Playing for Keeps by Mur Lafferty

Well, huzzah, finally a chance to review some more superhero prose fiction.

This one is “Playing for Keeps” by writer and podcaster Mur Lafferty. It was published back in 2008 and won the Parsec Award for Best Novel. It focuses on the heroes and villains of Seventh City — and on the Third Wavers, the people who have the most useless and ridiculous of powers. They’re legally banned from dressing up in costumes, taking superhero names, or fighting crime. They’re distrusted by civilians, ignored by villains, and held in utter contempt by the superheroes.

There’s Peter, who has a superpowered sense of smell; Tomas, who has superstrength in five-second bursts; Michelle, a waitress who can carry any tray, no matter how overloaded, without dropping it; Alex, who can heal one square inch of an injured person at a time; Collette, the world’s greatest chef; and Ian, who can shoot powerful jets of, well, poop.

And there’s Laura “Keepsie” Branson, our lead character, a bar owner whose power makes it impossible for anyone to steal anything from her.

The action gets started early when Keepsie is briefly kidnapped by a supervillain called Doodad, who secretly slips her a strange metal sphere. And then every superhero and supervillain in Seventh City is desperate to get that metal sphere away from Keepsie. What makes it so important? No one will tell her. But they’re all willing to dish out plenty of pain and suffering on any Third Waver who gets in their way. Will the Third Wavers discover the secrets behind the world’s superpowered beings? Will they be able to survive attacks by the most powerful people in the world? Will they be able to keep Seventh City from being destroyed?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Really enjoyable characters — Keepsie, Peter, Ian, Tomas, Michelle, really all the Third Wavers. And the villains, especially Clever Jack. And all the superheroes, even though you hate all of them and want them to die in agony. Good action scenes, too — as desperate and frantic as you’d expect from a bunch of people with lousy powers facing off against people with really good powers. Good dialogue — nothing spectacular, but I was happy with it.

And it’s a nice brainy story, too. All the Third Wavers have useless powers — but of course, they’re not all that useless. If they can be leveraged the right ways, they become very, very powerful. I’m not telling you what they can do, ’cause that’d spoil too much of the surprise. But it’s often really good and really unexpected.

If I’ve got any complaint, it’s that the setting is a lot bleaker than I generally prefer in my comics-based stories. I mean, society seems to be functioning pretty normally, but nearly every single superhero we’re introduced to is a psychotic, willing to torture the Third Wavers and murder scores of civilians. Laws have been passed to prevent anyone designated as a Third Waver from using their powers to fight crime, and even nicknames based on their powers are frowned upon. That’s a pretty dark, grim setting, once you think about it a little.

Still, that’s a small complaint for a story that is, on the whole, exciting, fun, engaging, dramatic, and grandly written. Go pick it up.

Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan by Rick Bowers

I picked up this book a few weeks back, and I wasn’t expecting a lot — I know Scholastic Books publishes a lot of good stuff now, but when I grew up, it was strictly for kids’ books — and not particularly good kids’ books either. But I ended up liking what I read here.

This is basically a history book, with its initial focus on the history of Superman, from the early youths of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, through their initial failures in the comics biz, to the unstoppable success of the Man of Steel, and clear through the way Siegel and Shuster got screwed out of their rights to the character. There’s quite a lot of info about the years when “The Adventures of Superman” was one of the most successful programs on the radio, earning millions of dollars for his advertisers and enthralling legions of fans, both kids and adults.

The book’s other focus is a fairly detailed and warts-and-all history of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi organizations, and hate groups in 19th and early 20th centuries. And a lot of this is stuff that was definitely never taught to me when I was in school, mainly because textbooks have always seemed to put more emphasis on teaching kids the national legends instead of the actual facts. There were times when the KKK and pro-Nazi groups had a lot of political power — and a lot of times when they were mostly devoted to fleecing their members of every dime they could get. And a lot of the time, there were a vast number of people, ranging from everyday citizens to federal officers to Southern newspaper editors, who hated the stuffing out of the Klan.

