Jack Kirby’s The Demon by Jack Kirby

Supernatural adventures with spectacular art

Comic book artist extraordinaire Jack Kirby is best known for co-creating many of Marvel Comics’ most famous superheroes. He was Marvel’s number-one artist (both qualitatively and quantitatively) throughout the 1960s. In 1970, however, Kirby got fed up with his treatment by Marvel and jumped over to rival DC Comics. With the new creative freedom that DC allowed him, Kirby created some bold and innovative new comics series. These titles didn’t achieve household-name status like Superman and Batman, but they are nonetheless regarded in hindsight by comics aficionados as groundbreaking and amazing work. One of Kirby’s creations from this period, The Demon, made his debut in September 1972 in his own eponymous series that ran for 16 issues, up to January of 1974. The entire run of that series has been collected in a beautiful paperback edition entitled Jack Kirby’s The Demon, first published in 2008. I’m reviewing the 2017 edition (ISBN 978-1-4012-7718-5).

The story begins in the days of King Arthur. The evil sorceress Morgaine Le Fey, after laying waste to Camelot, hunts down the wizard Merlin. As he flees into another plane of existence, Merlin summons up a powerful demon named Etrigan to battle Morgaine Le Fey’s army of evil minions. Flash forward to the 1970s, and Etrigan is still doing Merlin’s bidding by fighting the forces of supernatural evil. Jason Blood, an expert in demonology, is the human host for the Demon. He undergoes a Hulk-like transformation when Etrigan’s powers are needed. This coexistence with the Demon has granted Jason immortality. He has lived for centuries without aging.

The stories here are somewhat basic: a monster shows up, and the Demon fights him. Like Shakespeare, Kirby draws story material from folklore and public domain literature. There’s a werewolf story, a Phantom of the Opera story, and a Frankenstein story, all with original touches from Kirby. The real attraction here, however, is the fabulous art, which is some of the best Kirby work I’ve ever seen. Kirby seems to have designed this series to allow himself to draw all the things he loves to draw: monsters (reptilian, rocky, furry, metallic), medieval-looking weapons and warfare, bizarre artifacts and machinery, and ugly faces. I don’t know if Kirby ever drew Doctor Strange for Marvel, but if he did, it would have looked a lot like this. This book unfortunately demonstrates that Kirby was not so great at drawing women’s faces. They look like unbaked biscuits with receding hairlines. He was a master, however, at drawing men’s faces, the uglier and craggier the better.

The Demon was not a part of Kirby’s Fourth World saga—a sci-fi/mythological epic that ran through at least four Kirby-created titles. When the Fourth World comics didn’t sell so well, DC asked Kirby to create some new stand-alone superheroes. The Demon was among these early-1970s creations, along with OMAC and Kamandi. Jason Blood, Etrigan’s human alter-ego, resides in an apartment in Gotham City, which sets him up for crossovers with Batman and other DC heroes. Although Kirby only wrote and drew the original 16-issue run of The Demon, the character has since been revived by later DC creators. The Demon has had a handful of his own series over the past half-century and has also guest-starred in the adventures of other DC heroes. Although not an A-list hero, Etrigan the Demon continues to be active in the DC universe today.

Paperback reprints of classic comics are usually printed either in black-and-white on newsprint or in full-color and bright matte paper that makes the colors too bright and garish. This volume, however, is printed on something in between, a clean white sheet with an uncoated texture that makes the colors rich and vivid. It’s very well done. Diehard Kirby fans should own this book.

Above: Cover of The Demon #2, 1972. Below: Spread from The Demon #6, 1973. Art by Jack Kirby. © DC Comics.

Life in the Soil: A Guide for Naturalists and Gardeners by James B. Nardi

Inside the society of dirt

I fancy myself an amateur naturalist. I like to explore nature and see what I can see: birds, plants, mammals, fungi, butterflies, etc.—whatever I can identify. One aspect of the wild that I’ve never really known much about, however, is the soil. Seeing as how so much life springs forth from the soil, and it’s loaded with living organisms, I wanted to learn more about the ground and its inhabitants. I found what I was looking for with Life in the Soil, the 2007 book by James B. Nardi, a research scientist at the University of Illinois. Suitable for general readers (nonscientists), this book provides a detailed look at what goes on in the dirt beneath our feet.

What is soil made of? How is it formed? How long does it take rocks and plant matter to become soil? What living creatures are involved in this process? How do elements and minerals cycle in and out of the soil? What makes good soil vs. bad? Nardi answers all of these questions and more. The reader comes to a vivid understanding of the soil as a living, breathing, changing community of organisms and nutrients. On the one hand, this is a book that’s deep enough to detail complex chemical reactions and biological processes. On the other hand, it’s accessible enough to first provide elementary explanations of chemical notation and taxonomical hierarchy.

