Awesome Overload

World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.

This is ridiculously impressive, beautiful, and sweet, and needs sharing, no matter how off-topic it may be. Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for posting about it, and also for this this, which I tried myself, and it's just amazing:

Seemed like a good idea at the time

I was looking for my old Watchmen issues last night, and decided my comics could use some reorganizing . . .

UPDATE: I really am aghast at some of the '90s X-crossover crap and Image shit I bought back in the day. What was I thinking?!?

We're all geeks now.

Adam Serwer at Tapped (American Prospect) defends comic book geekery, and is seconded by Atrios and Steve Benen, while Matthew Yglesias geeks out over a Watchmen reference by Ana Marie Cox.

Help identify this comics cover?

This is in the spirit of Kindertrauma's NAME THAT TRAUMA series, since it's an image from my childhood that has really stuck with me and haunts my psyche to this day. I remember seeing in a grocery store checkout line a comic book cover that featured the Human Torch (I'm pretty sure) getting skewered by a pitchfork, or maybe a trident? The time period had to have been between 1973 at the very earliest (I would have been three years old--can't imagine recalling an image like that from a younger age) and 1978 at the latest. As I recall (perhaps incorrectly), it was a fairly busy cover with a lot going on, but that horrific detail jumped out at me, because it showed the tines actually poking out through his back or something of the sort--the sense of impalement was very clear and vivid, however it was rendered. I'd be interested in looking at any Bronze Age comics covers that depict someone getting stabbed through with a pitchfork or trident. Thanks!

Update--here's one possibility:

Any others?

Sexy Witch at new digs!

After getting slapped with a content warning and other nonsense at blogger, Sexy Witch has relocated to wordpress. Let's give her some traffic and wish her well!

DIRTY GAME by Jessie Keane (Harper 2008)

Every once in a while, the "women's fiction" version of a genre that interests me will tempt me enough to cross over and check it out--and it becomes clear to me, very quickly, why it's a separate category. Paranormal romance may employ horror tropes and trappings like vampires, werewolves, and gothic stylings, but it aims to deliver a fundamentally different emotional experience, and its narrative conventions are accordingly distinct.

I bought this in the hopes of a somewhat gritty crime novel set in Swinging London, and halfway through, I'm afraid it's just not meeting any of those expectations for me. It's really a "women's fiction" version of a somewhat gritty crime novel, by which I mean the gritty crime elements provide the colorful details in a romance story mainly concerned with feelings and relationships. As for the setting, I'm finding almost nothing in the way of a Swinging London vibe. Neither the period nor the city come across with any vividness at all.

This gets great reviews at amazon.uk, so it's probably quite a good example of the kind of novel it is. My own wishful thinking just led me to misinterpret the otherwise accurate marketing and promotional blurbs, and thus I came to it with the wrong expectations.

MONSTERS & GIRLS: AMELIA by Denis St. John

When creator Denis St. John offered me a review copy of this comic, I asked if he'd be e-mailing a pdf or if he needed my address for a physical copy, to which he replied, "I'll mail out a physical copy, I always prefer that to a pdf." I could certainly see why when I removed it from the envelope. My eyes popped, I literally said, "Whoa!" out loud, and even the tactile quality of the artifact (for so it is) blew me away. The cover-scan above, though it does to some extent showcase St. John's stunning design, really does no justice to the impression it makes when you (be)hold it in your hands. I don't know--maybe regular collectors of mini-comics are more accustomed to this experience, but it was quite new for me.

All right, so what about the comic itself? S. R. Bissette's blurb likens it to all sorts of stuff, and Richard Sala's name is the very first he invokes. I'd definitely agree with that. It might seem unfair to compare this comic by St. John to Sala's work, which has matured finely over years in both storytelling and art, but I see it as more of a selling point--if Sala's comics are a dark, crooked lane off the mainstream, St. John's work is a darker, crookeder alley off of that, and I think many Sala fans would find it well worth exploring. Whereas Sala constructs weird, skewed worlds from relatively familiar reference points (silent serials, pulp mags, film noir, gothic horror), St. John constructs a similarly weird, skewed world from reference points that are quite a bit more personal and opaque. Even when he throws in something recognizable, the significance remains obscure.

