Sky Coyote by Kage Baker

Sky Coyote is Kage Baker’s second novel about The Company, a series that has brought her wide acclaim. Though I was a bit underwhelmed by the first entry, the overall scenario set up was intriguing enough that I wanted to continue. While some encouraged me to skip this novel since it was the weakest in the series and does not focus on my primary area of interest, I am glad I decided to go ahead and read it. However, I found this novel to be more disappointing than the first.

The Company is a 24th century organization dedicated to preserving works of art, literature, and endangered species through the work of immortal cyborgs. The Company travels back in time and grants immortality to people who then serve the Company’s ends throughout time.

The narrator of Sky Coyote is Facilitator Joseph, an immortal who is over 20,000 years old. He was responsible for the rescue of Mendoza in the first novel, and it is my suspicion that the two characters form the primary lens through which we will view the rest of the series. In this novel, set in 1700, Joseph’s assignment is to prepare a Chumash village to be preserved and taken to work for the Company. A tribe of Native American’s from the Bay Area of California, the Chumash are not a simple, primitive people but a sophisticated culture with a complex economic program in place. With a series of prosthetics, Joseph is transformed into the Chumash god Sky Coyote. Though the villagers accept his message disguised in mythology, the anthropologists and scientists working for the Company must gather and record samples of each aspect of Chumash culture. Joseph must maintain their interest and morale, as well as fight off the influence of monotheistic zealots from a southern tribe.

At the same time, Joseph must deal with the 24th century mortals who were sent back in time to supervise the project. The mortals possess a limited vocabulary and have a sense of immaturity about them. They are suspicious and fearful of immortals. Though the immortal operatives are told that in the 24th century their services will no longer be needed, there is much suspicion as to what happens at that point.

Throughout the narrative, Joseph flashes back to earlier times and ponders what the Company does with operatives that it considers unsatisfactory. While there had previously been a group of Enforcers who were created from the large Cro-Magnon people, they have all disappeared. Much of the story involves the question as to what happens when an immortal is no longer needed and what will be the reason the operatives are no longer needed in just 650 years. My expectation is that these questions will be answered over the course of the series, but their introduction here made me feel that at least a little answer should be given to a portion of the issues; instead, we just get mystery after mystery without any sense of payoff.

The saga of the Chumash people was quite boring and anticlimactic to me. Though the successful assimilation of their people into the Company is jeopardized at one point, that jeopardy never really seems to have much of an effect on their people and only really served to wrap up what proved to be a boring facet of the story. While the treatment of the Chumash as eloquent and sophisticated is a commendable choice, their population never amounted to anything interesting.

As with most stories involving time travel, Baker made some curious and baffling statements. After the capture of a Native American monotheist which proved that monotheism grew independently of Christianity among indigenous peoples, an operative claims that the opportunity for study would be as valuable as a firsthand account of Jesus’s apostles or Muhammad. Yet given that the Company has access to all of recorded history, why didn’t it have operatives in place to witness things like the crucifixion?

While the reader gets a better overall sense of the Company and its role in collecting history, one feels a dissonance in quality between the ideas and overall plot that Baker is creating and the stories in which she is communicating it. While I am very interested to learn what happens next, I have no faith that the basic plot will be interesting in the least. Perhaps as I have been advised, Sky Coyote is the weakest of the books and the series will skew more towards my interests in the future. I hope that is the case.

Thoughts on Several Comics

In X-Men: First Class, Jeff Parker focuses on the original five members of the team by setting his stories within their first days as classmates and teammates at Charles Xavier’s school. The most endearing quality of this collection of eight issues is the sense of fun one gets when reading. The world doesn’t hang in the balance, and the story is resolved by the end of the issue. It’s just fun. Yet there are touching moments as well, such as a trip into the heart of Africa to save the professor or Xavier’s granting Scott’s wish for time alone with Jean. And unlike the X-Men stories I have read of late, Parker does a great job getting back to the original metaphor of the outcast mutant being a stand-in for the alienated teenager. While the series doesn’t exactly portray teenagers in a realistic light, it is a delightful collection that would be ideal for children as well.

