Wondercon and my 401(k)

While the literary world is mourning the passing of one superhero right now (rest in peace,Gabriel Garcia Marquez!) and Christians everywhere are celebrating another this weekend, I've been thinking about comic book heroes after taking my boys to Wondercon in Anaheim, Calif. It was the perfect opportunity to make some acquisitions like these

wondercon

and also to conduct a little research on what's-selling-for-what in the superhero market these days. I still have a bunch of old comics from my younger days, and they should be worth something, right? I just didn't realize how much.

x-men 30Among the new acquisitions, I absolutely had to have a copy of "The Wedding of Scott Summers and Jean Grey" from X-Men, even though it's disappointing. Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum, and John Byrne ripped little kids' hearts apart with "The Dark Phoenix Saga" back in the 1980s, and this issue is an attempt to heal up what's unhealable. I'm glad to have it, but the entire thing is far too sentimental to measure up to what Claremont & Company created. They chose the best, and only way to conclude that story. Nuff said.

 

kirby-the-demonOn the other hand, nothing that the immortal Jack Kirby ever created can disappoint. While the price tag on his "New Gods" series scared me off (for the time being, at least), I picked up this nifty issue of "The Demon" instead. Switching companies, from Marvel to DC, did nothing to dilute or change his signature style and voice.  Open these pages and you instantly know where you are and whose world you've entered. Kirby was a true comics mythologist, and in this issue he gives us another terrific origins story for the aptly-named demonologist Jason Blood. Beware, faint-hearted readers!

Finally, I spotted the name of "Claremont" on the cover of a series about the heroes known as "The Sovereign Seven":

sovereign-seven-one

and when I realized that the name belonged to the same fellow who created the Dark Phoenix tales, and that he wrote this series for DC, not Marvel, I had just one reaction: I'm in!!!

As far as my 401(k) is concerned, my friends, Yours Truly owns several special old editions of certain comics, but I never knew their value. I never bothered to hunt in any comics price guides or surf e-Bay to see what they were worth.

One of these is an early issue of Daredevil, his battle against the Purple Man in #4, before the blind crusader switched to his devil-red costume:

daredevil-4-purple-man

... as well as this early appearance of storyteller Frank Miller ("300," "Sin City," "The Dark Knight Returns") in Daredevil:

daredevil-158-frank-miller

Even then, early in his career, Miller had a fully mature, sophisticated touch. This issue is creepy! There's also a later issue of DD's that features Miller's introduction of the assassin Elektra:

daredevil-elektra-frank-miller

In my mind, I can still see that comic book rack in the drugstore -- I can still hear it squeaking as my mother yelled at me and I frantically searched for something to buy. Elektra's silhouette and the look on Daredevil's face closed the deal for me.

And then there's the Dark Phoenix climactic issue (mentioned above) which is nothing short of Greek Tragedy, Marvel-style:

phoenix-saga-137

Well, my good friends, I found that these single issues range from $100 to several hundred dollars. I certainly can't quit my job anytime soon, but it was a nice discovery -- sort of like finding some old savings bonds in the attic that once belonged to Granny.

It's also a nice vindication of a childhood obsession, too. See? All that lawn-mowing money didn't go to waste afterall! What kind of stock portfolio gets this kind of return on investment?!

Not to mention that my boys and I have several more boxes of old comics to examine. Who knows what else we'll find?!!

P.S. Dante's salty bread

Credit: Fastily While a Kirkus Review item on Prue Shaw's Dante book praises Shaw for showing us the genius of Dante's work, there's something else I'd like to mention -- more of an aside than anything else -- that is just as worthy as her assessment of that mighty poem.

The poet's biography, embedded in the lines.

Not the major elements of his biography -- not his encounters with actual friends and family members, enough's said about that -- I'm thinking more of stray, little bits that dramatically illustrate his own circumstances.

One is especially moving to me, my friends. Maybe it will be to you, too.

