Joshua Malbin

The Strange Tales trade paperback is the result of a brilliant marketing gimmick: Marvel revived a classic title and under its banner invited many of the most popular indie comic book authors in the country to create very short stories featuring the company’s superheroes. As far as I can tell, they let the authors do whatever they wanted.

The results are about what I’d have expected. Authors I liked a lot from their other work produced the vignettes I liked the best here.

Peter Bagge’s Spider-Man stories alone are worth the cover price, for example: Spidey finds out his saintly uncle Ben was really just a petty crook, and in his disillusionment reads Ayn Rand and decides to use his great power selfishly. He becomes a corporate tycoon and spends his time tormenting JJ Jameson, now his underling.

By contrast, Johnny Ryan, author of Prison Pit, is exactly as puerile doing superheroes as he is in his own work.

Fortunately, there are a lot more good authors in the mix than bad ones. Tony Millionaire does Iron Man; James Kochalka does The Hulk (of course); Jason does Spider-Man; and Max Cannon does The Fantastic Four and Spider-Man.

A good gift book for someone who likes comics, especially if you’re not sure what type he or she prefers.

Preview here.

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About a year and a half ago I saw Keith Gessen read from All the Sad Young Literary Men. During the annoying Q&A that followed, he was asked something about characterizing the current literary moment, or something like that, and described a split in contemporary fiction between people reacting to dead realism by writing about “guys flying around and stuff” and people (like him) who were trying to explore the bizarre side of reality in the Internet age. As someone who writes about “guys flying around and stuff,” I can say that one reason I usually shy away from writing about Internet realities is that they’re incredibly ephemeral. When it can take a matter of several years for a fascination to pass from your brain to paper to a reader’s hands, and Internet culture is moving far faster than that, it’s difficult to write anything that doesn’t feel dated before it’s published.

I was reminded of this a little while reading Peter Bagge’s new graphic novel Other Lives. We haven’t seen anything at all from Peter Bagge in almost three years (and I wonder how many people even noticed that Apocalypse Nerd existed), and nothing really significant since Hate ended its legendary run in 1998. But let’s say that he’s been working on the Second Life–focused Other Lives since 2007, when Apocalypse Nerd wrapped up. I feel like about 2007 is when fascination with Second Life was at its peak; since then I’ve heard about nothing but World of Warcraft and Facebook. (Granted, I don’t travel in these circles, really. But World of Warcraft has 11.5 million paying monthly subscribers and Facebook has around 68.5 million unique visitors while last year Second Life had a record 769,000 repeat users.) So already, on its date of publication, Other Lives feels a bit like it’s fallen out of a time capsule.

That’s all beside the point, I guess. The book itself is mostly pretty good. The primary main character Vader Ryderbeck (the pen name of journalist Vladimir Rostov) feels like a recognizably Baggeish creature, full of self-loathing and insecurity, and self-aware enough to spell all of it out in thought bubbles and dialogue. He used to be fat and unpopular, but has pulled his act together enough and lost enough weight to get himself a hot girlfriend, though unbeknownst to him she’s carrying on a virtual romance with a creepy college friend of his on “Second World.” Through that creepy college friend he reconnects with a possibly insane college acquaintance who may or may not work for the CIA tracking terrorist conspiracies in Second World.

For the most part all this is likable and easygoing. The major problem with it is the ending, which is why the remainder of this review gets a major SPOILER ALERT and goes after the jump.

(continue reading…)

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