The End of an Era - The Adventures of Doctor McNinja

In 2004, Christopher Hastings began publishing The Adventures of Doctor McNinja online. A few years back, he started getting professional comic-writing gigs from Marvel, and about a year ago announced that he would be winding up the story of Doctor McNinja.

As his name suggests, Doctor McNinja is a doctor from a family of ninjas (specifically, Irish Ninjas(1), although his mother is Jewish by birth,) who, having abandoned the family business of assassination and pursuing memetic fueds with pirates, heals the sick and fights - and also, if we're honest, commits a lot of - crime in the city of Cumberland, Maryland(2). Initially facing an eclectic gaggle of threats such as copyright trolling fast food clown Donald McBonald, 'American Ninja' Frans Rayner, velociraptor-riding palaeontologists, vengeful pirates and Dracula, he eventually found his nemesis in the form of King Radical, a super cool crimelord intent on making the world a more radical place.

After travelling into space and into the future with Cumberland's mayor, astronaut and chrononaut Chuck Goodrich, and thwarting Radical's attempts to merge the world with his own home in the Radical Lands, McNinja entered into a final duel with his enemy as King Radical managed to become President and used the power of his office to exact petty and extravagant revenge on those who had thwarted him over the years(3). It is a fight that will cost McNinja his clone brother, his family and his very identity; and perhaps his life.

Ninjas can't grab you if you're on fire. Tru fax.

The twelve years of The Adventures of Dr McNinja is probably as textbook an example of Cerebus Syndrome as you'll find without having to read past the first couple of volumes of Cerebus itself and into the crazy stuff(4). It runs from a weird little comic about a doctor who is also a ninja to something with a coherent arc plot and goes to some pretty dark places by the end. And yes, it's still about a doctor who is also a ninja, who fights a man who wears a crown and rides a motorbike and dreams of filling the world with dinosaur people and introducing proper, radical tennis, whose secretary is a gorilla named Judy, who studied with a clone of Benjamin Franklin and whose youthful ward has a resplendent moustache. It's been a real blast, and if you haven't done so already, maybe you should check out the archive; it's substantial, yet finite, and that's not something you can say of many webcomics.

Also, he does a team up with Axe Cop.

(1) While the 'Mc' prefix is more commonly associated with Scots names, the two countries share a lot of cultural roots, and 'O'Ninja' just doesn't pop the same way.
(2) By long-standing agreement, the local police won't pursue him for any crime as long as he can reach his office and call 'base'.
(3) Well, this feels ominously prescient now.
(4) Cerebus Syndrome is when a work gets more serious over time, rather then the author having a complete psychological collapse, although that also happened with Cerebus the Aardvark.

2017 Reading Challenge - One Hundred Years of Solitude

Welcome to the jungle...

Book 1 (January, Magic Realism)

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (translated by Gregory Rabasso and read by John Lee.)

Reason for Reading: South American literature and magic realism are strongly intertwined, at least as far as the canon of translated works exported to the English speaking world goes, and neither is something that I know much about. One Hundred Years of Solitude has a strong reputation both in Spanish and in translation, so that seemed a fair place to start from.

One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the Buendias, a family of variously antisocial loners whose patriarch is one of the founders of the village of Macondo, along with his wife and first cousin Ursula. His name is Jose Arcadio Buendia, and his children are Jose Arcadio and Aureliano. Most of their descendants are also called Jose Arcadio or Aureliano (Aureliano in fact has seventeen children all bearing his name) with the only blips being Arcadio and Aureliano Jose, so it's a book that demands close attention. The daughters of the family have more varied names, but are fewer in number, as befits a line wallowing in machismo. The Buendia men are either towering geniuses or physical titans, blessed with an extraordinary blend of total commitment and capacity for vacillation. The women are determined and focused, but prey to violent passions.

