The Groovy Age of Horror

Cimiteria N. 35: Quasimodo Incinto (Pregnant Quasimodo), published in August 1978

2012-01-20T19:51:00.000-05:00

I have not followed superhero comics since the eighties, but recently on a Finnish comic book forum I happened to come across a thread complaining about how superheroines are always posing sexily for the male reader. I was reading Cimiteria at the time and realized that even though the series is partially porn, the heroine hardly ever poses for the "camera", which I found both ironic and satisfying: she's so fucking cool she doesn't need to! And in any case her adventures contain plenty of stuff that's definitely not designed for the male eye, the following "story" being a good example. But before we start, to avoid giggling, please repeat to yourself:

IT'S ONLY FUMETTI...
IT'S ONLY FUMETTI...
It's only fumetti...
it's only fumetti...

Ok, here goes. As you all remember, Cimiteria has a hunchback servant/lover called Quasimodo. After a visit to the Bermuda triangle and a subsequent rape by an alien from the planet of homosexuals, the poor little guy gets pregnant. Here are some snapshots from the family album:

Giving birth is a pain in the ass:

It's a boy:

Hey, that's not how you make breast milk:

The kid's name is Robby, by the way, and he can kill people with his gaze, but that's another story. Anyway, I bet those superhero comics look much more healthy and balanced by now ;-)

New Doc Savage novel just published!

2012-01-09T10:09:00.011-05:00

FYI, fans of the Bronze Man... Altus Press has just released an all-new Doc Savage novel, the second in their "New Wild Adventures" imprint: Horror in Gold, by Will Murray writing as Kenneth Robeson. (The first was The Desert Demons, reviewed for Groovy Age here.) I haven't read this one yet, but I certainly dig the cool pulpy cover art!

I was also pleased to see that Horror in Gold and The Desert Demons are available in substantially cheaper Kindle editions. In fact, a tiny handful of the original Doc novels of the 1930s and '40s have been converted to the e-book format, too, although they're admittedly not among the topnotch series entries... Murder Melody, Cold Death, The Black Spot, He Could Stop the World, Haunted Ocean, Murder Mirage, and Land of Long Juju are the only (original) Doc books I've been able to find so far for the Kindle.

Happy 2012 from Akujo

2012-01-06T09:56:00.000-05:00

Akujo says:

Happy 2012 Groovy Agers!

It's taken much longer than I'd anticipated, but my third scanlation is finally complete. Storie Blu #62: IL MOSTRO VIOLA was was first released on Monday, July 23rd, 1984 by Ediperiodici.

Something sinister is going on at the Hotel Rexon, and crack journalist Cyd Brougham is determined to find out what!

Beginning with this post, I'm going to start giving scenario and artist credits for each book to the best of my ability.

Candida la Marchesa #2 was written by Renzo Barbieri, drawn by Vincenzo Monti and the cover by Alessandro Biffignandi.

Storie Blu Special #15 was written by Carmelo Gozzo and drawn by Francesco Blanc.

Storie Blu #62 (this fumetti here) was also written by Carmelo Gozzo and drawn by Manlio Truscia.

I hope that you all enjoy this one and I'll do my best to get the next one ready for February!

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=GEAH5T3N

Mirrors:
https://rapidshare.com/files/2333700258/Storie_Blu_62__English___Akujo_.zip
http://www.sendspace.com/file/1g5ysb

Merry Boxing Day

2011-12-26T12:18:00.000-05:00

Santa got what he deserved, long live Madame Brutal and her man-hating lesbian cruelty!

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus!

2011-12-24T14:34:00.002-05:00

Poor Virginia, she's been captured and drugged by Santa, who's about sell her body to his buddy Satan. But wait, a fumetti heroine might soon arrive to rescue her. All you have to do is call her name five times: Madame Brutal, Madame Brutal, Madame Brutal, Madame Brutal, Madame Brutal. Do this quickly, and I guarantee you a Merry Christmas!

ZOMBOLOGY

2011-12-12T07:39:00.000-05:00

Everybody likes zombies, right? Of course they do. Who wouldn't? But, do they have enough drive to keep an entire publishing company alive. That's what The Library of the Living Dead is counting on. It was on one of my bi annual trips to a convention called Cinema Wasteland where I ran into the people behind this concept. I asked the guy behind the table to give me his best book. It was a novel called Dead Tide which I have just started. Too soon for an opinion. I also caught the cover of Zombology and I liked the word. I also like short, zombie fiction so I took a shot.
Like a lot of anthologies, it has it's ups and downs. There are old concepts and some newer twists on the theme, but none of that matters.
What matters is 'Stop Requested' by Rhiannon Frater.
I have read a lot of fiction. Some you plow through. Some you turn each page with expectations. This is one of the few times where I amp up the speed reading abilities and the pages turn in a blur. Kind of like The Flash reading a book. Pages all a flurry. See, I actually have been trained to speed read and I can, if I focus, manage about a thousand words a minute.
This was one of those times where I wished I could have gone faster.
As an avid reader you pray for those things where the writing immerses you completely and you can't read fast enough.
I think the last time was Bite by Richard Laymon.
Does that make it worth it? Is one story worth buying a book that is filled with a great deal of mediocre fiction with a couple of gems floating within?
I considered it for quite some time and finally came up with an answer.
This story is so unique, so immersive, so compelling that I would have to say yes. The Kindle edition is only three bucks. Used it's around eight bucks. That's a lot for one story, but it's a really good story.
I'll let you know how Dead Tide turns out.

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, Season 2 (spoilers)

2011-12-04T14:03:00.000-05:00

Wow, what a great season of television! I think it may be my favorite so far, trumping anything I've seen from Lost, BSG, or any of the other shows I've checked out on my teevee kick.

It breaks down, to my mind, into three kinds of episodes. The ones I like most are obviously those on the season's main story arc, directly concerning Angel and to a lesser extent Spike. I'll discuss these in a moment.

The ones I like least are the standalone "monster of the week" eps. The saving grace of these, I think, is that they serve as breathing points in the pacing, and thereby help the main arc build more slowly and feel bigger. I don't think any of them are completely disposable, and all of them introduce at least one minor development in some relationship between characters, but they usually do so in an incidental way, and it would have been nice if they'd been integrated more tightly with the bigger, broader goings-on.

But then there's an in-between kind of episode, that does hugely important character work, but doesn't stand directly on the main arc. I'm thinking here of "Halloween" and "Dark Ages," which really showed us another side of Giles. Daaaayamn, I couldn't believe it when he went stone-cold Get Carter on that one dude! How great was it, too, seeing him in full "Groovy Age of Horror" mode during that flashback? "Phases" certainly qualifies, with its jaw-dropping revelation about Oz--oh man, I hope they let his werewolf out to fight some other monsters in later seasons!

"I Only Have Eyes for You" seems, through most of the running-time, to be an exceptionally weak "monster of the week," but the final exorcising confrontation was a masterstroke. The gender-swap surprised me, and it was startlingly cathartic to see Buffy pour those feelings out to Angel, especially considering how reprehensible those feelings had been made to seem leading up to that moment. Seeing Angel play the other part was fascinating, too, since it raises the question of how much the reenactment wasn't just taking him over, but tapping into something still deep within him. I also thought it was clever the way his vampiric immortality made him uniquely capable of completing the cycle with forgiveness, allowing the troubled spirit(s?) to pass on. Most importantly, this encounter laid some vital emotional groundwork for the two-part season finale.

Okay, so, let's get to the meat of the season. The whole Angel arc was just flat-out amazing, abounding with shocking developments, tragic ironies, and unintended consequences. His backstory is that he slaughtered a bunch of Gypsies, and the survivors of that tribe cursed him by restoring his soul so he could be tormented by remorse over his victims. But there's a failsafe clause--if having a soul ever leads to him knowing happiness again, then he loses it again. And what comes of that last little vicious twist of the knife? Two more dead Gypsies--one of them being Jenny's still-vengeful uncle, and the other being Jenny herself, even as she hurries to find a "cure" that would restore Angel's soul again. The episode where that happened, "Passion," just knocked me on my ass. Through my own careless curiosity on the internet, I had already learned that Jenny would die, and it still took my breath away, so I can only imagine what a gut-punch it must have delivered when it originally aired.

This season also introduced Spike, and did great things with him, I'd say. I'd been enjoying Buffy up to his appearance, but the scene where he so casually disposed of the Anointed One was the first moment where I felt that I was watching something truly special. Restoring Drusilla to "health" (whatever exactly that means for a vampire--obviously not mental health) cost him the use of his legs, and I loved how bitterly ironic that became when she started gravitating away from him toward Angelus, in part because of the latter's non-impairment and--even worse--his cruel stream of wheelchair jokes! Spike's savage (however relatively insignificant) beating of Angelus in the finale was a satisfying and well-earned character payoff.

As for missteps, when they introduced Kendra, I thought she'd make a fantastic occasionally-recurring character. I was thrilled to see her return for the finale--and outraged at her perfunctory death. What an idiotic waste of such a promising character, to no worthwhile effect, and to no purpose that I could see. If that was the "point," the show lost more than it gained by making it.

I would much rather have seen Xander killed, as he was even more of an irksome douchebag this season. When they paired him off with Cordelia, I was hopeful at least that this would get him out of Willow's and Buffy's hair, but no--it only gave him one more girl toward whom he could act like a totally petulant, passive-aggressive asshole. His despicable confession to Willow that he "loves" her while a) she's happily involved with someone else, b) she's fucking COMATOSE, and c) he's supposedly involved with someone himself, made me really want to see him get curb-stomped by someone . . . anyone!

My final complaint is that this show really plays the ZOMG DOOMSDAY card too often, only to avert it way too easily. That happened twice in this season alone--once with the big blue Judge and than in the finale with the petrified vortex demon. I like occasional threats that are bigger and scarier than Ted or those fish guys, but it gets cheap to have so many with world-ending capability, especially when they get put down so easily in only one or two episodes.

On to season 3!

"The Annoying One"

2011-12-03T00:30:00.000-05:00

ZOMG, I just finished the third ep of Buffy Season 2. I guess that's what they mean by "jossed."

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, season 1

2011-12-02T22:15:00.000-05:00

I guess it's about damn time I checked this series out. I missed it on teevee for the same reason I missed Battlestar Galactica: the original was so underwhelming I couldn't see the promise in a reboot, and by the time I caught the buzz that it was awesome, I figured I had missed the boat. Well, that's the great thing about dvd sets--now I can catch up, start to finish!

The person loaning me this collection emphasized that the budget gets better after the first season. Honestly, though, I'm less interested in better production values and effects than I am in seeing bigger, longer, deeper stories. The first season wasn't bad in that regard--though only twelve episodes long and mostly episodic in structure, it did also serialize a longer arc that built from the first episode to a culmination in the season finale. From the second season on, the episode count ramps up to 22, and from what I understand, it becomes more strongly serialized too, so I'm really looking forward to that.

I find the cast/characters mostly appealing. Sarah Michelle Gellar is credible enough so far as Buffy, though it seems she has some room to grow into the role. FSM only fucking knows why smoking-hot Alyson Hannigan always winds up "geeky" and "homely," as she does here in the role of Willow, but oh well. Xander is annoying as fuck, but that seems to be by design, since he's the unfortunate load-bearing corner for everything bad in the whole love quadrangle. Anthony Stewart Head as Giles is likable from the start, but the chemistry that sparks when the lovely and fascinating Ms. Calendar gets thrown into the mix raises his game to a whole new level--I really hope to see more of her, and that their relationship goes somewhere good.

Sunnydale is already absurd as a setting--a small community suffering atrocities on a weekly basis, any one of which would shock the whole nation, but I guess that's one of the show's conventions, so I'll just grin and go with it.

And that's pretty much all I have for now. I'll reserve a few more opinions until I'm deeper into the series. Stay tuned, and stay groovy!

Original fumetti cover art

2011-12-02T12:28:00.001-05:00

Mark Alfrey has a collection of original fumetti cover art, and was generous enough to offer me the chance to post it. Here's the first batch, with accompanying scans of the fumetti covers for which the art was used. It never ceases to amaze me, how macabrely beautiful this stuff can be. Thanks so much, Mark!!!

My little brother having fun with a camera, some friends . . . and stuffed animals

2011-12-02T12:08:00.001-05:00

Oltretomba: conclusion

2011-11-30T14:52:00.006-05:00

Oltretomba ended in September 1986. The final issue was Oltretomba N. 300: Stirpe Di Giganti (Race Of Giants), a story about two perverted Norwegians, Christin Thornsen and Bjorn Sinding. In the village of Vadso, they witness a strange puppet show starring two enormous marionettes.

The show ends in tragedy, as the gentle giants are slain by evil dwarves.

The perverts decide to fool around with the marionette couple in secret...

...but then realize the terrible truth: the two giants are actually embalmed corpses.

It turns out the show was based on a true story: years ago two abnormally large teenager siblings were murdered by local molesters. Well, no more mister Nice Giant! The End.

After reading the whole Oltretomba Nuova Serie again, I was a little disappointed: it didn't have as many great stories as I remembered, and all too many stories were illustrated by the artist of Hell Can Wait (whoever he is), whose messy style fails more often than not. On the other hand Stirpe Di Giganti was done by the fantastic Lorenzo Lepori and still kinda sucked, thanks to a pretty forgettable plot. After some thought I've decided to end this set of reviews with one of the masterpieces of Lepori, Oltretomba N. 267: Jolly (Joker), published in December 1983. If memory serves me correctly, the French version of this story has been published completely on the BDTrash forum, but who's counting, this is such epic stuff. Let's begin:

London, year 1930. Meet Efrem and his wife Muriel. They have been invited to the mansion of Efrem's rich uncle Joseph, even though Joseph hasn't been very sosiable in the past. Copious paintings of playing cards hang on the walls of the mansion.

Joseph, however, claims that only one card has any real importance: the Joker. Because when it's wild, it can be any card at all.

Joseph also tells them that he has made his will, and Efram will be the one who will inherit all his fortune. But in the middle of his speech he suffers a fatal heart attack, and Efram and Muriel suddenly find themselves in a mysterious world, where Joker is the ruler.

He sentences Muriel to death.

But wait, all that was just a bad dream. Uncle Joseph did die, though, and Efrem did inherit his fortune. Especially Muriel is very happy about this and shows it in bed.

Efrem is still troubled about the dream, though. And he's been hearing very strange rumours about uncle Joseph: apparently the old man was into occultism, hated mirrors and was a notorius homosexual. Muriel tries to ease Efrem's mind by letting him bugger her.

Suddenly Efrem has an epiphany. He asks if Muriel remembers the time she made him come all over her face. "Of course," she says, "let's do it again!"

But in truth Muriel has never ever done such a thing. Efrem realizes that uncle Joseph has made a pact with the Joker and taken over Muriel's body, thus both cheating death and gaining a perfect disguise for making love to men. Furious Efrem uses a mirror to confirm the truth.

He strangles Muriel/Joseph to death, but in the end it solves nothing: poor Efrem will go to prison, and wild Joseph has now taken over the maid. The End.

FLESH AND BLOOD by Robert Tinnell and Neil Vokes (Monsterverse 2011)

2011-11-22T21:05:00.000-05:00

If you love gothic monsters in their natural habitat--castles, crypts, desecrated monasteries, and half-timber villages--here's your next must-read! It's a distinct take on them, much different from anything currently in vogue, inspired by vintage British horror movies produced by Hammer Films from the mid-1950s up through the early '70s. Writer Robert Tinnell, artist Neil Vokes, and colorist Matt Webb work together to boil the look and spirit of two-dozen or so movies down into a more concentrated dose in comics form than anything Hammer could possibly have put on film.

If you've never seen a Hammer flick, don't worry--this actually wouldn't make for a bad introduction, and I'd say you're in for quite a treat. Hammer's achievement, in a nutshell, was to take the classic monsters that Universal Studios made so iconic in an earlier spate of black-and-white movies--most notably Dracula and Frankenstein--and to hard-reboot them with color, blood, and increasingly frank eroticism.

As Jason Henderson notes, Hammer also introduced a gorgeous, consistent period look. They may have done so in large part out of necessity:

Part of the conceit, of course, was in re-use: Hammer knew how to stretch a pound and make it look like they wanted it that way. Like a modern television series, Hammer Studios employed the same key players and crew over and over again, until they invariably retired, having trained the younger set. Bernard Robinson, the brilliant set-designer who horror chronicler Dick Klemensen calls the "backbone and heart of the Hammer success story," created castles and marble floors and battlements out of plaster and chalk and not only made it look great, it looked right, and could look right over and over again. Cinematographer Jack Asher designed the well-contrasted and distinct color palette.

. . . but the effect of this consistency was to suggest a larger shared world--what Henderson calls the "Hammerscape":

In Horror, there's one world that holds together like that: a landscape slightly European and slightly British, slightly historical and modern, adaptable to many plots and characters and yet always recognizable. In Horror, there is the Hammerscape.

What is the Hammerscape? You have to see it to truly get it, but it is a cohesive horror universe reflected in curiously stagy and yet convincing sets, oddly lurid and sumptuous and yet stunningly classy colors (Ah, burgundy! Burgundy everywhere!), and not a single element that doesn't fit into the Hammer Ideal.

This is one thing it's a joy to see these creators get just right. Tinnell's story riffs on major settings, binding them together with action and intrigue. Vokes's art evocatively realizes the iconic structures and landscapes, and his panel progressions seamlessly splice them into a continuous world. Then Webb stylishly lays in the colors from Hammer's lush palette.

Presumably, the monsters could be said to share this Hammerscape, but they never actually shared it in any of the films. Perhaps you've heard of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man? That was Universal. So were the three multi-monster "rallies" that followed: House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Hammer never brought its monsters together like that. I'm not aware of any stated reason why they didn't, but despite the natural appeal of such encounters, it must be said that Universal almost indelibly tarnished the very idea, even as they introduced it to mass audiences, by exploiting it as a cheap, degrading, last-ditch gimmick. They did that for four movies in a row, each more execrable than the one before, and left an enduring, widespread impression that multi-monster stories are inherently gimmicky, unserious, and weak.

