"Doomsday Clock" by Geoff Johns, Gary Frank and Brad Anderson (2017-2019)

You've read Watchmen, right?  I'm assuming everyone has.  If you haven't read Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's original series you're either very young or not that interested in comics.  I'm assuming I can skip over Watchmen for the moment.  If you haven't read it you really should, and if you're pressed for time you can always watch the movie.

After the events of Watchmen Dr. Manhattan leaves his universe behind and enters the universe populated by the DC heroes we know and (sometimes) love.  Once there he starts manipulating past events for unknown reasons.  Ozymandias, his friend and sometime nemesis, follows him to the same universe, and of course Ozymandias always has a plan, and of course this plan involves the fate of mankind.

What follows after that point is really too convoluted for me to describe, and even after Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias explain their individual plans at the end of the series I was left scratching my head, wondering if it all made sense.  I'm still not sure if it does.  Parts of these plans seemed very arbitrary.

The real question is whether Doomsday Clock is as good as Watchman.  To this question I can only answer no, not in the slightest.  Geoff Johns is a good writer, but he can't hold a candle to Alan Moore in his prime.  Gary Frank is also a good artist, but he seems to ape what Dave Gibbons did a little too closely, distilling Gibbon's approach to art into a nine panel layout that continually reminds you of how much better Gibbons was at telling a story through images.

Is Doomsday Clock terrible?  No, I don't think so, but as DC crossover events go it's still not as good as other series such as Crisis On Infinite Earths, Infinite Crisis or even Justice League One Million.  If forced to qualify Doomsday Clock I would say that it's just OK.  Not great, not that good, just OK.

And at the end of the day did we really need the Watchmen characters in the same story as Superman and Batman?  I don't think we did.  Leaving them alone would have made them more special, while incorporating them into something like Doomsday Clock goes a long way toward diminishing their importance.

Besides that, I think a series in which the Watchmen characters come up against the Charlton characters that inspired them would have been more fun.  Let's leave Superman and Batman out of it for a moment, and have Captain Atom take on Dr. Manhattan, Peacemaker take on the Comedian, Blue Beetle take on Night Owl...

...or at least put them in a room together... with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.. who are trying to write an outline for a comic book idea called "Watchmen..."

That would have truly been more meta for your money

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"McTeague" by Frank Norris (1899)

"After the two had drunk together Maria produced the gold tape.  Zerkow's eyes glittered on the instant.  The sight of gold invariably sent a qualm all through him; try as he would, he could not repress it.  His fingers trembled and clawed at his mouth, his breath grew short."

Frank Norris was a journalist and author during the late 1880s and early 1900s.  He lived in San Francisco for most of his life, wrote for The San Francisco Chronicle, and died very young at 32.

McTeague is perhaps his most well-regarded novel, though Norris and his works have fallen out of fashion in recent years.  The novel details an oafish dentist's love affair with a friend's cousin, and bears many similarities to Shakespeare's Othello.

Norris the author was very influenced by French writer Emilie Zola, whose works he encountered while studying art in Paris.  Zola was a big proponent of the naturalist approach to literature, which explains Norris' championing of Theodore Dreiser's novel Sister Carrie.  I was often reminded of Dreiser's work while reading McTeague, given the flawed nature of the characters and the mistaken choices they often make.  A character in Sister Carrie engages in impulsive theft the same way that a character in McTeague decides that she's in love.  No one in either book really knows what they are doing, or what their choices will lead to, even though they make frequent attempts to rationalize their actions.

But where Sister Carrie succeeds in taking a step back from its characters - by not judging them for their actions - McTeague often tries too hard to make a point.  Instead of letting the drama play out, and instead of leaving conclusions to the reader, McTeague often interjects philosophical conclusions into the narrative. I think the result of this "tampering" is a much weaker, much less modern book.  Something about the way in which McTeague was written speaks to a lack of trust in the reader's judgement, and even a kind of condescension.  This condescension isn't pervasive enough to be annoying, but it did pull me out of the narrative at several points.

This, and there are parts of this book where even Norris' naturalism seems to break down, and in which his characters' actions verge on the irrational.  A young bride becomes a miser for no perceptible reason.  A young man develops an equally unfounded grudge.  It's not so much that such transformations couldn't develop out of earlier whims, but that they would proceed in stages.  Inserting them into the narrative out of the blue makes them seem less natural, rather than the opposite.

More worrying still are the racial stereotypes present in this book.  In McTeague one finds a clear divide between the Caucasian characters and non-Caucasian ones, with the latter often described in animalistic and/or negative terms.  The grasping Jew lusts after gold and exhibits "claws" (see quote above), while the resident "Mexican" is a thief and a fraud in equal measure.  The white upper-class inhabiting this book - for all their idiocy - are still superior to the Jew and the Mexican.  Othello again, but even more specifically racial than Shakespeare intended.

This said, McTeague is a well-written book that made me wonder what Norris would have come up with if he had lived longer, and if he had somehow overcome his racist mode of thinking.  He was definitely a good writer, and the portrait of old San Francisco one finds in McTeague is fascinating.  The characters that aren't stereotypes are also equally compelling, though the characters that are mitigate the quality of the overall story.

