July 4, 2012 Twilight Zone Episode Guide and Comments

I worried that something like this would happen. Of course, two things temper my complaints. For one thing, at least Syfy is having a July 4 Twilight Zone marathon which is better than their infamous cancellation of the July 4, 2010 marathon. I’ll get to the other thing after my complaint.  For those just interested in the episode list, scroll on down.

Before the New Year’s 2011-2012 Marathon, Syfy ran a poll on their website. Voters chose their favorite five or ten Twilight Zone episodes. The top forty vote getters ran in a Viewer’s Choice countdown. I’ve discussed my reservations about such polls elsewhere and the methodology of this particular one. I also admitted that I had fun seeing the results. I was  surprised certain episodes didn’t make the top forty. I was also puzzled that some made it, and pleasantly surprised that certain personal favorites cracked the list. For instance, I love “Dead Man’s Shoes,” but I didn’t think other Zone fans shared my enthusiasm. Agreeing with some choices and disagreeing with others, I really enjoyed the Viewer’s Choice experience. However, seeing the July 4, 2012 marathon’s lineup, some of my fears about future marathons appear to be materializing.

It’s a short marathon, only twenty-one hours. (Still that’s much longer than the 2010 experience, eh?) The listings both online and on my DirectTV channel guide show 42 episodes with one discrepancy. (I’m guessing the online listings are the correct ones because the DirectTV listing has an “hour” episode in a half-hour slot.) Looking over that lineup reveals a potential problem, especially if Syfy keeps repeating this practice. Of the forty-two episodes, forty of them come from the Viewer’s Choice top forty. On one hand this is good and makes sense. Over ninety-five percent of the marathon consists of consensus favorites. (Or at least they’re the late 2011 consensus favorites of Twilight Zone fans who hung around the Syfy Channel and its website enough to have known about the poll or who managed to hear about it elsewhere.) Hey, Syfy is only giving us what we want, right? On the other hand, let’s put it this way. My favorite color is blue. That doesn’t mean I want to walk across blue floors to a blue door across a blue lawn to a blue car that I will drive down a blue road lined with blue trees and blue houses. Get the picture?  I like blue, but it’s not the only color I ever want to see. Yeah, ninety-five percent of the episodes are fan favorites. But it also means we saw ninety-five percent of them during the last semi-annual marathon. (Actually, 100% of the episodes ran last time as both of the non-top forty episodes also appeared then.) During the New Year’s Marathon, Syfy ran eighty-nine episodes. (“Midnight Sun” ran twice.) So there are sixty-seven episodes we didn’t see last time. Syfy could vary things this time out by mixing a few of those in. Heck, they could fill all forty-two slots with episodes that didn’t appear last time. (I’m not saying they should do that. I’m  just pointing out that Syfy has a lot of unused material with which to vary the palette. Just because something is a favorite, it doesn’t mean it’s all I like nor that it’s what I want all the time. 

Variety is the spice of life. There are 116 episodes that didn’t make that top forty, and some of them are terrific such as “Walking Distance,” “The Lonely,” “Mirror Image,” “Printer’s Devil,” and “Of Late I Think of Cliffordville.” (Speaking of the last two, it’s still hard to believe that not a single one of the “hour long” episodes made it to the top forty.) Sure, some non-Viewer’s Choice episodes are mediocre, and I wouldn’t want them in marathon after marathon either. Still, even they should show up once in a while. Despite what I think of “The Fear,” there might be some fans who like it, and others who find it neat to see an episode they haven’t seen (or don’t remember seeing) before. One hundred and fifty-six episodes is limitation enough. Don’t reduce our marathon cannon down close to the same forty episodes running marathon after marathon. If Syfy limits the selection too much, they’ll increase the chances that people might actually get tired of the marathons some of us have watched for decades. (When I say marathons, I’m not talking about Syfy’s regular mini-marathons which run weekday mornings and afternoons and which sometimes feature The Twilight Zone. I’m talking about the semi-annual holiday marathons that people plan to watch months in advance. That people expect to watch twice a year. The marathons that are a tradition for us.)