And it all comes together after World War II when the advertising execs for Kelloggs — who also managed the Superman radio show — decided they wanted to try pointing the power of Superman at the nation’s social ills, particularly racism and intolerance. And what was interesting to me was that the radio producers didn’t just bang out some scripts for Superman to fight some Nazis — they did intense research on how to educate children about racism, and they interviewed people about what the Klan was like behind the white hoods. One of their interviewees was a man named Stetson Kennedy, a publicity-hungry Southerner with a serious mad-on against the Klan — he heroically infiltrated the organization while simultaneously campaigning publicly against it.

And what they came up with were a couple of storyarcs that infuriated the KKK and the rest of the nation’s racists. And that by itself is a pretty awesome victory.

Verdict: Thumbs up. It’s well-written, it’s detailed, it’s entertaining, and it’s filled with really interesting characters, including Siegel, Shuster, Stetson Kennedy, radio producer Robert Maxwell, education consultant Josette Frank, and even several of the Klan’s leaders, who generally come across as either charismatic lunatics or craven greedheads.

There were a couple of things that I knew already, being a longtime comic fan — but it was still nice to see them pointed out in a book designed for younger readers who probably aren’t as familiar with the history of Superman. The first was that in Superman’s earliest appearances, he was a very, very political guy — and he definitely came across as a liberal, since most of his opponents were greedy politicians, crooks, and factory owners who were making things hard for the common man. The second reminder — there were a huge number of Jewish people who had a hand in Superman’s success, including Siegel, Shuster, their publishers, and even their radio producer — no wonder they were so interested in putting the smackdown on the nation’s hatemongers!

I was pretty impressed that this book didn’t sugar-coat very much. These days, you read the newspapers and watch the news shows, and they’re absolutely devoted to never saying whether any group is right or wrong. If they mention the Klan these days, they definitely never say that they’re evil racist scumbags — that wouldn’t be properly Broderian or moderate — and they might offend some lunatic on hate radio. Rick Bowers really doesn’t do things that way — Superman’s the good guy, the Klan are the bad guys, and that’s really all there is to it. He also doesn’t mince many words about how Siegel and Shuster got mistreated after DC got its claws on Superman, and that’s pretty refreshing, too.

So there’s Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan by Rick Bowers. I liked it — go pick it up.

Dispensing Justice by Fritz Freiheit

It’s been a while since we got to review any comics-related fiction around here, so let’s get to it with “Dispensing Justice” by Fritz Freiheit.

This particular story is set in an alternate version of the 1980s — lots of movies and TV shows are similar, but technology has advanced a lot faster — for example, the Internet is fully functional and widely used — and humanity has had contact with an alien civilization. In 1947, a supernova bathed the Earth in radiation, causing widespread illness and death, but an interstellar civilization intervened and saved the planet. Soon afterwards, the cosmic radiation started giving certain people superpowers, and those people started styling themselves as superheroes and supervillains.

Our main character is Michael Gurick, a genius teenager who recently watched his father, a superhero called the Dispenser, get killed on national TV by a bunch of cyborg supervillains called the Demolition Squad. He’s surprised, however, when his dad then shows up to take him home from school — the government has assigned a lookalike agent to his family so no one will realize there’s a connection between the Dispenser and the rest of his family.

Michael’s mother isn’t reacting well to the crisis, so the Dispenser’s fellow superheroes in the Nova League take it upon themselves to help her adjust mentally and emotionally, leaving Michael with more time to spend with his friends, Kimball Kinnison, a normal kid who’s started to develop psionic powers, and Penny Riggs-Armstrong, daughter of another couple of superheroes, with her own high levels of associated kickassery. Added into this mix are Cleo Fox, blind daughter of Michael’s martial arts instructor, and Achilles and Andy Riggs-Armstrong, Penny’s twin siblings, who love to spend time finding new ways to torture Michael.