The bulk of this book is a field guide to all the creatures who live in, contribute to, or even just scratch the surface of the soil. The general arrangement is from smallest to largest, moving from microbes to invertebrates to vertebrates. This guide does not differentiate at the species level but rather at the family level. To include thousands of species would have been impossible, but this book will help you differentiate between true scorpions, pseudoscorpions, and microwhipscorpions, or between dung beetles, soldier beetles, tiger beetles, and ptilodactylid beetles, as well as different families of worms, flies, amphibians, rodents, and so on. There is no specific geographic range to this guide. In general, Nardi addresses an audience of American and British readers, but at times he might mention the land leeches of Guatemala, the shield-tailed snakes of India, or a stink badger from Indonesia. Within each family, Nardi discusses life cycles, feeding habits, and most importantly, the effect the organisms have on the soil. This guide is heavily illustrated with black and white drawings. The text makes reference to 69 color plates, but they are nowhere to be found in the ebook edition.

After the field guide portion of the book, Nardi outlines strategies for the creation and preservation of healthy soil, but at the same time he makes it sound like soil degradation is beyond the point of no return, and world famine is imminent. He encourages readers to start their own compost piles, but then he makes that process sound as difficult as possible, as if you need a PhD in biology and chemistry just to rot some vegetable matter. Finally, Nardi gives some tips for those who might like to collect and examine soil samples in order to view some of the creatures discussed in the book. The key audience for this book would be hobbyists in microscopy. Although the information in the book is scientifically comprehensive, the text is written in very simple vocabulary that even a junior high student can understand, so this would be a perfect gift for any kid or grown-up with a microscope. There is also some useful information here for gardeners, but again, without that microscope much of the book won’t apply to your average casual gardener.

Life in the Soil delivers a thorough entry-level education in soil science and biology that elevates the novice naturalist to an intermediate dirt-lover. I could have used those color plates, and at times the presentation of the information wavers between too elementary and not elementary enough. Overall, however, I learned a lot from this book and will likely refer to it on future hikes.

To a God Unknown by John Steinbeck

Young writer tries too hard

I have read quite a few of John Steinbeck’s novels and thought I had heard of all of them until I recently stumbled upon To a God Unknown. Published in 1933 when Steinbeck was in his early thirties, this was his second novel, after Cup of Gold. I was intrigued by To a God Unknown for the simple fact that any mention of it had somehow eluded me for fifty-plus years of my life. After having read the book, however, I can say with some certainty that the reason you’ve probably never heard of this novel is because it isn’t very good.

The time period of the novel is not specified, but it feels like the late 19th century. (I don’t recall any motorized vehicles.) Joseph Wayne is the third of four sons in a Vermont farming family. In bygone days of a century or more ago, the eldest son typically inherited the family farm after the father’s death, so Joseph decides to build his own future by striking out on his own and heading West to California. He finds some beautiful untouched land and establishes a homestead there. From Steinbeck’s descriptions of the surrounding countryside, it sounds like this would be located in what is now Monterrey County near the city of Soledad. 

Soon after Joseph establishes himself in California, his father dies back home. Hard times befall the Wayne family in Vermont, so Joseph’s three brothers and their families move out to California to join him. They build houses in close proximity to one another and work the surrounding land. The eldest brother, Thomas, is a rugged and likable common-sense farmer. The second brother, Burton, moonlights as a Protestant preacher and bears the judgmental attitude that comes with Christian fundamentalism. The youngest brother Benjy is the black sheep of the family, a heavy drinker and ladies’ man with a knack for inciting trouble. Joseph is the serious and moody member of the family. Being the pioneer in this California venture, he assumes the role of family patriarch.

The problem with To a God Unknown is that Steinbeck goes out of his way to load the story with religious imagery every chance he gets, often in a very heavy-handed and obtrusive manner. Joseph develops a love for the land that amounts to a form of pagan worship. He believes a certain tree on his land, for example, bears his father’s reincarnated soul. Burton, the Protestant preacher, naturally has a problem with this. Meanwhile, the family is surrounded by Mexican workers who are devout Catholics, though not without a few of their own pagan traditions. All of these religious cultures mix and clash. I like what I think is the book’s message: that we could learn a thing or two from the ancient pagans about how to respect and care for the land. I didn’t much care for, however, the way that message was delivered. In his early-career eagerness, Steinbeck seems hell-bent on convincing you that this family farming story is an epic of biblical proportions, to the point where he departs too much from realism. Contrast this with Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, an authentic realist novel about family farmers that rises to the level of an epic, but manages to do so in a seemingly effortless manner.