I've previously tried to dispel that impression with a little historical context, but the proof of any pudding is always in the eating, and Flesh and Blood delivers in a tremendously satisfying way on the hopes and expectations a less-disillusioned audience might bring to such a story. I'll put it this way: in the HBO series Carnivale, there's a scene where the barker lures rubes into a sideshow tent with the promise of a "man eating chicken!" The phrase conjures horrifying images of a monstrously inverted geek-show, right? Well, once they've all paid for the dubious privilege of beholding such a spectacle, he yanks the curtain aside to reveal . . . a man seated at a table, munching on a fried chicken drumstick. If we think of Universal's monster rallies in terms of such hokum, Flesh and Blood throws a flapping, snapping MAN-EATING CHICKEN in your face. It is, as Tim Lucas says in his typically informative and insightful Introduction, "nothing less than the epic Hammer horror film . . . which the venerable British company somehow never had the vision to produce."

It's actually, as Lucas goes on to suggest, more like the dream of such a movie. Tinnell has fished a lot of the most memorable, trademark Hammer moments out from their original contexts in the movies. He doesn't just plop them in here, though, or--even worse--contrive a plot that serves only the purpose of stringing them together. His grasp of Hammer narrative structures and rhythms, and of where these moments fit in them, is solid and intuitive enough that when he tells his story, it would be stranger if these moments weren't a part of it. What could have been little more than a highlight-reel becomes something closer to an ideal collectively projected by the movies.

The characters aren't quite as we remember them, either. Names and faces get a bit of a reshuffling, in some instances. And the faces are drawn more to the characters than the actors, if that makes sense. Vokes has told me in correspondence, "I start with actors in mind but didn't actually use anybody's likenesses beyond giving them just enough for a fan to get it," and Tinnell adds, "you think they look like the actors until you see them side-by-side." Among the names and faces are lots of "Easter eggs" for longtime fans to delight in, but just to reiterate for newcomers, nothing that you need to understand in order to enjoy this presumes any familiarity with the movies.

The key attraction here, of course, is the monsters, and specifically their encounters with each other. Tinnell and Vokes use the freedom of comics to subtly intensify everything that makes Hammer vampires (especially the female ones!) distinct. Webb heightens the effect by punching up the colors to a degree that would probably call too much attention to itself in live-action film: cool blue skin, blazing red eyes, and white, white fangs. The werewolf is a right beast. And Frankenstein (just the Baron, so far--sorry, no Monster yet . . .but then, it's only Book One!) is the most chilling of them all.

Tinnell does as good a job as I've ever seen of telling a story that plausibly brings them all together. It helps, of course, that he's not trying to merge existing continuities, but is rather telling a wholly original story, inspired by the movies but in no way connected to their events.

With any kind of crossover, there's a certain natural appeal to seeing the characters encounter each other, and a natural curiosity to see how the encounter will unfold. When it comes to monsters, I think there's a little more to it than that. They promise the spectacle of savage bloodshed between awesome and terrifying creatures. The Grimms' fairy tale "The Glass Coffin" presents a battle between two large animals--enchanted ones, it turns out. The way the scene is written just exudes a fascination that captures very well, I think, the compulsive desire to watch such a conflict, but also the trepidation:

Through the thin walls of the hut a fierce roaring and bellowing could be heard. Fired with unaccustomed courage, the tailor leaped out of bed, threw his clothes on, and ran outside. Not far away a big black bull and a beautiful stag were fighting desperately, charging each other with such fury that the ground trembled under their hoofbeats and the air resounded with their bellowing. For a long time the outcome seemed uncertain, but in the end the stag thrust his antlers into his enemy. The bull fell to the ground with a frightful roar, and the stag finished him off with a few more blows.

The tailor, who had been looking on with amazement, was still standing motionless. . . .

Consider this tale, too, quoted by Agnes Murgoci in her 1926 paper, "The Vampire in Roumania":

A lad who was in service with a female vampire noticed once that she was covered with blood during the day-time. He watched her closely, and saw that she anointed herself with something, and went out by the chimney. The lad also anointed himself with the ointment in the box, and went out of the chimney after his mistress. He arrived at a far off desert region, where the vampires fought. He watched them stabbing one another and fighting. The vampires go with their bodies, not their souls only. The ointment with which the vampires anoint themselves is made of the grease of serpents, hedgehogs, and badgers.

Not everyone feels it, of course, but for those of us who do, there's a dreadful allure to the idea of secretly observing carnage between monsters in the pale moonlight. If that's you, well--here you go! And this is only the beginning.

As for extras, I've already mentioned the Intro by Lucas. Bruce G. Hallenback also contributes a kind of afterward--a brief survey of where these monsters came from, literarily and cinematically speaking. And there's a b-feature, "Operation Satan," written by Tinnell, this time with art by Bob Hall that should appeal to fans of the black-and-white mags from Warren, Skywald, and Marvel back in the day. A guest gallery and pages from Vokes's sketchbook round it out. All in all, a very pleasing package, and a steal at 15 bucks from Monsterverse!

Crossovers

2011-11-18T15:30:00.000-05:00

I think crossovers are strongly associated in a lot of people's minds with profit-driven gimmickry. James Hunt from Den of Geek puts it this way:

In comics, event-driven crossovers have a bad reputation. It’s understandable. Where, in the 70s and early 80s they were a good excuse to tell a slightly-more epic than usual story, over 2 or 3 titles, they quickly mutated into the unwieldy, line-spanning beasts we see before us today. Not a huge surprise - crossovers drive sales, and men in suits love money.

This bad reputation is hardly confined to superhero comics, either--this review characterizes horror crossover movie Freddy vs. Jason, pictured above, as "more marketing gimmick than film."

Despite this view, the vast majority of crossovers are pretty much the opposite of "marketing gimmicks" cooked up or mandated by "men in suits [who] love money." I'm referring here to fanfics. TV-Tropes calls crossovers "one of the two or three biggest reasons to create them." How many fan-written crossover stories do you suppose there are on the internets? I'd guess bazillion sounds about right. These aren't conceived or written for any commercial reasons, but because fans want to see certain character combinations so badly that they're driven to write the stories themselves for the sheer purpose of experiencing them.

Given this mind-boggling volume of crossovers written on an amateur basis--literally, for the love of it--why are crossovers so strongly associated with the mandates of executives who are indifferent to art and driven by greed? It all boils down to the realities of intellectual property and the ways those realities shape attitudes and perceptions. As much as fans might love to write their own fan works, they also tend to hold strong and fastidious views of canonicity. For any given series, franchise, property, or whatever, works that are in-continuity and regarded as canon--which is to say, the works that really matter--are those which are authorized by whoever holds the rights (actually, they're a subset of authorized works, since stuff that's not canonical can be authorized, like Marvel's What If? and DC's Elseworlds, but not the other way around).

And who holds those rights, which are the keys to any canon? Corporate ownership is pretty much the order of the day, at least as far as characters from film, tv, and most comics are concerned. When we talk about creator-owned properties, we're pretty much only talking about characters introduced in novels and independent comics. But even when individual creators own their characters, they only own the characters they've created. Media conglomerates may control the rights to vast shared universes and extensive stables of characters from multiple continuities, and so are in a much better position to stage crossovers. Crossovers that are officially produced, distributed, and marketed through mainstream commercial channels are inevitably also vastly higher-profile than fan works, which can have none of those advantages.

For these reasons, the crossovers that stand out and matter most to us are almost always corporate products with some degree of executive involvement. And there are plenty of tales out of school to confirm our worst suspicions about that involvement. Here, for example, are Joe Quesada and Bob Layton dishing about the execrable, deservedly-infamous Image/Valiant crossover, Deathmate:

On the company’s next crossover Quesada states, “Now the Deathmate crossover with Image was just a stunt, so it wasn't one of those things that I was hyper excited about. I still forget I did that book until people bring it to me at cons to sign.” . . .

“Here’s what you don't know about that time at Valiant,” says Bob Layton. “I literally had nothing to do with most of those projects. Deathmate was thrust upon us because (Steve) Massarsky and Jim Lee were best buddies at the time and had privately arranged the crossover. The project was jammed down our throats and we did our best to comply, although most Valiant creators thought it was a bad idea."

Notoriously, according to Valerie D'Orazio, DC's Identity Crisis crossover was conceived in an editorial meeting, specifically when someone declared, "We need a rape"--their brilliant idea about how to take the company in a daring, more profitable new direction (and hey, from that perspective, it apparently worked).

Not to pick on DC, but Dan DiDio told IGN, "We're not just going to fill a bucket – as I like to say – with books just because we know people are going to buy anything with Blackest Night on it. If you do that, it hurts you for whatever you have to follow that." Well, as the crossover proved wildly successful, DC proceeded to do exactly that.

In sum, if there's a widespread perception that crossovers are profit-driven gimmicks, that's because so many that are canonical (and therefore most visible) give that impression, which is then confirmed by remarks from industry insiders.

Fan-written crossovers have their own problems, though--namely, the notoriously low quality of so much fan fiction. Again, from TV-Tropes:

Sturgeon's Law is particularly obvious when the barriers to entry — the whims of publishers — are removed. Self-publishing, especially in the virtually cost-free environment of the Internet, makes the cruddy 90% visible to the public; it no longer languishes in an aspiring writer's desk drawer. This often leads to the false impression that Fan Fic attracts poor writers; the fact is that the poor writers have always been out there, but until recently, their poor writing had few outlets to the public. As one writer put it, "flipping through Fanfiction.net is like flipping through hell with an occasional slice of the heavenly cheesecake thrown in."

If we assume that the 90% figure applies only to published works, then about one in a million of all things out there is not crud. Most people, though, have seen more than one non-cruddy thing in their lifetime.

Actually, I think the two problems--the gimmickiness of officially-produced crossovers and the abysmal quality of fan-produced ones--are related, and sometimes even identical. The core of both problems is . . . the very appeal of crossovers! The fact that this appeal is natural, broad, significant, and genuine is what makes it possible for crossovers to be exploited as gimmicks. But it also misleads legions of writers into thinking that a crossover--that is, the mere fact of being a crossover--delivers its own payoffs, all by itself.

In this regard, crossovers are sort of like that other biggest reason to write fanfics--sex.

The thing about sex is that it really is a hot-button. Just pushing it really does work, as anyone knows who's ever gotten off to some context-free image or video clip on the internet. Unfortunately, that misleads almost everyone into assuming that it only has to be pushed to get the desired response in the context of a story. Talk about exploiting something for profit--"Sex sells!" makes it the proverbial gimmick. Talk about Sturgeon's Law--I think the percentage of unreadably boring erotica would be cut in half if writers would just realize that simply writing a sex scene doesn't suffice to make it sexy. What they don't realize is that if sex and story aren't integrated properly, one will overwhelm the other to the point of annoying irrelevance. In more visual media like film and comics, the charge delivered by the immediacy of the images is more likely to make the story seem like pointless filler. For this reason, hardcore porn has pretty much reached a point where even a pretence of half-assed fictional narrative isn't worth the bother, as one scriptwriter learned to his chagrin:

Eventually I asked Brandon if he had any intention of shooting my script. "We have to shoot all the sex first," he said. "Once that's out of the way, we'll get to your stuff." . . .

As midnight approached, Brandon finally called a wrap. But before the crew could pack up their cameras and run for the doors, Brandon reminded them that their day was not over. "OK, people," he shouted. "Let's do the fast forward."

His announcement was greeted with groans of protest and gnashing of teeth. A gloomy fatigue fell over the room, and the crew went about their tasks with exaggerated fatigue. One of the actresses walked onto the set, her hair in curlers, and asked me why everybody looked so upset.

"Something about a fast forward," I said.

"Oh no, really?" The actress said, frowning deeply. "Shit, I hate this part."

"What's a fast forward?" I asked.

A grip walked over, dragging his feet like a teenager on his way to detention. "Fucking hell," he said.

"I know," the actress agreed.

"It never gets any easier," the grip said.

Another actor joined the group. "Fast forward?" he said, noting their sour expressions.

"It's just not fair," the actress scowled.

"What's a fast forward?" I asked again.

"The script," the actor said, almost whispering the words.

"I don't get it," I said. "Why's it called fast forward?"

They looked at me like I had missed something obvious. And then they each held up a hand, mimicking the use of a remote control. "Fucking fast forward," the grip moaned. "Like it matters."

In text-based media--which can "show" us things, just not as directly or vividly--a poorly-integrated sex-scene reads like any other chunk of text that interrupts the story's momentum; it's as leaden as a block of purple description or an infodump. This can happen in movies too, of course, when a gratuitous sex-scene is tossed into an otherwise strong story--it can feel like a few irksome minutes of nothing happening, with the story on hold. Too many critics and half-clever writers then look at all this dull sex and draw the wrong conclusion: that it doesn't leave enough to the imagination, and would be more erotic if it were suggested rather than shown. That's not the problem. The problem is that, for the hot-button to work, it needs to be connected to the power source of characters and story, and in almost all bad cases, it just isn't, or they aren't strong enough because the writer hasn't bothered to develop them, because, you know . . . SEX!

I think that for a sex scene not to be completely skippable, it must at least change the character's narrative position. For it to be truly interesting, I think the next minimum requirement is that it also have its own well-crafted internal plot structure. The explicit depiction of sex in a story has tremendous potential to be sexy and to deliver amazing intensity of experience, if done right. For example, Surrogate Wife is essentially a series of sexual encounters, but each one is a mini-story unto itself, and together they form the points that trace a definite character-arc for the heroine, and as a result, the sex not only never gets tedious, but it's some of the hottest I've ever read. The book is also well-written in general, with an engaging narrative voice, so I'm not claiming these formal principles are guaranteed to deliver that kind of payoff; what I'm saying is that sex in a story won't deliver any kind of payoff at all if they're neglected.

As with sex, so with crossovers, just pushing that button in a story doesn't cut it. Crossovers really do promise an incredibly rewarding payoff, but it doesn't come automatically--creators have to make it work. Because crossovers are ultimately about characters interacting, the possibilities for that are endless, and it's not so easy to distill principles that they can or must follow to achieve it. One point of all this is to say, just throwing two or more favorite characters together doesn't make a story good or enjoyable--a good, enjoyable story still has to be told about them. It has to be, but another point is that it can be. There's no reason why it can't. Crossovers don't fail as often as they do because of some inherent flaw. They fail because too many creators expect the crossover trope to do the work of storytelling. But if a crossover story is well-told, it will be all the more enjoyable for being about those favorite characters.

Sukia N. 116: L'amante Pollo (Chicken Lover), published in February 1983

2011-11-13T14:10:00.006-05:00

Tim really loves his chickens.

Sukia does not approve, so Tim decides to kick her ass.

Sukia's friend Malcom stops Tim...

...but later dies mysteriously and violently.

It turns out the love between Tim and his chickens is mutual: they pecked Malcom to death, and now they're about to do the same to Sukia.

But they lose heart, when Sukia's gay sidekick Gary and his two fuck buddies beat Tim to death.

THE END (wow, what a crappy pic that was, the guys don't seem to be moving at all, but a couple of chickens are headbanging)

But wait, don't go away yet! Remember Hushicho and his Sukia-esque comic Lamia. Well, he is back, bringing us Secret Disco Crisis. Amusingly enough, this story throws the vampiress Lamia and her gay sidekick Antonio into the world of superheroes, as if to compliment Curt's recent posts about crossovers. You can start reading here, I'm told the story is updated every Monday and Thursday.

Count your chickens and stay groovy!

What's Groovy

2011-10-31T11:43:00.001-04:00

The reason I haven't been posting much lately is because writer Bob Tinnell and artist Neil Vokes have finally released the first volume of their original graphic novel series, Flesh and Blood. This is the Hammer-inspired monster rally I've been waiting for, for years, and it's as good as I'd hoped. In writing my review, though, I bogged down in a mini-dissertation on monster-rallies/crossovers/shared-universes/etc., and as soon as I finish that, I'll post it as its own separate post first.

In the meantime, Groovy Age alumnus Holger Haase has his own review up, as well as interviews with both Tinnell and Vokes. Holger obviously is a Hammer fanatic (his blog is called "Hammer and Beyond"); Dan Taylor comes to Flesh and Blood with a cooler and more mixed reaction to the Hammer oeuvre, but still finds plenty to love in this excellent homage.

In other fantastic news, Sean T. Collins has collaborated with some of George R. R. Martin's most trusted and knowledgeable editorial assistants to annotate Game of Thrones for the iPad version. For a preview of the insight he brings to this material, I can't recommend highly enough his instant-classic post, "Playing a Game of Thrones: Why you should read George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series," which evangelizes to those who haven't seen the light, and is amazingly non-spoilery considering how persuasive it is, and how much it repays additional readings even after plowing through the novels. And good news for those of us who don't have iPads--a web-based version is in the works. I can't wait!

Finally, Gene Phillips has an epic multi-part response to my Superheroines Lose post: one, two, three, four, five.

Cimiteria N. 31: Porcobello, published in July 1978

2011-10-20T07:04:00.003-04:00

The last time we met Cimiteria, she was fighting gnomes with a gnome corpse.

Now she's trying to escape from the gnome caves with Quasimodo, but they run into the Loch Ness Monster.

And what's worse, it's a pet of the gnomes, and the gnome king orders it to eat Cimiteria and Quasimodo alive.

"No, kill him!" Cimiteria commands, pointing at the King.

The king didn't see this coming and starts to stutter. A big mistake!

He gets eaten, and our heroine escapes.

The rest of the story tells about Cimiteria's fight against a pee-pee and doo-doo lover called Porcobello, mercifully I will skip that part to talk to you about Quasimodo. In Victor Hugo's novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame Quasimodo was a hunchback who fell in love with the beautiful gypsy girl Esmeralda, but *SPOILER ALERT* she never loved him back, thanks to his ugliness. After Esmeralda was hanged, Quasimodo died embracing her corpse. A depressing thought, but of course if Esmeralda would've been undead like Cimiteria, things could've been so very different.

In this fumetti series Quasimodo is a deformed gravedigger, who aids in Cimiteria's resurrection and later becomes her lover. While they look like night and day on the outside, inside they are like night and night, two freaks disconnected from all things normal. The relationship isn't very balanced, Cimiteria always has the upper hand, but Quasimodo is nobody's bitch, either, if things don't go his way, he will sabotage almost anything to get what he wants. And yet these two psychos care about each other more than they'd probably like to admit. While the first 30 episodes of Cimiteria had less horror elements than I remembered, I just adore the interaction between these two characters. The greatest love story ever told.

