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The Law Is A Ass #431: Spider-Man’s Crime Fighting Needs Improv-Ment

Spider-Man. Spider-Man. Who, according to the song, does whatever a spider can. However, when it comes to fighting crime, sometimes he doesn’t do it as well as a spider would.

The Amazing Spider-Man Annual Vol 3, No. 1 had three stories in it. We’ll take what was behind Door Number 3, a little deal of the day called “Whose Crime Is It, Anyway?” written by Wayne Brady and Jonathan Mangum. Because that was the story that gave the law a zonk.

In said story, Spider-Man went to a nighttime comedy improv workshop being taught by the aforementioned regulars on Whose Line Is It, Anyway? because Spidey thought he needed a refresher to hone his one-liner skills. He was Hulked out by his puny banter and wanted to be more quip on the draw. Spidey’s lesson didn’t last long. A page or so into the improving, he heard a burglar alarm and knew it was time to put his newly honed skills to practical use.

Okay, I’ll need a place that has money and a number between one and five. Ah, I heard “bank” and “three.”

Spidey went to the bank next door and found three men planning to loot the safety deposit boxes from the small safe, because the big safe would take too long. Spider-Man then crashed their party. Literally. He jumped through the bank’s front window. Spidey suggested the crooks work together, listen to each other, and act as a team. They agreed and decided two of them would crack the safe while the third emptied the teller drawers

A little later, the crooks all had sacks full of money and were walking out the door thanking Spider-Man for making it the easiest job they’ve ever done. Meanwhile, even though the alarm had been going off for some time now, the police still hadn’t arrived. Apparently this bank wasn’t close to any donut shops.

Undaunted, Spidey webbed the door so the crooks couldn’t get out. The three crooks rushed him. In a straight line. So that when Spidey punched the first crook, he fell back and hit the second crook who, in turn, fell back and hit the third crook. Spidey subdued the three crooks with one blow, not as good as a brave little tailor, but necessary when you’re appearing in a short story. Then Spidey told the crooks that he had waited until after they actually took some money, so they could be arrested for more than attempted robbery.

Hey, Spidey, maybe you should have paid better attention to that improv class. The purpose of, “Yes and,” is that you’re supposed to agree with what the person before you said then build on that to make things go smoothly. You don’t say, “Yes and how can I make things worse?” Because worse is what your little escapade made things.

And I don’t mean worse for the crooks. You’re supposed to make things worse for them. It used to be right there in the Comics Code. No, I meant worse for the poor victims.

Look at what Spidey did. Or, in case you don’t happen to have the comic in front of you so you can’t look, let me tell you what he did. First, he crashed through the bank’s window instead of coming through whatever entrance the crooks used, because that’s what all banks need; a gaping hole right in the front of their secure building. Then he let the crooks take money out of the safety deposit boxes and teller drawers, meaning that the tellers will have to balance all their cash drawers again. Then all those safety deposit boxes. And that’s after they pick up all the stolen money and sort it out. He put them through all this just so that the crooks would actually take some money and could be charged with more than just attempted robbery? Good plan! Considering that when the crooks took the money they couldn’t be charged with robbery – actual or attempted – at all.

According to the section 160.00 of the New York state penal code (I write in my best Jack Webb monotone) robbery in the third degree happens when, “in the course of committing a larceny, [the perpetrator] uses or threatens the immediate use of physical force upon another person for the purpose of… Preventing or overcoming resistance to the taking of the property or to the retention thereof immediately after the taking.” When the crooks took the money they hadn’t used, or threatened the use of, any physical force on anyone. So they weren’t robbers.

What they were was burglars. Because what they did violated section 140.20 of that same penal code by trespassing in a building in order to commit a crime there in. And that’s burglary of the third degree. Moreover, both robbery and burglary of the third degree are Class D felonies in New York. So Spidey could have gotten them convicted of the exact same class of felony without having to wait until they actually touched the money. Which would have made everybody – Spidey and the bank employees – happy. Okay, it wouldn’t have made the crooks happy. But, I repeat, Comics Code.

Now, when the crooks rushed at Spidey, they were threatening the use of physical harm so were guilty of robbery in the third degree. In fact, they were guilty of the Class C felony robbery in the second degree, because each crook was aided another person who was present during the robbery. But Spidey could still have achieved this result without letting them actually touch the money.

