Fun But A Little Disappointing

Doom's Day trilogy
Boulevard Books
Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk: Rampage by Fanny Fingeroth and Eric Fein
Spider-Man and Iron Man: Sabotage by Pierce Askegren and Danny Fingeroth
Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four: Wreckage by Eric Fein and Pierce Askegren
Steven Butler, illustrations

I don't read just comic books; I read quite a bit of prose, as well. So I'm usually excited to see characters I enjoy from the comics featured in prose novels -- as long as they are well written. Roger Stern did a nice job adapting the comic storyline into the novel "The Death and Life of Superman," and the book was a joy to read. Peter David's novelization of the feature film "Batman Forever" is a lot better than the film was, especially in the scenes dealing with the origin of Robin. I've also picked up some anthologies that collect prose stories featuring Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and Spider-Man that I have greatly enjoyed, largely, I think, because they were such short stories.

There were a number of novels released in the mid- to late-1990s featuring various Marvel Comics characters, and I was very happy to see them appear on bookstore shelves at the time. But now that I have actually had time to read some of them, they are a pretty mixed bunch. Spider-Man and the X-Men were the subjects of the lion's share of these books. Iron Man starred in two adventures, "The Armor Trap" and "Operation: A.I.M.," and I have to say both of those novels fell kind of flat for me.

These three books are a notch above the Iron Man solo novels. They include some genuinely fun moments and great characterization by some writers familiar to the comics field. In the first, a renegade scientist with ties to both Hydra and A.I.M., two Marvel terrorist organization mainstays, attempts to create controllable duplicates of the incredible Hulk in a secret base beneath Manhattan. He must first capture the real Hulk for study, and his actions later draw the attention of Spider-Man when Spidey's friend, Flash Thompson, is one of the poor lugs transformed into a gamma-irradiated beast. In the second novel, first Hydra and then A.I.M. try to take control of Tony Stark's latest invention, the Infinity Engine, which promises to provide a cheap, clean energy source for the world. The terrorist organizations' attempts to pervert Stark technology draw the attention of not only Spidey, but also Iron Man. Both of these novels also include characters from a government organization named S.A.F.E. I'm not sure if S.A.F.E. ever appeared in any actual Marvel Comics of the time, but in the novels, they are a U.S. organization created to stand in for S.H.I.E.L.D., which had taken on a more international role. As one might guess from the name of the trilogy, Victor von Doom, Dr. Doom, is also a background player in the first two novels. Finally, in the third novel, Dr. Doom takes center stage using technologies perfected in both of the previous two novels in his latest bid to conquer the world. This brings together Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four to challenge him.

As I said before, all three books have some great moments and some stellar action sequences. But all three also tend to bog down a bit when it comes to the background descriptions and motivational narration. Descriptions can help a reader imagine the scene, but overkill on descriptions can pull the reader out of the story. That tends to be the issue here sometimes. Other times the descriptions just get a little tedious and repetitive, dragging the story pacing down from what one might expect from an action/adventure type of story. One further criticism, directed solely at the third novel, is the layout of the book. I was surprised at first to see that the third novel is about 50 pages shorter than the previous two. That is, until I started trying to read the third novel and found out why. The page margins on the third paperback are much smaller than the first two novels, running right down to the bottom edge of the page, and quite far into the spine of the book, making it somewhat harder to hold and read comfortably. There also seemed to be a pretty large number of typos in these three books, but that is something more on the editing side of things.

All in all, if you enjoy these characters, these books are fun reads, but I wouldn't put them at the top of the stack. Marvel has recently announced that it plans more prose novels based on some of its more popular company-wide crossover storylines. The plan is to launch the series with a prose adaptation of its popular Civil War limited series from 2006; that novel was released last week. Hopefully, Marvel does a little better with this latest round of prose novels.