Aureliano, who later becomes a revolutionary Colonel fighting thirty-two doomed wars against the forces of conservatism, has some gift of prophecy, and the family inherits from an ancient Gypsy named Melquiades a set of parchments which contain, deeply coded, the entire history of the line and of Macondo from Jose Arcadio Buendia's dream of a town of glass to the destruction of the doomed settlement in a great wind storm. The history of the family and their town is cyclical, not just in the names of the boys, but in repeating patterns of behaviour, the constant return of the more introspective sons to the study of Melquiades parchments, and a tendency for members of the family to fall in love with their own aunts (and an accompanying fear of one day producing a child with the tail of a pig,) to embark on doomed causes, and to remain forever solitary however many people surround them.

It's a somewhat bleak story, using elements of the fabulous as part of its commentary on the repeating nature of history and the political stagnation of a world where the conservative regime is eternal in its corruption because its liberal opponents either compromise too much or become monstrous warmongers; where hard work is always defeated by time and dissipation; and where the best that true virtue can hope for is to escape the miserable confines of reality after leaving a trail of destructive insanity in its wake. It is also, however, a deeply beautiful book, full of black humour and splendid prose. The translation is the only one ever published. It first appeared three years after the original, because Marquez insisted on waiting for the translator Gregory Rabasso to be available, and the author declared the prose to be superior to the original(1).

All in all, while I have a limited taste for doomed family sagas I think if I as going to read one then this is a good one to go for. I am definitely minded to look into the author's other work once the challenge is over, and perhaps see what else Latin America has to offer.

(1) New York Times, 2004 

My 2017 Reading Challenge

Okay, so I asked around about classics to read in 2017 a while back, but I think rather than specifically classics per se I think that my reading challenge to myself this year is going to be to broaden my horizons (as much as I could read Jane Austen until the cows come home.) I want to read different stuff to what I usually do (SF, fantasy, thrillers, primarily by British or American authors.)

So, my challenge to myself is this:

Each month, read or listen to (audiobook, not adaptation) and review two books which fall outside my usual genres of preference, and/or are written by authors who are non-white, non-English, non-straight, non-male or otherwise fall outside the usual range of voices in my reading. For extra credit, add in some poetry, because I basically never read poetry.

I plan to loosely theme each month, because that's how I roll. I've got the following penciled in, but there are obviously some pretty big gaps. What would you recommend to me to fill them?

January - Magic Realism

1. 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
2. Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter

February - Gothic

1. White is for Witching - Helen Oyeyemi
2. We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson

March - Mad People

1. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
2. Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh

April - China

1. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress - Dai Sijie
2. Wild Swans - Jung Chang

May - Australia

1. Carpentaria - Alexis Wright
2. That Deadman Dance - Kim Scott

June - Emancipation

1. Beloved - Toni Morrison
2. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

July - India

1. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
2.  The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy

August - The Luke Cage Syllabus

1. Little Green - Walter Mosley
2. Crime Partners - Donald Goines

September - Africa

1.  Dust - Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
2.  We Should All Be Feminists - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

October - 

1.  Travel Light - Naomi Mitchison
2.  

November - Muslim Authors
With this one, I might want to swap out one of the memoirs for something purely fictional.

1. Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi
2. Reading Lolita in Tehran - Azar Nafisi

December - Mother Russia

1.  Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
2. The Secret History of Moscow - Ekaterina Sedia

Poetry and Music Bonuses

1. Tupac - The Rose that Grew From Concrete
2. Guante - A Love Song, A Death Rattle, A Battle Cry
3. Edgar Allen Poe - Collected Verse
4. Te Vaka - Havili
5. Freida Hughes - Wooroloo

Reading Roundup - December

An unfortunate title, as all Google
searches go first to the song from The
Hunger Games.