And complicating all of this even more? Michael has decided to use his own superpowered intelligence and his father’s old equipment to avenge his father’s death. Can he handle a task that his father couldn’t? Will his friends be able to help? Or is this all going to end really, really badly for everyone?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Now lemme warn you, the first thing you’re going to think when you look at this book is: “Holy hamsters, that thing’s over 375 pages long! And it’s got over 100 chapters!” But whoa, whoa, calm down, cowboy, most of those chapters are only a couple pages long, which helps the story and the action move along at a nice, brisk pace. It’s real easy to sit down at lunch, plan to read only a few pages while you eat your sandwich, and end up burning through 50 or more pages and completely forgetting about your olive-loaf-on-rye.

The characters are entirely grand — Michael, Kim, and Penny seem like fairly realistic teenagers, Achilles and Andy are quite funny every time they appear, and the banter and rivalries among the superheroes in the Nova League are handled very well.

The setting is also a huge amount of fun. While it’s somewhat familiar, the differences that crop up — “Karate Kid” as a movie about learning how to use superpowers, a home with a flat-screen TV in the mid-1980s, “Ghostbusters” being made with computer-generated special effects, and a vast number of geek-friendly board games that I wish we’d had when I was a kid — give you plenty of moments to be surprised by how the setting has been changed from the world we lived in.

And while the action takes a while to get started — Michael and his friends are pretty formidable, but they realize that they can’t go out and start fighting crime without getting some level of training, along with something that’ll bounce bullets, first — once the superheroes and the supervillains get down to fighting, the action is fast, furious, and entirely excellent.

There is a lot going on in this novel, and there’s no way to cover all the material in a fairly short review. There’s plenty of mystery about Cleo Fox as well as an incident with a visit to Congress and some mind-controlling federal agents, too. And lots more besides that. There’s a lot going on in this book, and it’s all pretty fun to read. Even better, there’s a whole series of novels planned in this world, so expect some sequels coming out before too long…

“Dispensing Justice” by Fritz Freiheit. If you like superhero fiction, I think you’re going to like this. Go pick it up.

Kraken: The Curious, Exciting, and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid by Wendy Williams

Okay, got another unusual review I want to do today. Not a comic, not a novel, not even a book of Hitchcock poetry — this is a nonfiction book about squids and other cephalopods.

I decided to review this for three reasons. First, I was dead out of any other comics I could review. Second, squids are near and dear to the hearts of geeks worldwide, with everything from Cthulhu to Davy Jones to Doctor Octopus and “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and Dr. Zoidberg and Squidbillies and Squidward and many, many more.

And third… it’s my blog! I do what I want!

So here’s “Kraken” by Wendy Williams. Very much in the pop-science model — it’s about science, but it isn’t a textbook. There’s a lot less detail in some ways, but there’s a lot more reader-friendly writing so as not to run off people who don’t have advanced degrees in zoology.

There’s a lot of really interesting stuff here — we start out with a short history lesson, where we meet the first people to prove that large squids actually existed. We get lots of detail about squid anatomy. We take a cold, nighttime boat ride with a bunch of marine researchers as they do the messy, chaotic work of catching, tagging, and releasing Humboldt squid in Monterey Bay. We get details about cephalopod luminescence and about their amazing ability to change color in extremely detailed ways — especially interesting because they’re colorblind. We learn how the study of squids has led to breakthroughs in biology, medicine, and neuroscience. We get probably more info than we ever really wanted on the bizarre, endlessly varied mating habits of cephalopods.

What else we got? We get a lot of info about just how smart squids, octopuses, and cuttlefish are. I really think this is one of the most interesting scientific questions out there right now — there’s pretty widespread consensus that cephalopods are smarter than we suspected they might be, but no one really knows if they’re as smart as a mouse, as a cat, as a dog, as an ape, or even higher. They seem to be very good at figuring out puzzles — but is that true intelligence or animal instinct? Are their camouflaging and color-changing abilities better indicators of intelligence? Researchers who work closely with these animals say they’re intelligent and even have individual personalities — but is that just mankind anthropomorphizing animals? And how on earth do you measure the intelligence of any creature as deeply alien to the human bipedal norm?