All of this ostentatious symbolism might be forgivable if you actually cared about any of the characters, but that’s hard to do when they all speak in very stilted, stage-play dialogue that doesn’t resemble real human speech. Joseph and his wife sound more like professors of philosophy than farmers, and Steinbeck belabors words like “sacred” and “holy” in order to hammer home his religious imagery. To a God Unknown is not up to the level of quality one expects from Steinbeck. It reads like the work of a young author trying too hard to prove he’s profound.

The Great God Brown by Eugene O’Neill

Heavy-handed symbolism as O’Neill goes artsy

Eugene O’Neill’s play The Great God Brown was first staged in 1926. O’Neill may have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, but not every one of his works is a masterpiece, or even good. Sandwiched between better-known repertory classics like Desire Under the Elms and Strange Interlude comes this oddity. I have almost worked my way through O’Neill’s complete works, and this is one of the weirdest dramas he ever wrote. It doesn’t read like O’Neill at all but more like something by Samuel Beckett. Beckett, however, would have done it much better. When The Great God Brown debuted, the New York Post called it “a superb failure.”

Mr. Anthony and Mr. Brown are partners in a construction firm. Their teenage sons are best friends who have just graduated from high school. While Brown is the junior partner in the firm, often looked down upon by his partner, his son William shows far more promise than Anthony’s son Dion. William “Billy” Brown is a good student with the potential to become a great architect and take over the leadership of the family business. Dion Anthony, on the other hand, has the temperament of a tortured artist-poet and is a heavy drinker and philanderer. Both young men are in love with the same high school sweetheart, Margaret, but she only has eyes for Dion. While William is jealous, he resigns himself to bachelorhood and focuses on his career. 

Dion is a terribly overdone caricature of the artiste. His speech is just a series of random phrases, many of them biblical, which he spouts in an ostentatiously crazy way. He constantly refers to himself and others he’s speaking to in the third person. To some extent, O’Neill seems to be making fun of the artist stereotype, but at other times he’s clearly buying into it. Although there is definitely occasional humor in The Great God Brown, it also seems clear that O’Neill intended the play to be philosophically profound in much the same way that Dion thinks the relentless stream of non sequiturs that he utters is profound.

One of the odd things about this play is that the characters wear masks. The opening scene takes place at a dance, so at first I thought perhaps it was a masked ball, and the characters were wearing Mardi Gras or domino masks, but that’s not the case. The characters don their masks anytime, 24/7, at their discretion. O’Neill recycles this dramatic convention from ancient Greek tragedies or Japanese Noh theatre. The masks symbolize the difference between one’s true self (mask off) and the personality he or she projects to others (mask on)—what The Who once referred to as an “eminence front.” Confusingly, however, in The Great God Brown these masks function as more than just metaphor. The masks sometimes cause cases of mistaken identity, which means that the characters must literally see the masks just as we do, yet no one in the play seems to find the wearing of masks the least bit odd. The masks also exist as disembodied objects. When someone finds a discarded mask removed from its owner, they react as if they’ve discovered a corpse. This unresolved ambiguity between the reality and metaphor of the masks is just bizarre and clumsy. An avant-garde playwright like Beckett might have pulled it off, but this seems woefully heavy-handed and out of place in what is otherwise a pretty typical O’Neill play about relationships and morals.

The Great God Brown may be a terrible play, but it sure isn’t boring. It’s hard to tell what audiences of 1926 would have thought of this. They might have eaten up this pretentious drivel. For readers of today, however, there is some pleasure in watching this train wreck unfold. One can imagine what it would have been like to spend an evening in the theatre experiencing this strange presentation. It is somewhat kitschily entertaining in the same manner as one of those hacky movies that’s so-bad-it’s-good.

Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud by Peter Watson

The book about everything by the man who’s read everything

I had previously read Peter Watson’s book The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century and liked it very much. His follow-up to that book, Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud is a prequel in the same vein that covers everything before the 20th century. The Modern Mind opened with Sigmund Freud, and Ideas ends with him. In both cases, Watson deliveries sweeping world histories comprised not of wars, monarchs, and governments, but rather of important developments in the arts, sciences, and humanities. Both books are eminently fascinating and enlightening works, but Ideas is even more impressive and captivating than The Modern Mind.

