The Many Ghosts of Doctor Graves #1 (1967)

 The Many Ghosts of Doctor Graves #1 was published/cover-dated May 1967.

Here's the cover!

Normally, I'm a fan of word balloons and dialogue on a comic book cover, but even I gotta admit that this one goes a bit too far. The cover is, however, graced by a typically awesome Pat Boyette drawing, and a nice, if somewhat simple, listing of the main stories featured within, so overall, I'll let this one slide. I'm sure it's relieved.

 

Perhaps in order to make up for the workmanlike listing embedded in the cover, the next page we see when we open the book is this very cool illustrated "table of contents" spotlight: 

I could have sworn that the bottom panel featuring "The Witness" was drawn by the legendary Jim Aparo, but, you know, Charlton stalwart Rocke Mastroserio put his signature right there for all to see, eh?

Speaking of "The Witness," it turns out that as indicated on the cover, that will be the first story we dive into in this issue!  Check out the first page of that tale...now!

Ah, "Mr. Island," who simply does not want to get involved. I wonder if this tale will end with ol' Doc Graves commenting that "No Man is an Island?" Spoiler Alert: it does! I mean, I would have been pretty disappointed if it didn't!

It's a fun little tale, illustrated well, and narrated nicely by the "I'm a replacement for caption boxes, don't you know"-style host in the form of Graves commenting on his Case File as we go.

I don't think Graves was represented as a "Ghost Buster" who debunked the supernatural by the time I encountered his title in the late 70s, but the conceit works nicely here. Good opener!

Lest you dare assume that a formula has been established, the next story features Dr. M.T. Graves (get it??) as an active participant in the story, adventuring and condescending right along with the other protagonist in the not quite as racist as you might expect but still very racist "Drums of Darkness!"

Ah, yes, getting right on with the business of calling the white men "Bwana." Best not to waste any time letting the readers know when this book was published, eh, wot?

Unlike the first tale, the premise behind this one is poor, and the resolution is downright stupidly bad.

"White folks explain the natural phenomena of the jungle to the superstitious natives." Moving on!

Perhaps this next short, humorous little tale was meant to cleanse the palate after the previous well-drawn but other sour stinker of a story, hmm?

Judge for yourself when you gaze upon the first feline-fortified page of...."Mirror, Mirror on the Wall!"

There's no Dr. Graves to be found in this tale. Instead, we are treated to a single, silent appearance in the final panel of the story by a completely different Horror Host whom we will meet more formally in the very next story.

As for this tale, despite Rudi Palais' apparent distaste for Mrs. Crowley's cat-centric lifestyle, this is a fun, silly little piece about the Crowley's new mirror being haunted. The boys wreck that one, too, and are surprised to find her not upset with them at all this time.

I really like Rudi's art, here. He has a sketchy, almost abstract quality that reminds me of Frank Robbins, an all-time fave of mine.

 Next up, as I mentioned, we met "L. Dedd," host of another series entirely by the name of "Ghostly Tales from the Haunted House!"

 

The story has no title of its own, and its a quick two-pager where "Officer John" leads the rudely awakened citizen to the site of a car crash...where Officer John himself lies dead! GASP!!

Sure, it's predictable. But it's got great art, and it was a cool surprise to see a few pages in this book that served as a "sampler" for one of Charlton's other books.

Also, "L. Dedd" soon changed his moniker to "I.M. Dedd," which is a far better than hoping the reader guesses that the "L" stood for "Long" or something.

And now...the end approaches!  The end of the book, anyway. Check out the first page of the final story: "The Ghosts of the Stone Lovers"...below!

This time, Graves is both IN the story AND commenting on the Case File as a Narrator! Formulas be damned! This is Charlton! We do what we want!

Also, this story features the art of STEVE FRICKIN DITKO, so just be glad that we can still have nice things!

And, it helps that this story IS actually a nice thing, with the "let's see if this is all really supernatural, harrumpf, harrumpf" business being played out nicely, and some great Ancient Roman flashback scenes illustrated by Ditko along the way!

