Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review
Slaying the Dragon/Fantastic Four: Full Circle/Liarmouth: A Feel Bad Romance
From the Book Reviewer’s desk, Division of Media Review: Hi, everyone!! I just wanted to express my gratitude at being given a whole newsletter to talk about some things that have crossed my desk recently! Such fun!!!
It has been such a treat to review these books for you, and I hope I was able to do them proper justice. All I can tell you is that these were greatly enjoyed by the Admin Staff up in the front office at the Apocalypse Bunker! My goodness, so much laughter!!
If you have any book suggestions that you’d like to see reviewed, just drop me a line and I’ll order them up in the library’s computer. I can’t promise I’ll get to all of them, but I’ll sure try my darnedest!!
Also, if you know where the rest of my department is, please have them call me.
Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons by Ben Riggs
It’s a game whose very name itself stands in for an entire industry (like Xerox), and it’s an industry that it created, virtually from nothing, and has led to the rise of the computer game, dozens of intellectual properties worth billions, if not trillions, of dollars, and has emerged from the shadows of sub-culture into the mainstream. Dungeons and Dragons, the game that got you shoved into a locker in 1984 is now part of the gig economy in 2022 with professional DMs running games for people both online and in their homes as special party events.
Over the years a number of books have emerged purporting to shine a light on some seemingly forgotten bit of historical relevance regarding the formation of the tabletop role-playing game as typified by Dungeons & Dragons. The game was relaunched in 2014 for its fortieth anniversary and its popularity has only increased since that time. Now, with a major movie poised to drop in 2023 (one that looks like the game, and not some ersatz medieval sorta-world with a dragon painted in via CGI), Ben Riggs’ new book has positioned itself as a story never told, at least, not all in one place.
And why do we need another RPG history book? Because this one is a little iconoclastic, and that’s a good thing. Riggs is polite with his idol-toppling, saying “Excuse me,” and “I’m sorry” every time he tips a sacred cow over, but it’s necessary in order to look past the ego, the legend, the web of artifice, and the sanitized press releases in order to get to the truth.
Riggs wastes no time prying the lid off of the early years of TSR, where he spends most of his word count, and with good reason; this is where all of the bodies are buried. Riggs writes engagingly and with wry asides and a bit of sarcasm about a company that made a business strategy out of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. There’s lots of blame to spread around and Riggs is generous with it; likewise, he is just as generous with praise, when it is warranted, and that’s one of the best things about the book; there’s a balance and some nuance here that most gamer narratives lack. He throws eggs at everyone and then he hands them a towel and says, “Aren’t they great, folks? Let’s give them a hand!”
The book does a good job of forensic necromancy, sifting through the rubble and attempting to make sense of it all: he asks, “What happened?” a lot. It seems incredulous now, being run by a multimedia corporation and with products available on the shelves at Target, for crying out loud, but the original team of people were not businessmen, and they had no idea how to create a business whole cloth, much less an original company that focused on publishing and maintaining and controlling intellectual property. They were gamers, just trying to do a thing they loved. That love carried hundreds of people along for decades, and if you include fans, too, tens of thousands of people.
Riggs gets into the thick of it all, and provides much-needed context to some of TSR’s more infamous screw-ups and gaffs. If you were a gamer prior to the Wizards of the Coast takeover and you ever shook your head at an article you read in Dragon magazine and said, “What the hell are they doing?” the answer is probably somewhere in this book.
Slaying the Dragon is a quick read, and there’s a lot of stuff I didn’t know (and what I did know what scattered around in pieces and parts). Riggs stitches it all together for us and his interpretation of these key events will be the standard for some years to come.
Fantastic Four: Full Circle by Alex Ross
Alex Ross returns to the Marvel Universe with this original graphic novel about Marvel’s First Family, the Fantastic Four. I’m not going to blow the story for you, other than to mention FF #51, “This Man, This Monster!” and say maybe you might want to have it handy. It’s not necessary, but if you’re old school and you loved it when there was an asterisk in the word balloon and down at the bottom of the panel was a note from the editor saying, “It happened back in FF #51! –Smilin’ Stan”, then you will want to know what the jumping off point was.