Fine, Syfy. Repeat the entire top forty this time. That’s okay once. Next time, run twenty of them and mix in twenty that you didn’t use in last New Year’s marathon. Mix things up. Just don’t go to the opposite extreme. And that brings me to the other thing tempering my complaint. I’d hate to see Syfy go the Turner Classic Movies route which currently has mediocre old movies dominating the program list and actual classics few and far between. When Ted Turner got the rights to It’s A Wonderful Life,  he put a stop to the multiple marathons of the movie which ran on multiple networks simultaneously every Christmas. In fact, Turner didn’t even allow it to run in a marathon on any of his channels, giving the argument that to maintain the movie’s special status, it was necessary to stop overexposing it. Now TCM seems to apply its namesake’s theory to all classic movies, making them rare and supposedly more special. I’d hate to see Syfy apply that to Twilight Zone marathons, giving us a steady diet of “The Fear,” and “The Fugitive” and less memorable episodes while rarely ever running “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” or “It’s a Good Life.” No. Use moderation. We live in a society where people think that just because you reject the extreme political right, it means you must embrace the extreme political left or vice versa. It’s just as silly as someone thinking they should make everything blue for you. 

Once again there are no “hour long” episodes. “Of Late I Think of Cliffordville” is listed for July 5 at 1:30 AM, but “It’s a Good Life” is listed at 2:00 AM, leading me to believe online listings of “Third From the Sun” are correct. If my guess and the online listings are correct, that means that Syfy’s holiday marathons will continue to ignore an entire season of Twilight Zone’s five year run.

Also, once again,  “The Midnight Sun” appears to be permanently consigned to running at midnight. (Last time out, it ran twice, once so it could appear in its spot in the top forty list and the second time so it could appear at midnight.) Other than its countdown appearance last time, it has consistently run only at midnight for a few years worth of holiday marathons. Kind of limits that chances of younger viewers discovering this classic episode.  

