THE SAVAGE HAWKMAN #1 by Tony Daniels, Philip Tan, and Sunny Gho

Nearly all of the DC New 52 books usually begin with an origin statement somewhere in the early pages to familiarize the readers with the character(s) in case the read is a first-time experience. I’ve gotten used to them, as well as the intro blocks above characters in group books that cue the readers in. I actually think they’re kind of cool and make the comic feel more like a movie.

The first issue of The Savage Hawkman doesn’t do that. In fact, it starts out with the hero Carter Hall trying to destroy his superhero identity. That got my attention quickly.

Hawkman has to be one of the most retconned heroes in the DC Universe. He’s been a hero reincarnated through the ages, and he’s been an alien from the planet Thanagar (introduced in the 1960s). For a time, the character was even an aspect of a hawk god.

I’m not sure what’s going on with the character in this strip, but Carter Hall definitely isn’t the character I’ve read over the years. This one is much more down to earth and blue collar. He drives a pickup truck. Instead of being an archeologist as he always has in one way or another, he’s now a cryptologist – someone who breaks unknown languages.

I’m fascinated by the mix of archeology and alien technology in this first issue, so I’m betting writer Tony Daniel is trying to reconcile the two main “origin” stories of Hawkman in this series.

There’s a surprising lack of superhero action in this first issue, but Daniels is definitely building his story. The comic reads like the opening act of a thriller movie, sliding all the pieces into place and building up the stakes while backgrounding this version of Carter Hall and all the ancillary characters that will probably be with him throughout the strip.

I think that having the Nth metal become part of Hawkman is kind of cool, but it reminds me a little too much of the new Blue Beetle saddled with alien tech. The new villain, Morphicus, is pretty thin so far, but he jumps out of the shadows and starts being menacing pretty quickly. So far, everything is interesting.

Philip Tan’s artwork took me a little bit to acclimate to. At first glance it looks a little rough and unfinished, but when I leafed back through the book after finishing it, I discovered that it really suits the story. He breaks down the panels nicely and flows the action well. Tan also captures the close-ups as well as the telescoped views in some of the scenes in a way that feels cinematic as well. The perspective in those panels is really awesome when you look at them.

I absolutely love what colorist Sunny Gho has done with the pages. Gho makes the panels leap off the pages in explosions of color, and uses light and shadow really well.

I don’t know where this book is going yet, and I wasn’t blown away, but I’m definitely interested in the trip and the exploration of this incarnation of Hawkman.

TARZAN LORD OF THE JUNGLE #1 by Arvid Nelson, Roberto Castro, & Alex Guimares

Dynamite Comics has launched a new Tarzan title for 2012, one hundred years after the initial novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs was published. When I first saw the Alex Ross cover, I was won over. Tarzan has always been one of those iconic heroes for me. I grew up on the Russ Manning Sunday Comics and absolutely loved Joe Kubert’s take on the strip for DC Comics.

However, Tarzan’s origin story has been told by everybody, so I feel like I’m going to have to slog through these first few issues to get to the real meat of further adventures, which I hope are coming soon.

Everybody knows how Tarzan’s folks ended up getting abandoned in the wilds of the African jungle and how Tarzan ended up getting raised by the great apes (which aren’t quite ape and aren’t quite human according to this current storyline). I can’t think of any hero whose origins have been told more often than the jungle lord’s. Maybe Superman? Batman? Captain America?

At any rate, this first issue goes through the all-too-familiar beats. As far as story went, I was almost listless working through the pages. I even got irritated at John Greystoke shouting at the men who had abandoned him that his wife was pregnant. That wasn’t a word that was bandied about back in those days. He would have told them that she was “with child.”

As I read through the story, I couldn’t help but compare the way everything was laid out and revealed to the many ways I’ve seen it done before. I did like the revelation that the apes are carnivorous, which I knew from the original novels but which was never given much attention in the comics, movies, and television show. That savagery was pretty cool.