And really, that’s me covering a lot of what this book talks about, very quickly, in a very small amount of space — because this book has a lot of interesting stuff in here about squids.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Deeply fascinating and extremely readable. Some things are covered amazingly well. We get a very real sense that scientists are sometimes frustrated by how much they know but how little they understand about animals like squids. And this book has the very best discussion I’ve ever seen about animal intelligence and the question of how to measure it. Researchers used to give dogs the same IQ test they’d give babies — paint a dot on their forehead, put ’em in front of a mirror, and see whether they realize that the image in the mirror is really them. The problem, however, is that dogs don’t have a strong visual sense, so mirrors aren’t particularly significant to them — sense of smell, on the other hand, is very powerful for dogs, so intelligence tests should focus on the ways dogs learn through their olfactory senses. So how do you design IQ tests for an octopus?

If this book has a weak point, it might be that it gives very short shrift to the cephalopod in popular culture. There’s some discussion of some old novels and a monster movie from the ’50s, but this really is a golden age for squid popularity in the mass media, and it was an element I was a bit surprised to see get so little attention in this very thorough and comprehensive book.

Nevertheless, that’s a very minor nitpick for a book I really had a blast reading. Go pick it up.

I’m in the mood to review something that’s not comics today. In fact, I’m gonna go as far in the opposite direction as I can. Tremble, ye dudes and dudettes, as I review… a book of poetry!

A Sea of Alone: Poems for Alfred Hitchcock, edited by Christopher Conlon

Yes, you read right — a book full of poems that have film director Alfred Hitchcock as their primary point of inspiration. How does that work? It works better than you might expect.

I’d actually had some trouble deciding whether I should review this here. On one hand, it’s a comic book blog, and Hitchcock didn’t have anything to do with comics. On the other hand, I also do plenty of writing about horror and associated genres, and some of Hitchcock’s best known films fit very easily into the horror genre. But what really put this decision over the top was this: it’s my freakin’ blog, and I can review any durn thing I want to, so there!

The book was published just last year and edited by Christopher Conlon. There are a pretty large number of poets who contributed poems to the volume — most probably unknown to you because, unfortunately, working as a poet these days is a good way to not get a lot of attention. Or payment, actually.

As you’d expect, the poems in this book cover a pretty wide range of topics, even if they’re all inspired by Hitch and his movies. There are quite a few that focus on Hitchcock’s life, particularly his less-than-happy childhood and his interests and obsessions as a filmmaker. You also get plenty that are all about the movies, with “Psycho” and “The Birds” probably getting the most attention, though “The 39 Steps” is quite close behind.

Of course, I’ve got plenty of favorites in this book. They include:

• Steven Vernon’s “Leytonstone Lad,” which spotlights Hitchcock’s childhood;
• Miles David Moore’s “Shadow of a Doubt: Charles Oakley’s Speech,” which takes a walk through the mind of the killer from one of Hitchcock’s best-loved films;
• G.O. Clark’s “Alfred,” which pays tribute to Hitchcock’s film cameos;
• Lyn Lifshin’s “Alma,” dedicated to the director’s long-suffering wife;
• Lifshin’s “Think of a Woman Terrified by Birds, Caged,” a study of the trials Tippi Hedren endured on the “Birds” set;
• Kathi Stafford’s “Double Feature at the Pecos Drive-In,” for anyone who remembers drive-in movies;
• Richard A. Lupoff’s “At the Cosmic Saloon,” which gives Robert Bloch, Janet Leigh, and Anthony Perkins a chance to air their grievances;
• Marge Simon’s “The Birds’ Lullaby,” a wonderful bit of nonsense verse that gives voice to a bunch of murderous birds;
• Andrew J. Wilson’s “crop-duster,” almost more visual pun than poem, but the only work in the book to make me bust out with delighted, morbid laughter;
• and Sydney Duncan’s “Sestina for Alfred Hitchcock” — mainly because I like reading people writing unusual structured poems like sestinas.

