Jess Nevins is a Scholar. He's the type of Bibliophile &
Pop-Cultural Scholar that would be right at home in
Riskail, and I mean that in the best possible way. His work in
Annotating various comic book series such as
Kingdom Come led into his compiling a
series of in-depth Annotations for Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neil's
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen which in turn led to the publication of his
annotations (plus some essays, a great introduction and an interview with Alan Moore as well) as
Heroes & Monsters . A second volume,
A Blazing World, was likewise compiled from Nevin's erudite annotations and informed ruminations concerning the League's Second Series. He has also gone on to annotate
The Black Dossier in his
Impossible Territories, and
Century: 1910, which is an on-going project that you can find
here.
If you want a quick idea of just how formidable a task it is that Nevins took on in annotating the
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, take a look at this
list of the literary characters appearing in these 'funny-books.'
But that's just one example/project. Jess Nevin has also compiled a very thorough and eminently readable & enjoyable essay on
Timely Comics, the shop that became Atlas and then Marvel. He has also expanded upon that essay with a number of follow-up essays on many of the classic and criminally neglected
Timely Comics Characters such as
The Blue Blaze,
The American Avenger,
Dakor The Magician,
The Invisible Man,
Hercules,
The Thin Man,
The Black Widow,
Merzah The Mystic,
The Black Marvel, and even
Sub-Earth Man. Whew. And there's more. Like the
3Xs, but that's enough for now. Fascinating stuff. The Thin Man isn't Nick Charles, he's a super-scientist from a happy valley in the Himalayas who can turn himself super thin to get into places ordinary guys can't. Oh and he has a beautiful assistant named Oalla who helps him out. Likewise the Timely Comics'
Black Widow isn't a Russian spy who bears an uncanny resemblance to Scarlett Johanssen, but rather is the
"...strangest, most terrifying character in action picture magazines - the Black Widow. You've heard of the black widow spider - that evil creature whose bite spells doom. Now start the adventures of another black widow - a human tool of Satan whose very touch means death." Yeah. You read it. They wrote it. This is a character that I definitely want to learn more about, and probably would never have learned about at all if it hadn't been for Jess Nevins--Superhero Scholar and Librarian of the Lost Antiquities of Pop Literature. Ah the
Golden Age of
Comics, the more I learn about it, the more I come to realize just how short-changed we've been thanks to corporate myopia and greed...but that's a topic for another day, another post.
But there's much, much more. Jess Nevins has also done a great deal of research and annotation involving the
Golden Age Superheroes and the
Pre-Fantastic Four #1 Superheroes of Marvel Comics (The comics Giant that grew out of
Timely above...). He offers you a glimpse into the forgotten and buried secret history of the
Blazing Skull,
Dynamic Man,
The Eternal Brain,
KaZar (before he became a hippy), and
Vagabond & the Fighting Hobo (Both of whom sound like off-beat heroes that you might meet in
The City), amongst many, many others. (Some of whom overlap with the aforementioned
Timely characters, being in fact direct continuations or revisions of those earlier superheroes--comics, especially older comics, are more than a little cannibalistic as well as incestuous.) There is even a page devoted to the
Lost Generation of Marvel heroes active prior to the Fantastic Four's fateful (and all-too-often-and-Badly-RetConned) rocket-trip. You can find more details on the Lost generation characters
here.
He has also has contributed some rather intriguing things to the
Wold Newton Universe community such as the priceless
You Weren't Nuthin' But A Hound Dog essay that really throws the
WNU to the dogs by speculating on the canine descendants of a bitch irradiated by the meteor that set all of the WNU into motion in 1795. You can find a set of links to Nevin's WNU essays here. The essays on
The Carters of Virginia: A Tragedy and
Reach For Yuh Genealogical Charts, Stranger are really well-done. It is especially weird and wonderful to consider the implications of
John Carter (
Warlord of Mars) being related to
Randolph Carter (the
Silver Key wielding Dream-master from
HPL's tales). It certainly is
one way to make a
Statement. Nevins is also a contributor to the Win Scott Eckert edited anthology of P. J. Farmer WNU-focused parascholarship
Myths for a Modern Age.