I wasn’t a fan of Kurt Busiek’s Astro City when I read the first collection, but after some recommendations I decided to go ahead and take a look at the second. Entitled Confession, this is a typical coming of age tale in which a young man named Brian travels to the big city with the intention of becoming a superhero. He quickly becomes the sidekick of the Confessor, a sort of religious superhero. Going by the name Altar Boy (no joke), Brian comes to understand that the simplicity of the good v. evil in theory is not the case when put into practice. Despite the worn storyline, this held together pretty well and was rather effective. However, the depiction of a mayor with as much power as this one seemingly had is ridiculous; the federal government would not cede their authority and voice to a city mayor on issues like detention of superpowers. And I continue to be baffled by the ridiculous creations like a clown who fights crime and cheesy names like ‘Samaritan’ and ‘Honor Guard.’ Yet I am intrigued enough to seek out the next collection and will have thoughts on it in the future.

I had meant to write some thoughts on Brian K. Vaughan’s Ex Machina, especially pertaining to the lack of political savvy by the mayor of New York, but I feel uninspired to do so. The series is heavily flawed but has a hint of promise with the storyline in the sixth volume. However, I could make almost no sense of the dreadful League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier. Violating the rule of ‘show don’t tell,’ the comic went from boring to incomprehensible at the end. Apparently there have been several incarnations of the league, but we get this information through written reports rather than actual storytelling. I’ve found the collections to have interesting ideas with lackluster execution, but that hasn’t stopped thousands of people from drooling over this fanwank.

I’m reading a lot of comics, so I would expect more of these brief reviews in the coming months. Of course that’s assuming I have any time with this new job and school competing for attention.

Neil Gaiman's Marvel 1602

Trying to make my way through Neil Gaiman’s oeuvre, I finally picked up Marvel 1602 this week. The premise here is that events in the Marvel Universe are happening about four hundred years too early, in and near the England of Elizabeth I. It seems like every character from the Silver Age makes an appearance here, from Nick Fury as the queen’s chief spy to Peter Parquagh as an intelligent young man with a fondness for spiders. There is even a race of ‘Witchbreed’ (branded with the letter X) taught at a school by Carlos Javier. Through the eyes of new rescuee/recruit Angel we get to see the Witchbreed, and the depiction of Angel was the most resonating of the novel.

But what do we learn by placing heroes out of their context? Rather than defenders of major metropolises from threats they would otherwise be unequipped to handle, these superpowers are used by nation states in order to attack and/or spy on others. But more interestingly, rather than the struggle with the dual-self, these heroes only have one identity: Matthew Murdock is always himself with a red blindfold; Sue Storm is always invisible; Peter never makes a change into Spiderman. Even Bruce Banner, the poster boy for dual personality in comics, doesn’t change into the Hulk until the last page.

However, superheroes were never meant to be pawns between nation states. In fact, when a superhero does work for the government, like Superman in Frank Miller’s The Dark Night Returns, it is meant as a form of degradation of the archetype. Though we often see villains ties up for the police at the end of a fight, superhero justice subverts the political and legal system in all sorts of ways: from the obvious masked vigilantism to inability to be controlled by society. Whereas the average person would have to worry about the consequences of their actions, most superpowers can carry out whatever agenda they please without fear that society will be able to lock them away, expel them, or even kill them. Gaiman tells us more about the superhero as he is depicted in modern times than he does concerning the rise of superpowers four hundred years hence.

I’ve done a bit of a disservice to the plot here. It is quite complex and complicated, especially by interweaving historical figures with their Marvel equivalents. I was incredulous by the big revelation finding it almost impossible to believe, but perhaps this is due to my relative inexperience with the character in question. I also thought the conclusion served the sales department at Marvel more than the story itself. Gaiman also did not make it all that easy for a novice reader to determine whom certain figures are supposed to represent in the ‘real’ world.

The art team of Andy Kubert and Richard Isanove provide the same breathtaking artwork as they did in Origin. The etchings used as the cover art are exemplary, setting the tome for the series in a way that seldom is the case. In all, it is a fairly well done story with a disappointing and seemingly forced conclusion, something that may have been a result of shifting publishing demands from six 35-page issues to eight 24-page ones. But that is no excuse for what might have been one of the best superhero stories ever.

More on the Changing Media Landscape

As I continue to think more and more about the electronic dissemination of texts, something new occurs to me. I read recently, on a website that has since taken down the story, that Hachette Book Group has taken down their entire stock of ebooks as a result of a territorial dispute. The story was reported as a rumor, and I can't confirm it, but it does bring up an interesting scenario. Books are currently sold here in the US to domestic publishers and then to different publishers in foreign markets. In a world where someone in Austria could download a book from a Canadian publisher, what role would there be for the foreign markets for books?

