark back to Chaucer?

Where the annotation is most valuable is in pointing out the many inconsistencies and illogicalities in Stoker's own text, most notable of course the fact that, having explained how Dracula can be killed only by a stake through the heart, he is then dispatched with steel knives. This is a godsend for Klinger, of course, because it provides a rationale of internal logic on which he can hang his assumption that Dracula lived to direct Stoker in his writing. The notes also provide him with some opportunities for dry humour. Although he doesn't pursue the issue of Victorian sexuality too deeply, he does point out there is no hidden meaning when Seward, referring to Renfield, says 'so I took the hint and came too'.

Actually there is hidden meaning, and lots of it. Part of the appeal of the best popular fictions is that they tap instinctively into the audience's collective unconscious; this was a Jungian concept I first noticed when studying The Shadow. But when we examine our ideas of the repressions of the Victorian era, an era where a woman ruled the most powerful empire in the world, Dracula fits into a neat continuum with Jack the Ripper, and dare I say Holmes himself has a place. In the appendix on academic approaches to Dracula, Klinger and the professors touch on this, but obviously it is a rich vein to be mined, if not sucked.

I've also believed that part of the appeal of Dracula is its structure; the epistolary (and documentary) approach lends it both suspense and reality, and allows for multiple viewpoints that render Dracula himself more mysterious and thus more frightening. This doesn't receive much attention, but one thing Klinger's notes do help us realise is that Stoker 'padded out' his text by using Baedeckers, and other travel guides. This was a time when continental travel was just coming into its own for the British, and the Transylvanian origins of Dracula are not only one of the first warnings about traveling abroad, but also of allowing too much immigration from Eastern Europe.

THE NEW ANNOTATED SHERLOCK HOLMES
Edited by Leslie S Klinger
Norton 2005, £35.00, ISBN 9780393065947

I was probably 16 when my parents gave me William Baring-Gould’s original Annotated Sherlock Holmes, to which this is a worthy, if sometimes over-worthy, successor. I have to confess that even then I was shying away from a position of anorakia in my devotion to the great detective, and my then-evident delight in all things English has since been dissipated by prolonged residency here. Though I still marvel at Holmes’ ability to receive post the same day, get a cab whenever he walked out into the street and travel by train without delay, impoverishment, or considerable risk to his life, none of which is actually possible in today’s Britain.

The reason I said over-worthy is that many of Klinger’s annotations seem designed precisely for 16 year old Americans like me, except that nowadays your basic 16 year old American probably won’t go near a book like this, and his relative ignorance about Victorian England would apply to most adults from my home country, and far too many from this one as well.

Klinger follows in Baring-Gould’s conceit of treating Holmes and Watson as actual persons, and Conan Doyle as a mere editor; thus the canon becomes a primary record, however inaccurate or incomplete. Although this was, and is, great fun, the problem with taking fictions as truth, as illustrated by Holmes, is that there are so many internal contradictions, and so many illustrations of the ‘record‘s‘ errors, over most of which Klinger loves to linger. And then there are those annoying things, facts. No snake can do what the eponymous viper in The Speckled Band seems able to do, likewise geese do not have crops, hence the eponymous Blue Carbuncle cannot have been hidden in one. Addressing the latter, Klinger quotes Peter Blau, who sees it as a simple printer’s error, rather than Holmes’ or Watson’s mistake, substituting an ‘o’ for the correct ‘a’, which would render the stone rather more visible. As I said, it is all great fun, in the end.

We love Holmes partly for the element of the superman in him; adolescents of all ages thrill to his abilities of ratiocination, which we have all dreamed, usually at the wrong time, that we possess. But he is also the definitive Victorian character, and the stories tell us more about Victorian life and mores than all the works of Thomas Hardy. I thought of this while watching Mike Leigh’s Topsy Turvy, but I am not aware of anyone producing similar academic work on the real effect of Yum Yum on 19th century England. Or Japan. More’s the pity.

What is frightening is the ever-growing alternate universe of Holmes pastiches. What’s next, a similar volume of exegesis for them? But console yourself with the idea that even if you don’t enjoy this book’s facsimile editions of the original Strand Magazine presentation, you can always use these two handsome slipcased volumes as the foundations for an extension at the back of your Victorian cottage. Elementary…
originally published in Crime Time 44