(That's a fake penis, by the way, Cimiteria is planning to go to the Isle of Man, a very gay place according to this fumetti. That's another story that I will mercifully skip...)

PAPERBACK FANATIC 20

2011-10-16T18:26:00.000-04:00

I know I'm a broken record about Paperback Fanatic, saying each issue is better than the last. Well, if that ever stops being true, you'll stop hearing me say it. Fat chance of that, though--creator/editor Justin Marriott is the master of moving the goal-posts on himself, chasing an increasingly ambitious ideal, and fixing what ain't broke because he can imagine something better. It's true again this time. This one (see the cover here) is really something special. It's an oversize issue (88 pages instead of 64), giving Marriott extra room to swing--and he swings for the bleachers.

Joe Kenney, the excellent blogger of Glorious Trash, kicks off his tenure as an apparently regular columnist with an article on Andrew Sugar's Enforcer men's adventure series. I actually have the second installment, Calling Doctor Kill!, and was looking forward to it (you know how I love hospital settings, especially the nurses!!!), so I'm sorry to read him give it a thumbs-down, but his writing about it and all the others is still a pleasure.

Kenney's piece is actually the odd-man out, here. The rest of the issue is a well-structured drill-down from big-picture to fine-grain. Marriott begins with a feature about parent/umbrella company Universal Publishing (no relation to the film studio), then one about Universal's sleaze imprint Beacon, then reprints Brian Ritt's outstanding piece for James Reasoner's Rough Edges blog about Beacon mainstay Orrie Hitt (about whom this blog is a treasure-trove). Next we get a gallery juxtaposing original art from Brian Emrich's collection with the Beacon paperback covers for which the art was used--see, for example, the image at the top of this post. Features about other Universal lines, from Tandem's science-fantasy titles to Softcover Library's cheeezy photo-covers and back to Tandem's spaghetti-western adaptations round out the issue, all illustrated in full-color with nearly comprehensive cover-art galleries.

If you love vintage paperbacks, get this issue before it sells out, and get a subscription so you don't miss any other issues!

A little love for Paul Harrison-Davies

2011-10-16T16:57:00.005-04:00

Paul's a wonderful cartoonist. He generously contributed the art above to my Groovy Age of Horror virtual sketchbook.

He draws whimsical pictures of his daughter, inserting her into her favorite fantasies, like Hayao Miyazaki's beautiful Kiki's Delivery Service:

Every child should be so lucky!

And yet his sense of humor is dark and twisted as can be:

Head on over and dig into his archives for many more of the kinds of treasures any Groovy Ager should appreciate.

Superheroines Lose

2011-10-15T16:48:00.001-04:00

Sometimes it worries me, the fantasy material that fascinates me most. I'd like to think I'm nice and "normal" in real life, but when it comes to imagining and looking at make-believe stuff . . . well, you'll see. Or maybe not. Here's your warning: what follows is not for the faint-of-heart or able-to-be-offended.

Okay, so Sean T. Collins has this tumblr, Superheroes Lose. Click over and you'll see it's a lot of superhero comics cover art with the good-guys all defeated on the ground, and the villains standing triumphantly over them. Well, in my recent search for gruesome teen superhero deaths, I happened upon an extensive and astonishingly multifaceted genre of Japanese porn that's all about superheroines losing . . . and what happens to them afterward. Yep, I said porn--most of it hardcore, though not always in the usual sense. I couldn't resist a peek at this stuff, thanks to the same dark, dubious, and downright skeevy predilections that drove me to start collecting fumetti. I shudder to think what this says about me, but I've been on a binge ever since.

Here's the thing to realize about it--in my admittedly limited sample, I haven't seen any yet that are spoofy or campy or light. It used to be, if you saw a superhero porno at the video store, it would be a silly romp where Captain Schlongadong shoots Minxarella with some preposterous orgasmatronic ray-gun, and sexual hi-jinx would ensue. By contrast, the general spirit of these seems to be, "Hey, if you've ever wanted to see a superheroine like this get beaten down, raped, tortured, and possibly snuffed, then here you go!"

A loooong, detailed, gory, and sexually-explicit tour of the genre after the jump. Just remember--once you've seen this stuff, you can't unsee it.

The first-act fights where the superheroines lose can be startlingly brutal. Take, for example, the opening fight-scene of Heroine Cruel Story, vol. 1 (and it's not even the one she loses!):

The bulk of the movies are devoted to the aftermath, when the superheroine is in the villain's clutches, at his utter lack of mercy. If her losing fight sets a grim tone, things just get darker from there. If there's a goofball quality to any of it, that comes from the types of superheroines (see this menu of categories, for example) featured in these twisted fantasies, not because any of it gets played for yucks. I mean, what the fuck is this?:

I haven't seen it, because seriously--bunny armor?!? Notice, though, on the back cover, that purple dot toward the bottom. It says, "BAD END," and where this kind of movie is concerned, those words are no joke. That cute, spunky, Sailor-style heroine in the video clip above gets reduced over the course of the movie to this:

I have to admit, Heroine Cruel Story is an outlier among the movies I've seen. If any movie ever deserved the epithet of "torture porn," here it is. It's all about the torture and gore. There's minimal sexual content in the usual sense, and what little there is, is strictly for the purposes of torture. For example, there's one sequence where the villain jabs several thin steel tubes (like straws with sharp, pointy ends) into her torso, that cause her to bleed out; the last one, of course, goes in her crotch. This superheroine's gruesome murder is (with one exception I'll get to later) far and away the most extreme I've encountered. Rest assured, though, there's a vast range of BAD ENDs that don't have to go this far to still be quite disturbing.

One example from the mild end is Superlady 2. Superlady was depowered and defeated with kryptonite in the previous movie (the pics at the top of the post, btw, are from Superlady Zero), so she starts this one already a prisoner of the bad-guy. Instead of seeing her lose, we open with a rape scene:

These Superlady movies are actually more conventionally pornographic than most, so she eventually starts to like it, and ends up riding him hard:

It so happens that Superlady has a young protege who tries to come to her rescue. The problem is that the bad guy uses Superlady as a hostage, and threatens to zap her to death with a kryptonite ray-gun if Super Young Lady (?) doesn't have sex with him, too:

What's a Super Young Lady to do? Well, what do you think?

Like her mentor, Super Young Lady can't help responding positively to the ~~rape~~ sex, and comes pretty hard despite her apparent efforts not to. At least she gets that much of a "happy ending." Unfortunately, she ultimately gets the dreaded BAD END. When Superlady somehow breaks out of her kryptonite cage, beats the bad guy, and gets away, Super Young Lady doesn't make it off the spaceship in time before it explodes. Her ghost appears to Superlady in the denouement, so yep, she really died.

Mask the Glamour takes us one increment further into the BAD END zone. Our superheroine this time is modeled on manga maestro Go Nagai's Kekko Kamen, but played straighter. Like the original, she wears only gloves, boots, and a mask.

I hate to put it this way, but this kind of superheroine's costume makes her a natural choice for this genre. Once she's defeated, her bare body is immediately vulnerable to groping and rape, without the bad guys even needing to rip anything off her--except her mask, the removal of which is treated as a special kind of violation. Once this one is subdued, the first thing the bad guys do is pull that mask off, which makes her that much more naked and defenseless when they drag her back to their lair, chain her up, and get down to the business of tag-team raping her to a BAD END:

What makes this "one increment" worse than the Superlady movies is that her rapists are still human, but the rape seems much more rapey. When they make her come with a vibrator:

. . . it's degrading in a way that it wasn't even for Super Young Lady, who came in spite of herself but never seemed to lose her agency in the encounter.

Sticking with the "naked mask" superheroines, but edging into nastier territory, we come to White Kamen. The heroine's capture is brutal and humiliating. Here's a snippet, to give you an idea:

If it seems like that guy sure slugs her in the belly a bunch of times, apparently there's a whole niche subgenre unto itself devoted to nothing but stomach-punches! After she has lost, she's subjected to torture:

. . . and a few human and nonhuman rapes, such as this scene with naughty living slime:

Nonhuman rape is actually the norm in this genre. Here's a movie literally titled, Super Heroine Monster Rape:

Note how the top right corner of the back-cover promotes "MONSTER RAPE" as a feature--then note, lower down, that awful BAD END purple dot of doom! Having seen this, I can vouch for that. If this isn't a BAD END, I don't know what is:

I'd like to note a weird dissonance in this case, however, that doesn't seem to be unusual for the genre. The ideas here are ghastly as can be. A cute young superheroine getting simultaneously raped and devoured by horrible monsters?!? And yet, not only don't we see the hardcore penetration of Superlady 2 or the pukeworthy gorn of Heroine Cruel Story. but we don't even see a hint of nudity or blood. It's conceptually XXX but visually PG-13. It's weird, and I've seen this sort of thing a few times.

All this talk of "nonhuman rape" brings us where you knew it must.

Oh yes, there will be tentacles.

A lot of the movies above have a tentacle scene or two, but I haven't mentioned it because that's not their focus. Naturally, there are lots of movies where it is the focus. In fact, there's a whole series (up to 8 volumes, apparently) called Heroine Tentacle Insult. I checked out a couple of them. Vol. 4 is pretty weak. Basically, this superheroine:

. . . loses early to this buggy bad-guy:

. . . and spends the whole rest of the movie tangled up in tentacles like this:

Seriously, if I made an animated gif of that image, it would be indistinguishable from 2/3 of the whole movie. The monotony is sort of broken up once in a while by working in little moments of micro-fetish-service (by which I mean, stuff like the stomach punching in the White Kamen movie above). For example, armpit tickling:

I'm sure there are videos out there of nothing but girls getting their armpits tickled for 90 minutes at a time.

The tentacles don't do a very good job of raping her, either. Maybe they're only supposed to soften her up? She doesn't even lose her panties until the very final minutes, when the bug-man rips them off so he can rape her himself:

BAD END.

Vol. 2 is slightly more interesting. The superheroine faces not just one tentacled antagonist, but a whole invading team of them. She actually wins her first fight against them:

These guys fight dirty and don't give up, however. In violation of her secret identity, one sneaks into her bedroom and, well, violates her:

Despite getting raped, she ultimately fights off this one, too. She hunts them back to the scene of the first fight, meaning to end their menace once and for all. Things don't go so well for her this time, though:

Here are the final seconds of the movie, which fade out on the image of a tentacle monster gloating over a tearful, half-naked, utterly defeated superheroine:

Haha--there's one for the ol' tumblr, Sean!

And here's a review of Vol. 5 from another fan of the genre (see also his excellent post on Giga, the company that produces most of this fare).

The superheroine tentacle-rape title that intrigued me most (oof--did I really just type those words?) was Heroine Mimic Tentacle Insult: Superlady vs. Glamour Mask:

As my coverage above suggests, I'm pretty keen on both of these characters, and the packaging for this one made it look like a relatively high-end production. I'm glad I saw it, but I'm sorry to say it wasn't everything I hoped for. First, the two characters don't fight each other or team up or even meet. Their stories are completely separate. So we get a half-length Superlady movie, and a half-length Glamour Mask movie. Second, both movies follow the formula of the superheroine getting wrapped up in tentacles very early and then writhing around in them for the whole rest of the duration. As much as I wanted to see that, believe me, it gets tedious.

Third, adding to the tedium, both movies are padded by scenes where the heroines slip into soft-focus reveries where they imagine themselves to be dancing and masturbating (not at the same time, unfortunately). Finally, the slight uptick in production values does more harm than good, because what it amounts to is crappy CGI. I'm sure it seemed like a great idea at the time to throw more tentacles in there with computer effects, but it looks hokey as hell, and . . . there's no nice way to put this, but if you're watching this kind of movie, you want to see physical objects penetrating the actresses. The pixelized mosaic censorship bullshit is frustrating enough (How deep is it in her? Is it even in her?!?); when the "insulting" tentacles themselves are merely virtual visual effects, there goes most of the point of watching in the first place.

One visual effect deserves mention, not because it's particularly good, but just because. One ubiquitously recurring trope in tentacle hentai is the victim getting hoisted up and suspended by tentacles, the better for other tentacles to penetrate her. Here's an example from the Final Fantasy X-inspired hentai flash-game GuriGuri Cute Yuna:

I've never seen this, though, in a live-action tentacle rape movie. Promotional screenshots of the Glamour Mask portion of Heroine Mimic Tentacle Insult made it look like this movie at least tries to pull it off, so I was curious to see it. Here's the scene:

How do they do it? Check this shit out:

It looked to me like some kind of digital shenanigans was going on, but I never expected a gang of green-skinsuited guys lifting her up then getting digitally erased to be the way they did it. You learn something new every day!

Although all the examples above take a more-or-less classical approach to tentacle rape, the subgenre has grown surprisingly complicated, kinked up with developments no sane person could imagine. It's been crossbred, for example, with the "swallowing" fetish subgenre. I can't even believe there's such a thing as "vorarephilia." Nevertheless, here's a sexy superheroine getting swallowed by a plant monster:

The tentacle around her arm, being used to drag her into the leafy maw, isn't what I mean by the crossbreeding. Ooooh, no! That's something much stranger. You see, in this unholy spawn of two already-weird fetishes, the swallowing monster's stomach and guts are filled with rapey tentacles!!! A product blurb at J-List puts it this way:

This version features a wild new venture that takes tentacle sex to a new level as innocent AV idols are captured and swallowed by the multitentacled beast into a cave of unlimited ecstasy bringing an otherworldy/ demonic feel.

You know, revolting as the idea sounds, I have to concur with this positive assessment. When done well, this is really quite something to see. Here are the money-shots (one for her and one for "him") from one such scene in Touch of Tentacle Orgasm 8:

If that didn't shut down or blow out the rational part of your brain, you might be wondering, "Wait a minute--what about stomach acid?" Well, that also occurred to some of these filmmakers, and their response to the idea was, "Hey, that would be awesome!" Thus we come to one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen (and I think you know how much that counts for): Heroine Tentacle Hell Digestion. This superheroine:

. . . fights this bad-guy:

. . . who pukes out his stomach--not its contents, but the whole actual organ:

He then magically sucks her into it:

. . . where she's raped by tentacles:

She escapes somehow, but then later gets sucked back in again, this time to be digested by a flood of stomach acid:

. . . to death:

Bleargh! Talk about BAD END! If there's a more appalling way for a superheroine to lose, I don't want to know about it. There's apparently a whole superheroine digestion series, though I don't know how many installments.

The crazy thing is, I've barely scratched the surface of this stuff. There are sub-subgenres I haven't sampled yet, or even discovered, I'm sure. And many more yet to be created. To Rules 34, 35, and 36, we may add Rule Thirty-or Forty-whatever: If something does not exist, someone in Japan will create it for the purpose of making porn about it.

So why does this stuff fascinate me so? That will have to wait for a later post. This one is long enough already. And I'm a little afraid to look too closely at that question. And that digestion movie sickened me so much I really need a break. By the way, if you've read this far, you're going to hell with me. I hope this post doesn't get me kicked off the internet.

VERY FRIENDLY SKIES by Jan Kendrick (Warner 1976)

2011-10-05T11:01:00.000-04:00

That new Pan Am teevee show doesn't seem to be getting very good reviews from you Groovy Agers, so I thought I'd slap up some real vintage stewardess grooviness. Justin Marriott of Paperback Fanatic actually brought this one to my attention (as he's done so many other groovy titles), for which I'm grateful, because besides having fun, gorgeous cover art (by M. Kane--anyone familiar with him?), it's a pretty good entry in the genre.

It follows the three pictured stewardesses on several legs of a South American jaunt--from getting hijacked to Cuba, to scheduled stops in Bogota, Buenos Aires, and finally Rio for Carnival. They get mixed up in various political and black market intrigues, have flings with various married men, and when the men don't thrill them they just have hot lesbian sex with each other.

Given the complaints about lack of smoking in Pan Am, I paid close attention to see how often it might be mentioned here, and I have to say, it hardly receives any mention at all.

Fortunately, there's at least one sequel, and I hope to have a review of it up within the next few days. Stay tuned, and stay groovy!

Sneak peek at PAPERBACK FANATIC 20

2011-10-02T16:07:00.000-04:00

Extra pages in this one, as Justin Marriott continues his push to see how much awesomeness he can cram into each issue, so it might take me a little longer to finish it for review, but daaayumn!!!!--just look at that fucking cover!!! Go get yours here before they sell out. Better yet, get a subscription!

TEEN TITANS: ON THE CLOCK and CHANGING OF THE GUARD

2011-10-01T21:11:00.001-04:00

These trades aren't really worth discussing on their own merits, because frankly, they have none. I didn't expect them to. I read them to scratch a particular itch. I came to them with "a perverse appetite for seeing lots of brand-name superhero teens in technicolor costumes get fed through a meat-grinder in as exploitative a manner as possible." The weird thing is, they're chock full of scenes like the one above, and those itemized by J. Caleb Mozzocco in his review, and yet they somehow fail to scratch that itch. I guess that's because these scenes have no narrative weight or consequences. If the scene above of Wonder Girl getting strangled with her own lasso to the point of blood-vessels bursting in her eyes disturbs you, just turn the page and:

All better!

And I'm not exaggerating--literally a single page turn separates these two images.

This happens often enough to form enough of a pattern that all the icky, squicky, gruesome stuff starts coming off as mere theater. It's there to be seen but not felt. But if it isn't felt, what's the point of seeing it? I honestly wanted to feel a little soiled and degraded after reading these, but you just can't wallow in something this superficial, this flattened-out. Yes, the images are gross on their own terms, but the "context" of the story always goes on to rob them of any punch or bite.

No more. I'm done with this shitty run of comics.

TEEN TITANS: the Geoff Johns run

2011-09-30T12:00:00.002-04:00

For the past week or so, I've been working on a review of Craig Thompson's Blankets; it's an impressive and beautiful work that evoked an especially personal response from me, given how similar my religious background--and just as importantly, my relationship to it--seem to Thompson's. Perhaps because it's so personal for me, I'm having a hard time organizing the points I'd like to make about it.