And of course, plenty of others besides. I feel like I’m shortchanging some really good poems by not talking about ’em here, but dangit, I can’t just list every poem in the book.

Verdict: Thumbs up. This is a really fun book, a nice, easy read, though you ought to take a few days to read it, ’cause that’s the best way to read poetry. I enjoyed some of these poems a lot more than the rest, but there really wasn’t a single bad poem in the book. That’s a pretty good average, folks.

You’ve got poems long and short, complex and simple, dark and… more dark. It’s a good collection. I think Hitchcock would’ve liked it.

Go pick it up.

Finally! A chance to review something other than comics!

Empire State by Adam Christopher

“Empire State” is a sci-fi/fantasy/superhero/noir novel by Adam Christopher that starts out with a couple of super-people in 1930s New York having a fight so big, it ends up creating a pocket universe called the Empire State. It’s a darker, rainier, bleaker, more film-noir version of New York City — and only New York City. There’s no Jersey, no Albany, no Baltimore, no California, no Texas, no England, no Bangladesh, no nothing.

Our main character is Rad Bradley, a booze-swilling private eye on the trail of a missing woman, all while under the watchful eye of an oppressive wartime government, a shadowy religious conspiracy, mysterious bruisers wearing gas masks, a mad scientist, and a superhero called the Skyguard.

There are lots of sci-fi and fantasy touches here — robots, parallel worlds, super-science, mega-sized blimps, time travel, interdimensional mindtrip war — and the entire story is kicked off by a couple of superheroes who hit each other so hard they create a new universe — but the bulk of what you’re getting here is good old-fashioned pulp-flavored film noir. Rad Bradley is an old-school gumshoe. He gets hired by a leggy dame, he hangs out with a cynical newspaper reporter, he’s got a bad relationship with the cops, he’s got a run-down office, he wears a fedora — and he goes out investigating mysteries, just like any good old-school gumshoe.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Characters are pretty good. Action’s good. It’s got a fantastic hook. The book even comes with extras, including an interview with the author, a suggested playlist, and something called “WorldBuilder” that lets others write stories set in the Empire State universe.

If I’ve got a complaint, it’s about the lack of female characters. I think I counted four of them — one is Rad’s ex-wife, one is a murder victim, one is the lover of the murder victim, and the only one with a significant part to play in the story is the Science Pirate (not a spoiler — her identity is revealed very early in the book). But the Science Pirate never does a whole lot — gets captured a couple of times and is otherwise kinda generically villainous. Even worse, everyone talks about what a badass the Science Pirate is — until they find out she’s a woman, and then everyone starts disregarding her — “Oh, she’s just a woman, she’s no threat.”

Now that might be something you could excuse for historical accuracy — back in the ’30s, a woman might not be taken seriously by a lot of people. Two problems with that — first, Rad Bradley, the hero, is a black man, and no one ever suggests that he’s not a capable private eye, which definitely wouldn’t happen in the ’30s; and second, if the reader can accept a world with pulp mysteries, robots, superheroes, and all kinds of amazing science-fictional stuff that never happened in the 1930s, you can bet that the reader can also accept capable, non-background female characters.

And that’s a couple big fat paragraphs of negativity — when, really, I definitely enjoyed the book. It runs at a good, brisk pace, and it kept me reading as fast as I could all the way through. The mystery has even more twists and turns than you’d expect from a good pulp detective yarn, and the identity of the villain was a solid surprise for me, even if I could see, looking back, where he was being telegraphed to the reader. It’s a fun book, and other than that point about the female characters, it was a very enthusiastic thumbs up. Go hunt it down and read it, kids.