These crooks were stupid enough to rush Spidey unarmed. Okay they had arms, how else could they have carried those bags of money he let them get their hands on? But they didn’t have weapons. And they still rushed Spider-Man. In a straight line, no less, so he could punch one and turn them into human dominoes. I’m betting they were also dumb enough to have rushed Spidey if he told them he was going to stop them before they touched the money.

Spidey could have gotten the crooks to commit robbery of the second, robbery of the third degree, and burglary of the third degree without making the poor, underpaid tellers lives more difficult. But he didn’t. I guess Spidey was still in his improv class. And the game he was playing was “World’s Worst.”

Book-A-Day 2018 #84: Super-Powered Revenge Christmas by Bill Corbett and Len Peralta

I could make up all sorts of excuses why I read this book. Perhaps the MST3K connection, since I’m in a hotel in the Twin Cities area right now, on a business trip. Maybe I could pretend to have planned to read it at Christmas, and neglected it for a couple of months.

The answer is equally silly, but more boring. I’m on a week-long business trip, yes. I brought four books to read — three comics and one novel. I haven’t yet touched the novel, but I read one of the comics on each of the first three days of the trip. But now, on Day Four, they’re all done. So I was left to rummage through one of the e-reader apps on my tablet, after an evening excursion with my co-workers, to find something to read and then write about. I’ve had a couple of drinks, so I might not be thinking entirely like my normal self. And this book was up near the top in the default sort in GoodReader, I couldn’t remember why I had it at all, and it looked silly.

So that’s how I came to read Super-Powered Revenge Christmas , which by the way is a 2014 graphic novel written by Bill Corbett and drawn by Len Peralta. It’s a quirky take on Christmas, with a brooding Superman-esque “Red Avenger” whose is secretly Sa’nn Tah-Kl’awwz from the planet Yoool. (Look, I said it was silly, didn’t I?) RA battles an evil corporation — HEROD, which is a silly acronym, and run by a thinly-veiled Scrooge — and soon is joined in his battle by Caribou, a deer-man whose nose lights up when he gets angry. Then there’s a snow goddess as a gender-swap take on Frosty, plus two very nice people who are going to have a baby who will be the greatest mutant of all time. Oh, and there’s a frame story about a comics creator team-cum-couple who broke up over telling this story and are now recounting it to three strangers in a bar on Christmas Eve. And it apparently was both adapted from a stage play by Corbett and Kickstarted into existence in this form.

Super-Powered Revenge Christmas is deliberately designed so that it can’t be taken seriously at any point; it is impregnable to all criticism in its hermetic goofiness and sprawling pop-culture Xmas ambitions. It is very, very, very, very silly. Very. It’s not really funny, but it’s not trying to be — it’s aiming at knowing smirks rather than full laughs.

I don’t know why anyone would want to construct a story like this. But someone did. (Two someones, one of them twice.) And this now exists. I’ve just spent an hour or two first reading it and then typing this. None of that makes any sense. You can’t explain any of it. And yet it happened. Let that be a lesson to all of you.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Book-A-Day 2018 #84: Super-Powered Revenge Christmas by Bill Corbett and Len Peralta

I could make up all sorts of excuses why I read this book. Perhaps the MST3K connection, since I’m in a hotel in the Twin Cities area right now, on a business trip. Maybe I could pretend to have planned to read it at Christmas, and neglected it for a couple of months.

The answer is equally silly, but more boring. I’m on a week-long business trip, yes. I brought four books to read — three comics and one novel. I haven’t yet touched the novel, but I read one of the comics on each of the first three days of the trip. But now, on Day Four, they’re all done. So I was left to rummage through one of the e-reader apps on my tablet, after an evening excursion with my co-workers, to find something to read and then write about. I’ve had a couple of drinks, so I might not be thinking entirely like my normal self. And this book was up near the top in the default sort in GoodReader, I couldn’t remember why I had it at all, and it looked silly.