	Time	Episode
1	8:00 AM July 4	Probe 7: Over and Out An astronaut is stranded on another planet as nuclear war appears imminent back home. VIEWER’S CHOICE #40
2	830 AM	Caesar and Me A ventriloquist's dummy proves to be a bad influence.
3	9:00 AM	The Old Man in the Cave A town has survived a nuclear holocaust and its aftermath thanks to a mysterious old man.
4	930 AM	Mr. Dingle, the Strong Aliens give a scrawny, sad sack salesman incredible strength.  VIEWER’S CHOICE #39
5	10:00 AM	A Kind of Stopwatch A man gets a stopwatch that can stop time.  VIEWER’S CHOICE #38
6	10:30 AM	A Hundred Yards Over the Rim A nineteenth century pioneer finds the future while trying to save his son and guide his wagon train to safety. Script: Rod Serling VIEWER’S CHOICE #36
7	11:00 AM	Little Girl Lost When a little girl enters a doorway to another dimension, her parents and a neighbor attempt to rescue her. I never thought much of this episode. The short story it was based on is better. VIEWER’S CHOICE #34
8	11:30 AM	Game A Game of Pool When an ambitious and talented pool shark says he could beat a deceased legend regarded as the best pool player ever, he gets a chance to prove it. The stakes? His soul. Script: George Clayton Johnson VIEWER’S CHOICE #33
9	12:00 PM	Long Distance Call One of the videotape episodes. A boy talks to his dead grandmother on his toy telephone. VIEWER’S CHOICE #32
10	12:30 PM	A Most Unusual Camera Thieves find a camera that takes pictures of the future. VIEWER’S CHOICE #31
11	1:00 PM	Stopover in a Quiet Town A couple find themselves in a deserted town where they hear a child’s laughter. VIEWER’S CHOICE #30
12	1:30 PM	Number Twelve Looks Just Like You Based on Charles Beaumont’s story “The Beautiful People.” A futuristic society pressures people into medical treatments to make themselves physically perfect and beautiful. Although, commentators often note how this episodes warns against society’s increasing over emphasis on appearance resulting in eating disorders, use of Botox, and plastic surgery - its warning against anti-intellectualism often gets overlooked. VIEWER’S CHOICE #29
13	2:00 PM	I Sing the Body Electric Ray Bradbury’s story of three children and their android nanny (“Grandmother”). VIEWER’S CHOICE #27
14	2:30 PM	Five Characters in Search of an Exit A soldier, a clown, a ballerina, a hobo, and a bag pipe player find themselves in a mysterious prison. Adapted from Marvin Petal’s story. Script: Rod Serling VIEWER’S CHOICE #25
15	3:00 PM	Night of the Meek Art Carney as a down and out department store Santa Claus who finds a miraculous bag. VIEWER’S CHOICE #23
16	3:30 PM	Kick the Can Can the residents of an old age home find a little bit of magic and feel young again? VIEWER’S CHOICE #22
17	4:00 PM	Where is Everybody? The first episode. A man finds himself in a deserted town, but always there are tantalizing hints that he’s just missed finding somebody. VIEWER’S CHOICE #21
18	4:30 PM	Dead Man’s Shoes A homeless man puts on a pair shoes haunted by a gangster. Script: Charles Beaumont and OCee Ritch VIEWER’S CHOICE #19
19	5:00 PM	The Hitchhiker A creepy hitchhiker follows a young woman (Inger Stevens) across the country. Adapted from Lucille Fletcher’s radio play. Script: Rod Serling VIEWER’S CHOICE #18
20	5:30 PM	The Dummy One of two episodes about evil dummies who torment the ventriloquists who work with them. This one stars Cliff Robertson. Based on a story by Lee Polk Script: Rod Serling VIEWER’S CHOICE #17
21	6:00 PM	The Invaders An old woman is tormented by tiny aliens. Script: Richard Matheson VIEWER’S CHOICE #15
22	6:30 PM	The Bewitchin’ Pool The last episode of the original series. Two Southern children seek escape from their feuding parents by traveling to another dimension. Script: Earl Hamner, Jr., creator of The Waltons. VIEWER’S CHOICE #14
23	7:00 PM	Living Doll She’s Talky Tina, and she doesn’t think she likes you. Credited to Charles Beaumont, but actually written by Jerry Sohl. VIEWER’S CHOICE #9
24	7:30 PM	The Howling Man A traveler seeks shelter in an isolated monastery where a group of apparent fanatics hold a prisoner. Script: Charles Beaumont. (Adapted from his own short story) VIEWER’S CHOICE #11
25	8:00 PM	Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up? Two state troopers find a crashed spaceship and track an alien to a diner where they find the diner’s counterman, a bus driver, and the bus’s passengers. Is someone in the diner really the alien in disguise? VIEWER’S CHOICE #2
26	8:30 PM	The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street A parable of Cold War witch hunting. A mysterious object flies overhead, and a neighborhood loses all power. Then a select few regain and lose power. Suspicion grows that the flying object was an alien spaceship and that someone living on the street is an alien in disguise, preparing the way for an invasion. Script: Rod Serling VIEWER’S CHOICE #4
27	9:00 PM	Nightmare at 20,000 Feet “There’s a man on the wing!” A passenger who’d only recently recovered from a nervous breakdown sees a gremlin sabotaging the airplane he’s on, only nobody else sees it or believes him. Script: Richard Matheson (Author of I Am Legend) Based on his own short story. VIEWER’S CHOICE #1
28	9:30 PM	Time Enough at Last A man who just wants time to read, finds himself all alone with a library full of books after a nuclear war. Adapted from Lynn Venable’s story. Script: Rod Serling VIEWER’S CHOICE #6
29	10:00 PM	To Serve Man Aliens promising Utopia leave behind a book which reveals their true motives. Based on a Damon Knight story and originally broadcast over 20 years before the first version of V. Script: Rod Serling VIEWER’S CHOICE #3
30	10:30 PM	A Stop at Willoughby Stressed out by work, a tyrannical boss, and an unsympathetic wife, a man finds a haven on the train ride home. Script: Rod Serling VIEWER’S CHOICE #5
31	11:00 PM	The Eye of the Beholder A woman is in a hospital and her face is heavily bandaged after she undergoes plastic surgery in the hope of becoming beautiful. This episode sometimes appears with the title “Private World of Darkness.” Listen to the Leader’s speech on the television in the background in some of the scenes. Like “Number Twelve Looks Just Like You,” this episode also goes beyond a commentary on looks. It warns against too much conformity, a tendency which ran amok in 1950s and early 1960s America. Script: Rod Serling VIEWER’S CHOICE #7
32	11:30 PM	The Obsolete Man Burgess Meredith is a librarian facing execution in a totalitarian society where books are banned. Script: Rod Serling VIEWER’S CHOICE #8
33	12:00 AM July 5	The Midnight Sun It’s the hottest day in history as the world drifts towards the sun. VIEWER’S CHOICE #13
34	12:30 AM	The Odyssey of Flight 33 An airliner travels back and forth through time.  Script: Rod Serling VIEWER’S CHOICE #10
35	1:00 AM	The Masks Greedy family members visit a dying old man during Mardi Gras. As a condition of inheriting his fortune, they must wear certain masks. VIEWER’S CHOICE #12
36	1:30 AM	Third From the Sun Two families attempt to escape a world on the brink of nuclear war. Adapted from Richard Matheson’s story. Script: Rod Serling VIEWER’S CHOICE #16
37	2:00 AM	It’s a Good Life Think happy thoughts! Think happy thoughts! Think happy thoughts, or little Anthony will wish you into the cornfield. A town lives in fear of a child with incredible mind powers. Based on the story by Jerome Bixby.  VIEWER’S CHOICE #20
38	2:30 AM	Nick of Time A couple stop at a diner and are amused at first by a devil headed fortune telling machine on their table. Will they let the machines cryptic yet unnervingly accurate predictions run their lives? VIEWER’S CHOICE #24
39	3:00 AM	Night Call An old woman receives a serious of frightening phone calls. VIEWER’S CHOICE #26
40	3:30 AM	A Penny for Your Thoughts A coin lands on edge and a man gains the power to read minds. Script: George Clayton Johnson VIEWER’S CHOICE #28
41	4:00 AM	The After Hours Mannequins!! Starring Anne Francis VIEWER’S CHOICE #35
42	4:30 AM	The Little People Two astronauts land on a planet to repair their ship. One discovers a civilization of tiny people and sets himself up as their god. VIEWER’S CHOICE #37