Well, lookit what happened to me. I got too busy with Christmas and New Year’s travels and activities, and I completely ran out of time to go pick up last week’s new comics. So I’ve got no new comics to review.

First thing that means is I’m going to end up getting two or three weeks’ worth of comics this Wednesday, and that’s far, far too many for me to get reviewed without going nuts. So I probably won’t even try to review all of ’em — I’m just going to pick the ones that end up being the best and getting them done — or maybe just the worst. We’ll see what my mood is like, hey?

Second, I’m gonna have to review some non-comics today and Wednesday. Luckily, I’ve got something lined up I’ve been wanting to review for a couple weeks…

Switchblade Goddess by Lucy A. Snyder

I’ve already reviewed the first two novels in Lucy A. Snyder’s Jessie Shimmer trilogy, so it makes sense to get the third one reviewed here, too. This new book kicks off almost immediately after the end of the previous one — Jessie, with her magic stone eye and magic hellfire arm, has temporarily stopped the diabolical soul harvester Miko — that’s the clothing-bereft knife-slinger on the cover above — but Miko’s not down for the count, and Jessie needs to figure out a way to stop her, rescue the people whose souls she’s stolen, save her lover Cooper and her familiar Pal, and still escape the wrath of the magical and highly powerful Virtus Regnum. Can she do it? Maybe, but it won’t be easy, and it sure as heck won’t be painless.

This book takes on a much more global flavor, thanks to Jessie and Cooper discovering some portals that let them travel almost anywhere they want to. So we get to follow Jessie’s adventures on a tropical island, in the Louisiana swamps, at a ritzy European castle — and after spending the previous book mostly stuck in a little dead-end Texas town, that’s definitely a welcome change, just so we can see what other kinds of magical chaos can erupt in all these other settings. But a lot of the action here takes place inside Jessie’s mind, because after a certain point, any time Jessie falls asleep, Miko gets to torture her — as in not-for-the-squeamish flaying-you-alive torture. Luckily, it’s all in Jessie’s head, so there’s no physical damage — but the mental and emotional scars do some serious damage. And to top it all off, Miko also wants to sleep with Jessie and induct her as her loyal lieutenant — and Jessie would probably prefer the flaying-alive stuff instead.

This book is a great deal darker than the previous one (which was a lot darker than the first book in the series, too, come to think of it) — there’s uncomfortably graphic torture, barely-consensual sex, terrors and betrayals that strike at the emotional heart of anyone who’s ever been in a relationship. Large swaths of the plot are more cringingly terrifying than anything you’ll find in mainstream horror novels.

I think where this book — and the entire series, actually — really shines is in its characters. Not just the main characters, not just Jessie, Cooper, Pal, the Warlock, and Miko, but minor characters and walk-on parts often have some really fun, vibrant personalities that make you wish there were other novels that would follow what else these people were up to. Snyder clearly loves creating cool characters, whether they’re major roles or cameos, and dangit, I love reading that kind of stuff.

This isn’t something you can just pick up blind — if you wanna really enjoy this book, you’re gonna have to read “Spellbent” and “Shotgun Sorceress” first. But that ain’t too rough a requirement — all three books are just eight bucks apiece, and it sure wouldn’t hurt you to read all three in the trilogy.

I loved this book. Go pick it up.

The holidays will be here before you know it, and we’ve still got more gift recommendations to dig through! Can we finish all this stuff before Christmas? Today, let’s take a look at Munchkin Axe Cop!

If you pay any attention to gaming, you probably have heard of Munchkin, a humorous card game put out by Steve Jackson Games. The basic concept focuses on munchkins — power-mad, cheating, power-gamers who play roleplaying games to WIN instead of playing to have fun. The first game spotlighted the fantasy genre, but the company has come out with plenty of other expansions, with emphasis on science fiction, martial arts, pirates, zombies, goth vampire roleplayers, Westerns, Cthulhu, and of course, even superheroes.