Truly, the best thing about this issue (and probably several issues to come until we work through the origin) is Roberto Castro and Alex Guimares’ art. The pages, the jungle, the colors are all absolutely beautiful. The pair do an outstanding job on rendering the wilderness, and I loved the way the panels fit on the page. Very eye appealing. And the final panel where Kala is nursing Tarzan is moving.

I don’t know what the creative team has in store for the series after the initial origin sequence, but I’m hoping for some real down home jungle brawls and lost cities.

QUARRY’S EX by Max Allan Collins

Max Allan Collins has been writing the adventures of Quarry, a professiona hitman, for decades. I’ve been with the books from the very start and have enjoyed growing up with Quarry. The character has been through a lot of changes over those years, and lately his new adventures have actually been his older ones.

I like the new books about the old times, and Collins doesn’t try to pretend a lot of years haven’t gone by. The first person narrative reflects on the passage of time on occasion, making remarks to equate popular culture back then to popular culture now. A lot of writers would try to make the books just period piece things, and Collins is exceptionally good at that (the Nate Heller novels), but I think he chooses not to go that route because the time period back then is so close to present day. It makes sense that a guy like Quarry would still be around and his observations about the past and present would be in the stories.

Quarry’s Ex, the latest and hopefully not the last, is a gem of a book. It could just as easily have been called Quarry Goes Hollywood, or something like that, and the movie background in the story would have been fine. Since Collins is also an independent moviemaker, he brings a lot of background to the tale that makes the suspense story at the heart of this a lot more interesting.

But Collins goes one step further in this book: he makes it a bitter-sweet thing by confronting Quarry with the one person that set him on his profession path as a killer – his ex-wife Joni. Just putting those two people together in the pages, letting the past play out again in a new and fascinating way, would have been really cool, but Collins hits new riffs with this one.

I was curious about the ex-wife, and I wanted to know her story. I was predisposed not to trust her or like her after everything she’d done to Quarry, and Collins could have made bank on that with me. But he tosses up something new, and I wasn’t sure if she deserved my condemnation or if she was going to kill Quarry up until the final pages of the book.

I love Collins’s narrative voice in these books, and he’s never been funnier while still being deadly. His wry observations are on target, and I caught up with his curve balls right before they smacked into the glove, which is when you want a reader (and a batter) to see them best.

If you’ve read Collins and Quarry before, you’ll love this book. If this is your first Quarry book, do yourself a favor and read some of the others first. The earliest books have just been reprinted and are available everywhere.

UNDER THE MOONS OF MARS by John Joseph Adams

For those in the know, Under the Moons of Mars was the original title of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ first John Carter novel, which was subsequently retitled A Princess of Mars. With that one story, of dead Mars and the most beautiful woman in two worlds – a princess that just can’t seem to stay out of trouble, the author forever changed science fiction and the dreams of generations of teenaged males looking for adventure.

Suddenly, in one sword stroke, Earth was no longer enough to capture the attention of readers that are about to get an infusion of new blood in March when John Carter hits the big screens.

A Princess of Mars was first published in 1912. Now, a 100 years later, the rights to the character and to those stories has fallen into public domain. Other writers can lift up the swords of Mars and sally forth to poke about in dead cities and challenge fierce opponents.

John Joseph Adams, who is now one of my favorite anthology editors, has a book coming out that deals with John Carter, Dejah Thoris, Tars Tarkas, and Mars in all its savage glory.

My favorite of the bunch, and the first in the collection, is Joe Lansdale’s “The Metal Men of Mars.” Out of all the stories in this book, this is the one that is truest not only to John Carter and Mars, but to the unique and unpolished writing style of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

I hadn’t heard of David Barr Kirtley before, but he’s hit my radar now with “Three Deaths.” His story of one of the Tharks first defeated by John Carter shortly after his advent on the Red Planet touched my heart in ways that I just hadn’t expected. Truly awesome stuff and instantly more vulnerable than anything Burroughs had ever written.