In Paradiso, canto 17, Dante speaks of his exile from Florence. Following a gorgeously-stunning line that I can't help but think inspired Cavafy -- Tu lascerai ogne cosa diletta/piu caramente... ("You leave behind everything that you love most dearly"), he continues:

Tu proverai si come sa di sale lo pane altrui, e come e duro calle lo scendere e 'l salir per l'altrui scale.

("You will know how salty is the taste of another's bread, and how demanding a road it is to climb up and down another's stairs")

There's the real cost of being exiled -- the realization that one is lost comes with every bite of food and every movement through another's house. (I'm sure that anyone who's ever  had to sleep on a friend's couch for a few weeks  can appreciate this sentiment.)

Shaw is oh-so wise to include it. Yet another way to remind us of the poet's circumstances.

 

 

Second only to Paris ... 700 years ago, that is

Florentine sunset: courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/people/sherseydc/ Well, we wouldn't have Shakespeare's sonnets if plague hadn't closed all the London theaters; we wouldn't have Henry James' novels (a mixed blessing) if he'd struck gold as a playwright; and we definitely wouldn't have Dante's "Comedy" if the poet hadn't been driven out of Florence.

In other words, misfortune's often been the handmaiden to great art.

That last example is taken from Prue Shaw, whose recent book "Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity" (Liveright/W.W. Norton) achieves what seemed impossible -- to provide a fresh assessment of the poet and his poem for modern readers.

Why impossible?

It's not hard to understand, my friends. Go to the "D" shelf in your local university library. Or do a quick Google search. You'll find that Dante's poem is encased -- entombed (like Farinata in circle 6 of Hell) -- within layers of critical commentary (both scholarly and mainstream) . It seems that everything that could be said about the poem has been said about it.

And besides that, most of us cling to some snobby presumption about Dante that sounds like this:

"Devils and circles, a big terraced mountain and a damsel, and heaven at the end of it ... what else is there to know?"

What would Dante think of such a response? There's a Dore engraving that, I think, says it all:

dante-by-dore

He definitely didn't suffer fools. A pretty intimidating image.

And for those intimidated by the poem itself, the great mediator lately has been thriller-king Dan Brown, whose latest psychopath in the Robert Langdon series is a lover of "Inferno" (ok, so what does that say about the rest of his fans?).

ReadingDante_978-0-87140-742-9-1Shaw's the one, though, who really deserves the honor of being mediatrix, not Brown -- her book makes a compelling, poignant  case for why we should really care about this epic  composed some 700 years ago.

Why? Because it is easy to forget the ingenious, intricate structuring of the tripartite poem, the scathing political commentary, and the risks that Dante took -- which is why Shaw spends the first half of  her book on vivid descriptions of 13th century Florence's socio-political landscape. Today, she's a picturesque tour stop; in Dante's day, Florence was far more, "a huge metropolis in medieval terms. Only Venice and Milan equalled Florence in size; only Paris was larger."

When it comes to Dante, historical context is easily lost. But Shaw deftly sets his struggles against a tumultuous world and a corrupt pope (Boniface VIII) in terms that we can all easily understand:

Dante is as "engaged" a political writer as there has ever been, and as brave a one. A modern parallel would be Russian writers exiled under Stalin for speaking out: Osip Mandelstam comes to mind.

Dante as political dissident -- this is the sort of revelation that cracks away at all of the scholarship that's hardened over the poem through time.

There are plenty of other examples, like the "literary shoptalk" between Virgil and Statius which causes Dante to say of himself, "I listened to their talk, which gave me insight into writing poetry."

Or this bit about why, from a practical standpoint, Dante may have chosen to write in terza rima:

Medieval scribes often took liberties with the texts they copied. They cut bits they didn't like, added lines of their own, rather as a musician might treat a score as a basis for skilled improvisation. There is a whole scholarly industry devoted to scribal rewordings of the Roman de la Rose. Given the controversial nature of some of Dante's material, scribes might well have been tempted to censor the text by cutting awkward passages. But this is virtually impossible with the terza rims. Any cut will leave a text which is obviously botched. Any attempt to add material is likewise doomed to failure.