Citizen Stan?

The illustration accompanying Michael
Chabon's story.

What if an elderly Stan Lee visited Jack Kirby in a nursing home, seeking forgiveness? In Michael Chabon's short story "Citizen Conn" (published in the February 13 - 20th New Yorker), Artie Conn certainly seems a lot like Stan Lee and Morton Feathers seems a lot like Jack Kirby.

For those who don't know, here's a little background. Stan Lee is a household name among comics fans, and he's well known by many non-comics fans. He spent decades as a writer and editor of the company variously known as Timely Comics, Atlas (not to be confused with the 1970s Atlas Comics), and most famously Marvel Comics. From the early 1940s-1961, he was a journeyman, following trends and not doing anything particularly innovative. By the late 1950s Atlas was reeling following the anti-comics crusade earlier in the decade and then a misguided change in distribution that turned disastrous. By 1961, Lee was ready to move on from the world of comics. Then according to the corporate version of history long promoted by Lee, Martin Goodman - Marvel's owner - was out playing golf with Jack Liebowitz co-owner of DC. (Michael Uslan challenged this version and said Goodman probably golfed with someone who worked for Independent News, a DC owned distributor which also distributed Marvel's comics rather than Liebowitz or Irwin Donenfeld, son of DC's other co-owner. Besides being Harry Donenfeld's son, Irwin was also a high ranking DC executive at the time.) Supposedly, Liebowitz bragged about the strong sales that The Justice League of America was enjoying. This prompted Goodman to order Stan Lee to put out a competing super hero team book. As Lee tells it in Excelsior, he reconsidered quitting. He decided he would stay on and do the book, but he was going to do it his way. What's the worst that could happen if he broke with tradition? He could get fired. So, what? He wanted to quit anyway. Rather than the cardboard two-dimensional characters who'd prevailed in comics, Lee wanted to do complex, three dimensional characters with everyday problems. He wanted to write heroes who didn't always agree with each other, who had conflicts. And thus the floodgates of creativity were opened and the Marvel Age dawned with Stan Lee revolutionizing comics forever, and oh by the way, he worked with some great artists like Jolly Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and Jazzy John Romita.

Pressed for time at an understaffed Marvel and knowing that Kirby and Ditko were good at plotting stories, Lee eschewed the traditional full script method of writing comics. With a full script, the writer would write out what the artist was supposed to draw in every panel throughout the story. Plus the writer would write all of the dialogue and captions in advance. Lee turned to a different method. Instead of giving the artists a complete script, he gave them a synopsis, a short description of the plot and the artist fleshed it out into a full twenty-plus page story visually. When the artist was done, Lee then wrote the character dialogue and the other text. Lee said he did this to save time. Instead of Ditko and Kirby both having to wait while Lee scripted a story for Kirby, Lee could dash off a synopsis for Kirby. While Kirby was fleshing out the story and drawing, Lee could work on a synopsis for  Ditko, then dash off another synopsis for Kirby, and then add text for the first story while Kirby got to work on the new synopsis.  One innovative creation followed another starting with The Fantastic Four followed by Spider-man, The X-Men, The Hulk, Iron Man, The Avengers, and many others. Lee broke down the fourth wall, speaking directly to the readers. More than just a writer and editor, Lee became a spokesmen not just for Marvel, but for comic books themselves. In the 1970s in books like Origins of Marvel Comics and Son of Origins, Lee detailed how he came up with all the ideas for the Marvel Age characters. With the backing of corporate Marvel, and aided by his charming, loquacious personality, and his media savvy, Lee's version of events was the most widely publicized and embraced. But there was another lesser known version.