Peter S. Beagle’s “The Ape-Man of Mars” was diverting and kind of a cool juxtaposition of Tarzan and John Carter’s backgrounds played against the history they had come from, but I ended up wanting more than was offered.

“A Tinker of Warhoon” by Tobias S. Buckell was interesting and offered a different view of the Tharks and their mortal enemies, the Warhoon.

Everyone who has read the Mars books remembers Sarkojah, the evil female Thark who tried to get Dejah Thoris and Sola killed. Robin Wasserman tells the rest of her story in “Vengeance of Mars,” and I enjoyed it quite a lot.

I can’t wait to see how Woola, John Carter’s calot (dog) companion fares in the big-screen production. Theodora Goss relays his tale in “Woola’s Song.”

Austin Grossman’s “The River Gods of Mars,” started out really cool and there was a neat idea to involve real world space exploration in the Mars mythos, but I didn’t much care for how it played out at the end. Promised really cool adventure and didn’t quite get there.

“The Bronze Man of Mars” might have been a tip of the hat to Doc Savage, but I’m not certain. L. E. Modesitt, Jr. delivers a solid story of derring-do here.

To me, Genevieve Valentine’s “A Game of Mars” felt a little rushed, but that may have been because she was folding in so much history and emotion lifted from the old stories that were given new life in this one. I think I’d like to see more of Tara of Helium’s story after the events relayed in The Chessmen of Mars.

Garth Nix’s “Sidekick of Mars” was entertaining but felt truncated. A lot was missing, it seemed, but I liked the first person character he created well enough.

To those who remember, Chris Claremont basically finished out the John Carter, Warlord of Mars run at Marvel Comics after Marv Wolfman left the strip. The comics were solid, but his story, “The Ghost of the Superstition Mountains” left me cold. I had too many problems with John Carter, Dejah Thoris, and Tars Tarkas being on Earth. Gravity alone would have made this impossible, not to mention the heavy oxygen saturation that would have kept the two native Martians higher than kites. Throw in Cochise (why?) and a plot that doesn’t really get resolution, and I was confused. This is even listed as Chapter 11.

S. M. Stirling’s “The Jasoom Project” is a return to adventure and is the story of John Carter’s great-grandson. It smacks unerringly of a John Carter story and has lots of Martian history woven into it, as well as a nod to Tarzan and Pellucidar.

Finishing out the collection, Jonathan Maberry’s “The Death Song of Dwar Guntha” really hit the spot for a final goodbye to Mars – at least for the moment. The tale is about two warriors at the ends of their days, and the final fight that stretches before them. Awesome little story.

This collection was a great delight to me, the illustrations really set it off, and I hope that Adams manages to find a publisher interested in doing a sequel. I’d love to read it.

DUST OF THE DAMNED by Peter Brandvold

I’ve read some of Peter Brandvold’s Westerns under his name as well as the Frank Leslie name, and I’ve enjoyed them as solid actioners that are quite a bit harder edged than anything Louis L’Amour ever wrote. And his latest release, Dust of the Damned, is way weirder than anything L’Amour wrote even back in his early pulp days.

Imagine a world where President Abraham Lincoln hired a gang of European werewolves called the Hell’s Angels to help break the back of the South during the War Between the States. Brandvold did, and he elaborated his story from there. The author creates his own terminology for his creatures (vampires/swillers), but doesn’t really blaze any new territory, which is a shame because no one has really played with the American Indian mythology and that could have potential been really cool.

Dust of the Damned is pulp of the first water. The author doesn’t hold himself back in this one. Everything is fair, and the old West has never been weirder.

