REVIEW: End of Month Reviews #65 - May 2009 [spoilers]
Saxon Brenton
saxonbrenton at hotmail.com
Sun Jun 7 02:01:35 PDT 2009
[REVIEW] End of Month Reviews #65 - May 2009 [spoilers]
Reviewed This Issue:
Godling #13
Monsters 101 - An Academy Special
Hmm. There's not much to talk about this month. That's a bit of a
trend, these days, isn't it? It's at times like these I worry about
Arthur's conjecture (from last year) about the effects of the economic
downturn on RACC. [drums fingers thoughtfully] And of course there's
some guilt involved in that, since I certainly haven't produced anything
in the way of fiction this year, despite having a couple of things on
the backburner. I should probably do something about that...
Spoilers below:
====
Godling #13
'Tentacled Terror'
A Miscellaneous [Misc] series
by Jochem Vandersteen
Okay then. At first glance this story looks like it's about a fight
against a conjured Cthuloid horror. And to be fair that's certainly what
the bulk of this story is about.
However, keep in mind that the main plot thread for the last few
issues has been the legal case against Godling's alter ego Prof Alexander
by Amanda Reese. In that regard the key moment in this issue is the two
short paragraphs in the middle of the piece where Marcus Walker
(Alexander's lawyer, and also his fellow crime fighter Safari) unearths
the fact that Amanda has instituted three previous charges of rape, and
the rest of the issue reads as an intermission from the legal shenanigans
with a perfunctory bit of angst.
Not that there is anything wrong with this. More often than not
stories in the superhero genre are dominated issue-to-issue by 'action',
while the long term soap opera subplots are juggled across longer story
arcs. If you think about it, this is arguably how it should be in the
old-school style of superhero story that _Godling_ represents, since the
superheroics are the primary focus of this type of story and the human
aspects are important but nevertheless secondary concerns that flesh out
the characters to make them seem real to the reader. Other examples
would include the way that whenever a menace shows up the hero puts his
personal business on hold (if necessary by feigning sickness or cowardice
as an excuse) to don the brightly coloured costume of crime fighting; or
even by the way that superhumans can so often engage in lengthy and
implausibly articulate bouts of exposition in the middle of fight scenes.
The latter case shows is a rare example of how the personal feelings,
interpersonal drama, and philosophising on the nature of good and evil
can occur concurrently with the puncheminnaface. In summary, the fight
scenes get top billing.
So, the Reese subplot's importance is in the broader context of the
story arc. The overt plot for *this* issue can be summarised as: some
drugged out college students use a copy of the Necronomicon to summon
up a giant, tentacled monster, which duly rampages around campus doing
property damage and eating people until Godling channels the magical
abilities of Circe to abjure it.
I did briefly consider whether there was any significance to the
appearance of Cthulhu-lite - say, the divine energies that Godling is
wielding are acting as a catalyst for other mythopoeic phenomenon to
manifest in the physical world - but I quickly dismissed this as over-
analysing on my part. To return once again to the style of superhero
stories that Jochem has been writing here, it's simply a useful genre
convention to have random bad guys turn up for the hero to battle.
Furthermore, such a supposition would be factually incorrect, since
some of Godling's foes, such as Captain Wrakk, have no known
supernatural elements to their nature.
Monsters 101 - An Academy Special
An Academy of Super-Heroes [ASH] special
by Dave Van Domelen
This one-off takes the form of a lecture at the Academy of
Super-Heroes, on one of the esoteric subjects that crop up as part of
superhuman studies. In this case on the categorisation of monsters, or
'teratomorphs'. In the process of explaining it as a beginner's level
college class it also includes quite a bit of background on the
mechanics of how monsters arise in the first place, and some of the
major variables involved in how they continue to exist both individually
and as discernible groups.
From the perspective of writerly tricks a lecture transcript like
this is interesting because although it presents factual details - and
therefore for practical purposes acts as a Frequently Asked Question
document - it also has just enough narrative detail to act as a story in
its own right. That narrative detail does not have to be much:
descriptions of turning on the screen display, or the lecturer pausing
for a drink, or even the simple statement of the details on screen
changing. Anything to break up the exposition. Furthermore, within the
exposition itself the lecturer talks more or less naturalistically, and
he even makes asides to clarify points of information that would be
known to his in-story audience. Whether a real life audience would find
it an interesting story depends on several factors, including their
tolerance for information dumps, but at least the writer has tried to
make it more interesting than a straight dissertation.
In the concluding author's notes Dvandom also explains that the
impetus for this story came while in the shower and wouldn't go away
until he had written it down. I can accept that - at least for the
conscious level. I submit however that the idea may have been lurking
away in the back of his mind for considerably longer, since parts of the
subject matter relate back to the discussion he and I had in the wake of
_New Exarchs_ #11 in early 2008 when I postulated that the ASH setting
could have its own conspiracy of intelligent squirrels uplifted by
someone with the magene.
----------
Saxon Brenton University of Technology, city library, Sydney Australia
saxon.brenton at uts.edu.au
The Eyrie Archives of Russ Allbery which collect the online superhero
fiction of the rec.arts.comics.creative newsgroup and its sibling group
Superguy can be found at:
http://archives.eyrie.org/racc/ or
http://lists.eyrie.org/pipermail/racc/
http://archives.eyrie.org/superguy/ or
http://lists.eyrie.org/pipermail/superguy/
_________________________________________________________________
Get the latest news, goss and sport Make ninemsn your homepage!
More information about the racc
mailing list