Evil Genius

Evil Genius by Catherine Jinks

Imagine what Harry Potter would have been like if he had discovered that instead of being born to loving, though dead, parents, he was instead the son of Voldemort.  Harry would be heir to his entire evil empire, and sent not to Hogwarts, but to a school teaching all aspects of evil.  Essentially, that is Evil Genius.  Cadel Piggott gets into some trouble because he is too smart for his own good.  His adoptive parents are encouraged by the police to take Cadel to a therapist after he breaks into several different websites.  His therapist informs him that his biological father is the nefarious Dr. Darkkon, a supervillain currently in prison.  Cadel’s evil father begins to take an active role in Cadel’s education, teaching him the ways of the Force, as it were.  After graduating high school at 13, he is enrolled in the Axis Institute, a school to train future supervillains founded by Dr. Darkkon.

While the setup is very much like Harry Potter, with a poor little orphan boy with horrible surrogate parents being swept off to a school that embraces everything about him, Evil Genius is a very different beast.  Cadel Piggott/Darkkon is a hard character.  He’s not necessarily evil, he’s just super intelligent with no proper outlet for his ideas and interests.  He’s obsessed with systems, like traffic systems and the more complex system of human social interactions.  He learns about them by experimenting with them, and causing problems so that he can learn more.  If that’s by causing a traffic jam or setting off a chain of events that all of his classmates in his high school fail their final exams, it’s all in the interest of expanding his knowledge.  Again, he’s not evil or malicious, his intent is truly to learn, but it’s hard to empathize with him.  He’s almost so smart, he’s another species.

Trade Waiting Retrospective: New Avengers

New Avengers Volume 1: Breakout

New Avengers Volume 2: Sentry

New Avengers Volume 3: Secrets and Lies

New Avengers Volume 4: Collective

New Avengers Volume 5: Civil War

New Avengers Volume 6: Revolution

The past weekend I decided to reread all of Brian Michael Bendis’s New Avengers, the six trades that are out.  This was to prepare for the forthcoming seventh trade and to prepare myself for the Secret Invasion.  Clues abound in the series on the extent of the Skrull infiltration.   New Avengers truly is Marvel’s flagship title.  It touches on every major Marvel event in the past three years and ties them all together, leading the universe to the inevitable showdown between Earth’s heroes and the Skrull invaders.

The make-up of the team is interesting.  Marvel clearly gathered some of their most powerful and popular characters and united them in a single book.  Wolverine and Spider-man are both well placed in the public eye because of their highly successful movies.  Iron Man and Captain America are both standards in the Marvel Universe so they get in.  The inclusion of the little known Jessica Drew as Spider-woman was interesting.  I had never heard of her before New Avengers, but her role as a triple agent, lying to everyone about what her true motivations are, make her one of the best characters in the series.

What the Dead Know

What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman

This is a great mystery novel. The story takes place in the present and the past. In the present a mysterious woman gets into a traffic accident that requires a hospital stay and questions by police. She refuses to reveal her identity, and claims that she is one of two sisters that went missing decades previously. The parts of the novel that occur in the past are not flashbacks but rather they follow the sisters the day they went missing. The tension between the two accounts create a complicated yarn where the facts of both storylines becomes fuzzy and uncertain. What really happened to the sisters long ago? And does the woman claiming to be one of them returned telling the truth? Or is she just a impostor who has been leading everyone along?

In the end the truth is a good place to hide because it is so easily twisted to meet other people’s expectations. The real delight for me was how three dimensional the characters become over the course of the novel. Their heartbreaks (and there are a lot of those) ring true and are the best kind of engrossing.

Definitely worth a read!

Trade Waiting: Endangered Species

Endangered Species

Written By: Mike Carey, Chris Yost, and Christos Gage

Art By: Scot Eaton, Mark Bagley, Mike Perkins, and Andrea De Vito

Issues:  X-Men: Endangered Species One-Shot, 17 8-page chapters.

Endangered Species is the X-Men event that works to lead into Messiah Complex.  The story follows Beast as he searches for a cure to the depowering of the world’s mutants.  He begins a world tour, meeting with all of Marvel’s top minds, heroic and villainous.  Beast pairs with his corrupt counterpart from the Age of Apocalypse, Dark Beast, and search the world for answers, from the ruins of Genosha to the Neverland mutant containment facility.

The series does some good things and some bad things.  Most of the bad comes from the format.  17 short 8-page stories doesn’t give much time for development.  The characters don’t really go anywhere.  I said the same thing about Illuminati, but I feel this is more from inadequate space to develop the characters more than too many heavy-hitters on the page.  The story is likewise just filler.  While pegged as the lead in to Messiah Complex, I don’t see how this should be required reading.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret

The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick

The Caldecott Medal, which is awarded to a children’s book based on its illustrations, has been awarded to The Invention of Hugo Cabret in 2008.  Controversy has arisen as most libraries have this book in their young adult collection.  That’s where my library has our copy.  Arguments aside on what type of book the medal should be awarded to, based purely on illustrations, this book is a winner.

Selznick’s book follows Hugo Cabret, a young boy living alone in a train station in Paris, France in the early 1900s.  Hugo becomes apprenticed to a bitter toy-maker and begins to unravel the mystery of his past, which involves a cryptic notebook, a mysterious mechanical man, and messages from his dead father.  Story is compelling and mysterious without becoming too big.

Where the work really shines, however, is in the illustrations.  Many have called this a graphic novel.  While not a comic book, its story definitely relies upon the illustrations to tell the tale of Hugo and his mysterious past.  There are no thought bubbles or words on the illustrated pages.  The wonderfully drawn black and white images convey exactly what they’re supposed to without saying a word.  Blocks of text flesh out the characters, but never run for much more than ten pages, if even that.

This book is an excellent example of the evolution that is occurring in graphic novels.  They don’t have to be filled with spandex-wearing superheroes.  Great artwork can be just as compelling at storytelling as great words.  Hugo Cabret’s illustrations are just as important to the story as the words.  The book comes highly recommended, with it’s intriguing story and wonderful illustrations.