Once again we are seeing how the digital revolution is rapidly changing the media landscape. That eventually a vast majority of publishing will be digital rather than print is a fact. What is less certain is when this change will take place. Up until the past year, most people would have said that the shift was a ways off. Yet with the supposed proliferation of the Kindle and iPhone, we are already seeing a rapid shift that is frankly shocking.

Writing in The Atlantic, Michael Hirschorn diagnoses the immediate issues facing the future of the New York Times, the one paper in the world one would expect to never go out of business. Some of his treatments mirror what I discussed last week, and none of it seems to be a good thing for consumers of news. Yet what is striking about this article is how Hirschorn's analogy comparing the media landscape to a collection of sand dunes shifting in the winds is so apt. As he asks, what happens when a hurricane wipes out the dunes altogether?

We may very well be at that point for newspapers, but the winds affecting the book publishers seem to be blowing a lot harder than most are giving them credit for. That I had not thought of the overseas book market is not the important thing; what is important is the industry's inability to keep up with the changing landscape and stay profitable. It is becoming all too clear that the change is coming much faster than we thought it was going to be. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out, but I can't help but think that I may just like the landscape we have now a bit better than the one to come.

The Newspaper iPod

This week David Carr writing in the New York Times discusses the need for newspapers to generate a new revenue stream since print advertising is declining. Circulation is down and with it goes the ad buyers; of course, it doesn’t help that the two biggest sources of advertising in newspapers, car dealerships and department stores, aren’t having banner years. Since the idea of online subscription services to newspapers hasn’t met with much success, especially with the failed Times Select which I actually subscribed to, the revenue for online advertising has got to grow somehow.

Carr invokes the model of iTunes and the music industry, claiming that newspaper publishers would love for someone like Steve Jobs to show up and convince people to pay for new that they now can read for free. Of course, what do you need for that to happen? A newspaper iPod.

The thing is, Carr doesn’t realize that there already is a newspaper iPod called the Amazon Kindle. Now for a dozen reasons that I’ve been over before, I don’t think that the Kindle in its current form is going to revolutionize the way we read news. The design looks clunky and unimpressive. I have no idea what the interface is like because without shelling out $360 for my own, I don’t know how I could just test it out. Having the ability to demo a Kindle at a consumer electronic store would do wonders for the device, if it’s any good that is.

However, Carr overlooks the most troubling aspect of the newspaper/iPod analogy. The iPod only allows one to download songs from iTunes, which is owned by Apple and from which the computer company takes a cut from each sale. Amazon’s Kindle would essentially be the same model, with low subscription prices from which Amazon would take a healthy cut. Since one can only download content onto the Kindle from Amazon, the choices are limited. I recently read that the monthly take from Kindle sales of a major west coast newspaper was only a few thousand dollars; as of yet, this is not a viable answer.

I think a big issue with this model is the question of what newspapers can offer that a person couldn’t get from other news sources online for free. Imagine that no newspaper sites were free tomorrow. Why couldn’t I just check out Google News or CBS News or any other site that pays for AP stories and disseminates them? There has to be a local/regional appeal for coverage that just isn’t available many other places. Despite the fact that the Austin American-Statesman is a shitty newspaper, it’s the only game in town for local coverage. And by town here I pretty much mean universe. Without being able to persuade readers that local coverage is essential and a commitment to take some or all of their content offline without a subscription, the local newspaper is in a bad place.

The cost of real news gathering is increasing as revenue sources are headed the other way. Though the newspaper iPod is not without promise, I just don’t see the business model to make such a device succeed. The more and more I think about it, the more sure I am that the only good news reporting that will be done in twenty years will involve the support of nonprofit foundations to some extent. It’s just the only viable model I see out there.

2008 Reading Statistics

I’ve been keeping a list of each book, play, or graphic novel that I read since the start of 2006. My friend Bill Leisner introduced me to the process, and I found that it allowed me to realize when I had been watching too much television. But more importantly, I have been able to retain a lot more of what I read, for when I just glance at a list I usually am able to recall the situation in which I read it and access those memories. I’m not sure if that makes sense to anyone, but it works for me.