The opening sequences where the book’s hero Uriah Zane, a supernatural bounty hunter, will let readers know right quick whether they want to buy into the pot on this particular tale. Zane is a man larger than life, built with a swagger and carries all his tools around in a coffin-shaped wagon. Those tools include the traditional hammer and stake for vampires, but also a liberated Gatling gun that spews silver bullets.

The initial battle with the vampires is attention getting and could easily translate to the movie screen. Vampires in underground lairs with the sun just setting has BIG MISTAKE written all over it, but since these are the opening chapters, readers don’t have to worry too much. Still, it’s an interesting look at Zane and the lengths he goes to in order to get the job done.

Once Zane is introduced, Brandvold quickly widens his cast of characters by introducing US Marshal Aubrey Coffin, who also tracks down the spooky in the Old West. She’s an immediate departure for the times because there never was a female US Marshal in the history of the Old West that I’m aware of, and her sensibilities are more 21st century than 19th.

The Hell’s Angels include Charlie Hondo, the leader of the werewolf pack, but he’s already thrown in with a Mexican witch that can raise the dead. One of the things that really bothered me about the werewolves is that they were supposed to be of European heritage, but they talked and acted like owlhoots. They didn’t have to behave like refined gentlemen, but I would have liked at least a nod in that direction.

Dust of the Damned is a quick read and doesn’t require a lot of digestion. Horses “fog” the trail and the gunfights come fast and furious. There’s also a scattering of more supernatural forces at work that probably won’t satisfy any true horror/monster fan looking for something new, but the book keeps moving.

BEHEMOTH by Scott Westerfeld

Scott Westerfeld created a fascinating world out of the ashes of what was World War I (The Great War) in the real world. He peopled his Leviathan trilogy with real heroes and heroines young readers (and the young at heart) could get behind and root for, and he seasoned it with the wonderful spice of steampunk. The resulting concoction is a steaming mass of adrenaline and wonder, and the pages of his books almost turn themselves.

The sheer imagination of his world blows me away. It’s a living, breathing thing – except for the parts that clank, ratchet, and blow off steam. This is the kind of adventure Edgar Rice Burroughs and the pulp writers of the early 20th century offered, and I was consumed by it. Of course, most young readers have never read those books, but they’ll be drawn to this trilogy the same way I was to John Carter of Mars and Doc Savage.

The story picks up immediately and throws our courageous little band in the thick of the action again. Deryn (still in her guise as a male midshipman aboard Leviathan) is fighting for her life in no time at all. She’s also getting more attracted to Alek, the young Austrian prince who has been on the run for his life since the assassinations of his parents.

Westerfeld amps up the science in this one as well by throwing in Tesla cannons, genetically modified bullfrogs capable of memorizing lengthy conversations and repeating them back, diving suits made out of living creatures (cool and gross at the same time!), and a genuine feel for the exotic otherworldliness of Istanbul during the final days of the Ottoman Empire. The reimagining of the Orient Express is the bomb.

Once again, Westerfeld finds a way to separate his heroes and send them off on individual missions. I love this approach because Deryn and Alek each get to play to individual strengths, and the missions are much different. Alek is trying to survive and set up political connections, and Deryn is doing espionage missions that are hair-raising.

The books have a large cast of characters, but they’re all easy to keep track of because Westerfeld has made them all distinct and self-motivated rather than just channeling them into and overall effort. It’s this constant threatening and rebalancing of agendas that keeps the pages turning just as much as the action and adventure.

Throw in a young Turk woman who may or may not know Deryn’s secret, which all too many people seem to be guessing these days – except for Alek, and you’ve got a suddenly volatile mix in this one.

As always, Keith Thompson’s illustrations bring the story to life in added dimensions. He’s one of the best steampunk artists working these days, and I wonder who comes up with all the imaginative devices most: Thompson or Westerfeld.

I only hope that after this trilogy finishes that the two will do more stories in this fascinating world or one like it.