The basic gameplay is the same over all the games: players “kick down a door” by flipping over one of the Door cards, which usually reveal some sort of ridiculous pun-based monster that you have to fight. If you can beat it (by matching your level, plus your bonuses and equipment, against the monster’s level), then you get to draw a Treasure card (which usually has ridiculous pun-based treasure, armor, and weapons) and you go up a level. Of course, your opponents can interfere in the battle, either by helping you fight, or by helping the monster. The first player to level 10 wins and gets to cruelly taunt the losers.

Well, the newest expansion is Munchkin Axe Cop, based on the utterly mad webcomic by Ethan and Malachai Nicolle. All the artwork is by Ethan, the 30-year-old big brother, while the game design is by game industry legend Steve Jackson. And of course, the insane concepts and characters — the cop who keeps turning into different things when blood spills on him, the man wearing the baby costume, the dinosaur with chaingun arms, the baby with a unicorn horn, the nonconformist bunny, the duck who shoots exploding eggs out of his butt, the super-cop carrying a fireman’s axe — are by seven-year-old Malachai.

So how does this play out once you get the cards out of the box? Well, I can tell you you’ll have the most fun if you’re playing with people who are already familiar with Axe Cop. If you pull this game out after Christmas dinner to play with your family, your grandmother, Uncle Ned, and Cousin Merle will probably be pretty confused about the game where one of the villains is made of candy, a flute is considered a dangerous weapon, and Abraham Lincoln is an Explosion God. Better stick with Monopoly with folks who are unfamiliar with either Munchkin or Axe Cop.

But for people who are pretty clued in about the goofy cutthroat fun of Munchkin and the delirious lunacy of Axe Cop? Those folks are gonna love it, and they’ll probably love it as a Christmas gift. It’ll run you about $25, but that’s a lot of cards and a lot of fun.

Munchkin Axe Cop from Steve Jackson Games. Go pick it up.

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

This is a novel I’ve been thinking of reviewing for a while. It’s “The Eyre Affair” by a Brit named Jasper Fforde. It’s a really unusual book — the background itself is one of the best selling points of the book and the series, so let’s take a look at that in a little more detail.

The story is set in an alternate universe — it’s the ’80s in England, the monarchy doesn’t exist, the UK and imperial Russia have been fighting the Crimean War for over a century, the country is mostly ruled by an evil megacorp called the Goliath Corporation. Time travel is fairly common, as is cloning — dodos are now common pets, wooly mammoths roam the British countryside, and neanderthals are members of English society.

And the biggest change — literature, especially classic literature, is hugely popular. We’re talking popularity on the level of professional sports or long-running TV shows or major religions. People rename themselves for their favorite literary characters. People take pilgrimages to museums where the first drafts of famous novels are stored. Literary controversies are major elements of political elections. Book crimes are so common, there’s actually a branch of the police that investigates them.

Which brings us to our main character — a woman named Thursday Next, who is a member of the Literature Detective division of SpecOps. Her father was a former time cop, now erased from history but somehow still able to drop by for occasional visits. And her Uncle Mycroft is a mad scientist who specializes in inventing sometimes useless inventions that are nevertheless amazing and impossible.

Thursday has to help capture a supervillain named Acheron Hades after he steals the original manuscript of Charles Dickens’ “Martin Chuzzlewit,” but the raid goes bad, several SpecOps agents are killed, and Thursday is hospitalized. And soon, Hades kidnaps her uncle and aunt and takes Mycroft’s greatest invention — the Prose Portal, which allows people in the real world to enter novels. His ultimate goal? To kidnap Jane Eyre — from Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre,” naturally — and hold her for ransom. Can Thursday save British literature? Can she stop the evil and spectacularly powerful Acheron Hades? Can she get revenge on the Goliath Corporation? Can she survive entering the surprisingly dangerous world of “Jane Eyre”? Can she find true love? And what effect will all this lunacy have on her future and career?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Yeah, it has classic British literature as its focus point, but you shouldn’t let that fool you into thinking it’s a stuffy textbook. It’s amazing how much humor and action get packed into this one. It’s an extremely clever and engaging sci-fi/fantasy novel, with outstanding characters, dialogue, intrigue, and excitement, and it’s the type of thing that can get you addicted fast — which is a good thing, because there is a whole series of Thursday Next novels out there for you to enjoy. But you should definitely start with the first one, so go pick it up.