According to Amazon, the print edition of this book is 850 pages. According to my ebook copy, however, it’s 1850 pages, which seems more accurate when one contemplates just how much content is crammed into this volume. Yet crammed it never feels. Watson has to be one of the all-time greatest summarizers in history. Our grandparents had Will Durant to provide them with an overview of the world’s knowledge. We’ve got Watson, and I think we win. When you look at the sources that Watson cites for this book, typically he’s not going back to the original texts written in ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, or 19th-century Germany. Rather, he is drawing on the most recent scholarship—histories, biographies, critical studies—that have been published by eminent scholars about the people, -isms, and -ologies that he’s discussing. He doesn’t limit himself to Western civilization either, but includes contributions from Islamic, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Native American thought as well. Watson seems to have read everything, and he miraculously assimilates it all into a coherent whole. He demonstrates an encyclopedic knowledge in a variety of fields: history, science, literature, art, music, sociology, psychology, archaeology, and more. The task of assembling such a synthesis must have been herculean, yet Watson glides seamlessly from one topic to the next, explaining complex concepts in clear and accessible prose. That’s not to say that the text is dumbed down for a popular audience. The intelligent reader walks away from this book having acquired a great deal of knowledge.

What surprised me most about this history of ideas is that, for the most part, it’s also a history of religion. Metaphysical and mythological conjectures on God and the universe are just as much ideas as any scientific theory, and religious thought has dominated mankind’s intellectual development for most of homo sapiens’ existence. (Look at the pre-Enlightenment selections in any art museum or library, for example.) The history of human knowledge, as Watson tells it, is a history of overcoming religious superstition. Watson is not an atheist with an axe to grind like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. He just tells it like it is with a very objective account of how religion has stifled intellectual progress since ancient times. It seems like every major discovery had to go through a centuries-long probationary period during which it was repudiated, prohibited, and persecuted by religious authorities—the punishments of Galileo, for example, or the arduous process of establishing (via fossils) that the real world is older than literal Biblical time. The Catholic popes are famous for this sort of anti-intellectualism, but Watson shows that all faiths to some degree have worked to hold back the progress of learning: ancient polytheists, Buddhists, Muslims, Protestants, and others are all guilty of this crime. Reading this book really makes you wonder what mankind could have accomplished by now if we hadn’t wasted so much time fighting over theology. Of course, as Watson shows, ideas don’t always mean good ideas: White supremacy, social Darwinism, and eugenics are just a few examples of very wrong ideas that have nonetheless proven too influential in human history, and Watson covers such fallacies as well.

Watson is so good at kindling your curiosity, one walks away from his books with an extensive list of topics and readings for further study. Watson himself has written more narrowly focused intellectual histories on The French Mind, The German Genius, and The Great Divide between the cultures of the Old World and the New. Regardless of where and when he might take you, with Watson as your guide you are bound to be fascinated, amazed, enlightened, and entertained.

The Master of Jalna by Mazo de la Roche

Hard times on the family farm

The Master of Jalna, published in 1933, is the fourth book of 16 in Canadian author Mazo de la Roche’s series of Jalna novels (the fourth novel to be published but the tenth novel in the Jalna chronology, because of all the prequels). These books take place mostly in rural Southern Ontario, along the shores of Lake Ontario. The Jalna novels are in the family drama genre, much like Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women series, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books, or the old TV show The Waltons. Sometimes the Jalna books venture into romance novel territory, but like the aforementioned examples, they can’t really be classified as romance novels. The family that stars in these books is the Whiteoaks. Their farm is named Jalna. The “Master” in this case is Renny Whiteoak, the eldest brother who manages the farm (The parents died prior to the first novel). As this novel opens, Renny is now married to his brother’s ex-wife, and they have a toddler daughter.

While the last Jalna novel, Finch’s Fortune, ventured as far as England, this installment in the series takes place entirely on the Jalna estate or its near environs. Wayward brothers Finch and Eden have returned from Europe to the family manor, wherein resides the Whiteoak siblings and their spouses, children, elderly aunt and uncles, and a few servants. The family’s circle of friends is limited, which means just about any woman the Whiteoak brothers meet is a potential mate. The dramatic events in this book are the universal dramas of many families: marriages, births, illnesses, deaths, funerals. This novel also brings in the element of financial hardship. The Whiteoaks are land-rich but cash-poor, and Renny, in his role as manager of the farm, is having trouble making ends meet. The family might have to sell some of its beloved acreage. It’s kind of hard to take such financial woes seriously, however, considering that this large family owns a lot of property, few of them work, and they always seem to indulge in lavish feasts of food and drink. A couple of the family members are actually borderline wealthy. The Whiteoaks have never been filthy rich, but they enjoy a prestige as a founding family of the region. Because of this, they often come across as having an inflated sense of pride and entitlement, particularly the elder generation.