I gotta say, even with the cringe factor baked into "Drums of Darkness," the debut issue of Doc Graves' titular title is off to a really good start.

"Red Sonja: Consumed" by Gail Simone

 

This past Tuesday (June 16), I finished "Red Sonja: Consumed" by Gail Simone on my Kindle while I was sitting in the Jury Lounge in Providence, RI.  (I didn't get picked. Day off reading in a crappy room - not all bad)

If you want to follow me on Storygraph, you can find my brief review of the book here.

I will add here that I think Simone does perhaps the best job of fixing the weird old horny and misogynistic Best Her to Bed Her trope by just....not mentioning it at all. In fact, the Sonja in this book is just simply horny, and gets down with whoever she pleases whenever she sees fit. The character never needed the trope, and in fact, no character ever did. So, Simone just acts like it was never there to begin with, which I applaud.

A new nitpick of mine that hadn't fully formed until now is that I found the lore behind the admittedly cool bad guys to be a bit unclear.  Were they exiled from Hyrkania? Were they citizens of another nation, left for dead?  Either way, how exactly did they become what they are now? I really shouldn't be that unclear on these points, even allowing for my brain's tendency to wander when I should be focusing on something.

I still really enjoyed this book, and it's a hell of a prose debut from someone who has pretty much only written comics for the past few decades.  However, those two cringy sentence fragments are SUPER cringy, so much so that I'm hoping they don't become one of the main things I remember about this novel (see the Storygraph review linked above)

And now that I've finished the Red Sonja book, I have started on this collection of new and old short fiction celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the "Weird Tales" pulp magazine:

I've owned it for at least a couple of years, so it's about time I dove in, eh?

May 17 2026 Updates

 I recently finished the audiobook version of "Brigands and Breadknives," the third entry in the "cozy fantasy" series by Travis Baldree that began with "Legends and Lattes."

The much-deserved runaway success of "L&L" of course launched countless hopeful copycats, and from what I've heard, pretty much of all them have fallen far short of Baldree's books.  

This makes perfect sense, as it seems there was quite a rush to create a whole genre (the aforementioned "cozy fantasy") around what was at the time only one single published novel. Or so it certainly seemed.

Even though I greatly enjoyed "L&L," I was rather hesitant to move on to its follow-up, "Bookshops and Bonedust." After all it was advertised as a "prequel" to "L&L," which to me, kind of signalled that Baldree was already out of ideas as to how to move his main character's (Viv the Orc) story forward.

However, I did give it a chance, and ended up really enjoying that book, too.

So, when "Breadknives" came out, I decided to read that one, too. However, I was already in the middle of some other books (see previous posts), so I waited a bit before pulling the trigger on the audio version.

I'll say right now that I wish I'd listened to the previous two books this way, too. Baldree is a voice actor, so it's no surprise that his narration is entertaining and skillful. That being said, the one element that I found a little tiresome in this latest work of his did involve "speaking." Specifically, it involved magical blades that could speak aloud when unsheathed.

Talking Swords are not a new concept in fantasy fiction, but I've always been a bit averse to the trope. In this book especially, the idea wears a bit thin, especially once there are two such enchanted weapons travelling with the main group of characters, and after a while it feels like both of them are constantly chiming in.

I will say that until I looked it up after my drive home one day, I was dead certain that Travis Baldree was the voice actor behind "Daxter" from the PS2 "Jak and Daxter" video game series.  It turns out that he was not, which I guess tracks since that game series began quite a long time ago (sigh), but I am almost certain that Baldree used Daxter as the template for the titular "Breadknife's" voice.

While the overabundance of Enchanted Chattery did annoy me a bit, I was almost as entertained and charmed by this entry in the series as I was by the previous two, and that's more than enough to keep me interested in the next book, should Baldree decide to write one.

Of course, I'll go straight to the audio version next time.