So that’s how I came to read Super-Powered Revenge Christmas , which by the way is a 2014 graphic novel written by Bill Corbett and drawn by Len Peralta. It’s a quirky take on Christmas, with a brooding Superman-esque “Red Avenger” whose is secretly Sa’nn Tah-Kl’awwz from the planet Yoool. (Look, I said it was silly, didn’t I?) RA battles an evil corporation — HEROD, which is a silly acronym, and run by a thinly-veiled Scrooge — and soon is joined in his battle by Caribou, a deer-man whose nose lights up when he gets angry. Then there’s a snow goddess as a gender-swap take on Frosty, plus two very nice people who are going to have a baby who will be the greatest mutant of all time. Oh, and there’s a frame story about a comics creator team-cum-couple who broke up over telling this story and are now recounting it to three strangers in a bar on Christmas Eve. And it apparently was both adapted from a stage play by Corbett and Kickstarted into existence in this form.

Super-Powered Revenge Christmas is deliberately designed so that it can’t be taken seriously at any point; it is impregnable to all criticism in its hermetic goofiness and sprawling pop-culture Xmas ambitions. It is very, very, very, very silly. Very. It’s not really funny, but it’s not trying to be — it’s aiming at knowing smirks rather than full laughs.

I don’t know why anyone would want to construct a story like this. But someone did. (Two someones, one of them twice.) And this now exists. I’ve just spent an hour or two first reading it and then typing this. None of that makes any sense. You can’t explain any of it. And yet it happened. Let that be a lesson to all of you.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Book-A-Day 2018 #83: You & A Bike & A Road by Eleanor Davis

What is this book about?

Well, the title is You & A Bike & A Road . It’s by Eleanor Davis. It was published by Koyama Press in May 2017.

The outside of the book will tell you no more. Opening it doesn’t give much more information — some legalese on the copyright page, and more of the pretty cover scenery on the French flaps.

The only way to know what You & A Bike & A Road is about is to read it. But it’s a comic, so reading it is easy. You might as well just jump in and see what you find.

The same spirit drove Davis to try to bike from her parents’ home in Tucson, Arizona to her home in Atlanta, Georgia. Her father had just built her a bike, so why not ride it back? Why not draw a couple of pages each day along the way, and see what comes of it?

So this is a travelogue, of what Davis hoped would be a month or two of biking across the southwest and southeast US, starting March 16, 2016. Davis works in what looks like soft pencils, and gives us an impressionistic view of days on the road — knee pain, headwinds, flowers, friendly fellow bikers, and the omnipresent Border Patrol. It was over two thousand miles, but she sets off in good spirits: alone but happy to see the world and push against it for a while.

Any travel book is as much about its creator as the territory covered, and You & A Bike & A Road is no exception. Davis was riding alone, camping alone, spending most of her days alone with her thoughts and her bike beneath her. That’ll lead to a lot of introspection, a lot of thinking.

You & A Bike & A Road is a lovely, thoughtful book, as much a meditation on life and physical activity as anything else. Davis makes great pictures and thinks serious thoughts — and is open enough to meet people and learn about the landscapes she travels through. This book is as wide and open as the desert and as welcoming as the people you meet. If you see it, pick it up, even if you’re not sure what it is.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Book-A-Day 2018 #82: Nicolas by Pascal Girard

Early success is the most dangerous kind. Great success for something you did quickly can be even worse. When the two are combined…well, it’s hard for your career to be other than disappointing afterward.

Nicolas  wasn’t Pascal Girard’s first comics work, or first book — but it was really close, on both counts. And it’s pretty clear I wasn’t the only one really impressed by this short book — it was widely praised for its raw honesty and authentic grief at the time.

Girard has an introduction in this expanded 2016 edition of Nicolas about how it came to be and how it affected him. And his other memoirs — I’ve seen Reunion  and Petty Theft ; there may be others still lurking in Quebecois French I don’t know of — show other sides of Girard, of the man who lived through this as a boy. I don’t think it’s something you get over.

Nicolas was Girard’s younger brother. Girard was born in 1981, and, around 1990, when Girard was nine and Nicolas was five, Nicolas died. Girard didn’t know what killed him for a while — he eventually learned it was lactic acidosis, which was probably just as meaningful to him then as it is to you or me right now. It’s two medical words, technical terms, that mean “your kid brother is dead.”

Nicolas, the original book, is bookended by scenes with Nicolas alive. The two boys are playing with a tape recorder, making Ghostbusters jokes. I have to imagine that tape still exists. I have to imagine Girard listening to it, years later, when about to make this book. But I can’t imagine what that must feel like.

