Review: Spawn of Mars and Other Stories
One of my goals for the month of March is to post a review of something every Sunday. So!
Spawn of Mars and Other Stories, illustrated by Wallace Wood, written by Al Feldstein, Harry Harrison, and Wallace Wood. Edited by Gary Groth. Introduction by Bill Mason. Historical Essay by Ted White.
A volume of about two dozen selected science fiction comic stories drawn by Wallace Wood and orginally published by Entertaining Comics in um. The early nineteen fifties? Presumably? Since EC published science fiction comics from 1947 to 1956, when the company folded (only Mad Magazine surviving) I have to assume that's about the range for these stories. I am forced to rely on guesswork because for some unknowable reason, there are no original publication dates anywhere. Personally I find this a very annoying editorial flaw: I like to know when my anthologized stories were intially published! Bill Mason's introduction is no help. Every person he mentions is given their birth and death dates, but no other dates are given, leaving the chronology of Spawn of Mars and Other Stories a mushy amorphous sea.
(Mason also completely unnecessarily deadnames and misgenders Christine Jorgensen, and not just in quoting the contemporary media coverage. It is fairly appalling.)
The stories themselves are beautifully drawn, and Wood is even capable of designing more than one woman! ...admittedly, that only happens if the woman in question is the protagonist, so basically only the main character of “Spawn of Mars” gets her own design, and all the other women characters have to settle for looking pretty same-y, but hey.
The actual plots kind of suffer from being over a half century old: what could be reasonably fresh to a reader new to spec fic in 1952 is less so when you're a spec fic fan from 2016. But it's generally pretty competently done, and I actually really like a few of them. Harry Harrison wrote the script for “Black Arts,” one of the last stories in the collection, and while you can kind of see the twist coming from a mile away, it's still a nastily satisfying revenge fantasy, in which a man attempting to romantically coerce a woman doesn't get what he wanted at all.
(“Spawn of Mars” also revolves around romantic coercion and rape by deceit, and in it too, the woman survives to live with the consequences and hard choices the story just kind of hints at. I think it would be possible to read these as a lot more appalling than I do, but something about Wood's art is so sympathetic to the protagonist that I feel we're meant to empathize with her and her situation rather than be titillated by it, and that makes a difference to me.)
Spawn of Mars and Other Stories is an interesting slice of fandom history, but I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone who doesn't enjoy pulp speculative fiction.
Note: “Transformation Completed”, one of the stories in the middle of the volume, involves coercive gender reassignment without that person's knowledge and against their expressed gender identity. It's less prurient than that kind of story often is, especially from this era, and unlike a lot of coercive gender reassignment stories it isn't played for laughs but it's still - - - to me, a cis person, it feels very cis-gazey, and the narrator is the perpetrator of the medical abuse, so. I feel like this deserves a warning.
This entry was originally posted at http://tiamatschild.dreamwidth.org/131778.html. Please feel free to comment there using OpenID. Or here! It'll be read either way, is what I'm saying.
Spawn of Mars and Other Stories, illustrated by Wallace Wood, written by Al Feldstein, Harry Harrison, and Wallace Wood. Edited by Gary Groth. Introduction by Bill Mason. Historical Essay by Ted White.
A volume of about two dozen selected science fiction comic stories drawn by Wallace Wood and orginally published by Entertaining Comics in um. The early nineteen fifties? Presumably? Since EC published science fiction comics from 1947 to 1956, when the company folded (only Mad Magazine surviving) I have to assume that's about the range for these stories. I am forced to rely on guesswork because for some unknowable reason, there are no original publication dates anywhere. Personally I find this a very annoying editorial flaw: I like to know when my anthologized stories were intially published! Bill Mason's introduction is no help. Every person he mentions is given their birth and death dates, but no other dates are given, leaving the chronology of Spawn of Mars and Other Stories a mushy amorphous sea.
(Mason also completely unnecessarily deadnames and misgenders Christine Jorgensen, and not just in quoting the contemporary media coverage. It is fairly appalling.)
The stories themselves are beautifully drawn, and Wood is even capable of designing more than one woman! ...admittedly, that only happens if the woman in question is the protagonist, so basically only the main character of “Spawn of Mars” gets her own design, and all the other women characters have to settle for looking pretty same-y, but hey.
The actual plots kind of suffer from being over a half century old: what could be reasonably fresh to a reader new to spec fic in 1952 is less so when you're a spec fic fan from 2016. But it's generally pretty competently done, and I actually really like a few of them. Harry Harrison wrote the script for “Black Arts,” one of the last stories in the collection, and while you can kind of see the twist coming from a mile away, it's still a nastily satisfying revenge fantasy, in which a man attempting to romantically coerce a woman doesn't get what he wanted at all.
(“Spawn of Mars” also revolves around romantic coercion and rape by deceit, and in it too, the woman survives to live with the consequences and hard choices the story just kind of hints at. I think it would be possible to read these as a lot more appalling than I do, but something about Wood's art is so sympathetic to the protagonist that I feel we're meant to empathize with her and her situation rather than be titillated by it, and that makes a difference to me.)
Spawn of Mars and Other Stories is an interesting slice of fandom history, but I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone who doesn't enjoy pulp speculative fiction.
Note: “Transformation Completed”, one of the stories in the middle of the volume, involves coercive gender reassignment without that person's knowledge and against their expressed gender identity. It's less prurient than that kind of story often is, especially from this era, and unlike a lot of coercive gender reassignment stories it isn't played for laughs but it's still - - - to me, a cis person, it feels very cis-gazey, and the narrator is the perpetrator of the medical abuse, so. I feel like this deserves a warning.
This entry was originally posted at http://tiamatschild.dreamwidth.org/131778.html. Please feel free to comment there using OpenID. Or here! It'll be read either way, is what I'm saying.