Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Welcome to our recurring MCC feature in which I scribble capsule reviews of everything I’ve read that was published in a physical format over a certain page count with a squarebound spine on it — novels, original graphic novels, trade paperbacks, infrequent nonfiction dalliances, and so on. Due to the way I structure my media-consumption time blocks, the list will always feature more graphic novels than works of prose and pure text, though I do try to diversify my literary diet as time and acquisitions permit.

Occasionally I’ll sneak in a contemporary review if I’ve gone out of my way to buy and read something brand new. Every so often I’ll borrow from my wife Anne or from our local library. But the majority of our spotlighted works are presented years after the rest of the world already finished and moved on from them because I’m drawing from my vast unread pile that presently occupies four oversize shelves comprising thirty-five years of uncontrolled book shopping. I’ve occasionally pruned the pile, but as you can imagine, cut out one unread book and three more take its place…

Yeah, this is beyond late and into the realm of “why bother now?” It isn’t even the only “year in review” post still on my to-do list. The stacks have cluttered the area around our computer desk this entire time and really need to be moved so I don’t start mixing them up with the books I’ve read so far in 2024, but in my mind they can’t be moved till their capsules are finished. I hate to post an abbreviated entry simply to get something “over with”, but the time has come, gone, lapped around and come again. In the spirit of spring cleaning before summer begins this very week, here’s everything else I read last year but with (mostly) shorter capsules than usual. Longer capsules could be provided upon request, I guess?

12. John Jackson Miller, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: The High Country (2022). Miller’s done great works in the field of ancillary geek novels (the best being his Picard novel Rogue Elements), but this one’s a sort-of sequel to an episode of Enterprise that I’ve never seen because I gave up on that show partway into the Xindi War. Missing some key context was a personal disappointment to me, but the core concept, about a patchwork world made from pieces of other worlds, reminded me of Marvel’s Secret Wars with slightly fewer supervillains. He’s expert at capturing the voices of Trek actors and their characters just right, and slips nimbly into the personae of Captain Pike and company. We need more stories starring them.

13. John Scalzi, The Kaiju Preservation Society (2022). What if we could access an alternate Earth where the primary inhabitants were Godzilla-sized creatures living merrily without buildings to stomp or Toho licenses to heed? Should they be observed in their natural habitat for science’s sake, or greedily exploited, as is humanity’s least grand tradition? Once again the author of Redshirts follows his ideas to their logical and realistically absurd conclusions, excels at witty banter and keeps it all eminently entertaining. Part of me does wish the characters’ individual traits were more than faint pencil sketches beyond their names and scant hints buried dozens of pages deep. Whenever prose authors favor getting to the “good parts” of world-building and skimp on the character-building details, my retaliatory impulse is to cast each one in my head using the least imaginative choices of actors. Next time I read one of his novels, I’m just gonna imagine the hero is played by Casper Van Dien and read his dialogue woodenly on purpose. That’ll show him!

14. Kate Beaton, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (2022). A change of pace from such delightful historical-strip collections as Hark! A Vagrant! and Step Aside, Pops, Beaton’s first full-length memoir relives her blue-collar young-adulthood in the Canadian oil industry, and all the blood, sweat and sexism that entailed. The rough labors, the grave doubts about the usefulness of her college education, and the fact that a lot of Canadians have gone through this same graduate-to-grunt rat-race conveyor — she’s withstood and risen above more than her share as her comics career has taken her beyond all that. She recalls it all in regretful hindsight with flourishes of rueful wit.

15. Zoe Thorogood, It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth (2023). The sophomore follow-up to her debut OGN The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott (one of the best books I read in 2022), her radical memoir is a deeply existentialist, self-deprecating, sometimes self-defeating self-interrogation of her state of mind upon finding comics success so early on, grappling with the paralyzing fear of failure, and coping with suicidal ideation so intensely, we quickly realize the back-cover header (“This book was not supposed to exist”) does not refer to the unlikelihood of finding a publisher, but rather the narrowness of how close she came to dying far too young. Multiple versions of herself and/or the voices in her head form an unlikely ensemble in varying art styles and media, shifting from color to B&W and back again as her tone tilts precariously among modes of black humor, solipsism, and anecdotal this-really-happened wonder. Her quest for meaning is in some ways more for herself than for the reader, but it’s uncomfortably relatable and intricately engrossing.