Girard says, in that new introduction, that he wanted to do a quick book, inspired by Jeffrey Brown. That he planned it out a bit, writing some stories and memories in a notebook. But that the comics pages themselves, one or two quick borderless panels to a page, came out over a long weekend. Sometimes strong material is like that: it needs to come out, and forces its way onto the page.

This new edition of Nicolas includes the original book, that new introduction, and a comics afterword — twenty-five pages about Girard in the years since Nicolas was published. As Girard says in his introduction, those pages ended up being about Girard’s other brother, Joel. The one even younger than Nicolas, the one who didn’t die. The one that grown-up Girard mostly ignores, even when they live in the same city.

Girard, as always, is unsparing of his own flaws and foibles — his comics sometimes feel like penance on his part, as he drags his worst self out for self-ridicule and as the butt of every joke. Nicolas, maybe, explains why, or points to a possible reason. It’s still the strongest comics work I’ve seen from Girard, for all its rawness, for all it was done quickly by a novice creator. Some stories need to be told, and this one made Girard tell it brilliantly.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Book-A-Day 2018 #80: Jack Staff, Vol. 2: Soldiers by Paul Grist and Phil Elliott

It was just a little over a month ago that I covered Jack Staff Vol. 1 here, a decade after it was published. I’m accelerating a bit now, getting to 2010’s second volume with what passes for blinding speed around here.

Jack Staff, Vol. 2: Soldiers sees Paul Grist’s superhero universe transformed into full color with the addition of Phil Elliott as colorist to the team, and possibly some increased distribution from a then-new publishing management with Image. (The first series of Jack Staff came out from Grist’s own Dancing Elephant Press.) Otherwise, this is still an all-Paul Grist production: he writes and draws and (I’m pretty sure) letters as well.

Since this was the big relaunch, it needed to stand on its own. Traditionally, that’s the time to trot out a retelling of the origin, but Grist hadn’t revealed that yet — I’m not sure if he has even now, actually, and I hope he hasn’t. So, instead, we get a less-deep flashback: the story of the case that sent Jack Staff into retirement “twenty years ago” — roughly the late ’80s, given when the Jack Staff series started.

Jack, to refresh your memory, is a really long-lived — we don’t know how long, but he’s looked young and exactly the same since WW II, at least — who is a mid-level brick. In this book, we learn a little more about what he can do, but he’s basically a strong guy with a big stick and occasional glowy hands. He was, as the cover claims, Britain’s greatest hero, though he seems to spend all of his time hanging about a minor provincial city called Castletown. (Maybe that’s why Britain did fine for twenty years without him.)

Anyway, Soldiers is told in a complicated flashback structure, jumping between twenty years ago and “now,” sometimes on the same page, in a style I’m coming to think Grist particularly likes. (And I’m completely in sync with him: if you’re telling a story about big guys punching each other for pages on end, it definitely helps to do something to mix that up and make it more interesting.) So Soldiers bounces back and forth in time like a yo-yo, also bouncing around the large cast almost as much as the stories in the first book did. (Becky Burdock, {Spoiler} Reporter gets less obvious on-page time here, but there are some new superheroes, from the ’60s and ’80s.)

The big fight scene twenty years ago was between Jack and Hurricane, the British Army’s secret and greatest weapon, who of course is a Hulk-ish guy with an anger problem and an exceptionally limited vocabulary. In between bits of that fight, there’s a more complicated plot going on in the present day, plus some military machinations back twenty years ago. It may sound confusing, but on the page it’s always entirely clear who is doing what when and to whom.

There is a lot of talking in between the fighting, and plenty of fighting in the modern day as well. This is a superhero comic, after all.

Grist tells a zippy story here, and his art is dynamic and fun — he still uses a lot of black here (as he did in the early Jack Staff stories, as well as Kane), but the addition of color does make the whole thing that much more superhero-y.

Nobody needs any more superhero comics, but this is a good one, unencumbered by any stupid continuity and entirely owned by the guy that thought it up. If you need superheroes in your life, this is the kind to have.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Book-A-Day 2018 #79: Nat Turner by Kyle Baker

I am in great danger of dancing about architecture here, so I’ll acknowledge it, first, and then try to move on.