Setting something aside and switching gears for a while gives my subconscious a chance to sort things like that out for me. The recently-released omnibus of Marv Wolfman and George Perez's classic run on New Teen Titans arrived for me not too long ago, and I've been looking forward to digging into it. A funny thing happened as I started to (re)read it, though. I began to remember stuff I'd read online about the latest (at least until the reboot) version of Teen Titans (with which I'm not at all familiar). Like comics creator Tim Seeley complaining that it's "GORIER" than his own gruesome horror title Hack/Slash. And J. Caleb Mozzocco's horrified review of, "A couple of very violent Teen Titans trades." And this sequence from Sean Whitmore and Brandon Hanvey's webcomic Comic Critics:

When I saw that Geoff Johns had written the first 45 issues, I recalled Sean T. Collins cluing me in back during Blackest Night that Johns has long been notorious for over-the-top scenes of dismemberment and evisceration.

And suddenly I had to check it out. It seems that my immersion in a sensitive black-and-white autobio indie comic gave me a perverse appetite for seeing lots of brand-name superhero teens in technicolor costumes get fed through a meat-grinder in as exploitative a manner as possible. (And yes, I have read most of The Boys, but I wanted to see it played straight, without the dark humor, scathing irony, and meta- bullshit that someone like Ennis or Veitch brings to such material.)

Well, I've made it through the entirety of Johns's run, and I'm sorry to say, it was nowhere near bad enough to satisfy my craving. I found shockingly few "Hey Kids! Comics!" moments, to my great disappointment.

In fairness (?), both Mozzocco's review and the Comic Critics sequence refer to issues after Johns's departure, so maybe if I just keep plugging, things will take a welcome turn for the worse.

Since I'm on the topic, I might as well say a little more about how I found the issues I've read so far. The truth is, they're thoroughly mediocre. I didn't have to struggle to make myself keep reading, but neither did I feel engaged at any point whatsoever. I would never recommend them, and I'd say so if anyone cared to ask, but if someone piped up to praise or defend them, I'd probably just shrug and say, "Suit yourself." There are some things they get pretty far wrong, though, that I think are worth mentioning.

Most discussions about the kinds of fantasies that find expression in superhero comics center around the superpowers/abilities and their use/abuse, but when I think about my love of bronze-age Avengers, X-Men, and New Teen Titans, two other kinds of fantasies were crucial to my enjoyment. You may have noticed these are all team titles, and I'd say the fantasy of being part of a team accounts for much of their appeal. Obviously, "being part of a team" isn't some exotic experience only available to costumed superheroes, but superhero team comics offer a concentrated dose of what's pleasurable about it, like having each other's backs and working together to accomplish something. As for the second kind, there's also very much a "lifestyle fantasy" thing going on with amazing cribs like Avengers Mansion, the X-Mansion, and Titans Tower. Back in the day on both X-Men and Avengers, John Byrne drew lots of absolutely drool-worthy interiors. Tying this in with the team fantasy is the fact that the superheroes are sharing these sumptuous digs with other superheroes, who are mostly attractive and fascinating people.

Johns certainly gets that these are important fantasy components of superhero comics. He gets it so much, in fact, that he foregrounds them as the very reason this batch of Teen Titans gets together in the first place. The idea is that the Teen Titans will hang out together on weekends, and Titans Tower is the peculiarly awesome clubhouse where they get to kick back and chill. They yammer constantly about being part of a team, being there for each other, being friends, being family. This is where it really goes wrong, because this stuff is best left implicit and left in the background. Johns is hamfisted about it from start to finish, and it gets hokier with each tiresome reiteration.

Then, apart from all the talk, these themes really don't get supported, and sometimes even get undercut. Even though the lifestyle fantasy is explicit and central to the premise of the title, we seldom get much sense of what it's actually like to hang out at Titans Tower. For being so supposedly close-knit, there's also an awful lot of squabbling--at one point, so much that other superheroes start to suggest maybe they should break up as a team. Done right, this would come off as the natural love-hate everyone has for those closest in their lives. Johns does it wrong, though, so instead of the squabbling seeming to be an expression of their closeness, it just clangs discordantly against their claims to be so close.

All right, so I'm probably just throwing good time and money after bad, but I'm going to keep on at least through the two trades Mozzocco reviewed, in the hopes of getting to some properly horrid gorn. I want to see a Titan die, dammit!

Cimiteria N. 30: Tremenda Vendetta (Tremendous Vendetta), published in June 1978

2011-09-25T05:22:00.005-04:00

This guy pisses Cimiteria off. A big mistake!

Don't do it again!

After this tremendous revenge, she decides to look for The Loch Ness Monster with her faithful companion Quasimodo.

Unfortunately they get captured by gnomes.

Cimiteria speculates whether Nessie is just a lie the gnomes cooked up, a scarecrow to keep people off their lands.

Later the gnomes decide to experiment whether they can breed with humans.

They don't know about the lethal electric charge inside Cimiteria's vagina.

Like I said earlier, it's a big mistake to piss off Cimiteria. Now she's going to beat the other gnomes with the corpse of their dead friend!

To be continued.

More adventures in carlessness

2011-09-23T12:16:00.000-04:00

I've praised carlessness, and still quite enjoy it, but I do have to admit to some downsides (as I have here, for example).

Part of what made it possible for me to go carless was having a washer and dryer in my apartment. Some while back, the washer died, and my landlord hasn't been duly diligent in replacing it, despite my increasingly urgent follow-ups. Well, I finally came to the point when I just had to do laundry. Absurdly (because I do, after all, live right in the middle of a downtown residential area), there's no laundromat within walking distance of me. There is one within biking distance, though. Sure, I could get a ride from a friend, but my philosophy is, you aren't really carless if you're always bumming rides.

Lugging two weeks' worth of laundry all that way in a sack slung over my shoulder was a pain in the ass, but also an accomplishment, so I didn't mind it so much. My idea was, I'd just wash the clothes, then bring them home and use my own still-intact dryer. So far so good--until the ride home. I knew the clothes would be heavier wet, and they were, but I was managing all right. All of a sudden, though, out of a clear blue sky, it started raining. I mean, really coming down. And I mean, it was very, very clear--just a couple of wispy clouds above. I seriously looked up and wondered where the fuck it was coming from. It was so weird, if my life were a movie, it would be plainly metaphorical.

The problem with bikes and rain is the way the tires throw up water and mud from the road. So when I got home, the laundry in my netting-sack was ruined, and in need of being washed again.

I was so fucking pissed off, I stormed into the landlord's office and made a huge awful scene--in front of some prospective renters who were about to view an apartment. Haha. I got fifty bucks knocked off my next month's rent and a promise that they'd get right on it, which is something I guess, but the whole situations is still a tremendous pain in the ass.

It's not raining any more, and looks clear enough that I might risk another trip up there, but then that's how it looked the first time. Argh!

DRIVE

2011-09-20T15:05:00.001-04:00

Saw it yesterday, and it is simply outstanding.

Having little familiarity with Ryan Gosling, I had my doubts whether someone whose name literally means "baby goose" could be a credible noirish anti-hero, but he delivers a tough, taciturn, and explosively violent performance that I'd almost put in the neighborhood of Lee Marvin in Point Blank or Michael Caine in Get Carter. His features are pretty, almost elfin, but he certainly figured out how to arrange them into a convincing mask of hard-bitten stoicism (I guess the toothpick doesn't hurt). This film rewards his achievement by working overtime to make him iconic, always lingering on his face, whether it's paused in impassivity before he delivers the next line, or dripping blood after he's given some thug a tracheotomy with a shower curtain pole. In particular, there's tons of footage of him driving at night, and we stare for loooong minutes from a variety of strong, flattering angles as neon light and shadow stream across his impressively expressively inexpressive expression.

Then, his silver bomber jacket with the big gold scorpion on the back never fails to stick out like a sore thumb, as visually arresting as it is preposterous. Every time I saw it, I heard Nicholas Cage from Wild at Heart braying, "This here jacket is a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom!" It's a naked grab for iconicity, and just offbeat enough to do the trick. Oh, and of course the light color shows blood spatter to very nice effect.

Bryan Cranston puts a raw sawtooth on the edge he's honed for Breaking Bad, as Gosling's mentor-wannabe (it's pretty clear Gosling's character doesn't need one, and merely tolerates/indulges him in that role, because why not?), limping around from an old injury inflicted by a mid-level crime-boss he once pissed off. That crime-boss, played by the ever-fearsome Ron Perlman, is another treat; even better is funnyman Albert Brooks as a partner to Perlman who turns out to be way scarier and more chillingly violent.

As for the ladies, Christina Hendricks plays--what else?--the Hardboiled Redhead. In someone else's story, she'd be the femme fatale, but Gosling only has eyes for the diner-waitress-next-door. Carey Mulligan embodies that role to perfection--pretty but unglamorous, guarded at first but ultimately sweet and even a little needy, and a working mom. Great job here of moving her from the edge of Gosling's awareness to the center of his heart. At first she's just someone he passes in the garage, dressed for work in a way that made me think of this passage from Raymond Carver:

Sometimes she called it her outfit, sometimes her uniform. For as long as I could remember, it was always hanging in the closet or hanging on the clothesline or getting washed out by hand at night or being ironed in the kitchen.

After sharing an elevator, he notices her as his neighbor, and as a woman. Next, he sees her in the grocery store, with her young son. Things progress from there, until her husband gets home from prison.

In the role of this husband, Oscar Isaac rounds out the men of note, and turns in a solid performance. Specifically, he nails the scene where he confronts Gosling about "taking care of" his wife and son while he was locked up. He does a pitch-perfect job of making the implicit accusation and threat as understated as they are unmistakable, and then rocking back on his heels and not quite knowing what to do with Gosling's unthreatened and unthreatening admission that, yeah, he has been hanging around and helping out.

Story-wise, Drive is an elegantly by-the-numbers neo-noir, with a foundation of familiar elements like the Wrong Woman, the Heist-Gone-Bad, the Jinxed Money, etc. Director Nicholas Winding Refn is confident enough in the power of his execution here to indulge in these basic devices with almost no elaboration. You've no doubt seen/heard/read this story a lot of times before, just as you've no doubt eaten a lot of pepperoni pizzas before; just as the simple combination of crust, sauce, cheese, and pepperoni can range from inedible to heavenly depending on the quality of the ingredients and the care that goes into the making, so too the simple combination of these recurring tropes can range from tediously rote crap to . . . well, to Drive.

I have to mention a couple of stylistic touches. The first is the opening credits in a hot-pink font reminiscent of the '80s. The incongruous tone they set is reinforced by a soundtrack of poppy electronica with breathy female vocals, sometimes over scenes of savage bloodletting. It reminded me of those Hong Kong gangster flicks that burst into impossibly saccharine covers of Carpenters songs or whatever at the start of their ultraviolent climaxes.

I can't wait for this on dvd. Highly recommended!

PAN AM

2011-09-17T04:00:00.001-04:00

Looks promising, and makes me want to read some more stewardess paperbacks . . .

BREAKING BAD Season 3

2011-09-16T22:54:00.001-04:00

This was certainly the series' strongest season thus far. They did their best to redeem the previous season's poor finale, and mostly succeeded. The "cousins" arc was gripping, right up through the showdown with Hank. Characters like Gus and Mike totally hit their stride. Walt, Jesse, and their relationship went to freshly irredeemable places--Walt killed for Jesse, and then turned right around and called in that marker with the demand that Jesse kill much more cold-bloodedly for him. Even Skyler broke bad a little.

For all that, I don't feel very . . . "involved" with this series. Not like I was with Battlestar Galactica and Lost, even at their lowest stretches. Not sure why that is.

Prophecy in ASoIaF? (UPDATED)

2011-09-16T00:12:00.003-04:00

Sean offers some informed and well-reasoned speculation.

I've refrained from such speculation because a) I interpreted the shocking stillbirth of THE STALLION WHO MOUNTS THE WORLD!!11! as an early warning that prophecies in this world are unreliable, and b) Martin churns the story in a way that makes any kind of prediction a treacherous affair--with at least two more 1000+ page novels to go, our basis for guessing with respect to big story questions is comparable to Lost fans after the fourth season finale.

Also, specifically: how many characters now can be interpreted as meeting the formal conditions for being Azor Ahai? At what point do we stop regarding some of those characters as red herrings, and just admit the prophecy is garbage? Ask yourself this: could you be Azor Ahai, by the standards that are being applied in discussion forums? Yeah, me too. If you've shaken a sodium-heavy flavor packet into a boiling pot of ramen noodles under the little red light bulb on the smoke alarm in your kitchen, then hey--you qualify!

Also, specifically: I prophesy that President Obama will know three betrayals, "once for gold and once for love and once for blood," before the end of next week (9/24/2011). A special Groovy Age of Horror No-Prize to anyone who can name "three treasons" that make this prophecy come true. Hell, I'll probably know "three treasons" in that time-frame, and so, probably, will you. That's life. Why should Dany be exempt?

I guess the big question is, why does anyone believe Martin is playing absolutely straight with any of these prophecies, to the point that it makes sense to speculate not whether they'll come true, but how?

UPDATE: And Sean responds! A lot of fair, solid points. He's probably right, and speculation is fun, but my bottom line is that if Martin stays true to form, the story will turn several corners that we not only can't see around but don't even see coming.

Interview with David Wellington (aka David Chandler) about DEN OF THIEVES

2011-09-15T13:01:00.000-04:00

Longtime Groovy Age favorite David Wellington has released his first fantasy novel, Den of Thieves, under the pseudonym David Chandler. He's always been generous with his time for interviews here, and now is no exception. I press him a bit harder than usual on a few points, but make no mistake--this novel is good fun, and I recommend it for any fantasy enthusiasts!

1. In an e-mailed press release, you characterize your latest novel, Den of Thieves, as "the book I've wanted to write since I was a kid." Whenever I hear something like that, I'm always curious to know which specific elements or general features most reflect such a longstanding desire. Can you give me some idea of the animating vision, or the dream of a novel, you carried with you for so many years, before you got down to the business of planning it with an eye toward actually writing it?

In the simplest terms this is just the book I really wanted to read when I was that young. A fast-paced adventure story where the characters can act without being mediated by some literary critical tradition. There's no post-modernism here, no irony, no meta- anything. It's just a fun story that exists purely to entertain. Which is not to say it's "dumb fun". I was a pretty smart 13 year old. It's clever, if I say so myself. It's a heist novel, with all the plot twists and surprises that entails. But there's zero pretension of hipness here. This is a geek book.

2. One of the greatest challenges facing any writer of medievalish secondary-world fantasy must surely be the balance that must be struck in the language between authentic-sounding archaism (derogatorily known as "forsoothery") and anachronistic readability for modern audiences. How difficult did you find this challenge, how did you approach it, and how happy are you with the way you ended up dealing with it?

I spent a lot of time worrying about this. The first draft for the book was heavily inspired by all the reading I was doing at the time, which included a ton of period stuff--medieval texts, most of which were in fact written in a courtly, formal style nothing at all like natural speech. I went back and read a lot of the dialogue out loud and it didn't just sound archaic, it sounded leaden. I panicked and punched almost all of it up. But the real program there was to make sure the characters weren't speaking in 21st century idiom. I have read so many fantasy novels lately where the characters say "okay" all the time. That always makes my skin crawl. For one thing, in, say 1450 (roughly the equivalent time period for the book) people weren't speaking English as we know it today, or even as Shakespeare knew it. They were speaking Middle English, which for most people today is unreadable. Totally incomprehensible. You need to make it feel like these people are living in their own time. It was mostly a subtractive process--removing all the tics and shortcuts that have entered the language since then.

3. You say some perplexing, even confounding things about the process of getting Den of Thieves written and published. In this piece you wrote for the Flames Rising website, under the title, "How I Ended up Writing a Fantasy Novel and Changed my Name," you mention acquiescing to publishing gatekeepers' taboos against, say, mixing genres with a zombies-on-the-moon novel (which strikes me as a great high-concept). In this interview, you say you "never really planned on publishing" Den of Thieves, and instead "planned on sticking it in the back of my hard drive somewhere and just forgetting about it." The gist, here, it seems to me, is that you've abandoned posting fiction online as a proving ground, or even just an outlet, for material that doesn't obviously meet commercial publishing criteria or fit your established "brand." Are you at a stage in your career where that door is simply closed to you (perhaps contractually?), or has your perspective changed so much since the online launch of your career?

I wouldn't say I've given up on any of that, though I've certainly slowed down with it. I'm getting older and I just don't have the time and energy I used to when I could stay up all night watching hit counters and studying analytics and answering every comment seconds after it came in. I've also turned this into my livelihood, and projects that make money always have to win out over things that are cool but free, which is sad, but it's reality. When it comes to Den of Thieves, though, it's funny, I never for a second considered putting it online. I didn't think anybody wanted to read it! It was my therapy book, where I worked out a bunch of things that were of interest to me but nobody else. As has often been the case in my career I was totally wrong about what people wanted. A friend badgered me into letting him read it, even after I'd sworn up and down the book was for me and me alone. And then he wouldn't shut up until I showed it to my agent. I thought my agent would be angry I was wasting time on this! Instead, he loved it, and insisted we try to publish it. The whole process has been a surprise to me.

4. I get the sense that it rankles for you to some degree that you've had to publish Den of Thieves under the pseudonym David Chandler, just because it's a fantasy novel, rather than the kind of horror novel associated with your real name of David Wellington. As much as I get that, and shared that reaction before reading DoT, having now read it, I'm more inclined to say the pseudonym is justified, because DoT doesn't read like a David Wellington novel in almost any way, and the switch of genres is only the most superficial difference. More fundamentally, it's much lighter in both tone and substance.

I don't object to the pseudonym as much as I object to the fact that it's become so necessary. I don't like the fact that I'm only "allowed" to write one kind of book. I read all kinds of books and enjoy them, whether they are light and fun (like Terry Pratchett) or ruthlessly naturalistic (like William Gibson). Why can't I write both? Why, after writing a certain kind of novel at one point in my life, am I never going to be forgiven for writing something in a different vein? I have plenty of gritty horror novels in me, but I also have fun, light fantasies and awe-inspiring space operas and blood-curdling mysteries and who knows what else. But "David Wellington" can only write one kind of book. I'm not a brand, but apparently my name is. That's the way of the world, and I don't think it's anybody's fault in particular, but it's one of the things I like least about the world today. People pigeonhole themselves and they never think to poke their heads out of their pigeonholes and look around and see what else is going on. The political situation, the culture war, whatever side your on, requires that we all sort ourselves into neat, arbitrary categories and never deviate. Whatever. The market makes its demands and we live with them the best we can.