MANHUNTER’S MOUNTAIN by Wayne D. Dundee

Manhunter’s Mountain is a short novel about Cash Laramie, a Western character created by Edward Grainger. Grainger has been graciously allowing other writers to play with his toys of late, including Heath Lowrance’s take on Gideon Miles, the other U. S. Marshal in the Laramie world.

The writer for this particular tale, Wayne D. Dundee, comes with a host of bonafides – as Western characters are fond of saying, pardner. Dundee is the author of the Joe Hannibal private eye novels, and the writers of several Western tales of late.

This episode in Laramie’s life is one blistering read from start to finish. Things happen from the outset, and they don’t stop happening. I also enjoyed the fact that the story is set among frozen mountains instead on the range in or some two-bit backwater town that seem to be the settings for a lot of Westerns. The West includes a lot of inhospitable real estate, deserts as well as winter wildernesses. Jack London explored a lot of those.

I also loved the town, Silver Gulch, that has given up the ghost after the mines petered out and times got hard. Dundee is a wonderfully evocative reader and plunks his readers squarely down in the center of the decaying town and shows them the bark on those people who haven’t quite moved on yet.

The story unfolds naturally, and the characters involved in the tale are all realistically motivated, though most of them on a really base nature that can be a common denominator when many of the conventions of civilization are ripped away.

Dundee doesn’t write for the faint-hearted. One of his scenes is going to live on inside my head way past its welcome, I assure you. This vision of the Old West and the hard men that lived it is as hard-boiled as they come. I’ve read most of Dundee’s work, and I’m looking forward to more of his Westerns as well as more private eye stories.

THE SKIN MAP by Stephen R. Lawhead

Stephen R. Lawhead embarks on a new and entertaining old school fantasy trilogy with some interesting new twists that include string theory and multiple earths. I enjoy the quest aspects of The Skin Map, his first book in his Bright Empires trilogy, the large casts of characters all set out to chart their own courses, the unrelenting eye to detail, and the hybridization of scientific thought. Of course, Sheldon of The Big Bang Theory would poke holes in things, but for me it’s a wonderful concoction.

The Skin Map’s title drew me to the book. I kept flashing back to the old Geena Davis movie, Cutthroat Island, where the treasure map was tattooed on the guy’s head. Well, the map in this case isn’t far removed from that, but I’ll leave that surprise up to you to discover as you turn the pages.

I will say that Lawhead’s book is immediately immersive and leaves you wanting more. I’ve already bought the second book – The Bone House – and queued it up in my ereader, though I’ll have to wait for the third book because it hasn’t been published yet.

I didn’t immediately warm up to the main character, Kit Livingston, but I’m convinced that was by design. Kit is one of those characters that’s going to come of age in this trilogy, and it’s going to be a journey that sucks the reader into it.

The story is broken down like an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, presenting multiple characters on multiple voyages that touch in places over and over again. The tale is a well structured puzzle, and more than once I couldn’t help but thinking, I should have seen this coming. The whole is much more than the sum of the pieces, and I’m really excited about seeing where it all goes.

I loved Cosimo, Kit’s great-grandfather, almost from the start. As I said, Kit took some time. Kit’s girlfriend Wilhelmina took even longer to warm up to, but her story is – weirdly enough – the one that I grew more and more excited about first. Watching her struggle in the past, a true fish out of water, was awesome. I couldn’t believe Lawhead had me hanging on what she was going to survive in business and in her life, but I think that particular plotline touches elegantly on what’s going on in the real world where so many people have had everything they’ve known yanked out from under them.

This is a big book, and I have to admit that I approached it with some trepidation because my time can get severely limited. And a good book can leach away a good night’s sleep or a chance to do something from the to-do list. However, the overall feeling I got from the read was a fired-up, can-do attitude because I felt I’d shared the road with great friends on a great road trip. This is good fantasy.