What Shaw accomplishes with passages like these is to inject blood back into the poet: He was human. He struggled as a writer, and he anticipated the meddling of editors by making his poem a bit harder to edit.

Scholar extraordinaire: Prue Shaw (photo by Cordelia Beresford)

(In this she is very much like "The Swerve's" Stephen Greenblatt, who is also published by W.W. Norton and who yours truly heard speak not long ago.)

My friends, I could easily go on, but then I'd have a 5,000-word blog post, which sort of defeats the purpose of a blog. If you've perused Call of the Siren before, I'm sure you know how much I adore Dante. But instead, I'll humbly point the way ahead to paradise, like Virgil did for the poet, and ask you to explore the riches of Shaw's book for yourself. Ciao, amici.

DANTE-RELATED AT CALL OF THE SIREN:

 DANTE-RELATED  FROM ELSEWHERE

DANTE SCHOLAR PRUE SHAW:

 

Strange & Norrell: Where did that novel go?

A republished post by fantasy novelist Jo Walton asks a poignant question, Whatever happened to Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell?

"It did about as well as any book can do," Walton writes, "….but five years later, it doesn't seem to have had any impact."

Walton's piece first appeared in 2010 (hence the five years remark -- Clarke's wondrous strange novel first appeared in 2004). I just read the piece, which was republished on the Tor website to promote her latest book, a collection of writings and ruminations,  What Makes this Book so Great: Re Reading the Classics of Science fiction and fantasy. (A great idea for a book that any blogger could produce!)

'Magic Circle' - John William Waterhouse (1886)

Walton's is the kind of piece that every writer wishes to see -- it not only tells you that your book matters, but that it's worth reading a second or a third time (and that's quite a thing to say when it comes to Clarke's novel, which is Dickensian in length as well as style).

Walton's piece is thoughtful, and she entertains  several reasons why more novels haven't been clearly inspired by the Norrell/Strange epic (though, since 2010, I think her judgment is dated -- the landscape hasn't been nearly as empty as she claimed back then).

Among them:

  • Inspiration just takes a long time to have an effect on people, and Clarke's book will require time to inspire: "influence does take time to permeate through"
  • Maybe this novel is just too wonderful and unique to influence other fantasy works or to engage in a dialogue with other works of fantasy; in other words, it is sealed off on its own fictive island

I don't entirely disagree with Walton, but my immediate reaction was, hey, more of the burden's on the industry's shoulders, not Clarke's.

As I recall, Clarke's novel appeared in between two books in the Harry Potter series — it was an incredible stroke of timing for her. Magic-hungry readers snapped it up as they impatiently waited for the next Potter installment. The ten years that she spent writing her novel were amply repaid.

Jonathan_strange_and_mr_norrell_coverBut afterwards, I think Walton is right: For a long time, the publishing field remained pretty clear of anything resembling Clarke's (or Rowling's) work. Some publishers did try to cash in with deliberate, pathetic clones. (Anybody out there read a silly series of YA novels about the adventures of Charlie Bone?)  But aside from these, it was mostly Harry who held the field.

That had less to do with the powers of Clarke's inspiration and more with the power of the publishers, the gatekeepers of what we see in bookstores and online.

I suspect — based on my own work, which draws some light from blessed St. Susanna, and from my other experiences in the industry — that plenty of admirers are out there, writing works that are in perfect dialogue with hers. But the buyers for various publishers are thinking of other things. They're chasing after tastes and trends -- one's hope remains, as always, to find that editor who believes in nurturing stories for a simple reason: They should be read and shared.

Walton, I think, forgot about that back in 2010.

As of today, in 2014, Clarke's book still pops up in discussions on the blogosphere. She seems less a solitary figure than a writer in company with the names Rothfuss, Gaiman, Grossman, Link, etc.

And there's a miniseries in the works, which should be terrific -- in other words, Clarke's novel is still alive and well in people's minds.

***

P.S. I do like Walton's idea of re-reading classic works and explaining why they're great. I've been thinking of ways to feed the Siren. That's a terrific one.

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