As for tone, your horror novels are awfully grim and unsparing, sometimes almost noir-ish; although you've set your fantasy novel largely in a criminal underworld and made the protagonist a thief and the son of a prostitute, it feels much more like a popcorn-movie-style adventure story.

Yes, yes, yes! Because that's what horror novels are supposed to be! Grim and unsparing. They're supposed to make you feel dread. Like the walls are closing in. Fantasy novels are supposed to make you feel (not believe, mind you, but feel) that the world is bigger than this little circumscribed space you're in. They demand that things be larger than life, that the walls might just break open and you can go to this other place, this shinier, better place if just for a while and just in your imagination. God it sounds corny but it's true.

As for the substance, much of what makes your horror novels so enjoyably immersive is the fine-grained attention you lavish on characters, institutions, places, and objects. All of these are drawn much more broadly in Den of Thieves, and they all conform much more to genre conventions, as well. In contrast to the psychological realism and verisimilitudinous backstories of your werewolves, vampires, and even zombies, in Den of Thieves, all the major characters fit comfortably into classic Dungeons and Dragons templates of class, alignment, etc., and aren't characterized in very much detail beyond that. I've often expressed admiration for your depiction of modern bureaucracies like FEMA and various law-enforcement agencies; institutions like the Burgrave's court and the Thieves' Guild don't get anywhere near a comparable treatment in Den of Thieves. You've shown a knack for evoking imaginatively-transformed real-world settings like a zombie-infested Manhattan or a vampire-haunted Centralia in complex and multidimensional detail; I'm afraid Ness didn't come alive for me in quite the same way, and felt like a pretty generic fantasy city. As for objects, Croy's armor and Bikker's "magic sword" weren't as imaginatively tangible for me as the paper hazmat suits or depleted uranium bullets you've taken such care to depict in the horror novels.

In fantasy, in a secondary world, you have to invent everything. You have to describe things in broad terms just so people get a sense of what you're talking about. If I talk about depleted uranium rounds you know what they look like, what they feel like if you hold them in your hand, or you can Google them if you don't. When I talk about magical swords forged eight hundred years ago through techniques lost to man, I'm on my own--you can't help me describe that. Fantasy will always come across as broader and less immersive because the author has to do all the work. I don't think it's any less evocative for that but it's evocative in a different way. It speaks--it should speak--to a different part of the brain. I didn't set out to write a horror novel set in Medieval Europe, here. I set out to create a whole new world in 150,000 words. It sounds like it didn't work for you, which saddens me, really, but I'll be the first to admit this is not a book for everybody. Just like my horror novels weren't going to entertain everybody. [Just to clarify, I wouldn't say it "didn't work" for me; the horror novels are more to my taste, and I think they're stronger for the reasons given above, but I still enjoyed Den of Thieves.--Curt]

As critically as I put these points, they aren't necessarily criticisms. You obviously set out to write a different kind of book, and certainly succeeded in doing so. I'm most curious as to why. George R. R. Martin's "Sopranos with swords" approach to fantasy is all the rage right now, and much of what distinguishes it are the grim "realism" and attention to detail I've identified as among the chief strengths of your horror novels. Did you make a deliberate decision not to try to ride that wave? Do you generally prefer fantasy to be lighter and broader in these ways? Did you just need a break from your usual--something more playful and fun? You've mentioned that writing this served as therapy during a difficult transition in your life; could it have done that if it were more like your horror novels, or did it really need to be this kind of book to help you through that time?

I'm a huge fan of Martin, and have been since the first Wild Cards anthology. He's done something really impressive and I respect that. But I never go into a project wanting to do what everybody else is doing. That's boring to me. This is the book I wanted to write. This is the way I wanted to write a fantasy novel. I wanted it to be playful and fun, definitely. I wanted it to be driven by the plot and be pulpy fun, and I'm extremely proud of how it turned out. There are a ton of George R.R. Martin imitators out there and if people just want more of the same (but not done as well, because an imitation never is) they can find it easily enough. Could I have written a grimy, gritty, naturalistic fantasy novel? Maybe. But I didn't want to. It's just that simple. It wasn't really a question of what I needed, or what purpose it would serve towards my therapy, it was about being honest with myself. I sat down and said, "fantasy heist novel. How do you want to write it?" and it started to flow.

5. Anything else? Thanks so much for another entertaining novel, and thanks especially for taking the time to discuss it with me!

Thanks, Curt. I appreciate that you took the time to read this so closely and to think about it so carefully.

BREAKING BAD Season 2

2011-09-13T13:24:00.001-04:00

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Okay, just to start with the ending, OH MY GOD what a lame-ass fakeout!!! That was the "payoff" for the increasingly ominous cold-opens they've been feeding us since the first frame of the season? They've been building up the promise of something like Breaking Bad's own version of Walking Dead's prison siege, or ASoIaF's Red Wedding--by which I mean, something so horrible you almost can't imagine it happening to the characters, actually happening. The burnt teddy bear in the pool is ominous because Skyler is about to have a baby. The glasses in the evidence bag are ominous because they put Walter at the scene, possibly as a victim, at least of injury. The shot of the badly damaged car in front of the house is ominous because it all-but-promises that drug violence of one kind or another has followed Walter home in a way neither he nor we were ready for. The fact that there are two body bags is ominous because, you know, who's in them? Presumably someone we care about, and/or someone who tried to hurt someone we care about. What I wanted was to see shit hit the fan, and then find out who survived and what was left of them.

What we got was a stupidly improbable coincidence whereby the grieving air-traffic-control father of a girl Walt allowed to die was overcome by exhaustion on the job and accidentally allowed two planes to crash--right over Walt's house at the exact moment he's sitting out by his pool, as it so happens. So that teddy bear? Nothing to do with Skyler or her baby. It came from one of the planes. The glasses? For all we know, not Walt's. The damage to the car? Falling debris. And, as show creator Vince Gilligan confirms to Alan Sepinwall, "the bodies in those bags on the driveway are just random airplane passengers," rather than anyone we might give a damn about.

Gilligan tries to defend this bait-and-switch by saying, "And my philosophy is if you can guess it's the cartel, and it turns out to be the cartel – well, as a viewer, I'd rather be surprised." I think he means, surprised by the "twist" he devised to make it something other than the expected cartel. But here's the thing--it's not that we as viewers guessed it would be the cartel; it's that we as viewers dreaded it would be the cartel, and what the cartel might do to Walter and his loved ones. Now, it's okay to subvert that expectation/fear if you replace it with something even more horrifying that makes even more narrative sense in a way we didn't see coming. George R. R. Martin has refined that very technique to a science--he's always setting us up to expect one very bad thing, only to blindside us with an even worse development that he's meticulously prepared in another subplot or story arc. What's not okay is to promise high stakes for the characters we care about and then shortchange us by dumping the cost on characters in whom we have no investment or even acquaintance, who were made up for no other reason than to pay that price. What's not okay is to promise Awesome and deliver Suck, just for the sake of faking the audience out.

Gilligan also describes the plane crash and fiery rain of debris as a "cosmic indictment of Walt's life choices." But for such a purpose, it's both absurdly melodramatic and too tenuous, too abstract, too many steps removed.

Perhaps worst of all, it cheapens one of the most powerful scenes in the series to that point, where Walt watches Jane die--a scene that feels like a shiv to the gut--by overshadowing real consequences, both internal and external, with a preposterous chain of cause-and-effect that leads to this obtrusively artificial set-piece.

In short, that is seriously one of the worst season endings I've encountered yet. Which is a shame, because I thought the second season was pretty outstanding, overall. They kicked everything up several notches, across the board--visuals, story, characters, you name it.

I was especially impressed with the layers they developed in Walt's fat, racist, macho DEA brother-in-law Hank Schrader. Almost every interaction with another character either revealed some new facet or shone new light on an old one. The confrontation at the pool pretty much flipped the script as to who was face and who was heel, as far as he and Walt are concerned.

Jesse got humanized a lot. Some of it was pretty hamfisted, like the stuff with his parents and that child of the junkies. Even that worked well enough, but his interactions with Jane and especially with his dealers--interactions which seemed less rigidly determined by sentimental conventions--are what really sold it.

As for Walt, he just gets harder and scarier. His remission kicks the legs out from under all his original rationalizations, at least as far as continuing down the path he's on, which is a great development for both the story and his character. The dilemma about having amassed so much money but not being able to use it--or more importantly, to take credit for it--was perfectly played. After refusing charity at every turn and making his money the old fashioned way, through blood, sweat, and tears, he must assume the humiliating posture of accepting charity after all, and every "ding!" of that Paypal alert is just more salt rubbed in his wounded pride. He's reduced to showing his hard-earned yet ill-gotten gains to his infant daughter, and boasting, "Look what Daddy did for you."

I LOVE Saul Goodman. He's like a walking, talking embodiment of the show's pitch-dark streak of humor, and his jaded competence serves as a wonderful foil to Walt and Jesse's emotionally-fraught bumblings as they climb the drug-trade learning-curve. His reaction when they told him they had 38 pounds of inventory on-hand was absolutely priceless.

Ultimately, this season was good enough over the long haul that even the awful season ender couldn't ruin it for me. On to season three . . .

BREAKING BAD Season 1

2011-09-10T11:19:00.000-04:00

A lot of people have suggested I give this series a look, and critics seem to praise it often, so here goes.

This first season, while entertaining enough, came nowhere near knocking me on my ass the way the opening seasons of BSG and Lost did. The premise--a mild-mannered high school chemistry teacher turns desperately to the lucrative cooking of pharmaceutical-grade meth when diagnosed with cancer and faced with ruinous medical expenses--has a lot of promise, but without the pizazz of a premise like Dexter's--a serial killer working in law enforcement so he can vent his compulsions on other serial killers. So far, the complications built into main character Walter White's situation--a pregnant wife, a handicapped son, a DEA brother-in-law--are fairly rote, and haven't been explored beyond the surface yet. The story- and character-beats unspool pretty predictably from the premise, like Walter's first murder, Walter's horror at his young partner's injuries after Walt pressured him to approach a sociopathic distributor, etc. There are some nice big moments, like the ghastly bathtub incident and the "twist of chemistry." Performances so far range from solid to excellent. I can only assume, though, that this series improves drastically in the second or third seasons, to garner the superlatives I see bandied around about it these days. So I'll keep watching . . .

Jigsaw Puzzle

2011-09-09T20:06:00.005-04:00

My feelings about the Saw movies have evolved a great deal, to put it mildly. For a long time, based on marketing and buzz that made them sound repellent to me, I simply refused to see them. When I finally took the plunge into "torture porn," I found the Hostel movies more immediately interesting, and had little to say about the Saws by the time I got around to them. Now I love them. I've been watching them compulsively for the past few weeks, listening to commentary tracks, and trying to figure out how they reeled me in like that.

I don't expect many to share my enthusiasm. The franchise's reputation as "torture porn" counts strongly against it in most quarters, turning a lot of people away from the films without bothering to view them (as was the case with me), and coloring the perceptions of even those who do see the movies, almost always for the worse. Then, the very fact that it is a franchise raises strong, often gleeful expectations of declining quality--if there's one thing horror fans love more than a franchise, it's shitting all over one.

I won't try to argue that these are great movies; to be honest, probably the biggest difference between my first underwhelmed watch-through and my recent Saw-a-thon is that the previous exposure made it easier for me this time to tune right into what engaged me and tune out the crap that didn't. Be that as it may, these movies did engage me, often and intensely, and I'd like to take a few posts to think out loud about how they did that and what I've come to appreciate about them. If that helps anyone else "see what I see" and enjoy or appreciate them more, so much the better.

Oh yes, there will be SPOILERS.

*The first and most general thing I'll say is that this franchise is impressively cohesive, with a tight narrative continuity and a distinct, consistent visual style. The elements that repeat from movie to movie and the patterns that emerge coalesce into the building-blocks and contours of a compelling storyverse. And the way the final movie brings everything full-circle (not only with Dr. Gordon and the bathroom set, but even just letting us see the "reverse bear-trap" actually work for once) draws the seven Saws together as one grand long-form serial story in a way I don't think any other horror franchise has achieved or maybe even attempted.

*Coming now to the main focus of this post, a lot of people say the franchise should have ended with John Kramer's death at the end of the third movie. I strongly disagree. One of the great things about this franchise is that the "monster" really does die in the third movie, stays dead for the four that come after, but remains a chillingly active presence from start to finish. How does that work?

Well, for starters, he's not technically dead yet for most of the fourth movie. The opening scene may graphically depict his autopsy, but that's actually the conclusion the movie builds up to--for the whole rest of the running time, the action flashes back to take place simultaneously with and parallel to the action of the third movie. Thus, Strahm's investigation, Rigg's gauntlet, and Matthews's excruciating final moments get braided together with Jeff's game, Lynn's ordeal, and Amanda's test. It adds up to such a sprawling and complicated clusterfuck (considering that almost everyone ends up dead on the floor) that I can only regard it with slack-jawed admiration.

The culmination of the autopsy, of course, is the discovery of the tape that promises much more posthumous carnage still to come. And that's exactly what the next three movies deliver. Shakespeare wrote, "The evil that men do lives after them," and the last three films really dramatize that in a way strangely seldom seen in horror. In life, Kramer has sown winds that, after his death, others reap as devastating whirlwinds. Of course, someone has to keep building the traps and putting new subjects to the test, and a variety of characters serve this function: protege Detective Hoffman, ex-wife Jill Tuck, medical "consultant" Dr. Lawrence Gordon. You could say that these are legacy versions of Jigsaw, or that Kramer expanded "Jigsaw" into a brand, as CRwM argues here:

These developments – the bifurcated plotting and the removal of the original Jigsaw – have lead to some complaints from fans of the series, but I personally didn't mind them. The Jigsaw killer has never been an icon in the way the '80s slashers were. It's his methods that are the hallmark of the series. He's got a set of best practices (the traps and ideology), a brand name (Jigsaw), and a mascot (the doll). A truly post-modern movie maniac, Jigsaw isn't a killer so much as a murder franchise. From the second film, the filmmakers have established that the original Jigsaw planned to train little Baby Jigsaws and send them out into the world. That we're now dealing with Jigsaw 2.0 is not only expected, but it is preferable to either dragging out the original killer's influence as if there was no operational limit to his ability to predict human behavior or doing what the slashers would have done and reintroducing him as a supernatural entity.

I imagine Kramer would view them as components of a machine or trap--one that can perpetuate itself and even expand. He's not as good at predicting human behavior as he likes to think, though, and this machine starts breaking down before he's even gone. Both Amanda and Hoffman go off the rails almost from the start. Amanda must be tested yet again, and fails. Hoffman proves to be such a loose cannon that Kramer feels obliged to make multiple contingency plans to deal with him. Even as this machine comes apart, though, it continues to shed blood, and as the flashbacks drive home, Kramer is the one who set it in motion. What happens in the last three Saw movies may not always be exactly the horror Kramer intended to inflict, but that makes it no less horrific, nor any less the consequences of his actions. The evil that he does lives after him, indeed.

Sorry for the suckitude

2011-09-06T07:44:00.000-04:00

I know I've been way off my game lately. Not sure what my problem is, but I'll see what I can do about posting something worth reading soon, and getting back in a good groove.

Musical Interlude

2011-09-05T19:18:00.000-04:00

If it's good enough for Paul Krugman, it's good enough for me.

Oltretomba N. 277: L’Inferno può attendere (Hell Can Wait), published in October, 1984

2011-08-29T03:13:00.003-04:00

Cleveland, Ohio. A group of surgeons fail to save the life of a badly beaten man, but somehow, without moving his lips, he still speaks. He claims that while his body is dead, his will is stronger than death. Then he starts spouting obscenities, apparently fantasizing about violenting someone.

Meanwhile a taxi driver suddenly rapes his customer...

...and then dies mysteriously.

This pattern of rape and death keeps repeating itself, and no one knows why, until one night a butcher shoves a salami into his customer.

Nurse Joan hears about this, and remembers the corpse describing a similar act earlier. The dead man has been identified as Peter Kinney, a notorious sex maniac, which raises a terrible question: what if he's not fantasizing at all, what if his undying will is possessing other people?

Joan explains her theory to professor Emerson, but Kinney possesses him and kills her.

Later Kinney is buried, but that resolves nothing. "I'll never stop! NEVERRRR..." he screams from the grave.

The End.

To Groovy Agers in Irene's path

2011-08-27T12:33:00.000-04:00

Best wishes, and stay safe!!!

The Universal Code of (Formerly) Unwritten Rules by Quentin Parker

2011-08-26T10:40:00.000-04:00

Not since Emily Post's book on etiquette has a rulebook been so necessary. With 251 rules concerning just about everything, Parker tells us the obvious, but with it written down it gives each rule more weight. The really bad part of the book is that the people who need to read it probably never will.
Let me give you a few examples;

UNWRITTEN RULE # 171 A gentleman should never try to engage another gentleman in conversation while both gentlemen are using urinals.

Amen to that!

UNWRITTEN RULE #33 One should always remove all snow and ice from one's car before getting out on the road.

Living in Michigan and having been behind these ice throwing death machines, I think this is a great idea.

And, finally;

UNWRITTEN RULE #16 One should never play the music in one's car at a volume discernible by other motorists.

I live in an urban area and this would be fantastic!

There are rules for men, women, work, home...you name it and there are rules. Each rule has it's own paragraph or two explaining the thought process behind each one. It all boils down to common sense. Some of the chapters have the best quotes and I will leave you with my favorite one by Oscar Wilde;

"Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing it is always from the noblest motives."

More music

2011-08-25T17:21:00.003-04:00

I know I just posted a "Musical Interlude" a few days ago, but hey . . . ~~Veronica Mars~~ Kristen Bell! And that Saw post is taking me longer than expected (sorry, but worth the wait, I promise!). Stay tuned, and stay groovy!

Everyone okay?

2011-08-23T14:59:00.002-04:00

I hope everyone's uninjured and their property undamaged after that earthquake in the US northeast. For myself, I think Irene will pass me by, but you never know with hurricanes until they're over.

I was wrong.