As for my other reading "projects," I am about 80% finished with "Batman: Resurrection."

This book hasn't quite provided the relief from disappointment in the latest "Black Company" book ("Lies Weeping") that I was hoping for. 

I'm still determined to finish it, and it's not a terrible or even slightly bad piece of work, but it does kind of feel like someone's supremely competent homework assignment.

The goal seems to be to work Clayface and Hugo Strange into the world of the Tim Burton Bat-films, and it does so rather well, but after a while, I get the sense of a watching a check-list being completed rather than enjoying and exciting Batman adventure story.  

Ah, well. Better luck with the next (non-Batman tie-in) book, let's hope.

I also recently Ebay'd a complete run of the "Justice Machine" comics from Comico, including the 4-issue "Justice Machine featuring the Elementals" mini-series. I've read enough of the series before to know that what was done with the series ended up having several differences between what writer Tony Isabella (and others) decided to do with the story compared to what I've read through several times in my beloved "Heroes Unlimited" JM sourcebook, but that's fine. The sheer volume of pages of (mostly) Mike Gustovich's art will easily put a balm on those minor injuries to my head canon.

Also delivered to me via Ebay is the "DNAgents" sourcebook for the classic "Villains and Vigilantes" RPG. I never actually got to read more than an issue or two of that series back when it was coming out (or since), so this will be a fun way to "review" the material while also getting a kick out of seeing the characters' "write-ups" in good ol' V&V.

Okay, that's enough for now, I guess!

Reading Roundup: "Lies Weeping" by Glen Cook

 Yes, I finally finished ONE of the novels I mentioned reading back at the end of December.

That novel was "Lies Weeping" the 10th (? Feels like more than that have been written) novel in the "Black Company" series.

My short review: this is the weakest entry in the series to date. I still enjoyed reading it, but yeah: dead last place in the Chronicles for me.

Somewhat longer review comments:

• The dual Annalist chapters kept things breezy between the ponderous Shivetya info-dump chapters.
• If Cook didn't tell me which Voroshk girl was narrating, it would be hard to tell, though.
• Using "boob-monster" as the way to let us know that we were listening to Shukrat talk about Arkana is not the way to establish this. The constant mention of one character's breast size is cringe-inducing, creepy, and just reeks of "old man writes teen girl characters" all at once.  These are the Chronicles of the Black Company, not the Files of Epstein Island, right? RIGHT?
• This was at best half of a novel stretched out to fill 371 pages. I was having so much fun just being back "in" the world of the Black Company that I didn't mind...much.
• The ending itself is completely unforgivable, with the last sentence depicting one of our protagonists literally about to attack one of the main antagonists...but not even carrying out that attack. Cook expects his readers to wait a full year to essentially see how a punch that's just been thrown ends up landing. 
• I will say that since I did not read "Port of Shadows," which was apparently released previous to this book, and found myself not feeling very lost at all, that this book did a decent job of making this lapsed reader feel more or less at home.
• If this were somehow to be anyone's first exposure to the Black Company series, I strongly doubt that they'd bother reading any further.

Better luck next November, I guess!

Reading Roundup Dec 21 2025: "Ring of Worlds" and "A Thing Immortal!"

 Recently finished prose reading! Exciting every time!

I finally got around to finishing this one on Kindle, and it was a pretty great chapter in the "Steel Ring" series, which makes use of various characters from golden age publisher "Centaur Comics" that have long since fallen into the Public Domain. Author R.A. Jones previously used versions of these characters in the 1990s in a series from Malibu Comics called "The Protectors" and its various spin-offs, but this novel series represents a completely different take on those properties. The comic book series set the characters in what was then the modern world, but the prose series takes place in their "native" 1940s or so. This book, minimal spoilers aside, starts with our heroes suffering a major defeat and getting scattered through time and space. Along the way, we meet new heroes and villains from various time periods, possibly based on more Public Domain figures (or not), followed by the heroes reassembling and meeting in an other-dimensional nexus in scene very much like the one depicted on the cover above. The cast returns to Earth to find they've missed two years of WWII, it's now 1944, and the President has a new assignment for them called "Operation Overlord."  Unfortunately, this seems to be where the series itself rather mysteriously ends. There's a cryptic note out there from the publisher about how the series would be "discontinued" in early 2025, and I can find no evidence that the fifth entry was ever actually published. It's too bad, because even though I felt this series had its flaws, it was obviously engaging enough for me to read 4 of its full-length-novel-length offerings. If anyone knows if/when/where the 5th entry is available, I would love to know.