16. Richard Dreyfuss, One Thought Scares Me… (2022). The subtitle is nearly as long as the book itself: We Teach Our Children What We Wish Them to Know; We Don’t Teach Our Children What We Don’t Wish Them to Know. Before his recent apparent cancellation, the Academy Award Winner held court on his theories as to the gradual, alarming decline in the intelligence of the average American and what he perceives as our pervasive ignorance of subjects that used to be required in school, particularly basic civics and How Government Works 101. It’s arguably centrist in its final verdicts, though I could imagine either side recognizing elements to vilify in their opponents. It’s more lucid than his recent public appearances might imply, and more worrisome that he might not be wrong.

17. Mara Wilson, Where Am I Now?: True Stories of Girlhood and Accidental Fame (2016). You might remember her from such films as Matilda, Mrs. Doubtfire, Thomas and the Magic Railroad, or her stymied attempts to keep acting as she aged out of childhood cuteness only to be judged Not Hot by creepily sexualized casting norms. Hollywood’s loss was the writing field’s gain as her self-effacing memoir vivisects the child-actor mill and celebrates the life and guidance of her late mother, whose sensible instincts and enforcement of structured parenting made all the difference in the world and prevented Wilson from becoming just another wasted cautionary tale. Selfishly speaking, my favorite part — as heart-rending as it is — was her recount of her experiences with Robin Williams. One wonders what might’ve been if someone like Wilson’s mom had intervened earlier in his life.

18. Claudia Christian with Morgan Grant Buchanan, Babylon Confidential: A Memoir of Love, Sex & Addiction (2012). Yes, I do love buying books directly from guests at the comic cons we attend, thanks for noticing. I’ve never read a tell-all autobio just to learn which other famous people they’ve canoodled with, nor was that my intent here. In Christian’s case it’s hard to extricate some of those flings and extended relationships (including a stint with the late Dodi Fayed, apropos of my contemporaneous watching of The Crown) from the entirety of her narrative, considering how many of them caused or worsened her issues. With unflinching candor and humility borne of repeated humiliations, Christian goes through everything that led to where she is today — from the singularly horrifying childhood trauma to teen modeling to hot-chick acting gigs to the main cast of Babylon 5 to her Playboy pictorial to her fall from grace and up to her longtime alcoholism, which for too many years was more of a lifestyle than a battle. I’ve known a few people who dealt with demons in bottles, including one aunt who drank herself to death, but absolutely none of them ever spoke about the experience so openly as she does here, or as constructively about her ongoing recovery.

19. Seth M. Sherwood, The Scary Movie Writer’s Guide (2023). Some disclosure: I’ve known the author in an internet message-board capacity pre-MCC and even pre-social media, though in recent years he’s achieved professional careerhood and I’ve admittedly slunk to the back rows of his Peanut Gallery through fault of my own. In his capacity as screenwriter of the controversial Leatherface prequel and the much better throwback-slasher Hell Fest, as well as a top contributor to Hulu’s two-season teen-horror series Light as a Feather, Sherwood used his free time during last year’s WGA strike (when he wasn’t taking turns on the picket lines) penning and self-publishing his own how-to guide for aspiring shock-hacks and “elevated horror” scribes alike, categorizing the subgenres and sub-subgenres and providing his perspectives on the process as a lifelong horror aficionado and as someone who’s gotten paid more than once to do what he loves. He’s not dogmatic, he knows what works for him won’t work for everyone, and he provides worksheets and exercises for more industrious learners who want to dive in that deeply. (Beyond the book, he’s keeping the lessons coming on his Substack.) In my capacity as an aging crank, my only complaints are the typos (not that I have room to talk these days) and — because I have a petty pet peeve about reliance on any new slang terms that I haven’t yet co-opted for myself — how I screeched a little inside every time he uses “vibe” as a verb. It is a lot and I’m just not down with that yet.