2011-08-22T21:23:00.002-04:00

A little while ago, in a post about going carless in my new home city of Savannah, I dismissed sweat as a concern. Well, the Georgia summer hadn't quite kicked in yet, but now that I've had a good couple months of it, I have to admit I was at least half-wrong. Never mind biking to work--just walking to my fucking mailbox is enough, some days, to give my shirt sweat rings like a character on Lost. That's why I say I was only half-wrong; downtown Savannah is very much a park-and-walk environment, so no matter how you get around here, you're gonna sweat.

No sympathy for the non-devil-worshippers

2011-08-22T12:15:00.005-04:00

Purcell's 17th Corollary of How Not To Be Stupid:

When you're picking out a name for the religion you've just made up, if you don't want to be confused with devil-worshippers, then don't fucking call yourself something that means (as established through centuries of official and popular usage) devil-worshipper. If you go ahead and choose that name, despite having no basis whatsoever for any claim to it, you have only yourself to thank if people confuse you with devil-worshippers and persist in the established usage despite your groundless, petulant objections.

Musical Interlude

2011-08-21T23:48:00.001-04:00

Something to listen to whilst I work on my big Saw post.

THE DESERT DEMONS by Kenneth Robeson (Altus Press 2011)

2011-08-19T12:54:00.024-04:00

The first new Doc Savage adventure in 20 years!

After wrapping up Bantam’s long-running Doc series (1964-91) with his own turn as “Kenneth Robeson”, author Will Murray is back with more novels based on notes, outlines and synopses left behind by the late pulp master Lester Dent. The Desert Demons is the purportedly the first of seven Doc books from niche publisher Altus Press, billed as The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage — the “wild” denoting a willingness to fully embrace sci-fi/fantasy elements. Some of the best, most memorable of the original Doc stories from the 1930s certainly qualify on that score (The Land of Terror, The Monsters, and Land of Always-Night are prime examples), but ‘gangster with a super-weapon’ plots — or worse, Scooby Doo-style phonies — were too often the rule rather than the exception. Because of this, while reading The Desert Demons I was expecting the titular creatures to be ultimately revealed as some clever fake engineered by the villain. Well, it turns out they aren’t demons in any supernatural sense… but they are most definitely NOT a hoax.

Strange, howling, copper-colored clouds — seemingly alive and sentient — are descending on California, attacking people and vehicles with astonishing results. With the notable exception of glass, every substance they touch is almost instantly reduced to piles of salt-like elements. The helplessness of the authorities has citizens of the Golden State on the verge of mass panic, as rumors fly of everything from an old Native American curse to an attack by Martians. It’s up to the mighty Man of Bronze, joined by his five assistants and glamorous cousin Patricia “Pat” Savage, to discover the nature of these deadly phenomena and devise a countermeasure. Doc races from the movie backlots of Hollywood to the very edge of the stratosphere in his battle against the unearthly cyclonic monsters.

This is the Doc Savage that his fans love to see in action: the ass-kicking daredevil super-scientist, the ultimate combination of Hercules, Mr. Spock, and James Bond. Perhaps the grooviest aspect of the book is the fact that Murray has utterly nailed Lester Dent’s voice — the plot, prose and dialog are completely indistinguishable from the “Golden Age” Doc Savage stories of the ‘30s. I’ve never before read a continuation novel — by a writer to whom the torch has been passed by another — that achieves this feat so seamlessly. (Authorship is officially credited to "Will Murray and Lester Dent, writing as Kenneth Robeson".) Instead of a shiny new trade paperback I felt I should’ve been holding a battered and moldy Bantam edition procured via eBay.

Grade: B+

LOTT-D on the SAW franchise

2011-08-19T10:40:00.002-04:00

I've really grown to love the Saw movies. In fact, I've watched the whole series through three times now, and find it more absorbing than ever. I'll have a lot to say about that--hopefully soon--in a forthcoming post, but in the meantime, I asked my fellow League of Tana Tea Drinkers for links to their posts about it. My own thoughts may turn out to be too idiosyncratic to mesh very well with any points made in these reviews, but I appreciate those who troubled to respond, and am happy to offer them here for your reading pleasure and edification:

Zombos' Closet
The Moon Is a Dead World
TheoFantastique
Monster Land

More to come as soon as I can get to it!

Oh STFU

2011-08-18T10:41:00.002-04:00

Is there anything more stupid than "Wiccans" getting all pissy and offended at fictional depictions of witches? If I understand correctly, the term and concept have traditionally been employed as attempts to explain misfortunes like disease, infertility, crops not growing, etc., by blaming/scapegoating someone, and as pretexts for persecution. So depictions of someone using magical powers malignantly would be correct usage, since that's how this mythical figure was imagined. It's not like there was, historically, some actual oppressed religious minority corresponding to the term. So it's not like this silly New Age "spirituality" that got made up within the last half-century is actually carrying on any such tradition. The fact that these people decided to call themselves that doesn't give them any real standing to dictate how witches should be portrayed in fiction, nor to be offended by portrayals that don't meet their approval.

ASoIaF: Is it possible NOT to glamorize war?

2011-08-17T13:45:00.002-04:00

One recurring point of agreement between Sean T. Collins and myself in our discussions of George R. R. Martin's sprawling epic fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire, is that, in Sean's words, "Martin has unfailingly portrayed war as a grotesque folly, a crime against our common humanity." Sean sees this as, at root, an extension of the broader point that depiction does not equal endorsement, and argues that, at its most poignant, it embodies the values articulated in, for example, this history teacher's call to stop normalizing and even glamorizing war in the classroom.

But CRwM has made a point in another context that perhaps should give us pause:

In his 1991 memoir of the Gulf War, ex-Marine Anthony Swofford admirably demolished the notion of filmmakers diminish our taste for conflict when they depict the violence of conflict in graphic terms. Previous, and perhaps more eloquent, writers had dismissed the utility of anti-war art before. Leslie Fiedler, for example, astutely pointed out the obvious in his introduction to Jaroslav Hašek's classic unfinished novel The Good Soldier Svejk and stated that anti-war art hasn't done anything to prevent us from going to war, it's simply stripped it of its nobility. Swofford went one further than Fiedler and suggested that, by stripping it of the nobility that inscribed conflict within a matrix of civil action and responsibility, modern graphic depictions of war became a sort of naked celebration of the unleashed power of violence. Freed of the ideals of combat, what's left is a darkly glamorous wallowing in the use of force, liberated by the presumption of evil of any need to answer to moral calculus. Horace's suicidal war erotica might not have been "true," was it really worse than Blackhawk Down's war porn? Swofford recalls how, prior to deployment, he and his fellow Marines would eat up ostensibly anti-war films like Apocalypse Now and Platoon, getting a proxy wargasm off the display of raw hell that they would soon (potentially) be in a position to wield themselves.

THE HIDDEN by Richard Sala (Fantagraphics 2011)

2011-08-16T10:47:00.001-04:00

Sala fans rejoice!--and reserve or pre-order your copies of The Hidden, his latest, which finally streets September 12.

It's his second full-color book, after Cat Burglar Black. As much as I've enjoyed his black-and-white work, it's eye-popping to see things like the sun-baked reds and yellows of his desert, or the unsettling blue tint of a nightmarish flashback, especially when he gives them great big splash pages for maximum effect, as he often does here.

Though not as plainly visible as the turn to color, a more striking departure from his previous work is the tone, which largely dispenses with the zaniness and whimsy that typically lighten even the darkest goings-on in a Sala comic. In that regard, The Hidden is closer to the subdued, even dour emotional palette of Delphine than it is to, say, a Judy Drood comic. That takes a little getting used to, because this does sport, much more than Delphine does, Sala's usual complement of spooky monsters, cute girls, mad scientists, secret hideouts, etc.; it's just that he plays them a lot straighter this time, with far fewer of the tongue-in-cheek touches that lend his work an undercurrent of dark, sly humor.

Since that humor has emerged as such a tremendous, even defining part of Sala's appeal, I must confess that on a first reading, I was a little put-off to find it reduced to such a dim flicker. But on a second reading, with the understanding that he was exploring grimmer and more downbeat territory, other strengths grew more apparent--dreadful scenes of apocalypse, vistas of desolation, one truly appalling horror flashback set-piece, violence that feels more brutal than delirious, and tension between characters rooted more in how they treat each other than in their comical quirks.

So what's it all about? It bears a family resemblance to a zombie apocalypse, but I don't want to say much more about it than that. This study on spoilers notwithstanding, one of the great pleasures of reading a Sala comic for me is to let him lead me down the uniquely crooked lanes of his imagination. So buy The Hidden, and enjoy the journey (preview the first 13 pages here, btw). Highly recommended!

Tom Spurgeon

2011-08-15T12:52:00.002-04:00

Wow--sounds like it was a very near thing. We would have lost a treasure. Here's wishing him the best of health and the most complete recovery possible. That link, btw, isn't just a news item or blog update, but a moving meditation on life and death, and comics from that perspective.

ANNE FRANKENSTEIN by Jared Morgan

2011-08-13T19:27:00.007-04:00

With the tasteful treatment of sensitive topics you've come to expect from the Groovy Age of Horror, I'm proud to unveil a new minicomic from my fellow Savannahian, Jared Morgan . . . Anne Frankenstein!!! It's a pinch of backstory ("Dear Kitty . . .") and a Frankenfistful of what the movie advertisements refer to as a Roaring Rampage of Revenge:

If that sounds like your cup o' grue (and if you're reading this blog, why the hell wouldn't it?), get yours from andtheycalledhimjared[AT]gmail[DOT]com.

UPDATE: Price is 4 + 1.25 shipping = $5.25 total.

ASoIaF: The Wall and 9/11

2011-08-12T15:36:00.002-04:00

Sean T. Collins's post about 9/11 on his ASoIaF tumblr reminds me of something that's been in the back of my mind ever since the Wall was introduced--along with the prospect of it coming down.

The conventional wisdom is that when the Others attack, the Wall will come down. I'm not so sure, given Martin's knack for confounding and subverting expectations, but any alternative would need to be pretty fucking awesome to make up for not delivering on that implicit promise.

If the Wall does come down, the hostile destruction of something so monumental will, by default, carry echoes of 9/11, and I'd be curious to see how Martin would handle that. I say "by default" because I presume that there are ways to minimize the resonance or perhaps even avoid it altogether, but they would require very deliberate craft on Martin's part. On the other hand, he could embrace it, though if he takes that route, I'd expect him to do it with subtlety and nuance--assuming such are even possible in a case like that.

The toppling of that giant tree in James Cameron's Avatar is an interesting example. On the one hand, the movie fairly dripped with political agenda, and the many visual references to 9/11 as the tree collapsed were certainly part of that. On the other hand, for better and worse, 9/11 defined in real-life the iconography of destruction on a scale that could previously only be imagined in speculative entertainment. If you want to depict the collapse of such a monumental structure, even for strictly and purely narrative purposes, there simply is no other model.

How will Martin negotiate all of this? That will certainly be interesting to see.

A DANCE WITH DRAGONS: Marking time

2011-08-11T11:54:00.000-04:00

Sean T. Collins does an excellent job of explaining the lack of narrative momentum in Dany's chapters in ADwD, by noting that Martin seems to have paused in them from using specific techniques and devices he uses elsewhere in ASoIaF to keep narrative momentum high. I've debated whether to make that point myself, and refrained from doing so, because I didn't think the internets needed one more critic piling on about how tedious Dany's chapters sometimes seem here, but Sean brings a more sympathetic perspective, and does a better job than I would have of offering it as an observation rather than a complaint. I agree that, "A lack of forward momentum appears to me to be precisely the point of the Meereen storyline," but I'm less inclined to count that in Martin's favor.

I think Sean is on more solid ground in explaining it as a function of the "Meereenese knot"--as a narrative bottleneck, during which all the major players must be moved into place in a way that doesn't magically whisk them there without mishap from all corners of the world. I think this gives us a useful perspective, too, for understanding Quentyn Martell's ill-fated arc. Sean has said about it:

Quentyn Martell’s storyarc reminded me of some late-season Sopranos characters, when the show had gotten so confident in its abilities (and rightfully so) that it had no problem either introducing brand-new characters or elevating minor ones to major importance, fleshing them out, giving them an arc that dominated an entire season, and then killing them. The effect is like opening your favorite novel to discover a complete, cohesive novella tucked inside; it makes a big work feel bigger. Or maybe it’s like listening to a really great remix EP of one of your favorite songs; it takes elements from something you love and spins them into something separate and new, an exploration of themes you already love but with pleasures of its own to discover. Or maybe it’s like the writer is putting his own godlike power to create and destroy lives you care about on full display; he’s saying “Here, look at this beautiful thing I made…but beautiful things can’t last.”

Sure, but more than anything, I suspect poor Quentyn's story is something to keep us occupied while we're waiting for all these journeys to put the real players where they need to be for the next huge and off-kilter lurch forward. Sean lists a whoooole lot of arcs converging on Dany; when they all start to collide, we might well see a bigger, more satisfyingly complicated payoff than anything we've seen thus far. In the end, my money's on it being worth the wait.

A DANCE WITH DRAGONS: How to read the Pink Letter

2011-08-11T01:09:00.001-04:00

It's not canonical parlance, but by "Pink Letter" (a term coined here, I believe) I mean that ne plus ultra of nasty missives which Jon Snow receives in his last chapter of ADwD, ostensibly from Ramsay Bolton. If you need (and can stomach) a refresher for it, Sean T. Collins has posted the text here.

This thing was bound to provoke discussion, and it has. The silliest response to it is the complaint that this is a terrible way to reveal plot developments, as if it just slipped George R. R. motherfucking Martin's mind that in fiction it's better to show than tell. And, more to the point, as if the Pink Letter straightforwardly reveals anything. It is, after all, just a letter, and as we've seen on multiple occasions, even real severed heads displayed on walls can be misleading. Martin anticipates this as a topic of internet discussion when he puts the words in Tormund's mouth,

If I had me a nice goose quill and a pot o' maester's ink, I could write down that me member was long and thick as me arm, wouldn't make it so.

. . . and fashions Jon's response thus:

"He has Lightbringer. He talks of heads upon the walls of Winterfell. He knows about the spearwives and their number." He knows about Mance Rayder. "No. There is truth in there."

Along these lines, the main response to the Pink Letter has been a torrent of speculation about which parts in it are true and which are not. Here's one thread that hashes over every mathematical possibility of every single line, right down to the signature.

Amongst this contingent, there's further grumbling that these questions are left as cliffhangers, with the relevant plot threads unresolved. That brings us full-circle to the complaint that whatever events led to the truth (or falsity) of the Pink Letter's claims should have been directly depicted in the real-time of the story; now, if we see those events, they'll at best come from a lagging perspective that must catch up to this point, and they might even be consigned to flashback or, worst of all, further summary in dialogue or letter.

I understand the fun of speculation like this. It's only natural to ponder those sorts of questions, and of course I've given them some thought. And if some fans want to analyze the whole thing in such exhaustive detail, well, as long as they enjoy doing so, I'm certainly not one to begrudge them that pleasure. If there's one thing I've learned from Lost fandom's obsession with ANSWERS!!!, though, it's that such a focus can blind to other pleasures, and becomes truly pernicious when it needlessly sours enjoyment, as in the case of the complainers mentioned above.

Significantly, the poster who initiated the thread about the letter compares it to the Red Wedding in terms of the "gut punch" it delivers. That was also my reaction, and the most interesting question to me is not so much the truth or falsity of this or that claim in the letter, but rather how Martin crafts such a raw, intense experience.

* ASoIaF is chock full of shocks, but as startling as they are, they almost never come out of the blue. Rather, they hit us from blind-spots that Martin takes great care to establish. That isn't a matter of withholding information, either. Martin has proven very adept in these novels at narrative sleight-of-hand, whereby he lays the groundwork for a game-changing development, sometimes foreshadowing it quite heavily, then immerses us in a different point of view which is thoroughly focused and invested in a completely different set of concerns. While we're looking through that viewpoint character's eyes in this other direction, he blindsides us with the upsetting new development. To cite one of my favorite examples, one reason Melisandre's sorcerous assassination of Renly was so startling was because we spent so many pages earlier in the chapter with Catelyn in the sept, getting practically catechized into her viewpoint--her hopes and fears, expectations and resolutions, and therefore also her blind spots.

Similarly, the Pink Letter chapter opens with Jon absorbed in the problem of a letter he received at the end of his previous chapter--one reporting disaster for the Hardhome expedition, that tells ominously of "Dead things in the woods. . . . Dead things in the water." The Pink Letter's arrival intrudes upon and interrupts his urgent efforts at organizing an overland rescue mission.

* The next point I'd make is that, before the Pink Letter is even opened, we get this:

[Jon] broke off when Mully poked his nose inside the door, grim-faced, to announce that Clydas had brought a letter.

"Tell him to leave it with you. I will read it later."

"As you say, m'lord, only . . . Clydas don't look his proper self . . . he's more white than pink, if you get my meaning . . . and he's shaking."

[ . . . ]

"Show Clydas in if you would be so good."

Mully had not been wrong; the old steward was trembling, his face as pale as the snows outside. "I am being foolish, Lord Commander, but . . . this letter frightens me. See here?"

Bastard, was the only word written on the scroll. No Lord Snow or Jon Snow or Lord Commander. Simply Bastard. And the letter was sealed with a smear of hard pink wax. "You were right to come at once," Jon said. You were right to be afraid. He cracked the seal, flattened the parchment, and read.

I've boldfaced the relevant parts--this passage exhibits pretty much every principle I've described at length in another context, to establish an atmosphere of foreboding and dread around the Pink Letter.

* Before getting into the specifics of the letter, I'd just observe that the medium really matters here. When HBO adapts ADwD for television, the Pink Letter scene will be realized as . . . a guy reading a letter aloud. By contrast, the Red Wedding will be realized as the massacre it is. In the novels, however, the Pink Letter is an exquisite piece of writing that really sticks out from the writing around it. What's more, in the novels, the Pink Letter can punch as hard as the Red Wedding scene because both are text, and we "see" the extraordinarily vivid imagery they evoke with the same "mind's eye."