Supergods by Grant Morrison

So we got Grant Morrison, who is pretty much the most important comic book writers working in the industry today. He’s written “The Invisibles,” “Animal Man,” “Arkham Asylum,” “Doom Patrol,” “Flex Mentallo,” “JLA,” “New X-Men,” “We3,” “Seven Soldiers,” “All-Star Superman,” and tons more. And he’s gone and written a book — a real book! With mostly words and not so many pictures! — about the history of superheroes. Not the history of comic books, but the history of superheroes. So what do we think of it?

This isn’t really a straight history. Sure, we start with Superman’s creation, move on to Batman, Captain Marvel, the Silver Age, Flash, Green Lantern, Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and on and on and on. But around the middle, the history starts mixing together with a Grant Morrison autobiography. Not a bad thing at all — like I said, he’s one of the most important guys working in comics right now — so it becomes a personal history of the superhero. From time to time, it becomes a full-on autobiography, as we follow Grant on trips around the world, doing drugs, experiencing ecstatic visions of the beings behind the universe, and working to create his best-known comics.

Where I think things really start kicking off strong is when Morrison starts talking his theories of superheroics — what makes superheroes work vs. what doesn’t make them work. He says — and I mostly agree — that the best superhero fiction is optimistic in tone and speaks to a desire of mankind to aspire to better things. While you can create great superhero comics founded on pessimism or realism — Alan Moore’s “Watchmen” and Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns” — if you use those to build an expanded comic universe on, you don’t get anything that’s a lot of fun to read. You get the grim-and-gritty ’90s.

Now I’m not the most optimistic guy in the world. I’ve never seen a speck of evidence that wishing for good things to happen is any way to drive off the inevitable disasters that plague us. For every football player who credits God for his latest touchdown, there are dozens of kids dying of cancer, scores of dirty cops looking for a way to cheat citizens of their rights, hundreds of homeless people trying to sleep on park benches, and thousands of newspaper commenters waving their “I’m a PSYCHO” flags like it’s their ticket to heaven. It’s a horrible world we live in, a horrible life to suffer through, and the only escape is no real escape at all.

But having said that, you really gotta have optimism in your superhero stories. They’re just not any fun otherwise. They’re big, over-the-top, thrill-of-the-future science fiction melodramas, and the entire point of all the spandex and capes and spitcurls is, aside from the obvious power fantasies, the desire to live in and create a better world. Why does grim, unsmiling Batman fight crime? To make a better world for his city. Why do the X-Men fight for a world that hates and fears them? Because they want to make a world that doesn’t hate and fear them.

The articulation of the ultimate optimism and aspirations of the superhero genre is probably the best and most thrilling part of Morrison’s book.

It’s not a perfect work, by any stretch. Morrison’s recent interview with Rolling Stone suggests that he soft-pedaled a lot of his opinions to spare others’ feelings. He’s quite complimentary of Brad Metzler’s “Identity Crisis” in the book, but he savages it in his interview. He mentions his disagreements with Alan Moore and Mark Millar in the book, but really uncorks on them in the interview. I think the book would be a great deal stronger if he’d been more honest with readers. (And his Rolling Stone interview would’ve been better if had acknowledged that, yes, he has also written comics that featured rapes.)

Verdict: Thumbs up. It’s a fun read. It’s a pretty insightful read. Its flaws don’t detract from its strengths. If you like superheroes, you should give it a read.