Nat Turner is a nearly wordless graphic novel: it contains only narration taken from The Confessions of Nat Turner (a contemporary account), and some sound effects. All of the characters in it are silent as we see them — for dramatic effect or because the vast majority of them were silenced at the time and by history, you can decide for yourself. So what I’m here to do is use words to talk about a story told only in pictures.

“Dancing about architecture,” as I said.

Nat Turner was written and drawn by Kyle Baker, and originally self-published by him as four individual comics. The book edition came from Abrams exactly a decade ago, in 2008. The copy I have in my hand has a slightly different cover than the one I’ve found online: there’s only a light spattering of blood drops over the word “Turner” and down the left side, connecting to a red-patterned spine and back cover. I light the brightness and visual metaphor of the version shown here, but maybe the bookstores of America balked at so much blood.

Nat Turner [1] was born into slavery in Virginia in 1800. His father is believed to have run away and escaped from slavery when Nat was very young. Nat was very intelligent, and self-taught as much as he could, learning to read on his own and devouring every book he could. He led a rebellion of local slaves in 1831, which had some immediate success but was quickly suppressed. And, of course, he was tried and killed soon afterward. (Depending on how cynical you are, it can be counted a victory that a black man in 1831 Virginia was actually tried and found guilty before he was killed by white people.) Those are the bare facts.

Baker takes that story and extends it, beginning with Nat’s mother, captured by slavers in Africa and shipped to America. That was the first issue; the second covers Nat’s youth, growth to manhood, and religious awakening. (Like so many others who led massacres, Nat thought God talked to him and made him for a special destiny. Unlike most of them, we still have sympathy for Nat.)  The third issue has the events of the rebellion, in all of their bloody, chaotic fury. And the fourth is the aftermath: Nat’s hanging and Baker’s notes and afterword.

Baker’s art is dark and moody, a chiaroscuro of browns and blacks. The faces are expressive and with just an occasional touch of cartooniness — much more realistic than most of his work. His choice of images and panel-to-panel storytelling is superb, and the whole thing — even told originally across four issues — is entirely unified. Nat Turner has a massive moral and imagistic power, even to this white guy whose ancestors were entirely Northerners.

I don’t see Nat Turner listed in those standard compilations of the “Best Modern Graphic Novels” much — maybe because it’s too raw, too shocking. It should be; it does stand that comparison and should be in that company. And it’s a good reminder to oppressors everywhere — even if they don’t think themselves oppressors, even if they think they’re the ones oppressed — that when there are people under you with no way out and no recourse, they will rise up eventually, and you may not survive the experience.

[1] “Turner” was the family name of Nat’s owners. It’s not clear to me if he ever used a second name while alive, or if that was a luxury held by white people.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Book-A-Day 2018 #77: The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 3: Squirrel, You Really Got Me Now by Ryan North and Erica Henderson

Doreen Green is still cute, still a bit chunky, still indomitable, and still the most upbeat character in comics. But she’s now a second-year student in Computer Science at Empire State U — which state is weirdly referred to as a “second-year alum” more than once — which means she’s that much closer to actually being able to create {insert technical thing that I don’t really understand here}.

The “big” change in her status (oh, she’s also a New Avenger, which is mentioned in the first issue and ignored otherwise) is because this third collection starts up what was in late 2015 a new series of comics about Doreen, aka Squirrel Girl, after she was involved in whatever crisis was going on that summer. (I think it was the one where all mutants died, since there was a fourth-wall-leaning reference to her very definitely not being a mutant of any kind. But who can keep track of which money-grubbing Marvel Secret House Civil Infinity Age of Death Fear Chaos Shadow happened when?) It was the second issue #1 that year for Squirrel Girl, which game creators Ryan North and Erica Henderson mock here, but not so much as to piss off their Marvel overlords.

Anyway, it’s The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 3: Squirrel, You Really Got Me Now . Given the way Marvel keeps books in print, it’s probably impossible to find now.

It starts out with a done-in-one story re-introducing Doreen and her supporting cast — who knows! maybe there’s a substantial comic-shop-going audience that missed the first first issue that year! hope springs eternal! — and then dives into a longer story involving Doctor Doom, time travel, and fashions of the early 1960s. Along the way, there are lots of pseudo-alt-text comments at the bottom of the pages by writer North and extensive letter-column pages with responses from both North and Henderson. (Do most comics reprint letter columns these days? Is that a thing? Because it’s nice that people like the comics and send in pictures of themselves as Squirrel Girl, but it’s kind of a distraction from the actual story here.)

