Oh, May … we hardly knew ye. The month passed in a blur and I’m pretty sure a day or two after I realized it was May, it was May 31. Still, books were read, and they were all pretty good. Here’s what I read in the merry, merry month of May.
Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life by Dan Nadel • 5 Stars on Goodreads
This biography of Robert Crumb by comics historian and author Dan Nadel had the full cooperation of the notoriously cranky artist and is an amazing deep-dive into the life of a cartooning legend. At the same time, it’s a history lesson about underground comix, basically started by Crumb in the late 1960s with ZAP. You’ll learn all about Crumb’s pack o’peccadilloes—he insisted on a warts-and-all approach with Nadel—including his personal life with his two wives, Dana and cartoonist Aline Kominsky. It also doesn’t shy away from Crumb’s dysfunctional family life, growing up with his miltary dad, troubled mom, and his two brothers and two sisters, some of whom were equally troubled. It’s really an amazing biography, made all the better by Crumb’s honest and unflinching cooperation, and a great journey through comix history.
DC Finest: Superman Family: The Giant Turtle Man • 5 Stars on Goodreads
(The cover credits on this read “Otto Binder, Jerry Siegel, Jim Mooney,” but they’re obviously wrong, probably due to a designer using the DC Finest: Supergirl volume as a template for this book’s cover. “Jerry Siegel, Curt Swan, Kurt Schaffenberger,” or maybe substitute writer Robert Bernstein in there for one of the artists, and you’d have a more correct representation of the primary creators for this volume.)
Okay, this is the DC Finest book I’ve been waiting for! Superman Family: The Giant Turtle Man collects 1960-61 stories from books such as Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen, Superman’s Girl Friend Lois Lane, Action Comics, Adventure Comics, Superboy, and Superman. Its primary focus is the Jimmy and Lois books, but it also includes stories featuring Krypto, the Super-Dog, Streaky, the Super-Cat, Perry White, and Superboy’s pal, Pete Ross, so it’s a real hodgepodge of stories from this two-year run of Superman Family books. They’re all strange and wonky and sometimes wonderful. The primary artists are Curt Swan (mainly on Jimmy Olsen, but also an occasional Lois Lane story), Kurt Schaffenberger (Lois Lane), Al Plastino, and John Forte. Writers include Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel, Robert Bernstein, and a couple of Otto Binder stories. I especially loved Jimmy Olsen as a kid, growing up in the 1960s; it had a zany appeal to me, humorous but not as far gone as DC’s licensed comics, Adventures of Bob Hope or Jerry Lewis (books we will never see reprinted, I’m guessing). This is also the largest DC Finest volume to-date, weighing in at 664 pages.
Terry Moore Covers • 5 Stars on Goodreads
I’m a sucker for a book that’s just about comic book covers, even if I never read the series. Fortunately, in the case of this book, Terry Moore Covers, I’ve read all the series featured, including Strangers in Paradise, Echo, Rachel Rising, Motor Girl, SiPXXV, Five Years, Serial, and Parker Girls. This book reproduces all the covers (mostly without logos and trade dress) for each of those series, totaling over 275 covers over 20 years in just over 300 pages. Moore’s covers are often enigmatic, emblematic, and just downright fun, sometimes giving more than just a hint of what’s inside, sometimes not. I’m particularly fond of his SiP Mucha-like covers, which are included in this book. Production value on this book is great and each cover is given its own full page with the title logo tiny on top and the volume and issue number on the bottom. All-in-all, a great trip down memory lane for Moore’s work and a keepsake collection of all his covers.
David Wright’s Carol Day Showcase (This book is unavailable on Goodreads, but 5 stars nonetheless)
This is a larger format collection of Carol Day comic strips from British newspapers which reproduces the strips from the original art, and it’s beautiful. Over 130 strips are included over the ten or so years of artist David Wright’s run. Wright’s attention to detail and incredible line work is amazing. This collection does not reprint any one story (as the “Jack Slingsby” volume I reviewed recently did), but rather focuses on the original art aspect of the strip. I would love to see more budget-conscious story collections of Carol Day; the publisher has done some pricey “story books” that have sold out, so the demand is definitely there. There is so much great newspaper comic strip art and stories out there, which have never been reprinted … Carol Day is just one of them.
The Traitor by Ava Glass • 4 Stars on Goodreads
This is the second in the Emma Makepeace series, featuring a young British agent working for a shadowy organization called “the Vernon Institute,” which lies somewhere in between MI5 and MI6. This one involves Emma going undercover on a Russian oligarch’s yacht after an MI6 analyst is horribly murdered in his London flat. Emma’s investigation uncovers two Russians at its center and a mysterious third man who is possibly betraying her every move from within. It didn’t take long for me to figure out who that third man was, even if you don’t learn his actual identity until the end of the book. I liked this second “Alias Emma” book better than the first (although I enjoyed that one, too), and I’m looking forward to giving the third book, The Trap, a go soon.
Marble Hall Murders by Anthony Horowitz • 5 Stars on Goodreads
Marble Hall Murders is the third in a series featuring book editor Susan Ryeland, and it’s probably my favorite of the trilogy, which was started with Magpie Murders and continued with Moonflower Murders. This latest novel concerns a young author, Eliot Crace, writing a continuation novel featuring the character Atticus Pund. Susan Ryeland was the editor on the Atticus Pund series by original author Alan Conroy. The nine original books are set in the 1950s and Pund is a Hercule Poirot type detective. But Conroy was a difficult author to deal with and so is Eliot Crace and Susan finds herself getting involved with the whole Crace family, a group whose legacy is a mega-popular series of children’s books by their matriarch, Miriam Crace—Eliot’s grandmother—which has become an industry onto itself, with books, merchandising, and an upcoming multi-million dollar deal for a Netflix series. And while Crace seemingly embraces the Atticus Pund character, he also embraces the ways of his creator, Alan Conroy, and Susan has to pay the price once again for bad behavior by an author. As with the previous two books, this one contains a novel within a novel, as Crace’s Atticus Pund book is told. Horowitz has adapted his other Susan Ryeland books to TV series, which show here in the U.S. on PBS Masterpiece and star the great Lesley Manville. So far we’ve seen Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders. I’m sure we’ll see Marble Hall Murders on PBS soon and I certainly hope this isn’t the last book we’ve seen starring Susan Ryeland.
Currently reading: Nightshade by Michael Connelly
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