If you like Steinbeck you might find in Frank Norris an interesting precursor.  There are many parallels to be drawn between the two authors, not least among which are their naturalism, their relation to California, their journalistic backgrounds, and their concern for the working man.  Steinbeck is (of course) a far better writer, but one could argue that he wrote upon a template that Frank Norris helped set out.

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"Teacher Man" and "Angela's Ashes" by Frank McCourt (2005 and 1996)

"Of course Fintan knows who stood at the foot of the cross.  Why wouldn't he?  He's always running off to Mass with his mother, who is known for her holiness.  She's so holy her husband ran off to Canada to cut down trees, glad to be gone and never to be heard from again."

Frank McCourt grew up in the U.S. and Ireland, and worked as a teacher in New York for several decades prior to his becoming an author later in life.  All of his published works are autobiographical in nature, though Angela's Ashes is perhaps a more "polished" version of what was maybe not an entirely miserable childhood.

I read Teacher Man, the more recent of the two books first.  I'm glad I did.  I think if I had first read Angela's Ashes I would have been too depressed to continue on with Teacher Man.

In Teacher Man McCourt recalls his years teaching high school English.  He graduates from a teaching program, finds a job, and ends up raising a family on a teacher's salary.  This sets the stage for his observations on what it means to be a good teacher and some of the personalities he encounters over three decades in the classroom.  It's a very witty, very charming book, and it reminded me of why I became a teacher in the first place.

Every teacher should read Teacher Man at least once.  Twice would be even better.

In Angela's Ashes, the book that made McCourt famous, he recounts his childhood in Ireland and the struggles his family faced there.  It is a singularly depressing book, though written in a more "literary" style than Teacher Man and lightened a bit by a certain black humor.  It's a hearwrenching novel that deserved the Pulitzer awarded to it, though I found myself having to take breaks during the first half because it was so depressing.

Angela's Ashes was also adapted into a movie in 1999.  I'm still not sure if I've seen the film, though parts of the book seemed very familiar.  It could be that I saw another, similar film about Irish poverty, or it could be that I was just remembering parts of Angela's Ashes.  I don't know.

What I do know is that Teacher Man is one of the best books I've read in a while.  Angela's Ashes is also good, though it's definitely less accessible.  Angela's Ashes is best approached in the way people approach Crime and Punishment or anything by Tolstoy.  It's a book that will give you a lot to think about, but it's by no means light reading.

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"The Jesus Incident" by Frank Herbert and Bill Ransom (1979)

"Hylighters were a nuisance, yes.  They were buoyed by hydrogen and that, coupled with Pandora's frequent electrical storms, made the creatures into lethal firebombs.  In common with the 'lectrokelp, they were useless as food.  Even to touch them produced weird mental effects - hysteria and even, sometimes, convulsions.  Standing orders were to explode them at a distance when they approached the colony."

Frank Herbert co-wrote The Jesus Incident in 1979, between writing The Dosadi Experiment and God Emperor of Dune.  His co-author, Bill Ransom, was known as a poet prior to the publication of this novel, and is presently the Dean of Curriculum at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.  The Jesus Incident is the sequel to Herbert's novel Destination: Void, and is the first book of the Pandora series.

In The Jesus Incident we find the crew of Ship, a sentient spacecraft, attempting to colonize the planet Pandora after all life on Earth has been extinguished.  The crew, known to each other as "shipmen," consider Ship to be a living god, and their plans for Pandoran settlement often conflict with what they perceive to be Ship's (or God's) plan.  To complicate things still further, the wildlife of Pandora is very hostile towards the shipmen, and the shipmen's plans for Pandora often run counter to the designs of the Avata, a sentient form of plant life which inhabits Pandora's oceans.

If any of this sounds familiar, it is because elements of this story found their way into James Cameron's Avatar, and a lesser-known film called Pandorum.  In the case of Avatar, the borrowing of plot elements borders on plagiarism, and I wouldn't be surprised if members of Herbert's family or Bill Ransom hadn't tried to take legal action against Cameron for stealing their ideas.  In the case of Pandorum, the theft of ideas is even more blatant, and I assume that that film's obscurity is what protected it from lawsuits.

Given the (often uncredited) influence of this book, you might think that it's worth seeking out.  If so, you would be correct.  The Jesus Incident is an excellent book, even if it might seem a bit slow, intellectual, or (gasp) pretentious.  The Jesus Incident doesn't just explore the colonization of an alien planet; it also discusses our relationship with God, our idea of divinity, and the role of language in describing the divine.  It's heavy reading for sure, but it's rewarding in the way that truly great science fiction novels always are.

Compared to the rest of Herbert's bibliography (Ransom didn't write that much, and his books are hard to find), I would rank this one near the top.  I think co-writing with Ransom brought a lot of good things out of Herbert, and where he would have normally glossed over certain aspects of the plot Ransom's presence added a finish to the overall book that Herbert rarely accomplished.  The Jesus Incident is a fully imagined, involving read, and it's just a shame that more people aren't aware of the long shadow this book has cast.