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

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.

Among 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.

On 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":

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:

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

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:

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:

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?!!

It’s just not fair: the case of Evangeline Walton

It’s bittersweet to read — and read about — gothic novelist Evangeline Walton.  The sweet part has to do with Tachyon Press, that scrappy little Bay Area-based publisher of all things fantasy, receiving a fantastic opportunity to introduce readers to an overlooked work of gothic fiction by Walton (accompanied by an excellent foreword by Paul Di Filippo and an excellent afterword by Douglas A. Anderson).

The bitter part has to do with Walton’s publishing circumstances. It’s great that she finally is enjoying posthumous recognition (she died in 1996), but does it have to be posthumous?

My friends, I know that writers shouldn’t be driven to write by their audiences — it’s the inner voice that’s supposed to be the motivation, right? -- but a little recognition, a little connection, is food for any writer’s soul, whether in print or here, in the WordPress universe. It makes you feel good to know that someone is listening. When you feel that way, that feeling informs your work and can make all the difference.

Walton seems to have had very little such nourishment. Di Filippo’s foreword describes her very bruising, painful publishing history, and the brief fame she enjoyed for her Mabinogion Tetralogy — a set of books that some place alongside Tolkien and T.H. White.

“She Walks in Darkness” made the publishing rounds in the 1960s and landed back in the proverbial desk drawer when no one was interested. The book’s a small miracle in prose. A tightly-controlled, first-person narrative of a terrifying experience in a remote Italian villa.

Barbara, the narrator, and her husband Richard are honeymooners. They travel to Tuscany not for a wine-and-sunshine experience like you’ll find in Frances Mayes’ bestsellers, but because Richard is an archeologist eager to study the Etruscan catacombs under the Villa Carenni. The romantic devil.

The patriarch of the Carenni family “believed that the villa had been built over the site of an ancient temple to Mania, Queen of the Underworld....It was the old Etruscan name for the Queen of the Underworld before they began using Greek script names, and identified her with Persephone. Her rites weren’t pretty. Roman records mention the substitution of poppyheads for the kind of offerings she’d received earlier...Little boys’ heads....

When Richard is injured in a car accident, and lies unconscious, and Barbara believes a murder has escaped from a local prison and is hiding among the buried tombs — or is it Mania herself? -- the story takes off. She doesn’t know what to do. She can’t make a long trek to get help, she can’t leave Richard, not when she’s convinced someone is lurking around the deserted villa. Barbara’s trapped.

Just the sort of book I’d have pounced on when I was reviewing for the paper.

Walton’s compression, her economy is brilliant ... Barbara’s narrative, for instance, moves easily from the horrifying present to the innocence of the previous day in a single tense-shifting paragraph. No bells or whistles. Deftly done.

“The Da Vinci Code’s” Dan Brown also could learn something from her handling of big, historical enigmas. Theories don’t drop into her narrative like big, chunky encyclopedia entries — at one point, Barbara’s reading of a discovered notebook seamlessly gives us a theory of the true identity of the Etruscans, who originated in a place called Tyrrha:

Did not Plato say that Atlanteans once occupied the Tyrrhene coast? Whether the place that in his Greek foolishness he called Atlantis lies beneath the sea, or—as is more likely—beneath the sands of the Sahara, that land was the cradle-land, the birthplace of all the arts of man. The birthplace of the Rasenna [Etruscans].

The book reflects its time period — the 1950s — in Barbara’s view of herself, her relationship to her husband, an unexpected hunky Tuscan, and men in general ... But such dating isn’t necessarily a bad thing, is it? It reminds us that the book wasn’t written in a vacuum, that it arose out of a particular time from someone’s particular circumstances.

I’m just sorry that we had to discover it now, when it’s much too late for Walton to receive some of the praise she deserves.

Related:

Go here to learn more about Tachyon Publications, publisher of Walton's novel.

Go here for another nice review of "She Walks in Darkness" at Bibliophilic Monologues.

More Related:

• Early Reviews of SHE WALKS IN DARKNESS (evangelinewalton.wordpress.com)
• First publication: A new Evangeline Walton novel coming from Tachyon! (evangelinewalton.wordpress.com)
• The Power of the Tombs (cestebanwh1.wordpress.com)