DIAMONDBACK by James Reasoner

James Reasoner’s book, Diamondback, reads like a throwback to the old cop shows of the 1980s and the men’s action adventure series of the 1970s. But there’s a reason for that. The book was actually written back then, but the action adventure market dried up before the author could sell the book. With the advent of ebooks, he put it up for sale.

I remember haunting used book stories for books like this one while I was growing up. The racks were filled with lurid covers of strong men, half-dressed women, exotic guns, and big explosions. I had a strong appetite for those back then, and have to admit that I still have a sweet tooth for them now and again even though I’ve supposedly matured.

I still believe in tough guy heroes, and Tom Sloane, the hero of this novel, has all the earmarks of one. Even though this is a new character, I settled into him at once. I’ve seen him around a thousand times in various incarnations, even told his story myself a few dozen times, so I had an instant familiarity with Sloane and his story.

The thing that sets this book apart from several action adventure novels of the day is the Texas background. Reasoner lives in Texas and loves his state. It shows in the book, even though he doesn’t mind pointing out some of the failing Texas has as well. Most of the novels back then were exotic in some fashion, rambling metropolitan places, areas of international intrigue, and the villains were people and organizations that menaced the world.

Sloane’s world is smaller than that, but it’s up on a big canvas. Reasoner kicks the ball into motion on the first page and doesn’t really let up much. There is the inevitable “kicked off the force” moment followed by a readjustment in Sloane’s life as he tries to figure out what he’s going to do next. That gets thrown into an even wilder arc as assassins try to kill him and he ends up in front of Big Jack, one of the richest men in Texas, who’s also looking for his own personal policeman to clean up corners of Texas that the police can’t seem to get to.

Like I said, the premise is very familiar, but so are Doritos, and you can’t just eat one of those, either. Reading the novel was like taking a trip back to those “old days” of the ‘70s and ‘80s, and I could tell where Reasoner stuck in some modern day artifacts, like mentioning the cell phone. But those actually seemed to get in the way of the story. I just noticed them too much because I also noticed that he didn’t use them much.

The action kept me moving along just fine, and the issues that Reasoner plays out in the book – racism and big money – are still just a relevant today as they were thirty years ago.

I don’t know if Reasoner is planning to do another Tom Sloane book, it was originally planned as the first book of a series, but I’ll definitely pick it up and read it if he does.

THE HUNT FOR ATLANTIS by Andy McDermott

Warning: check your “willing suspension of disbelief,” ’cause it will be petal to the metal throughout this wild romp of an archeological treasure hunt cum international thriller. You’ll either love this one or hate it. The Hunt for Atlantis is Indiana Jones on steroids, both in the action department as well as the puzzle/history field.

I had an absolute blast with this one. Nina Wilde and Eddie Chase are two larger than life characters that barely step into three-dimensional life in this novel, but that’s all I needed, just heroes to root for. And since this is a series, I figure I’ll be learning more about them as I continue reading the other books. I’m definitely reading those other books. They’re already waiting on my Kindle.

Nina is the brains of the outfit, an archeological professor and offspring of two giants in the field, but she’s no slouch in the muscle department. Eddie Chase is ex-SAS, a British commando who doesn’t believe in giving up and loves all things explosive, but he’s able to come up to the mark in the thinking department, too. Thinking’s just not Eddie’s forte.

The novel starts off with the search for Atlantis, and with the ending of Nina’s parents’ lives. Ten years later, Nina is put onto the same trail her parents followed, and immediately runs afoul of the secret international organization dedicated to making sure Atlantis is never found. Throw in a billionaire willing to back Nina’s efforts and you’ve got the ingredients for a major potboiler.

As noted, the action is fast and furious throughout this novel, breath-taking in several places, and guaranteed to put a strain on a movie’s special effects and stunt budgets. The pages turned almost by themselves as I chased after the story and lost Atlantis.

Andy McDermott has obviously done considerable research in archeology as well as the technology fields, and he threw in some genome background as well. The conceit he has backing the story isn’t anything really new or innovative, but it plays well.