Skullkickers Vol. 3

Skullkickers Vol. 3: Six Shooter on the Seven Seas

By Jim Zub, Edwin Huang and Misty Coats

3 ½ out of 5 Covers

Note: Image shown is not the actual cover of the volume.  This is a variant cover to issue #15 created to avoid any spoilers.  I find the discrepancy between a title like Skullkickers and a cute kitten amusing.

 

Skullkickers is a wonderful comic book series about a dwarf and a big guy (I don’t think they even got names until this volume) who work as mercenaries in a medieval fantasy setting.  After the excellent Vol. 2, the duo find themselves on the high seas aboard an all-female pirate ship.  Being at sea also means an encounter with a monster that the big guy has sworn to kill.  The reason why also involves explaining why several mysteries about the bug guy: why does he have a golden six-shooter in a medieval  world?  Where does he get the bullets?  And why does he have to draw his eyebrows on?

The answers add dramatic heft to what has been an action-comedy.  Unfortunately, the story of the big guys past and what is happening in the present aboard the pirate ship don’t meld well.  The pirates themselves get particularly short shrift, never developing into full fledged characters despite the individually unique designs. 

What the creators do accomplish is a deft balance of telling a complete story in one volume that also develops the continuing storyline.  And the ending offers several potential changes to the status quo.

 
While this volume it not as well developed as the previous two, it’s still an enjoyable ride. 

Father Gaetano's Puppet Catechism

Father Gaetano’s Puppet Catechism

By Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden

3 ½ Covers out of Five

Mignola and Golden continue their collaboration with this novella.  The tale takes place in a post WWII orphanage in Italy.  Father Gaetano is the newly arrived pastor who is to help the nuns of the convent teach the children the gospel.  He struggles in this task until one of the orphans, Sebastiano, helps him discover the former caretaker’s puppets.  They repurpose the puppets to create visual lessons.  Unfortunately the puppets take to their roles a little too well.

Being a novella, the story is more focused than the authors previous efforts and the story greatly benefits from this.  Keeping it to a single, small location cultivates a claustrophobic atmosphere and the religious imagery is closer to its original intention than you might think.  And the characters are more fleshed out then the authors other books.

There is still the initial problem of too many points of view, but this quickly settles down. But there is also the problem that the threat is just puppets.  I know some people are creeped out by them, and Mignola and Golden have used puppets before in Baltimore, but it’s never been an issue for me.  The writers do everything they can to build it up and they do create q very dramatic ending, but the source of the horror doesn’t meet the expectation.

Joe Golem and the Drowning City

Joe Golem and the Drowning City

By Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden

3 Covers out of 5

This second collaboration between Mignola and Golden is not as successful as their first.  Whereas Baltimore looked to the Gothic tradition, Joe Golem originates in the pulp magazines.  It is a combination of the hard-nosed detective and weird tales, with a bit of Sherlock Holmes and steampunk thrown in for good measure.  The story follows Molly, who is trying to track down her kidnapped guardian and mentor, Felix, with the help of Joe Golem.  They travel throughout the Drowning City, the lower half of New York which is sinking into the ocean.  And, of course, there is a much larger and sinister plot behind the kidnapping.

The problems with the story start early on.  The first four chapters are each narrated by a different character, making hard to know who the protagonist is supposed to be.  The authors try very hard with the setting of the Drowning City, but the logic behind it just doesn’t work.  Yes, the people have chosen to remain there, but the government isn’t going to do anything try and fix things?  And the various genres that are used don’t mesh well.  It felt more like Mignola and Golden were shifting between them for whichever one was needed for that scene.

But whichever genre they are using, the authors use effective.  This is especially true of the weird tales, which is really in their wheelhouse.  The characters fall into clichés: Molly is a spunky young girl who won’t take no for an answer; Joe is a detective with a mysterious past. But these have become clichés because they work.  And the authors have included some twists to them interesting.  Plus, Mignola provides a lot of illustrations, and that is never a bad thing.

Joe Golem is an attempt by Mignola and Golden to try something different and I applaud them for stretching their creative muscles, but it is not an entirely successful experiment. 

Baltimore

Baltimore, or The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire

By Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden

4 ½ Covers out of 5

Mike Mignola is best known for his creation Hellboy.  Christopher Golden is a prolific author, many of whose books involve the supernatural.  Their collaboration on Baltimore is natural.  The setting is Europe during the Great War, but the war has been put on hold due to a strange plague.  Lord Baltimore has called a gathering of three friends, all of whom know the truth: the plague is caused by vampires.  How they know this is the core of the story as they each tell tales of their adventures with Lord Baltimore as well as other encounters with supernatural horrors.

The goal of a horror story is the emotional effect of being scared.  The authors ably achieve this through their tales which range from folktales to cosmic terror, including werecreatures, puppets and piece of leather floating on the water.  This is not achieved through gore or violence (not that there isn’t any violence) but rather through the macabre, taking what should be familiar and transforming it to the grotesque. 

Despite using the tried and true trope of a gathering where each member tells a story, there is a throughline involving Lord Baltimore: how he may have caused the plague and his hunt for the vampire he wounded.  It is a tragedy, and while all the tropes are there, they never seem tired.  And yes, the title does make sense by the end, in a shocking way.

Baltimore is a great addition to the Gothic canon.

A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol

 By Charles Dickens

No rating again this time, though for entirely different reasons than The Manuel of Aeronautics.  A Christmas Carol is a story and message that has stood the test of time.  It is imbued in our cultural DNA.  There has been every variation and iteration on the theme.  So to try and give it a rating is to court folly.  That doesn’t mean I don’t have anything to say.  Reading the book is very different than watching one of the adaptations (Mickey, Muppet and George C. Scott being canon in my family), mostly because of all the little things that a reader can pick up on.

Firstly, Dickens has a way with words.  Despite a very different style than most twenty-first century writing, it is instantly accessible and readable.  Only part of that is because the story is so familiar.  The narrator is conversational and willing to explain things with humorous asides.  The very opening sets the reader at ease.  From early on: “Marley was as dead as a doornail.  Mind! I don’t mean to know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclines, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade.”  Such writing engenders a genteel conviviality that makes one desire to listen to the narrator is going to say.

Secondly, Dickens makes wonderful use of all the senses.  His descriptions truly bring scenes to life; though this may be a side effect of having frequently seen the scenes brought to life on screen.  And sometimes the descriptions do go on a bit long.

And lastly, there are the things that don’t generally make it into the adaptations.  Sometimes there is good reason for this.  The description of the Ghost of Christmas Past is particularly confusing: old and young, tall and short, sometimes with one hand and sometimes with twenty,  It is like Dickens was trying to make the image all things to all people and in doing so made it nothing to anyone.  Yet the inverse is true of one of the great Gothic creations, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.  In simplicity of prose, Dickens is able to conjure an image that taps into a universal idea of dread and terror. 

There is one thing that bugs me, something that is usually changed in other formats.  Marley says that Scrooge will be visited by three ghosts, but on three successive days.  But in the end Scrooge says they did it all in one night. Was it some sort of Groundhog’s Day where Scrooge relived Christmas Eve three times so that the spirits could visit?  In the long run (and A Christmas Carol has had a long run) this is a minor quibble, because the message the story imparts is really one we should try to live everyday.