From The Fantastic Four #2 January 1962
(C) 2012 Marvel Comics

Long before working with Stan Lee in the 1960s, Jack Kirby had already established himself as one of the most important creators in the history of comic books. Although primarily known today as a penciler, Kirby was also a prolific story plotter and character creator. Long teamed with Joe Simon, Kirby had created or co-created myriads of characters before the Marvel Age dawned. The most famous of these is Captain America, but they also include the Challengers of the Unknown, the Boy Commandos, the Newsboy Legion, and many others. Simon and Kirby worked in many other genres besides super heroes. They worked in true crime, westerns, science fiction, horror, and they were even credited with starting the romance comics genre. In the late 1950s, Simon and Kirby went their separate ways as Joe Simon sought to branch out from comics while Kirby continued on in the industry. Although Kirby was sent scripts to draw, there are stories of him simply throwing out the scripts and making up his own story. After, a court battle with a DC editor over The Skymasters newspaper strip, Kirby felt unwelcome at DC and began to do more work for Atlas (Marvel) at a time when they were publishing lots of stories about giant monsters.

When Goodman demanded a super hero team book, Lee turned to Kirby. The result was The Fantastic Four and the rest is history. Their 102 consecutive issues together on The Fantastic Four included some of the best super hero comics ever published, contained a lot of ground breaking work, and set the foundation of the Marvel Universe. That alone was enough to make Lee and Kirby one of the greatest creative teams in the history of comics. However, they didn't stop with The Fantastic Four. They also created the Marvel version of Thor together, the X-Men, the Hulk, Iron Man (although Kirby wasn't the primary early artist on Iron Man, he was involved), the Avengers, and many others. They revived Captain America whom Kirby and Simon had created and who, prior to the Marvel Age, had been the company's most successful character. The company had stopped publishing Captain America in the late 1940s and there'd been a short-lived revival in the 1950s. According to Lee, Kirby was originally slated to draw Spider-man, but Kirby made Spider-man look too heroic while Lee wanted a scrawnier, less heroic look, so the job went to Steve Ditko although Kirby still drew the cover for Spider-man's first appearance, Amazing Fantasy #15. The comics often painted a picture of fun-loving camaradrie between Lee and Kirby. In fact, that image extended to all of Marvel's writers and artists. Lee and Kirby sometimes appeared in the comics themselves. Marvel's books contained credits at a time when artists at other companies had to content themselves with sneaking their signatures in somewhere. And those Marvel credits often contained colorful nicknames and playful banter. As Marvel grew and Lee was stretched thinner as a writer, editor, and spokesman and as Lee grew more comfortable with the new writing method, his synopses for Kirby became less detailed, leaving more for Kirby to supply. Instead of typewritten synopses, Lee would talk to Kirby in person or on the phone and they'd come up with the plot. Comics lore has it that Lee simply told Kirby that they should have the Fantastic Four meet God and the result was the Galactus triology. Lee once said that all he had to do was tell Kirby that this month's villain would be Dr. Doom and Kirby would come back with a fully drawn story and Lee would then think up dialogue and captions to go with it. When Lee got the art for the Galactus triology, he was surprised to see a strange character on a surf board in space. Lee asked Kirby who it was, and Kirby said that some one as powerful as Galactus should have a herald, so he gave him one. And that's how the Silver Surfer was created.