This is an excellent self-contained "tale of western horror" by Barry Gregory, a man who runs the pretty great "IndyPlanet" print-on-demand independent comic book service, and who also authors grizzled crime fiction under the name "Barry Kithe" besides other works under this name. I had started reading this one on Kindle Vella, and then Vella was shut down before I could finish it. I likely could have still finished the book in that format, but I figured I'd toss Barry a few bucks for the regular Kindle version as well. I'm pretty sure he's using AI for his cover art, and normally that's a full stop for me, but I'm making an exception for him as he's done so much for the indie comic/artist community with IndyPlanet. Maybe that's why I should hold him MORE accountable instead, but here we are. The text of the book itself is fantastic. Probably one of my favorite adventure/horror novels I've ever read, in fact. It largely follows three characters, through chapter bearing their titles "The Manhunter, The Gunslinger, and the Wing-Thief," and before it's al said and done, this trio will have taken you on a journey that involves Native American magic (known as "medicine" throughout), serial resurrection, gods dead, alive, and of death itself, as well as some pretty mind-bending time travel. That being said, the story is very engaging and not confusing to follow, and the chapters are just the right length to keep you bouncing from character to character until their stories intertwine.  This is marketed and described as a "horror" story, and there are certainly very gory and grim elements to the proceedings, and a lot of them, but at no point did I feel like I did when I read the first "Necroscope" book, which is my watermark for "books that feature patently impossible elements that kind of had me scared anyway." STILL: I absolutely recommend this book, and I intend read more prose fiction by Mr. Gregory as soon as my ADD-addled brain can get 'round to it.

That's it for December!  Up next in my prose queue (and in PRINT, even) are:

 

and:

SteepleJack for High Five RPG!

 It's been too long since I made a random "High Five" character, so... I made one!

Check him out!

Diversions #22 from Blue Moon Comics

"Diversions" is one of my favorite modern day ongoing comic book series, as one could tell by persuing this very blog.

However, even a favorite can come out with an installment (episode, issue, album, etc) that lands a little "softer" than most. 

Getting right to it, here's the cover to Blue Moon Comics' "Diversions" #22:

Now, the cover itself is right up my retro alley, if you don't mind my phrasing, there. It's colorful, dynamic, well-composed, and it's got nice, big dramatic word balloons on it! High marks, as usual from this series, I say.

The intro page, or "frontispiece" as some call it, is also excellent; continuing a very welcome trend of giving the super-talented Dana Black free reign to tease the reader with all the exciting contents of the latest issue:

As for the contents themselves; this time around, I had some (more or less minor) problems with every story in the book.

The opening "Max Miracle" tale is possibly the strongest in the book in some ways, especially in the raw, unhinged "Silver Age" flavor of it all; it's actually almost got a Golden Age level of craziness to it, which I am a fan of when it's done right.  However, the main character is drawn to look like a teenager throughout, and I seem to recall him looking more like a "Doc Savage" or "Tom Strong" sort of hero in his previous appearances. Other than that, the art by Dell Barras is great, with clear storytelling that keeps you up to speed with the breakneck pace and crazy ideas that whiz by you over the course of the 8-page proceedings.

