Paul Guinan

A marvelous tale of the first mechanical man created in the late 19th century. Equal parts art book, graphic novel, history text--this Gump like adventure has the mechanical man Boilerplate moving through history but not in a way that trivializes like Gump...but as a critique of the world man created as the 20th century burst into being. Created with the intention of freeing man from war, Boilerplate instead was misused like new technology often is. Can almost be read as a straight historic show more text as Boilerplate's interaction with history is presented in a thorough and fleshed out manner. Each event is presented in a historical context, given a full background with tasty famous people mixed in all over the place. From the Boxer Rebellion to Teddy Roosevelt's mythic charge up San Juan Hill to the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, it's a delightful trip through time. Especially interesting to me was the original US/Korean conflict--known as the Korean Expedition of 1871. The art work is fantastic--original and recreations with Boilerplate inserted in history--historical photographs with Boilerplate inserted all seem to work. The work is effortless and never seems forced. show less

There should definitely be more compilations of this sort published, not only because there's so much god material out there to be collected, but also because it's hard to find copies of some of the one-shot story arcs that get published. Most of them don't last long enough to have enough issues to make up a graphic novel (due to their lack of selling power), but collecting a selection of short runs by a well-known author can work from a marketting perspective. For someone (like me) who show more likes to collect all of the stories by her favourite authors, collections like this are a lot more handy than trying to find the single issues of the comics (often years after the fact).

It also helps that these storyarcs (no matter how short lived) are actually quite fantastic reads. I particularly liked The Thessaliad and Thessaly: Witch for Hire because Thessaly is kind of a bad ass, but the shorts about the Dreaming were wonderful, and the Danny Nod library adventurer story was so amusing that I'm going to be laughing over that one for years to come. show less

http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2012/02/20/bill-willinghams-bad-doings-and-big...

This is hefty hardback full of horror comedy. Bill Willingham is best known for his series of comics, Fables. This is not that. It’s a collection of Other Stuff, including a number of adventures of minor characters from the Sandman universe. I don’t know what the uninitiated would make of these, with their injokes and unexplained walk-ons, but the stories stand up by themselves, especially the 60 or so show more pages of Thessaly the witch.

The opening story, Proposition Player, is the longest (130+ pages) and most interesting. Willingham tells us in his introductory blurb that it was the first thing he wrote for Vertigo, having been an artist with them for some time. It must have been quite a debut: the hero starts out working for a casino and ends up through a series of poor choices and successful gambles as the most powerful God (capital intended) in the cosmos. I wonder if the story’s cheerful blasphemy is a bigger challenge to the cultural authority of established religion than the humourless argumentation of, say, Richard Dawkins. show less

Boilerplate reads like a textbook or maybe one of those Time-Life history books from the 1980's covering the period 1893-1918 when Professor Archie Campion's Mechanical Marvel walked the Earth. In hopes of eliminating the loss of life in war, Campion invented the automaton Boilerplate to be a robot soldier. This book covers the life and times of Professor Campion, his remarkable sister Lily, and the mechanical marvel itself, Boilerplate. A noble automaton, Boilerplate served in the show more Spanish-American War in Cuba and the Phillipines, is on hand for the Boxer Rebellion and the Russo-Japanese War, and finally serves as a doughboy in The Great War where he vanishes while searching for the Lost Battalion. Along thew way he becomes acquainted with Theodore Roosevelt, Nikola Tesla, Jack London, Mark Twain, Frank Reade, Alice Roosevelt, Jack Johnson, Lewis Hine, T.E. Lawrence, Jeanette Rankin, Pancho Villa, and Black Jack Pershing. It shouldn't be too big a spoiler to reveal that this robot never existed. The beauty of this book is in its historical detail. Sidebars cover historical events in accurate detail without mentioning the fictional centerpiece of this book. I could see this could be an interesting teaching tool for children, because there's so much history here as long as you keep in mind that the robot is fake. This is a unique and entertaining take on alternate history. show less