* I've explained how Martin sets us up to be blindsided; in order to understand what exactly he sucker-punches us with here, we'll need to look at another narrative technique I've discussed before that he employs to great effect throughout ASoIaF. It's a big part of how he manages to keep a story of this length and scale moving forward in a compelling manner, and often plays a crucial role in stunning and memorable moments like this.

What it is, basically, is the kind of interaction he engineers among the various plot threads and narrative arcs in play. Conventionally in long fiction, multiple plotlines sometimes resolve independently, but more often they merge toward a unified resolution. Martin, by contrast, tends to bring multiple plotlines into shocking and violent collision which derails, fractures, or even obliterates one or more of them. Whichever arcs survive or break off have been knocked onto new trajectories, building almost from scratch toward radically altered resolutions. Apart from the "oh shit!" scenes that usually result from such collisions, this technique permits Martin to defer resolution almost indefinitely while also maintaining strong forward momentum.

Interestingly, the plotlines that come crashing into Jon's in the Pink Letter also derive from his. Stannis left the Wall to win the North, and Mance Rayder took his Fox Force ~~Five~~ Six ("Young ones, and pretty,") to Winterfell to rescue "Arya" from Ramsay Bolton's depraved clutches. This derivation is important; it puts a personal edge on Ramsay's (?) nastiness sharp enough to cut through Jon's defenses, and lends the whole thing a sense of chickens coming home to roost. But for the collision effect to work, Martin also has to give these plotlines enough distance from Jon's for readers to experience them as independent. With Stannis, the victory at Deepwood Motte and then increasingly grievous trudge through the snow do the trick. Mance and his spearwives settle into Theon Greyjoy's viewpoint incognito, and their "Ten Little Indians" routine emerges as its own little subplot.

When last we see Stannis, things have grown almost comically dire for both his forces and the Boltons'. I was really starting to wonder if Martin would give us a "What if they gave a war and nobody came?" sequence where exposure, starvation, and dissension in the ranks killed everyone before hostilities could commence. When last we see Mance, the rescue operation has gone clusterfuck, and the only question is how badly it will end for everyone involved.

These questions arise in other viewpoints, so we're not prepared to see them answered in Jon's--any more than Jon is. What Martin does is maneuver us into position to experience what it's like to get a letter like this. The naysayers who insist that we should have gotten a battle scene and a Mance Rayder action scene just don't understand what an achievement that is, or how it would have been undermined by what they're demanding. It's exponentially shocking, for us through Jon's eyes, to see all of these questions answered, so succinctly, and every answer a worst-case-scenario. Not that those answers are necessarily true, as we've seen, but that uncertainty is also part of Jon's perspective, and we must share it with him.

* The irony of the Pink Letter is that it, in turn, sets us up to be blindsided by Jon's assassination. Only in this instance, the shiny object waved before our eyes is more arresting than the final twist, even after the latter is revealed. There are a lot of reasons for that, but the most fundamental is that the Pink Letter is something new, and Jon's death simply isn't. We've seen a Lord Commander murdered by Night's Watch, and we've seen Starks murdered through treachery aplenty. Jon's murder therefore retreads more than one path Martin has already shown us. And that's to say nothing of the fact that this death stinks of cheapness. Parts of the Pink Letter might not be a bluff, but Jon's "death" surely is.

* And so, I do think the "Pink Letter" earns that appellation, as an echo of "Red Wedding"--by almost all accounts, one of the hardest gut-punches in a series famous for them.

Cimiteria N. 6: L'uomo Lupo (The Werewolf), published in July, 1977

2011-08-09T11:38:00.004-04:00

At the end of the Victorian era a dark but beautiful heroine is born in London. She's a corpse brought back to life via magic and lightning, an unholy cross between a zombie and the Frankenstein's monster, and her name is Cimiteria. The undead Venus has lost all memories of her past, but gained a rather straightforward mind, she now pursues all her goals without giving a crap about any collateral damage. And at the moment her goal is to get buggered by the handsome stranger Sigmund Fury.

Cimiteria would love to have normal sex, but her resurrection left a deadly electric charge inside her lady parts, which interrupts any attempts of coitus with a million volts to the penis. Fortunately Sigmund is quite happy to bugger her.

To her surprise, he turns into a werewolf.

Sigmund intends to devour Cimiteria, but she has a devious last request: "Eat me first!"

The vaginal electricity sparks a fire...

...and the werewolf becames such an inferno that his heart fails.

I am seriously in love with this series. It's like the best of Hammer horror and the best of Tarantino combined, the plots take insane turns that can easily be compared with the notorious "Zed" -storyline from Pulp Fiction. The werewolf incident was actually only a small side plot, most of the story was about Cimiteria trying to free her true love from prison. Quentin, if you ever feel the need to do more horror, this series is for you!

But then again, Groovy Age's own Andy Decker seems to think that the series is more or less just mean exploitation for exploitation's sake. Well, personally I don't need any redeeming qualities in my fumetti, but your mileage might vary. Besides, I find the series quite ambitious, so many game-changing things happened during its run that it would be hard to read the episodes out of sequence. Fortunately I've collected all the 119 issues and five supplements, and plan to re-read them all this year, so maybe I can eventually provide some kind of a highlight reel. Stay tuned.

Realistic Depiction and (not versus!) Moral Idealism in ASoIaF

2011-08-08T12:51:00.007-04:00

Sean T. Collins. Great stuff!

Musical Interlude

2011-08-05T19:28:00.000-04:00

TGIMFF!

ADwD: Separate Peaces follow-up

2011-08-04T16:54:00.000-04:00

*Thanks to Sean's kind words and linkage, the Westeros message board has taken up an interesting thread discussing issues of peace and its relation to war in ADwD.

*To clarify another point Sean touched on, although I do think two more doorstop volumes should leave ample room for Martin to resolve everything he needs to, I'd just ask why anyone thinks it necessarily must be done in the two named, planned volumes. Suppose he cranks out another 1500 pages, only to realize that he's less than halfway into Winds of Winter. His agent and publisher are probably praying for just such an eventuality. As if anyone would say, "No, goose, I want only two more golden eggs from you, and not a single golden egg more!!!" I don't know--has Martin himself said he refuses to let it drag out past two more volumes?

*To touch again on the question of whether the Others can be established as satisfying antagonists within whatever allotted timeframe, when Sean says that Martin "has to root us and the characters alike in the conflict with the Others," my own sense is that Martin doesn't want either us or the characters to be ready for the Others when they finally attack in force. To cite a bit more comics "junk" (which I haven't even read, for good measure!), I suspect it will look something like this:

In a special What If by David Hine and Mico Suayan, the Annihilation Wave reaches Earth in the climactic battle of the super hero Civil War. Nova is outraged the heroes are fighting over secret identities when such a massive threat is coming.

In this case, as I imagine it, Civil War translates to Westeros's Game of Thrones (which is slowly but surely reducing the entire realm to a macrocosmic Reek), and the Annihilation Wave translates to the Others. That's a too-geeky-by-half way of saying Westeros will have everything but Others on its collective mind on the day the Wall falls. Everyone will be utterly knocked on their ass by it--including us readers, I hope!--and everyone who isn't Night's Watch will almost certainly be caught in the middle of some other situation that seemed dire enough already.

*Where do I even begin with the Pink Letter? It deserves its own post (or two?), and that's what I'll tackle next. Stay tuned, and stay groovy!

A DANCE WITH DRAGONS: Separate Peaces

2011-08-03T09:23:00.001-04:00

*To begin most superficially, Jesus fuck I'm glad not to have to lug this thing around in my messenger bag any longer.

*From what I've gathered in my surfing of internets, there's some question whether Martin can bring everything to resolution within the two remaining planned volumes. That's just stupid. The entire publication history of the series to date has been one long study in letting this epic tale grow into what it needs to be. It was originally planned as a trilogy, but is now up to five volumes, with two more planned. And really, Feast for Crows and Dance with Dragons were supposed to be a single volume, but again, sensible flexibility allowed the story to grow where it needed to. Let's not forget, either, that we're talking about thousand-page installments; there are whole series out there that don't weigh in at the page-count of a single ASoIaF novel. So, you know, a whole fucking lot can happen in a thousand pages. Let's not forget, either, what makes that even possible--Martin is employing sophisticated narrative structures and devices specifically designed to subvert and defer resolution in the traditional sense. Once he knocks that off and commences the "landing pattern" of action rising toward climax and denouement, I think we'll see the pieces come together very quickly. So ultimately, barring some catastrophic "author existence failure" (and please do note the trope-defining quote), I expect A Song of Ice and Fire to be exactly as long as it needs to be.

*Sean T. Collins puts a specific twist on this question in wondering whether the Others can be built up into satisfying antagonists within a single volume or two. I don't see why not--and I especially don't see why a seasoned superhero comics fan like Sean might have doubts on this point. Big Bads and their minions are constantly bubbling up from the "Cauldron of Story" on amazingly short notice to form some of the most satisfying and cathartic arcs in amazingly longstanding superhero series--arcs that can be collected into single volumes much less substantial (not just physically but narratively) than a typical ASoIaF novel. From the Black Queen/Dark Phoenix Saga to the Great Darkness Saga to the Death of Superman to Knightfall to Blackest Night, "it is known" to happen. Granted, I didn't find Blackest Night especially satisfying, but my quibbles come down to execution--the concept remains strong, and I expect the ultimate confrontation with the Others to be the ASoIaF universe's own Blackest Night, in Martin's much more capable hands. I doubt we have any idea yet which dead will rise to bedevil the living, but I'll be shocked if we don't see a motherfucking dragon with death-blackened wings and hauntingly blue eyes (you thought they were going to use a silly horn to bring the Wall down?).

*Whilst I'm speculating about dragons, I'll lay odds here that Bran the ultra-warg commandeers one for the final battle. Now that's what I call flying instead of walking!

*My biggest "oh shit!" moment came when, in the midst of marveling over what a huge set-piece Martin was staging to bring the wildlings through the Wall, something clicked for me and I realized it was the central set-piece of Dance with Dragons--this novel's equivalent of the Battle of Blackwater. And what's remarkable about that is, it's a scene, a spectacular one, of peace, of two civilizations riven by ancient hostilities at long last coming to uneasy terms with each other.

That really helped sharpen for me the thematic and tonal differences between Feast for Crows and Dance with Dragons. Martin's aggressively unsentimental approach to depicting violence has gradually and unobtrusively assumed the contours of a meditation on violence and war (Sean T. Collins has touched repeatedly on this point, most recently here). It's a pretty damning one, and nowhere more so than in Feast for Crows, the very title of which evokes fields of corpses in the aftermath of battle. In particular, Brienne's wanderings through the smoking, blood-drenched ruins of Westeros serve as a grim kaleidoscope of post-apocalyptic, practically Infernal imagery.

By contrast, the strongest thematic thread in Dance with Dragons is the struggle for peace: Jon's with the wildlings in the north, and Dany's with the hostile factions that menace her people in Meereen. It's ambitious, even audacious to make these two peace processes the heart of a novel like this, in a series like this, and to try to dramatize them with all the gut-clenching tension of the violence that has characterized the series so far. The challenge Martin seems to be setting himself here is to ennoble peacemaking without sentimentalizing it. He seems to be trying to establish peace as a venue for heroism; the tightrope he must walk is to make it a flawed heroism (or it wouldn't be true to the series, or for that matter to life) without reinforcing the all-but-inevitable cliche that the flaw is naivete or weakness. The violence in the series always goes horribly awry or leads to ghastly blowback sooner or later, and so must the peace--but in a way that doesn't slip into the oft-evoked real-world religio-political narrative that striving for peace in the first place is stupid or contemptible and bound to fail, and that violence and war thus constitute the only strong and rational response to grievance or aggression. I'm reminded here of something else Sean said in another context:

But what I learned [from reading Ian Kershaw's Hitler: A Biography] is that the actions of Chamberlain and the other European governments prior to the war had nothing to do with being giant pussies who didn’t have the balls to go kill them some Nazis and defend human freedom against Cobra, a ruthless terrorist organization determined to rule the world. What it had to do with was remembering how around 20 years earlier, the nations of Europe had collectively fed themselves into a nightmarish meat grinder, and could we please try to avoid slaughtering tens of millions of our children in the near future. After reading Kershaw’s book, I don’t get the sense that Chamberlain’s appeasement at Munich had anything to do with a moral defect on the part of Chamberlain or anyone else, anyone else but Hitler that is.

I really had the sense that Martin was trying to get something like that across, but even more, to make the scenes depicting it as exciting and moving as all the preceding scenes of violence. If that indeed was his aim, I'd say he played a losing hand about as well as anyone could have. After all of the above, it might sound strange for me to call it a "losing hand," but let's face it--conflict is the heart of story, and violence is the most spectacular and dramatic expression of conflict. The Wall set-piece is beautiful, even awesome . . . but ultimately, it didn't have the punch to knock me on my ass the way Martin's violent set-pieces almost always do.

*Whew! Probably more to come, as I turn my thoughts to other arcs and aspects . . .

Musical Interlude

2011-07-29T23:16:00.001-04:00

Something to listen to whilst I plow through Dances with Dragons.

DANCES WITH DRAGONS: Characters Welcome

2011-07-25T17:08:00.002-04:00

Now this is more like it! Surprisingly, my most moving "reunion" so far has been with Davos--seeing his chapter-head just made me smile. There's an offhand remark about him I recall from Feast for Crows that's either misleading or a spoiler. I'm hoping it's the former.

now showing in Savannah: LOVECRAFTED

2011-07-22T23:31:00.003-04:00

This was a fun little show--a narrator relating his discovery of and increasing fondness for Lovecraft, interspersed with other people (in various degrees of costume) reading passages from Lovecraft that illustrate the memories and rhetorical points. There's some humorous Neil Gaiman material stirred in (with permission, so my program declares), and one good idea that fell a little flat where a group of people stood on stage and chanted a stream of Lovecraft's favorite words (the ones that blew my thirteen-year-old mind). Not many Groovy Agers that I know of in my neck of the swamp, but if you're in Savannah this Saturday, you could do worse than drop in on this show. Who knows?--you could even win the raffle for the plush Cthulhu toy!

A FEAST FOR CROWS by George R. R. Martin

2011-07-21T15:16:00.003-04:00

I read this while in the process of moving, and didn't get around to reviewing it the way I intended. Now, a few months later, I find it's made very little lasting impression on me. Each of the first three novels delivered gut-punches I still feel to this day, but not Feast for Crows. In the narrative rhythm of peaks and valleys, it's a solid thousand pages of valley.

Like I said, too, with Jon Snow, Tyrion, and Dany out of the picture, it reads much more like tie-in than main story--an effect exacerbated by expanding the cast and geographical sweep to include people and places we've been given little or no reason to care about up until now.

We catch glimpses of Sansa and Arya, of course, but they're both in "chrysalis" phases of their lives. I expect Arya in particular to kick ass spectacularly once she's ready for prime time, but until then, it's pretty much, "Wax on, wax off."

There is one positive observation I'd like to make, though, that this novel exemplifies better than the others, I think. I've praised Martin before for employing surprising non-resolutions to significant (even central) story arcs--for example, by allowing them to disintegrate, casting the characters involved off in different directions. Of course, new arcs form around the major characters. But the minor characters have continuing roles to play as well--Martin uses them as narrative shrapnel. They continue to grind around in the larger story, causing all kinds of damage. I'm thinking here especially of characters like the Cleganes, Bronn, Rorge, Biter, Lord Beric and Thoros, etc. They recur, but in different contexts, drifting from subplot to subplot, and are thorns in the side of every A-lister they encounter. It's funny that both Catelyn Stark and Cersei Lannister have had plans fucked up by someone thinking it was a fine idea to challenge Bronn to single combat.

There's one other quip I was going to make, but I figured someone else must have made it already, and when I googled the title along with the words, sure enough, someone did:

I certainly wouldn't have predicted at the end of Storm of Swords that the end of this book would have Cersei a captive of the Spanish Inquisition. But that's because nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, especially not Cersei apparently.

I'm just surprised another Monty Python fan I know didn't make it.

On to Dances with Dragons . . .

DEATH NOTE

2011-07-20T10:24:00.000-04:00

The single biggest thing that prompted me to check out Death Note was this paragraph from Tom Spurgeon's epic interview with comics critic Jog about it:

Death Note, you see, is a plot machine. If, as the old saying goes, manga is different from Western pop comics in that it's more about going somewhere than getting there, Death Note splits the difference by making virtually every chapter a small destination. It's a suspense comic that's just diabolically focused on plot points, dozens and dozens of them, everything swirling around Light the ambitious kid's efforts to evade capture while killing the shit out of criminals so as to reform the world, initially powered by new "rules" regarding how to use the deadly notebook, every one of them providing fresh fodder for cat 'n mouse contortions, but later just sprawling all of this accumulated background over expanded scenarios. What if Light loses his memory for a while? What if other Shinigami show up with extra Death Notes? What if we fucking kill the series' most popular character right here and replace him with two characters representing (a) emotion and (b) full Vulcan? Oooh, how do we get out of this, dear readers??

I was intrigued to see how that would work. Unfortunately, not so well.

I've mentioned how hard it was to tear myself away from the Death Note manga series once I started it, but now that I've finished it, I have to say it's more compelling in the reading than in retrospect. The first few volumes made a tremendous impression on me, but after a while I realized I was still turning pages on the strength of that impression more than on the strength of the ongoing story, and I ended feeling more glad it was over than satisfied.

It starts with a simple-enough concept: there's a magic notebook that lets you kill anyone if you write their name in it, and this notebook falls into the hands of a young man determined to use it to rid the world of criminals and crime. The big hook, for me at least, is that even though these killings are carried out literally by magic, they form patterns that the police can actually investigate, and that lead an especially smart detective to zero in fairly quickly on the actual perpetrator. From there on, it's a game of cat-and-mouse as Light Yagami (the killer, or Kira) tries to continue his kill-spree without getting caught by super-detective L, who is on to him and he knows it. All kinds of complications get thrown into the mix, and though they start off strong, they ultimately drag the story down. Introducing a second notebook makes a great twist, for example, but introducing new rules for the notebooks usually doesn't. Too often, the story gets hung up spinning around the legalistics of an increasingly long and detailed list of rules. Light's scheming becomes leadenly tedious as newly-revealed intricacies prompt him to plan that many more steps ahead.

