17 Oxen

3 years, 9 months ago ,, by Fred (, skip to comments
Tags: none yet
Comments Feed ,

I apparently have a thing for the 1600s. I’m in the midst of slogging my way through Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World), a three-volume, umpteen page prequel of sorts to his Cryptonomicon, which encompasses everything from…well, let’s just say it encompasses everything. In the middle of that effort, which is made decidedly more difficult by the presence of eight years worth of cumulative children, I picked up Neil Gaiman’s Marvel 1602 over the weekend, a graphic novel that places a number of the heroes from the Marvel comics universe in Queen Elizabeth/King James’ England. Both works are fascinating, but each really requires the reader to bring to the work a base of knowledge to enjoy the tale(s). The first half of Quicksilver really requires a base of knowledge about Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz, Robert Hooke, John Wilkins and Christopher Wren. Marvel 1602, on the other hand, does a good job of laying out the history, but requires one to have a base of information about Marvel’s Silver Age from the 1960s (Fantastic Four, Dr. Strange, Nick Fury, X-Men, Spider-man, Daredevil, etc.)

Share This

Leave a Reply