20. Warren Ellis, Leonardo Manco, Peter Gross, Derek Yaniger, Martin Chaplin, et al., Hellstorm by Warren Ellis (2018). Before The Authority and Transmetropolitan made their respective marks on the late-’90s comics scene, the since-canceled author was a 26-year-old splatterpunk edgelord given free rein to turn Marvel’s cheesy ’70s antihero Son of Satan inside out, double down on that name, and make DC’s Hellblazer look like Scooby-Doo Mysteries as far as his Delphi message-board members were concerned. (His equally grimdark spinoff Druid miniseries is also included here.) Despite a swift axing, this was later adapted into a Hulu series that fell in a forest and no one noticed. In hindsight the visuals better approximate Clive Barker’s works than the verbiage does, especially the early Manco issues, but this has aged poorly on multiple levels (as have 90% of all ’90s comics, to be fair). As a deeply discounted comic-con clearance-rack find, it was still too much spent to scratch an already fading itch.

21. Al Ewing, Joe Bennett, Ruy José, Belardino Brabo, Paul Mounts, et al., The Immortal Hulk Vol. 5 (2023). Our Canceled Creator Cavalcade continues, for better or worse. I latched onto the hardcover collections during the pandemic and refused to let go even after its primary artist’s public fallout because, as I said last time, I wanted to witness Ewing’s completed gamma-horror arc for myself through to its wild finale. Its problematic asterisk may never go away, but for what it’s worth in and of itself, it was the best Hulk series in ages, and it was gratifying to see Marvel horror come a long, long way since Hellstorm‘s day. Thankfully Ewing’s subsequent Immortal Thor has had no such foul-ups so far and it’s differently awesome.

22. Al Ewing, Crystal Frasier, Lan Medina and Antonio Fabela, Gamma Flight (2021). This Immortal Hulk spinoff had to sit in my unread pile till after the hardcovers were done. When I was a kid, Marvel’s Canadian government-run super-teams had a hierarchy: Alpha Flight were the big heroes starring in sometimes readable adventures; Beta Flight were their ostensible successors in theory, if never in practice; and Gamma Flight trained the rookies. Years later, Ewing’s quest to craft a long-term storyline starring every “gamma” character ever turned their preexisting team literal, greener, and 60% less Canadian. The ending is disappointing, especially the part where everyone’s crammed back into the dusty IP closet for the foreseeable future, but clever bits abounded and some long-neglected Hulk supporting players got to see daylight and some slight twists, which was nice.

…

…this is taking too long. Time for READING STACKS LIGHTNING ROUND!

23. C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942; 1996 edition). The Narnia creator’s Unreliable Devil Narrator classic. I wish I had the audiobook read by Andy Serkis, but even imagining it in my head added to the already fascinating experience.

24. George R. R. Martin, ed., Wild Cards: Knaves Over Queens (2018). A recurring feature in the stacks over the past several years as I’ve inched closer and closer to catching up to the present on this shared-world superpower anthology that’s been running since I was in tenth grade. Shifting perspective to the UK side of its alt-history opened grand new opportunities, starting with Queen Elizabeth II drawing the Black Queen, and all the radical changes resulting from her death.

25. George R. R. Martin, ed., Wild Cards: Joker Moon (2021). More alt-history fun with the space race! What if Elon Musk were a giant-sized, socially awkward half-snail genius from South Carolina who self-funded a privatized trip to the moon? It might look a little something like this, decades early and sans social media.

26. Melinda M. Snodgrass & George R. R. Martin, ed., Wild Cards: Three Kings (2022). The oddly delayed wrap-up to Knaves Over Queens‘ political tumult shifts, as the series often does, from short stories to a round-robin mosaic novel as a racist throne usurper, Elizabeth’s long-lost secret son, a metal-skinned Alan Turing, and some meta-anarchists in the UK vie for supremacy and/or survival, and everything’s a mess — the situation and, by the end, the novel itself.

27. Meredith McClaren, Hinges, Book 1: Clockwork City (2013). Before co-creating the Image Comics fantasy/police drama Black Cloak with Kelly Thompson, McClaren self-published this li’l tale of a factory-worker doll who seeks her true purpose while dealing with a tiny critter that might be more trouble than it’s worth. Several pages suffer extremely confusing layouts full of interacting shapes, so I had to keep skimming past those bewildering patches till the narrative flow reasserted itself.

28. Paul Storrie, Rob Davis and Michael C. Larson, Robyn of Sherwood (2012). Robin Hood is DEAD! But his daughter with similar first name picks up the bow and arrow to fight the good fight, because decades in, the British woodland oppression is the same as it ever was. Reprinting a 1998 Caliber Press miniseries, which is nice because our local shops back in the day rarely ordered any Caliber books except Deadworld.