It came as a shock to fans in 1970 when Kirby abruptly left Marvel and went to DC where he created The New Gods, The Forever People, and Kamandi among others. Although Kirby would occasionally work with a writer after 1970, from then on, most comics he worked on listed him as Writer, Editor, and Artist. Kirby would return to Marvel in the mid-1970s, creating The Eternals, Devil Dinosaur, and Machine Man. Other than Captain America and the Black Panther, Kirby was reluctant to work on his old characters. He teamed with Lee on a Silver Surfter project, but other than that, he preferred to create new characters. After leaving Marvel for a final time, Kirby created Captain Victory and Silver Star at Pacific Comics. In this he helped pioneer creator owned work published by independent companies aiming at the emerging comic book stores which were beginning to replace newsstands and corner stores as the primary markets for comics. Kirby's dialogue wasn't as hip and witty as Lee's at Marvel. His books literally burst with ideas and creative energy, but he never again enjoyed the commercial success he'd had with either Stan Lee or Joe Simon.

For his part, Lee seemed to go into a creative rut after Kirby left, recycling old concepts in a tired way. After Ditko had left Spider-man, Lee continued to develop and build on the foundation he and Ditko established, delving deeper into the characters and their conflicts and their angst. By contrast, when Kirby left The Fantastic Four, the spark went out. Lee soon stopped writing and editing full time. He took the title of Publisher. Later, he went out to California where he began pitching Marvel's characters to Hollywood. (Kirby had earlier left New York for California). Lee remained the face of Marvel and its leading spokesmen. For years after he stopped writing regularly, every Marvel comic had the legend "Stan Lee Presents" on its first page. However, even as Lee told his version of Marvel history through the corporate megaphone, that other version circulated in the fan press.

From The Fantastic Four #79 October 1968
(C) 2012 Marvel Comics

This version painted Kirby and not Lee as the primary creative force behind Marvel. Kirby grew increasingly bitter as he heard Lee take the lion's share of the credit for years. At the height of his bitterness, Kirby even claimed that Lee didn't do anything except for messing with the words a little before they went into the dialogue balloons. For decades now while Lee has continued to be idolized by Marvel fans and the general public, the Lee vs Kirby controversy has raged among a certain segment of fandom. There are those who give Lee most of the credit, pointing out differences and perceived shortcomings in Kirby's dialogue writing and characterization. There are those who give Kirby the credit, pointing out that the house of ideas ran short of ideas when Kirby and Ditko weren't around. Then there those who think that the writing and character creation was a team effort with both men making essential contributions. Although he's less famous than Lee, Kirby is now acknowledged at least as the co-plotter of most Lee/Kirby stories and as the co-creator of many Marvel Age characters.

The splash page of Adventure Comics #75 as
reprinted in The Collected Jack Kirby Collector
Volume Three.

For those who totally dismiss the idea that Kirby had any hand in character creation, there are some things to consider. Take the case of Thor for instance. In Origins of Marvel Comics, Lee claimed that after creating the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, and Spider-man, the only thing he could think of to top those characters would be with Super-God. Only, Marvel couldn't publish a Super-God comic without offending almost everyone. Then during a radio interview, a talk-show host referred to Marvel's comics as twentieth century mythology. That made Lee realize that although he couldn't use God as a character, he could use a mythological god. Lee claimed that he had a big interest in Norse mythology, hence he decided Thor would be Marvel's newest character. While I can't claim familiarity with everything Lee wrote prior to the Marvel Age, I'm not aware of him using Norse mythology before. At that time Greco-Roman mythology was far better known to the general public. Norse mythology was more obscure especially outside of Wagner. Super hero comics had many references to mythology, but most often it was Greco-Roman. Wonder Woman is one example. Another example is Captain Marvel who with the exception of Solomon derives his powers from Greco-Roman mythological figures. He has the strength of Hercules, the endurance of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles, and the speed of Mercury to go along with Solomon's wisdom. One place where Norse mythology did appear in comics was in Simon and Kirby comics. The first two issues of Captain America Comics had a back-up feature called Hurricane. The title character was the son of Thor. This is just before Stan Lee's comics career began, folks. After Simon and Kirby left DC, they used Thor himself in a Sandman story in Adventure Comics #75 (May 1942). In Boy Commandos #7 (Summer 1944) the character Brooklyn meets Thor in a dream. Although this story was written and drawn by someone other than Simon and Kirby, it came from their shop and the late Rich Morrissey, a terrific comics scholar, points out the possibility that Kirby may have supplied the plot as he often did. At DC in the late 1950s, Kirby, without Joe Simon, again used Thor, this time in a story called "The Magic Hammer" which appeared in Tales of the Unexpected #16 (August 1957). So while, Lee later claimed a fascination with Norse mythology, Kirby actually displayed an interest in it in work published over the two decades before the creation of the Marvel Thor. With Lee and Kirby each claiming they came up with the idea of doing a Thor comic, is it so hard to believe Kirby's version considering that he'd already used Thor in comics?