Have you ever heard of
Captain Mors aka der Luftpirat? You can find out about this forgotten hero of the German Dime-Novels of the Early Twentieth-Century. In some respects he gives a German spin on Verne's Robur
the Conquerer (with some Robin Hood style quasi-socialism) and might even be considered a distinct predecessor to Perry Rhodan. His adventures were far-ranging to say the least, extending out unto the rest of our solar system and possibly beyond in at least 165 installments, most of which remain in German. The dime-novel series featuring Captian Mors was very possibly the first Science Fiction magazine, but that's an argument for Scholars to settle with their swords. In the meantime, you can check out one of the two E-Text versions of Captain Mor's adventures
here, thanks to Jess Nevins (and Justin Gilbert who translated it over from the German). Like
Perry Rhodan and
Dray Prescott, there is a great deal of this stuff that is trapped in German language just begging to be translated and unleashed upon an otherwise unsuspecting English-reading audience...
If you are at all interested in doing research into
Literature,
Art,
Books,
Comics,
Maps,
Medieval Stuff,
History, or
Role Playing (amongst many other things), Jess Nevins provides pages upon pages of links and references for you to make use of including his exceptional list of
Reference Texts. And yes, I realize that his page of Role-Playing links is a bit out of date, but with all the stuff this guy has going on, that's perfectly understandable, and besides, it's still a very extensive list that is worth investigating. The
Anarchy & Espionage page is perhaps my favorite of the bunch, but that's because it is the most appropriate to the next few Riskail posts. You can find a directory-list of Jess Nevins assorted
Bookmarks here. It's quite a lot of resources, so you'll definitely want to bookmark it yourself.
Nevins has also built an
Online Directory to Golden Age Heroes that offers a listing of just about every known Golden Age Hero from 1935-1949, all arranged from A to Z and navigated via the little box on the upper left. This is an incredible treasure-trove of obscure, esoteric and mostly forgotten information sure to help others in their research efforts. It's a handy reference for digging back through the accumulated data-debris in order to look up or locate obscure old characters that might have fallen not only into obscurity, but the Public Domain. Alternative sites in this area include
The Mystery Men & Mystery Women Encyclopedia, Hero Goggles'
Golden Age Superhero and Villain Encyclopedia,
Cash Gorman's Golden Age Encyclopedia,
Mikel Midnight's Golden Age Directory, and others whom I hope to get to in the near future. And of course there is Jeff Rovin's amazing
Encyclopedia of Super Heroes
. You might also want to check out
Lev Gleasons' Comics Page for a bunch more Golden Age links.
If you're a fan of the classic superhero
Lee Falk's Phantom then you might want to check out these posts over at Nevins'
No Fear of the Future blog:
Painted by Pygmies, and
The Color Purple (as rendered in black newspaper ink). He also maintains a
Livejournal that is simply fascinating, if you are interested in the market shares of the old Pulps from back in their hey day, which I actually am. All those numbers came out of the process of assembling
The Pulp Magazine Holding Directory
, which is about as rampant a bit of nerdistry as you can shake a stick at, but it's damn cool...to anyone really, really interested in the Pulps.
You can also find a wonderful article at io9 by Jess Nevins that details the development of
Science Fiction from out of the Pulps.
And if you are interested in the
Pulp and Adventure Heroes of the Pre-War Years then you need to go
here. Right now. No fooling. Jess Nevins has compiled another incredible collection of Heroes dragged from the cold wreckage of the earliest days of the Pulp and Adventure magazine days, all of it alphabetized, annotated and presented as a wonderful jumping-off point for really diving into this are of the Pop Cultural Underworld/Wasteland for days on end.
Then there's the vast amount of
Fantastic Victoriana stuff that Jess Nevins has likewise compiled, annotated and converted into an
Encyclopedia of the Fantastic Victoriana. The site offers you a wealth of incredible, well-researched and fun essays that range from
A to
Z. He has also included at this site
a detailed list of links for researching the Fantastic Victoriana all for yourself--a true gift to every would-be steampunk and Victoriaphile out there.
Is this the end for Jess Nevins? Not by a long shot. But it is the end of this post.