29. Various, Kagemono: Flowers and Skulls (2015). Indie horror anthology with shorts by a few names I recognize (Russell Lissau, Steve Horton, Marvin Perry Mann) and lots I don’t. Some of them might have steady webcomic followings, but I wouldn’t know because I don’t read webcomics. Kind of a long short-story in itself.

30. Gary Reed, Seth Damoose, and Sara Dhyne, Savants (2020). Superpowered teens fight back against those who’d make them lab rats, which looks increasingly more like the Hawkins National Laboratory as it goes, even though this was completed well before Stranger Things came around. Not a new premise or setting even then, but it’s billed as the final comics project from Reed, creator of the aforementioned Caliber Press, before his passing in 2016, so it earns a little historical comics-trivia cred.

31/32. Michael Cherkas and Larry Hancock, The Silent Invasion, Vol. 3: Abductions! / Vol. 4: Dark Matter (2020-2021). I’m old and weird enough to remember R.A. Jones reviewing the original Renegade Press series nearly forty years ago in Amazing Heroes. Its retro-visualized alien-conspiracy paranoia thriller foresaw The X-Files several years ahead. Like me, the creators are older now yet reunited to continue the story into even more upsetting developments that do not include a happy ending where the aliens agree to play nice and the government repents of its sins. If only!

33/34. Kyle Starks with Chris Schweitzer, Rock Candy Mountain, Vol. 1-2 (2017-2018). From the wickedly witty writer of subsequent grade-A works such as Assassin Nation, The Six Sidekicks of Trigger Keaton, and Peacemaker Tries Hard!: two hoboes — one grizzled pro, one softie new to the life — ride the rails on an epic quest while dodging evil hobo factions, the law, and the Devil incarnate. If you know of a funnier magical two-fisted hobo epic, I’m all ears.

35. K. Lynn Smith, For Goodness’ Sake, Vol. 1 (2020). She’s a free-spirited artist living the nomadic flowery-bus life! He’s a cursed demon on a motorcycle! Can this odd couple find true love and not get dead? So far, so good, so cute.

36. Anthony Ruttgaizer, Carlos Granda and Fred C. Stresing, Heroes of Homeroom C (2017). Black tween fraternal-twin superheroes lose their powers and try adjusting to ordinary life. Things go poorly even before an evil boy wizard also moves to town and inevitably super-fights have to become a thing again. A lot of old dynamics intersect in uncommon, entertaining ways.

37. Jason Aaron and Chris Bachalo, Doctor Strange, Vol. 1: The Way of the Weird (2016) Collecting the first five issues of their 20-issue run, in which Bachalo proves himself the perfect artist for a book packed to the panel borders with oodles of magical whimsies, weirdness, and otherworldly wildlife. I approve of Marvel’s decision to hew more closely to Cumberbatch’s sarcastic Sorcerer Supreme than to classic Serious Sagely Stephen, but I’m annoyed this ends To Be Continued, reminding me why I buy so very few Marvel series in trades.

38. Jeff Lemire with José Villarrubia, Sweet Tooth, Vol. 2 (2018 re-release). I’ve been on board for numerous Lemire works in recent years (including his current Image miniseries Fishflies), but I missed his acclaimed Vertigo series the first time around and have been running behind for a while. The closing volume and The Return are both near the top of my nearest unread stack, which I’m hoping to get to by year-end so I can finally watch the Netflix adaptation, whose third and final season just dropped two weeks ago, to literally zero response and nary a mention in all my social-media feeds.

39. Fred van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey, The (Four Color) Comic Book History of Comics: Birth of a Medium (2017). Now fully colorized! The creators of Action Philopsophers! apply their knacks for nonfiction, American history, cartooning and comedy to the very medium in which they toil. I’ve been devouring books-about-comics ever since I was a grade-schooler checking and re-checking out my local library’s entire 741.5 section, six books at a time for years, so I knew some of this but not all of it. It’s funny, enlightening, comprehensive coverage of the graphic storytelling medium starting from the dawn of cave paintings and ending (oddly abruptly) with the ’70s underground comix scene that I, uh, wasn’t supposed to learn about at the library as a kid.

The End. See you later this year whenever I start the new stacks!

See also: Stack #1 | Stack #2 | Stack #3