(I owe a debt to the articles of Richard Kolkman and Rich Morrissey from The Jack Kirby Collector #14 for the information in the preceding paragraph.)

Next time out, I'll discuss Chabon's story itself and the ways in which the Artie Conn and Morton Feathers resemble Lee and Kirby and the ways they don't. After that, I'll get back to my ongoing trek through The Year's Best Science Fiction 27

From The Fantastic Four #79 October 1968
(C) 2012 Marvel Comics

Is There a Cookbook Involved?

In Paul J. McAuley’s “Crimes and Glory” after Earth has been devastated by wars, economic collapse, and radical climate events, an alien race named the Jackaroo have come to help mankind. The Jackaroo have transported many humans from Earth to colony worlds. People win a lottery to move from Earth to a dystopian New World, grim but filled with opportunity. People dream of escaping from troubles on Earth by starting over on a new planet. The colony worlds once housed other races collectively called the Elder Culture. These long vanished races also received the Jackaroo’s aid. The Elder Culture left behind abandoned space ships and other pieces of their technology. 

The story has a hardboiled tone. Emma, the main character, works as a detective for the U.N. Technology Control Unit. Among humans there is both legal and illegal traffic in Elder Culture technology. Some Elder Culture technology is helpful. Some is both helpful and dangerous. Some “is simply dangerous. Stuff that could give an individual the power to hold worlds to ransom. Stuff that could change the human race so radically that it would either die out or become something other than human.” ( The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection 94) Coders working at code farms study, decipher, and learn the code that makes the technology run. Consider this passage about the ships left behind by the Elder Culture called the Ghajar: 

“In any case, whether dead or alive or smashed to flinders, all the ships were to some degree or another infested with code. It was quantum stuff, hardware and software embedded in the spin properties of fundamental particles in the molecular matrices of the ship’s hulls, raw and fragmented, and crusty with errors and necrotic patches that had accumulated during millennia of disuse and exposure to cosmic radiation.

“Coders working in farms like Meyer Lansky’s analysed and catalogued this junk and stitched together viable fragments and spent hours and days trying to get them to run in virtual partitions on the farm’s hypercomputer cloud. Code approved by the licensing board was bought by software developers who used it to patch controls ships reclaimed from the vast Sargassos, manipulate exotic matter, refine front ends of quantum technology, and so on and so forth. There were theoretical applications, too - four of the so-called hard mathematical problems had been solved using code reclaimed from the farms.” (YBSF 94-95)

For some people, coding is like a recreational drug which sometimes proves fatal. Emma’s husband suffered this fate. It’s suggested that his death fuels Emma’s obsession as she pursues a criminal named Niles Sarkka much like Ahab pursued a certain white whale. “Crimes and Glory” starts with Emma in pursuit of Sarkka and then backtracks to the murder mystery which led to the pursuit. Her investigation takes us on a trek through the vicious underworld of the city of Port of Plenty (featuring that Meyer Lansky fellow mentioned above).  

Sarkka is a rogue expert on the Elder Cultures. He once was a University Chair. Handsome and charismatic, Sarkka also hosted a popular TV show in which he and his team went on various expeditions to recover Elder Culture technology while expounding what Emma calls crackpot theories. Sounds like a nice fit for the Discovery Channel. Sarkka argued that the Jackaroo were manipulating human history long before their appearance and that they created the crisis from which they saved us. He believes the colony worlds aren’t a refuge. They’re a trap. Sarkka was discredited and became a criminal after one of his exploits resulted in disaster. “My boss had been one of the team who had prosecuted Niles Sarkka after most of his crew had become infected with nanotech viroids while excavating the remains of ancient machinery in a remote part of the Great Central Desert. Marc had seen the bodies, all of them horribly transformed, some still partly alive. His boss, who’d later shot himself, had ordered cauterisation of the site with a low-yield nuclear weapon.” (YBSF 102)

Is Sarkka a greedy egomaniac? Is he a nutty conspiracy theorist? Or is he right? The story prompts the reader and the narrator herself to wonder who’s the hero and who’s the villain.