Whether intentional or not, masculinity is a recurring and overt theme in these books. De la Roche uses the Whiteoak brothers to compare and contrast competing conceptions of masculinity. I expanded on that in my review of Finch’s Fortune, so I won’t go into it too much here. Though a woman herself, and possibly a lesbian, de la Roche really doesn’t give equal time or importance to her female characters. As the title indicates, Renny is the main focus of this book. He’s always seemed to be the author’s ideal of a man’s man. His marriage is far from ideal, however, as he and his wife Alayne are positively rude to each other throughout the book. Alayne was depicted sympathetically in earlier books, but her she’s just a constant whiner.

Much like a television series, the pleasure of the Jalna books comes from just seeing what these familiar characters are up to, even if it’s nothing earth-shattering. The other main attraction here is the atmosphere. These novels take you back to a wholesome, idyllic time and place in Canadian history. I recently made a visit to the Niagara region of Southern Ontario, where the farms extend right up to the shore of the great lake. Nowadays, this countryside is mostly occupied by wineries and tourism, but driving through the area it’s not hard to imagine what Jalna might have been like a century ago. The storytelling in these books is almost an afterthought, and mostly predictable. The first novel, Jalna, is quite good. The second and third books, however, did not impress me much. I’m glad I hung in there for this fourth novel though, because The Master of Jalna is an improvement over the last couple installments.

The Dark Mother by Waldo Frank

Annoyingly overwrought relationships spoil promising prose

Waldo Frank

The Dark Mother, published in 1920, is the third novel I’ve read by American author Waldo Frank. After completing it, I’ve come to the conclusion that I like the idea of Waldo Frank better than I actually like Waldo Frank’s writing. Frank was a leftist, avant-garde American writer who was active in Jazz Age Greenwich Village, decades before the beat poets of the ‘50s or the hippies of the ‘60s. I keep hoping I will discover some obscure, unconventional, and unsung masterpiece among his oeuvre, but I always come away from Frank’s books feeling somewhat disappointed. Such is my reaction to The Dark Mother, as it was with City Block (1922) and Chalk Face (1924).

David Markand’s father died when he was 10. He grew up in a small town in upstate New York. As The Dark Mother opens, David is 19, and his mother has just died. His sonless uncle in New York City offers to take David into his home and give him a start in his tobacco business. Just prior to leaving for the city, David meets a young man slightly his senior, Tom Rennard, a New York City lawyer who is vacationing upstate. The two strike up an immediate friendship. After David moves to the city, the two reconnect and continue getting to know one another. Tom is unmarried and lives with his sister Cornelia, with whom David also becomes close. Despite his relative youth, Tom is a jaded cynic who knows how to play the game of social climbing and career advancement while realizing that it’s all just a pointless game. He admires and envies the innocence, naiveté, and optimism of David, a literal babe-from-the-woods. While the two form a close friendship, even fraternal love, Tom’s self-hatred makes him resent David’s contentment to the point where he desires to corrupt the younger man and tarnish his enviable innocence.

Tom and David’s relationship is like that of an old, bickering gay married couple, but without the benefit of actually being gay. Their friendship consists mostly of discussing, analyzing, and arguing over their friendship and love for one another. Rarely, if ever, do we see the two having fun or enjoying each other’s company. Tom is the more annoying of the two, often badgering David with complaints about how David doesn’t pay him enough attention, or David doesn’t give himself up completely to their friendship, or David wasn’t there when Tom got home from work. In the desire to depict intense emotions and make profound statements about human nature, Frank really goes overboard with the intensity of the friendship, even for a century ago. It’s hard to imagine a couple of buddies as codependent as these two. Again, David and Tom are not gay, as evidenced by the fact that many women throw themselves at the two young men—married women, single women, young women, older women—to an extent that defies belief.

One admirable aspect of the book is Frank’s fine command of the English language. He tells the story in very poetic prose that’s experimental in style. Calling to mind Harlem Renaissance writers like Jean Toomer and Ralph Ellison, who were his contemporaries, Frank’s writing does what modernism was supposed to do, before modernism pretentiously went off the deep end. His semi-abstract voice does not obscure the story that’s being told, but it’s unconventional enough to make you view the world and human nature in new and different ways.

Over the course of the book, Frank keeps introducing supporting characters who distract from the narrative arc of David, Tom, and Cornelia—the three leads, all of whom are rather annoying themselves. After a while, you kind of hope one of them will commit suicide (they think about it enough) just so something momentous will happen in this story that otherwise just drones on. 14 years after The Dark Mother, Frank published a sequel, The Death and Life of David Markand. I don’t fine David interesting enough, however, to want to read a second book about him.