There's been a death among the bright young things of London. The daughter of the Goddess of the River Tyburn is involved, and to repay a debt Peter Grant - the Met's only apprentice magician - is to make sure that no-one knows that. It is a debt that he utterly fails to repay, but that soon becomes the least of his problems as a lost work by Sir Isaac Newton appears and is pursued by at least two other groups considering themselves the heirs to the great man's legacy, and a series of unnecessarily horrible deaths surrounding the original murder hint that someone has inadvertently angered the Folly's nemesis, the Faceless Man. On the upside, if the old Faceless is going after Lady Tyburn's daughter, Grant might just have another chance to pay back his debt.

The Hanging Tree is the sixth novel in the Rivers of London series, but don't let that fool you into thinking it's the sixth story or you'll be baffled by references to Russian sorcerers and self-driving cars. The comics are full on canon and don't you forget it(1). We return to London after the dreamy rural idyll of Foxglove Summer, and both Grant and Aaronovich are on firmer ground for a case which brings us round one of the long awaited throwdown between the Folly and the Faceless Man, as well as introducing two new factions in the form of an American paranormal PMC and a matriarchal counterpoint to the traditional Newtonian sausage fest.

This was the first of the series I'd come to as an audiobook, and Kobna Holbrook-Smith more than justified his continued employment as the series narrator, bringing Grant's distinctive voice to life.

Soon to add 'soon to be a major motion
picture' to its cover.

The Screaming Staircase is the first in a series of YA paranormal mystery novels featuring Lockwood & Co, one of a large number of agencies who deal with the UK's major ghost problem. With seeing, tracking and thus containing ghosts largely the purview of the young, most agencies use adult supervisors, but Lockwood & Co is owned and run by teenagers, specifically the titular Lockwood. A charming, reckless, slightly Peter Pannish youth, Lockwood recruits narrator Lucy Carlyle to join his agency alongside the book smart George. When they stumble on a long-cold murder case the exposure attracts a millionaire industrialist, who asks them to cleanse one of the most haunted mansions in the country; a job which could be the making of the agency... or the death of them all.

The book does a good deal of world-building and character introduction, but also has a fine plot of its own and a wonderfully villainous villain. Oddly, I kept thinking it was set around the Victorian era, rather than in an alternate modern day, possibly because of the swords, or the widespread use of child labour (for reasons of spiritual sensitivity.) I've been a fan of Stroud since the Bartimaeus trilogy, albeit I've not followed him closely and there are now about half a dozen Lockwood & Co books for me to catch up on, but them's the breaks.

Miranda Raison's reading was excellent.

Like Goldfinger, but more so.

And speaking of YA authors I touch base with occasionally, Goldenhand is the latest in the occasional Old Kingdom series. Following directly from the short story 'Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case', it follows Nicholas and Abhorsen-in-Waiting Lirael as they faff around the Clayr glacier arguing snittily about librarians and obviously fancying the ever-loving pants off each other, while to the north of the Old Kingdom (because it turns out there is a north of the Old Kingdom) a young woman is struggling to bring a years-old message to warn Lirael of the danger still posed by 'the Witch Without a Face.'

As my summary may suggest, I found Goldenhand to be an awkwardly balanced book. Ferin's mission is all urgency and good people falling under the plot bus while waiting for the badasses to arrive, but the Lirael and Nick bits are basically a comedy of manners, intercut with the life or death stuff. For my money, it would have worked better to focus on Lirael until she hears news of the message, then cut back to what Ferin has been up to (chases, violence, death and sacrifice.)

I confess, I was also a little disappointed that this is the end of Chlorr of the Mask, who from her introduction in Clariel frankly deserved to be more than a sinister presence, but then Nix has never been good at... No, scratch that; has never really been one to give screen time to his villains. I don't think it's that he can't write them; he chooses not to. Even the human antagonists barely get a mention, and the northern tribes in particular end up as a literal faceless horde.

The performance by Heather Wilds was not one of the best I've heard. It's not the worst, but it doesn't bring the book to life and makes the slow sections drag.

(1) Note to self, acquire comics.