Here's another point of contrast worth mentioning. Sala's work is full of pretty girls and playful sexiness, but never goes "all the way" with it. I can't tell how attractive Amelia is supposed to be. She looks fairly cute in some panels, but her expressions are . . . off, somehow, most of the time. Suffice it to say, she's no Peculia. That's not necessarily a bad thing, since she seems perfectly suited to everything else in this comic. St. John totally goes there with the sex, and it is squicky.

Overall, he does a wonderful job of evoking a moody world of mystery, as intriguing as it is inscrutable, full of concealed motives, bizarre antiques with occult power, and characters with names like "The Mustache Man." I'd second this reviewer's mostly positive take, and recommend checking this out. Buy the comic here--with bonus glow-in-the-dark eyeball (while they last)!

THE SPOTTED MEN by Kenneth Robeson (Bantam 1977)

• Originally published in Doc Savage Magazine, March 1940
• Reprinted by Bantam as DS # 87
• William G. Bogart writing as Kenneth Robeson

Doc Savage battles potbellied shirtless guys with unfortunate skin.

Seemingly at random, workers at Mason Steel Plant No. 5 near Albany, New York are stricken with a strange illness producing huge pimple-like blotches on their faces, hands and torsos. The malady also causes sudden, uncontrollable fits of homicidal/suicidal rage — afflicted men are killing themselves and their co-workers in often gruesome ways. (One poor shlub has a bucket of molten steel poured over him.) Coincident with this terrifying outbreak (or is it?), products made using Mason Industries’ revolutionary new “T3” process are inexplicably failing, the supposedly super-strong alloy snapping into brittle shards even under normal stress. When company owner J. Henry Mason mysteriously vanishes in the midst of the crisis, panicked plant engineer “Tink” O’Neil summons Doc Savage for help. The bronze man will need to work fast… O’Neill tells him that, at that very moment, Doc’s thrillseeking cousin Patricia is test-piloting an airplane made with the faulty T3 steel.

This is your typical William Bogart Doc — utterly bland, about as generic a Doc Savage adventure as you can get. The mystery involves a case of industrial sabotage, of course; it’s a plot to ruin the Mason steel firm on the stock market. The behind-the-scenes mastermind — whose identity is pathetically easy to guess — then plans to buy up the company and produce uncompromised T3 at a huge profit. Doc, with the aid of Ham, Monk and Renny, quickly deduces the source of the spotting disease (chemically tainted salt tablets ingested by workers in the broiling hot mill) and susses out the saboteurs planted among the employees. Bogart doesn’t bother naming or describing the compound causing the splotching and madness; suffice it that Doc knows what it is and has the exact counteragent at hand. “Woman of Bronze” Pat Savage gets a heroic scene when she successfully crash-lands her disintegrating plane, but then disappears for the rest of the story once kidnapped by the villain’s thugs.

Zzzzzz.

Grade: D

Who's NOT honoring me now?

Splatcademy Awards

(shakes fist and shouts:) FINAL GIIIIIIIRL!!!

Haha--congratulations, Stacie!

Storie Viola N. 8: Strumenti Diabolici (Diabolic instruments), Published in June 1986

I'm not even trying to explain the plot of this one, it's just too complex, but there's a lot of underwater skeleton action:



Eventually the skeleton comes up for air, though.



Man, I just love living skeletons. If the world had any justice, they'd be as popular as zombies.



The first nightmare I remember having was about a skeleton teacher. I was trying to escape from its classroom, but even if I'd manage to get out, the skeleton would push a button of a strange machine...



...and I'd be back in a flash. Same kind of thing happens also to the male protagonist of this story, which I find immensely satisfying in a kindertrauma sort of way.



The skeleton in my dream didn't suck off my flesh to become a babe, though. Damn. The End.



P.S. The second nightmare I remember having was about the Finnish actor Vesa-Matti Loiri:



It also featured his actor buddy Simo Salminen:



In the dream Vesa-Matti had a single red rose, and for some reason he wanted to sting me with its thorns. I tried to run away, but he sent Simo after me, and even though I ran around the whole world many times, the man followed me relentlessly like laser-guided missile. In the end they cornered me in my grandparents' cowhouse, and just when I was about to get stung, I woke up. I doubt I'll ever find a fumetti featuring that kind of action, but one can always dream (pun intended)...