March Reading Log

 

Two books. That's it. Two crummy books (well, one not-quite-crummy-but-certainly-not-great book and one excellent book.)

March was an exceedingly busy month, with a weeklong vacation, personnel decisions, several special events, and lots and lots of Easter prep. There were way too many mornings where I either 1) slept through my morning reading time, 2) worked through my morning reading time, or 3) mindlessly watched something on YouTube when I should have been reading.

So this month you get two books. Have a nice 3 minutes reading these reviews!

THE UNFINISHED PRESIDENCY by Douglas Brinkley

When it was announced on February 18 that Jimmy Carter was opting for hospice care in the face of his declining health, I knew I wanted to read another book about our 39th president,  a man of virtually unimpeachable ethics whose time in office was nevertheless considered a disappointment by friends and an outright disaster by opponents. The book I chose, however, was not about Carter's presidency, but his post-presidency, a period when, aided by his eponymously named Carter Center, he actively monitored international elections, helped broker peace deals, and served as the face and chief fundraiser for Habitat for Humanity.

In The Unfinished Presidency, Brinkley makes the compelling argument that Carter, despite his electoral drubbing in 1980, didn't really shift gears at all when he left the White House. The same things that he prioritized during his presidency—the environment, the spread of democracy, peace in the Middle East, and, most of all, human rights—were the passions of his post-presidency as well. With nothing to run for, Carter was largely freed of the concerns of public opinion and could essentially pick up where he had left off, stripped of the powers of the executive branch but still imbued with its bully pulpit.

And if his priorities were unchanged, so too were his best-known characteristics. Carter was still typically the smartest person in the room, he still didn't suffer fools, he still focused obsessively over details (sometimes to the detriment of the big picture), he still cared more about policy than politics, and he was still fundamentally a man of faith trying to do the right thing as he saw it. The same Jimmy Carter who almost singlehandedly brokered peace between Israel and Egypt at Camp David in 1978 was able to talk down North Korea's Kim Sung Il in 1994—and the same Jimmy Carter who Ted Kennedy regarded as a messianic blowhard was seen similarly by Bill Clinton 15 years later.

Jimmy Carter—in 1976, in 1980, in 1998 (when this book was published), and today—hasn't changed much at all, it seems. And because the promise which arguably got him elected, that he would always tell us the truth, has been kept for almost 50 years, we know exactly who he is. The Unfinished Presidency offers a detailed, journalistic look at the man and his accomplishments post-1980. And whether the stories are new to you or old news, I can just about promise you this: nothing you read about Jimmy Carter will surprise you. To paraphrase Dennis Green, Jimmy Carter is who we thought he was—for better and for worse.

ESSENTIAL KILLRAVEN VOL. 1 by Don McGregor, P. Craig Russell, et al.

The 1970s were a weird time at Marvel Comics. On the one hand, you had the big-name books—Amazing Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, etc.—treading water creatively even as they continued to hit the top of the sales charts month after month. On the other hand, in a little corner of the Marvel Bullpen, there was a cohort of new, young writers (many of whom were sampling every psychedelic drug they could get a hold of) who were toiling away on B-level titles, unafraid to throw crazy ideas at the wall to see what would stick. Some of these runs—think Jim Starlin on Warlock and Captain Marvel, or Chris Claremont on Power Man and Iron Fist—are now regarded as cult classics.

Killraven, whose 2-year run of stories in Amazing Adventures was piloted almost entirely by Don McGregor and P. Craig Russell, is not one of those. Or, if he is, I'm not part of the cult.

The idea for Killraven came from Roy Thomas, Stan Lee's protégé and Marvel's editor-in-chief in the mid-1970s. He envisioned a sequel to H.G. Well's class tale The War of the Worlds, a story where this time, having been expelled from Earth in 1901 by their inability to handle Earth's bacteria, they return 100 years later to finish what they'd started and conquer the world. Under this conceit, Killraven would be the leader of a band of freedom fighters seeking to overthrow the Martians.

Unfortunately, Don McGregor—not the most disciplined writer even on his seminal work, Black Panther—is all over the place when he takes the wheel early in the character's run. Rarely have so many words been put on a page to say so little. I was at least 5 issues into the run before I knew the names of Killraven's allies or understood what they were doing with him. I was probably 10 issues in before I had a handle on which of Killraven's enemies were Martians and which were traitorous earthlings. And at no point did I really understand what, from issue to issue, Killraven and Co. were trying to achieve beyond the overarching goal of "beat the Martians."

As for the art, it's equally enigmatic, with P. Craig Russell repeatedly employing experimental page layouts and collages to tell the story. These attempts come off more as pretentious than creative, and they never fail to confuse the storytelling. Panel to panel, he's a fine artist, but frankly, he's not special enough to get away with all of the weird stuff.

All in all, this book is a failure of storytelling, an excellent example of a sci-fi book where the worldbuilding overwhelms the plot and characters, leaving the reader to like the world without caring about the story being told. Many of the Young Guns' 1970s projects have been resurrected in the last few years by modern creators who grew up on those books; Killraven has largely remained a product of its time. There's good reason for that—Killraven, I'm sorry to say, is far from essential.