Ross isn’t breaking any new ground, here: his methodology is right out of John Byrne’s playbook, back when he was writing FF stories in the 1980s and tying them into the original Lee/Kirby issues (who can forget the awesome Byrne FF Annual 17 story that tied back to the Skrulls in FF #2), and he’s wise to use whatever works. Byrne’s run is the second great hallmark on that storied series, notably for his reverence to the first, original 101 issue run. And while Byrne made a career out of taking old, seemingly dead concepts and freshening them up for a modern audience, Ross is going in the other direction. His designs for the characters are such an amalgamation of all the different variations of the team over the years, that he has rendered them effectively timeless.
The only vintage inferences in the graphic novel are the obvious deployment of Kirby Tech, which is non-negotiable, frankly, and Ross’ version of the Negative Zone which is both a throwback to some of Kirby’s crazy color and collage work on the book, but really seems to be pulling from the posters, greeting cards, and puzzles that were produced by a company called Third Eye in the early 1970s—black light pop art super heroes in the Mighty Marvel Manner, don’tcha know.
I remember these things, and I wanted a black light and some Third Eye posters so bad, but my parents wisely concluded that they would be a gateway to harder things, like fuzzy velvet posters, and denied me my happiness. But I digress.
This original graphic novel is gorgeous, and features a fold-out origin story in that style Ross popularized over at DC on those treasury edition books. It’s a single adventure that feels good, the kind of comics we grew up reading that they don’t make anymore and I say that knowing how it sounds, but it’s true. Fantastic Four: Full Circle stays in the nostalgia lane and never drifts into sentimentality, but it’s bittersweet knowing that the only way we’re going to get Marvel comics like this anymore is when Ross decides to make them.
Liarmouth: A Feel Bad Romance: A Novel by John Waters
(editor’s note: I did not write this review. I could not make it past the third chapter, which was absolutely appalling.)
I’m going to tell you right up front: this is not for everyone. Hell, it’s so filthydirty it’s hard to imagine it is aimed at anyone. But it is, in fact, aimed squarely at John Waters fans, and particularly those who feel he’s gone legit, or lost a step in his ascension to to the plateau of Mainstream-Adjacent Icon.
This book reads like how old John Waters movies watch, with the catch being, as a fiction writer, Waters is not restrained by what he can and cannot film. His voice is omnipresent, obligingly sharing every character’s base desires, most private thoughts, and a dash of omniscient commentary as we follow the lives of two petty criminals and the people they impact on the day of their professional and presumably personal breakup. Marsha Sprinkle is one of the most singularly unlikeable characters I’ve ever read, and even still, I found myself rooting for her again and again as she attempts to ditch her most recent partner for greener pastures.
Despite these awful characters inhabiting a world of tourists, hitchhikers, militant bouncers (don’t ask) and ordinary folks by way of Philadelphia and Baltimore, Waters seems to genuinely love his special needs sociopaths and it shows, no matter how absurd he makes them, or how many times he stops to make an authorial aside regarding alternative and counter-culture lifestyles in the 21st century. His affection for his weirdos and freaks always shines through.
Waters’ writing style is…well, if it was anyone else, I’d think, “this guy is overdoing it a bit,” but lavish and vulgar excess has always been Waters’ bread and butter. Seeing his vision distilled into words, descriptions, and some of the most improbable actions ever, is fun, but I found myself needing to take a break every few chapters. The imagery was a pile-up after a while and I needed to clear the cache.
Liarmouth is pure pulp, somewhere south of Todd Browning’s Freaks, and somewhere North of Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. It’s out there where the busses don’t run, and it’s great—if that’s your kind of thing. At least once per chapter, a sentence would come along that left my mouth hanging open. There are so many words I never thought I’d read in a sequence in this book that I may be giving this out exclusively to everyone on my Christmas list. I need to be able to look at other people and go, “I know, right!?” I hope he writes another one.
So who actually read, and wrote the review for Liarmouth?