Reader, Marvel did not have to change the title to The Only Beaten That One Time Squirrel Girl after this volume. But you knew that already, if you know anything about how comics work. It’s a lot like the first two collections — see my posts on volume one and volume two , if you have some time to waste — showing that the relaunch was entirely pointless. This is sad, but reinforces what I already believe about big corporate comics, so it makes me Schadenfreudenly happy. If you think comics about a superhero with a great attitude, a realistic body, buck teeth, and the proportional whatever of a squirrel would also make you happy, for whatever specific reason, I think you’re probably right. You might as well try it.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Book-A-Day 2018 #76: The Soddyssey and The Werewolf of New York by Batton Lash

I’m not a lawyer. But I’m a lot more familiar with lawyers these days, having spent the last three years working with a bunch of them (including more “recovering lawyers” than one would expect) and marketing things to lawyers all day every day. So maybe this time I came back to Batton Lash’s long-running “Supernatural Law” comics series with just a bit more understanding of who he’s talking about and what some of the jokes mean.

(The supernatural side of Supernatural Law is much simpler: Lash’s bedrock sense of the supernatural is pretty much that of monster movies from the B&W era, all Draculas, Frankensteins, and Wolfmen. There are no hot-to-trot young women with lower-back tattoos and complicated love lives, no modern wizards, no elves hidden in plain sight, no unexpected Grail quests. Actually, given that Lash isn’t a lawyer himself, his take on both sides of the equation come from similar places: general cultural knowledge. It’s just that lawyers are more common in everyday life and more apt to have complained to Lash about perceived slights.)

I read Supernatural Law back when it ran in CBG as Wolff & Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre — yes, I am old — and I think I used to read it in floppy-comics form through the ’90s and early ’00s, too. (I gave up on floppies about a decade ago, and lost twenty-five years of accumulated comics in my 2011 flood, so I can’t check.) But, like everything else in comics, Lash has been moving his creations into book and webcomic form, since that’s where the readers are these days. (Some of the comics used to be available at supernaturallaw.com , but there’s just a single “cover” image there now.)

There were two Supernatural Law collections sitting on my shelf, for longer than they should have been: The Soddyssey and Other Tales of Supernatural Law and The Werewolf of New York . Since I’m doing Book-A-Day this year, I’m running through books more quickly and actually clearing out those shelves. (Stop me before I turn into an infomercial.)

Soddyssey collected issues 9-16 of the comics series — which I think I vaguely recognized from reading in the ’90s — while Werewolf was a brand-new graphic novel created for book publication and funded by a Kickstarter campaign a few years back. But they’re both the same kind of thing: stories about supernatural creatures in legal trouble, told mildly tongue-in-cheek but with realistic legal outcomes. Soddyssey has several stories; Werewolf one. But Lash was telling a soap-opera-style story to begin with, full of life and romantic complications for his series heroes and their supporting cast, and that continues throughout, even as one case ends and another starts.

Alanna Wolf and Jeff Byrd are the principals of a small law firm, one that concentrates not on a particular area of law — though they do end up involved in litigation more often that not, since that spells “law” to a non-legal audience — but on a particular kind of client. One might wonder how all of these diverse creatures know to make their way to Wolff & Byrd, or how likely it is that they all have legal troubles in a state where those two are barred, but that’s the premise. We’ll be here all day if we start to question premises.

Supernatural Law always felt old-fashioned to me, in the best way, as if it should have been a daily-comics strip like The Heart of Juliet Jones or Mary Worth — something more culturally central than it really was. These two collections give me that same sense: Wolff & Byrd do the kind of law you’d see on TV fifty years ago. They’re not brokering the merger of the Seelie and Unseelie Courts, or negotiating the transfer of IP from a banshee to a hot new pop star, or handling the import paperwork on a half-ton of grave dirt. They’re filing briefs, traipsing back and forth to court to plead in front of a judge, and counseling their current client to keep his mouth shut. (Always good advice, from any lawyer to any client.) It’s the kind of law you recognize, even if you don’t know anything about law.

These are fun stories about that kind of law, with some inventive twists on the kind of supernatural creatures you know the same way. Creator Batton Lash has been doing this, off and on, for forty years, and he makes it all smoothly entertaining.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.