I also wish that Max Miracle's powers were explained a little more; maybe some details on just who the "five other heroes" he is apparently made up of are/were, and why/how they ended up combined into one being (apparently across all realities), etc. And while I see where writer Lloyd Smith is coming from, I would have liked to see a more consistent approach to the matter of Max Miracle's personal pronoun(s). Max uses "we" self-referentially at times, but "I" at others times, and the narration refers to Max with the singular "he" but also says that Max "is/are" the only "being(s) on FF420 with certain powers. Again, I can see why these terms were used, but they didn't seem to have a consistent application, which resulted in pulling me out of the story a bit every time.

The story itself left me scratching my head a little, too: Max needs to essentially steal a rare object from a formidably protected location, and is even confronted by a seemingly immortal guardian while doing so. However, it's never clear why the object needs to be hoarded so jealously, when there seem to be tons of them just sitting at the bottom of a stream, and Max just needs one of them to save an entire planet. 

Again, I mostly enjoyed this one, but found I had to re-read it a few times, and each, those minor quibbles bugged me a little bit more. Also, the name of the planet "FF420" seemed like an easter egg, but when I looked up Fantastic Four #420, I discovered that it referred to the fourth issues of Jim Lee's "Heroes Reborn" reboot of the series, of which I could think of nothing worth remembering...

Up next is "How to Win Friends and Influence People" or "Toom! Son of Toombora!" by the aforementioned writer/artist Dana Black. In his third outing as solo auteur in this series, Dana takes yet another experimental approach to the storytelling; using mostly just two panels across each of the 8 pages that are allotted to his tale. 

While Dana's experiments worked very well for me before, this time around, it just really didn't. Each page is its own "vignette," featuring a large image of the child-monster named TOOM engaging in misguidedly destructive antics, and some human character in a smaller panel commenting on their history with the titular titan.

It's all extremely well-drawn, colored, and composed, and Dana's talent for dialogue even made me chuckle out loud right on the first page. I even caught his own "cameo" in the story, which was a fun Easter Egg for those of us in the know. 

However...it just didn't "add up" to feeling like a story to me. It's all incredibly cool to look at, even amusing to read, but I kind of wanted more of a narrative through-line, which is perhaps my fault and no one else's.  I am looking forward to having my physical copy delivered, as these page sin particular will be so cool to look at "in person."

The next feature, "Per Aspera Ad Astra," which means "through hardship to the stars," was unfortunately something that just didn't appeal to me at all. In fact, its message seemed more than mildly misogynistic, with a bunch of men running a death gauntlet to win a woman's hand in marriage, only for the sole survivor to be killed as well when he could not produce the "password." A wealthy man then rolls up in an expensive car and recites the password, which is "One Million Dollars," and he is then allowed, well, "possession" of the female human "prize." The woman is treated like an object, and will only approve of the man who values her in the most materialistic fashion. I honestly would rather lose these nine pages of the issue and still pay the same price for it, honestly.

Ending things on a (much) more positive note is the second chapter in the ongoing revival of "Mercury: the Hero Rises" story, and I am pleased to say that I am very much still engaged and looking forward to more of this story about legacy and the very nature of heroism. My only nitpick here has to do with the fasct that the original hero is said to have been dead for 20 years at the time of this chapter. I thought that the other "heroes" were already running around murdering "bad guys" in chapter one? This sort of thing has now been going on for two decades? And Xenos is only picking a successor for his old pal Mercury now? It seemed that this only needed to be happening a year at most after the events of chapter one to me.

So, yes, this was one of the weaker issues of "Diversions" in my opinion. REMEMBER, though, that this one of my favorite series, and I only TRULY disliked one offering between these two covers. I said when I re-started blogging about comics recently that I would not be beholden to act as the "press release" center for other people's work, but I do admit that is perhaps hardest to write even slightly negative remarks about something you otherwise enjoy. Especially at length. 

And this has been a long post!

I hereby release you to do things more worthy of your time!

(TO BE CLEAR: I mostly enjoyed this issue, and am still a Blue Moon Comics "Luna"-tic, eh?)