Since I post a list at the end of each month detailing the books I finished, I decided not to post a year end wrap up a couple of weeks ago. But as I am seemingly writing more and more about graphic novels because the library has an abundant supply, I decided I would run some statistics for last year so at the end of this year I could make a comparison.

This year I completed 230 books, plays, and graphic novels, blowing away my 2006 total of 178, my previous high. However, Sarah Weinman read 462 books last year, so I am sufficiently humbled. It breaks down like this:

• 67 novels (29.1%)
• 21 short story collections (9.1%)
• 45 works of nonfiction (19.6%)
• 29 plays (12.6%)
• 68 graphic novels or nonfiction comic works (29.6%)

Of those 67 novels, 15 were set in the Star Trek universe, including the six novels in the Myriad Universes collections. I was surprised that I read so many graphic novels, but I did read ten collections of Bill Willingham’s Fables as well as the entire run of Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: the Last Man.

My predictions for this year are that I will likely read less that 200 books, though without school to distract me during the late summer and fall I might make it up there. I would also suspect that I will read more graphic novels this year, and that they will make up a greater percentage of the total. Less plays as well since I am not studying drama this semester.

And if you were to only read one book that I did this past year, I think I would have to recommend Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland a shade above Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

Jodi Picoult's Wonder Woman

I’ve never really gotten Wonder Woman. Maybe it is because I am a man, but I think it has more to do with the fact that there isn’t really a part of the character to identify with. For example, take iconic Superman. Clark Kent is an established person, the real identity, and I get that. But Wonder Woman is the real identity, and that just reminds me of all the terrible interpretations of superheroes from the past.

But when DC relaunched Wonder Woman around the time of Infinite Crisis, I picked up the first few issues. They didn’t do a lot for me, and I quit buying individual issues about that time, so I had little idea what was happening with the character to this point. Just after I left the recruited bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult to do a five issue arc, and I picked it up over the weekend.

A warning: I am going to spoil this book. After the events of Infinite Crisis, somewhere around the point where WW kills Max Lord and video of the execution gets out, she takes on a role at the Metahuman Affairs Office working for the government. Her partner is Nemesis, a guy I sort of remember from some esoteric comic, but essentially he’s a guy who can change his appearance at will ala Iman in Star Trek VI. He also is an asshole in these comics, making jokes that aren’t so much chauvinistic as sophomoric.

Former villain Circe shows up and starts playing havoc with Wonder Woman, impersonating her in abducting Nemesis. This might have worked great, but I didn’t get any sense of who the hell Circe is in the greater WW mythos, so it didn’t work for me. I’m sure that all the ladies picking up this comic based on Picoult’s name would be a bit aggravated too.

Eventually Nemesis is rescued, and Circe goes back to Paradise Island and brings Wonder Woman’s mother Hippolyta back from the dead. Showing that her daughter is imprisoned by the feds, for the very crime Circe impersonated her to commit, Hippolyta declares war on humans and ends up wrecking a lot of Washington, DC. Superman, Batman, and for some reason Black Canary all show up to try and stave off the attack.

One place Picoult really does do a good job is in the light tone. The Amazonians destroy the Washington Monument because it is a symbol of male prowess; there is commentary about how someone really shouldn’t be able to both fight crime and stay inside a bustier. Bt her overall story arc is where the reader really suffers.

Fighting her mother for control, Wonder Woman finally comes out on top and has a dagger held up to her mother’s throat. She says that all she has to do to end the war is kill Hippolyta and then order the war to cease as the Amazonians new queen. Wonder Woman says that she is willing to die for the humans she protects, but that her mother has been asking the wrong question. It’s not about what Wonder Woman stands to lose, but whether or not her mother would kill her to win. She gives Hippolyta the dagger and holds it up to her own throat. End of book.

I don’t have to read the next issue to know what doesn’t happen. Are we supposed to believe that in the lauded relaunch of the series, DC was going to off her in issue 10? But it fails to work on a more fundamental level. Picoult’s name was always going to be used to heavily market the collection in bookstores, just as has been the case recently with a dozen prominent prose authors. While leaving a cliffhanger might work in a regular monthly issue, it irreparably harms Picoult’s collected work. To attract the readers DC was attempting with the big name, an effort to tell an accessible, complete story should have been imperative. Instead, it’s not really even considered.

I understand that Picoult has done some good work in prose, though I have yet to sample any of it. But skip this collection; a sub par effort makes for a sub par product.