There's one source of plot complications that I have especially mixed feelings about--the death spirits (shinigami) who accompany each notebook. On the plus side, they're wondrously designed and add a lot of visual appeal. And when they function as characters, as when Rem unexpectedly reveals feelings for Misa, they do spice the story up in welcome ways.

My main beef with them is . . . how shall I put this? When I first heard about Death Note, the idea of these magic notebooks struck me as a great high-concept, very clean and simple, and then when I started reading, the shinigami seemed to muddy that concept in a way I didn't care for. As an extension of that point, most of the notebook rules I complain about above seem to center around them--sometimes in ways even they find confusing:

I could recommend checking the manga out up to around volume 4, but after that, the longer it goes on, the more it fails to entertain as serial narrative.

Paperback Fanatic 19

2011-07-17T09:26:00.004-04:00

Paperback Fanatic started out as Justin Marriott's one-man labor of love. The caliber of his writing and the quality of production quickly made it an attractive venue for guest contributors (of whom I am proud to have been one). Now that he seems to have found the ideal format and settled into it for several issues, it's another indication of how far this enterprise has come that he doesn't contribute a single major article to the latest issue. Bill Pronzini (himself a novelist of groovy vintage) and David Whitehead survey the careers of Jay Flynn and Peter McCurtin, respectively. Johnny Mains contributes two interviews, one of Basil Copper and one of David Case. Graham Andrews rounds out the roster with a piece on J. G. Ballard. The issue concludes with Stuart Williams's brief, poignant remembrance of Jeffrey Catherine Jones. All outstanding work; although Marriott's own voice is missed, there's certainly no dip in quality here. Naturally, I couldn't make it through the thing without adding several items to my must-get list.

Always stuffed with such in-depth, informative fare, and illustrated throughout with full-color reproductions of eye-popping vintage paperback covers--if you don't already have a subscription to Paperback Fanatic, what the hell are you waiting for? Get it here!

STIR OF ECHOES by Richard Matheson (Avon 1969)

2011-07-15T08:36:00.002-04:00

A party game of hypnosis taps the latent psychic ability of a suburban family man, who not only becomes alarmingly aware of the thoughts and feelings of the people around him, but also finds himself haunted by the apparition of a woman who's supposed to be alive . . .

The thing about Richard Matheson is, he's a great concept guy, but after reading this and Hell House, I have to say I'm far from impressed with his execution. In fairness, I think this particular novel suffers a bit from being the product of a time that hasn't aged well. My edition is actually a groovy-age reprint, but the original copyright is 1958. This is one of those periods of non-decadence when social mores and imaginative styles are at their most conventional; the revolutions in those areas that would define the Groovy Age were still a long way off, and we see not the faintest hint or glimmer of them here.

Ages ago, I saw the movie adaptation starring Kevin Bacon, and seem to recall liking it much better. If you want to see Matheson's admittedly cool concept developed to better effect, I'd recommend seeing that movie. But this novel? Give it a miss.

Good news for people who love groovy news

2011-07-08T15:37:00.003-04:00

A new horror comic in the works from Bob Tinnell and Ade Salmon!

Weekend Playlist

2011-07-08T10:11:00.002-04:00

Stuff I'm listening to these days:

(click to expand)

THE OWL SERVICE by Alan Garner (Collins Lions 1974)

2011-07-05T23:12:00.003-04:00

This was a pretty confounding read for me.

It gets praised to the skies a lot (see for example here and here), and I can understand why. It has a really intriguing premise--it doesn't just retell a love-triangle story from mythology, but depicts three teenagers possessed by magical/spiritual echoes of the myth and forced to act it out in the valley where it's supposed to have actually taken place.

Part of the "problem" is that the myth is Welsh. If it's part of your cultural heritage, and already woven into your imaginative life, then my guess is that you'd find this quite resonant and affecting. If you're as unfamiliar with the myth as I was, however, I don't think this novel quite gets it all across. To me, it was just a love-triangle with some peculiar embroidery. I figured there must be more to it than that, but I wasn't picking up on it.

Even worse, Garner uses the reenacted myth as an occasion for commentary on various social divisions that may not mean a lot to anyone outside the British Isles. I think this must account for some of the disconnect between the distribution of positive and negative reviews between amazon and amazon.co.uk readers.

Garner also interposes a prior enactment between the original one and the one taking place in the 1967 present of the story. I think he might have done better in his choice of details for how that all played out. Instead of suggesting powerful cycles of recurrence, which I believe it was supposed to do, it interjected some really off-notes of unwelcome banality.

Unless there's more to the ending than I noticed, it wraps up a little too quickly and easily. And, for all that, pretty obscurely, as well. I came away thinking, "That's all he had to do to accomplish . . . whatever that was?"

Like I said, this book is obviously much-beloved by some, so your mileage may vary, but I can't recommend it.

THE MUCKER (1921) Edgar Rice Burroughs

2011-06-29T13:12:00.000-04:00

Being a big fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs stuff I have been recently reading his less popular books. The Monster Men was a great read so I had high hopes for The Mucker.
I was not disappointed.
The Mucker tells the tale of one Billy Byrne. Billy grew up on the mean streets of Chicago and learned how to survive the harsh existence with his fists. A brute of a man, Billy knew that he could solve anything with his gargantuan fists.
Then the drinking began.
He had a thing for the drink and it wasn't long before he was wrongly accused of murder.
Knowing when to take it on the lam, Billy heads for the West Coast where he gets shanghaied by a ship. It seems that these men are pirates and they have a plot of kidnapping to achieve.
Things go sour and the crew finds themselves shipwrecked on an island of rogue samurai who are none too pleased to have these intruders on their island.
To complete things, Billy has developed feelings for Barbara, the kidnap victim.
The Mucker manages to incorporate so many genres of pulp fiction that it will make your head swim. It switches from gangster to pirates to island adventures without missing a beat and retaining the logic of the situation at any given moment.
Let me give you an example.
There is a scene where The Mucker, a tough guy from Chicago, has Barbara, a wealthy socialite, slung over his shoulder. Accompanied by an adventurer who is also a Count as they scale an island mountain as they are being pursued by a throng of angry rogue samurai.
In the context of the book, this makes perfect sense and compels you to read straight through the book.
I find it a shame that such a character only appears in three of Burroughs' books. The Mucker is true pulp fiction of the highest order and deserved to be as famous as Tarzan or John Carter.
I give this book one of my highest recommendations.

Fashion in DEATH NOTE: Near

2011-06-27T11:55:00.014-04:00

Near may seem like a strange one to treat in terms of fashion, since he only ever wears blank white pajamas and socks. But I think the function that fashion serves for the characters I've considered thus far is served for Near by his toys, which are just as varied and meticulously detailed as the wardrobes of Light and Misa. Here's a comprehensive breakdown of all the toys we see Near playing with. We first see him working on a puzzle, and he's fond of stacking various objects (matchsticks, dice, disc cases, etc.), but it's his action figures that are especially interesting (note: the pics aren't too spoilery, but the dialogue absolutely is, so look but don't read if that's a concern):

I love it that the only time we see him in anything besides pajamas, he's wearing riot gear--and clutching an armful of toy robots:

I know there are several guides to this kind of stuff (like So Crazy Japanese Toys!), and I might be interested in checking a few out. Any recommendations, Groovy Agers? Links to online galleries or flickr sets would also be cool (including any of your personal collections)!

Having said that, my favorite things for Near to play with--which is to say, the ones I find most amusingly preposterous--are a toss-up between his Christmas tree:

and his inflatable child's pool filled with rubber duckies:

When I turned the pages and saw these things, I was like, "Jesus, Near, wtf?!?"

The truth is, Near is a pretty unlikeable character, and without the quirkiness and visual interest of his toys, I might well have found him grating or even downright intolerable.

Fashion in DEATH NOTE: Naomi Misora

2011-06-25T19:23:00.005-04:00

I’ll tell you what — I don’t remember the name of that ill-fated FBI agent from the second volume, but I sure remember her jacket.

--Sean T. Collins

This is a character I really looked forward to drawing after hearing about the plot. Because she's a type I've never drawn before, I think I became really invested in her. Her design color is black because it fits with her mourning over Raye. And as a battle uniform to go against Kira, I gave her a black leather jacket. I then designed her face and hair to fit the clothes. She's really a character born from her clothes.

--series artist Takeshi Obata

Gene Colan, RIP

2011-06-24T19:47:00.002-04:00

Oh no! A true master, sadly departed.

Fashion in DEATH NOTE: Misa Amane

2011-06-24T17:38:00.001-04:00

Here's another look (here's Pt. 1) at the amazingly detailed fashion in the Death Note manga series. Artist Takeshi Obata says about the character Misa Amane,

I was really psyched about having a female main character. I remember having a lot of fun drawing her while looking through Gothic Lolita magazines.

That Gothic Lolita sensibility comes through very clearly in a lot of her outfits:

I think this one's my favorite:

It's worth noting that Obata doesn't just draw her in completely different clothes every single time. A lot of pieces recur with other combinations, as for example the plaid skirt above with another outfit below:

Then we see the jacket again with yet a different outfit. Note the plaid again, however, as tights rather than the skirt:

Here she is in disguise:

She's not always "in costume," though. Here she is in a pretty regular jeans outfit:

I really like the simplicity of this look:

And here she is in just a top and some pants:

As with Light, what's striking to me is the attention to detail in designing and depicting her wardrobe. Again, I've never seen anything comparable in any western comics.

Fashion in DEATH NOTE: Light Yagami

2011-06-23T13:11:00.003-04:00

I'm working on a more substantive post about the Death Note manga series, but as I flip through the various volumes to review for it, I'm just gobsmacked at the attention to detail where clothing is concerned. I haven't read enough other titles to know if that's unique to this series or a more general manga thing, but what I do know is that I've never seen anything approaching it in any western comics.

Artist Takeshi Obata speaks to this directly in his Vol. 13 production notes about series protagonist Light Yagami:

I spent a lot of effort on his clothes. I couldn't even imagine what kind of clothes a brilliant person would wear, so this part was very difficult. I used a lot of fashion magazines for reference when I was coming up with ideas. I thought of him as a slim and smart guy who wears a formal shirt. I tried to avoid casual clothes like jeans; most of what he wears is fitted.

We first see Light in his school uniform, which is about as generic as you'd expect:

But here's a sweatered version he also sports, relaxed once he's home:

Sharp as hell in a suit:

Notice the detailing in his tennis outfit:

The contrasting sleeves and stripe around the collar go an extra mile or two from what I'm used to seeing in western comics. And then, afterward, he throws on warm-up pants and jacket that build further on the look:

That's not the only exercise apparel he sports, either. Here he is in a dark hooded track suit with white stripe:

Smart wardrobe choices by Obata really help sell Light as a smart, fashionable young man. Like this nicely detailed western shirt, complete with contrasting yoke and piping:

Or this ribbed half-zip mock-neck sweater:

My favorite outfit of his comes late in the series, partly because I just like it, and partly because so much attention is paid to the way people wear clothes a little differently in different contexts. In the airport, he wears it all tucked-in and buttoned-up, with jacket:

Once he's ensconced at his destination, he loses the jacket, pulls it out, and loosens buttons at top, bottom, and cuffs:

This was a fun post to put together. I may do similar ones for Misa and another character or two, all of whom are supplied by Obata with just as meticulously detailed wardrobes as Light.

X-MEN: FIRST CLASS

2011-06-18T13:40:00.003-04:00

Not a review, just a few bullet-points.

Michael Fassbender's Magneto was simply awesome. It was great to see how totally badass Magneto could be even before his powers developed to the nearly godlike levels of the comics. His Nazi-hunting rampage was thrilling, his character arc compelling, and he looked amazing in the role.

Banshee's big scene, from his dive out of the Blackbird to his aerial duel with Angel to his crash on the beach, was some of the best superhero action I've seen in a movie. Pure exhilaration.

I have no idea why they called that woman Moira MacTaggert. For all the resemblance she bore to the comic book character, they might as well have called her Empress Lilandra.

Wow, they really made Xavier quite the smarmy, over-privileged douchebag, didn't they?

Weird that Mystique would have all those bumps all over her body--but no nipples. The reason, of course, is because Americans are so fucking moronic about breasts.

I was aghast at the handling of the Darwin character. My God, it's like they googled all the gripes about how minority characters are treated in movies like this, and then instead of avoiding them, proceeded to use that as their playbook.

On balance, the good parts make it worth the price of admission, but what a mixed bag.

Serial junkie

2011-06-18T12:43:00.002-04:00

I've been a pretty bad blogger lately, and I can't blame it all on the move. More than that, I've been getting caught up in various long-serial stories, then not blogging them as I go, then moving on to the next one before blogging my thoughts about the one I just finished. I guess it started when I tore through Battlestar Galactica, then got absorbed in Lost before I'd blogged all my thoughts about it, then I think I started reading A Song of Ice and Fire, then the Death Note manga series, and before I could say anything at all about the latter, I was already neck-deep in Dexter, and now I'm about to do a Saw-a-rama and pay more attention to the narrative twists and turns (last time through, I was more focused on the "torture porn" aspect). Sorry, Groovy Agers! I'll try to start posting more analysis soon.

La Schiava (Slave Woman)

2011-06-11T13:22:00.003-04:00

Meet Zeudia, a beautiful runaway slave. Her story starts in Louisiana, year 1861, and soon becomes an epic odyssey around the globe as she tries to find freedom in a world that doesn't want to recognize her human rights. This fumetti is all kinds of porny and rapy and incorrecty, but it has a heart of gold: while our heroine has to endure plenty of hideous abuse...

...she always finds time for love...

...adventure...

...and revenge, too.

(for some idiotic reason the tone of her skin started getting lighter on the cover art somewhere around issue thirty)

La Schiava ran for 52 issues (from 1983 to 1987), and I wish I could highly recommend it, but I can't: the plot is ok and the covers are fantastic, but otherwise the art leaves me cold. I wouldn't call it bad, it just somehow lacks impact, particularly during money shots.

"Sprut" indeed, this fumetti also has way too many cartoonish sound effects. That's Zeudia on the picture, by the way, the artist doesn't make much effort to depict her skin color.

But if you like your pleasures guilty, this series is definitely worth checking out.

Paperback Fanatic 18

2011-06-07T16:50:00.004-04:00

Groovy Agers, I've been derelict of duty in bringing news of the latest issue of Paperback Fanatic--blame it on my recent move, from which I'm still unpacking. Then again, if you had a subscription (and you should!), you wouldn't need me to tell you.

EIC Justin Marriott continues to make amazing use of both the format size and color. When I say he makes great use of color, I don't just mean he does a lot of color reproductions of awesome vintage paperback covers, though he certainly does that; he also colors select pages, as in this two-page spread:

That could be an easy thing to overdo, and Marriott doesn't. He uses it sparingly enough to keep it effective and add just a dash of visual interest. He also, per reader requests, has been adding vintage adverts, and the one he includes here is worth the price of admission all by itself (you really need to see it, and I don't want to spoil it for you--yes, there's actually an ad that could be spoiled!).

Visuals aside, the content has always been and remains the real reason Paperback Fanatic is such a treasure. The central pillars of this issue are Marriott's own article about Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane stories and the various editions in which they appeared down through the years (a timely piece, considering Jeff Jones's artwork on some of the latter), and also Ramsey Campbell's reminiscences about editing and completing a number of unfinished stories and fragments.

I think I most personally enjoyed Marriott's piece on the Sergeant Fury series. This paragraph certainly resonated with me:

I really struggled with this series, with Levinson applying what I would describe as the "McCurtin" (after Peter McCurtin) school of minimalism to his writing, meaning even the action scenes are dull and perfunctory. And despite being laced with colourful profanities, the dialogue is clunky and corny. I am really struggling to look for the positives with these and coming up short.

Ah yes, I know the feeling well enough to have sworn off paperbacks altogether for a while, after too many awesome-looking series turned out to be such dreck.

On another personal note, it's a real point of pride for me to host probably the first and at-the-time only English-language site on the internet that covered not only the Italian fumetti, but also the German Groschenromane. Holger Haase, my buddy from Eurotrash Paradise, helped me get that off the ground, and then Andy Decker stepped up and did yeoman's work introducing us to this groovy format/medium. He reprises and summarizes much of that great stuff now in this issue of Fanatic, and yes it's worth reading even if you've read all his posts here.

There's plenty more I'll leave for you to discover, and I'd urge you to do so, if you have any interest in vintage paperbacks. Snatch this issue before it sells out (as almost all previous issues have done), then subscribe so you don't miss any more.

Book Sale

2011-06-04T11:18:00.000-04:00

Twice a year, October and June, the Kalamazoo Public Library hosts a book sale where you can fill a bag for two bucks. This is the booty I got this year;

Faerie Tales Edited by Martin H. Greenburg & Russell Davis
The Bane Of The Black Sword by Michael Moorcock
The Barbarian of World's End by Lin Carter
Whipping Star by Frank Herbert
The Dosadi Experiment by Frank Herbert
The Best From Fantasy & Science Fiction Edited by Robert P. Mills
Invasion Of The Robots Edited by Roger Elwood
Mike Mars Around The Moon by Donald Wolheim
The Devil Wives of Li Fong by E. Hoffman Price
Fuzzy Bones by H. Beam Piper
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
The Golden Apples Of The Sun by Ray Bradbury
The Weird of The White Wolf by Michael Moorcock
The Sailor on the Seas of Fate by Michael Moorcock
Elric of Melnibone by Michael Moorcock
Raven, Swordmistress of Chaos by Richard Kirk
The Comic Book Killer by Richard A. Lupoff
The Infinite Man by Daniel F. Galouye
Stories From The Twilight Zone by Rod Serling
Dr. Cyclops by Henry Kuttner
The Fate of the Phoenix by Sondra Marshak & Myrna Culbreath
The Vanishing Tower by Michael Moorcock
The Best Science Fiction of the Year Edited by Terry Carr
The Spellstone of Shaltus by Linda E. Bushyager
Tales From The Vulgar Unicorn by Robert Lynn Asprin
The Time Axis by Henry Kuttner
The Man Who Awoke by Laurence Manning
Had I But Groaned by Carter Brown
The Secret of the Martian Moons by Donlad Wollheim
The Secret of Saturn's Rings by Donald Wollheim
The Unknown 5 Edited by D.R. Bensen
After Things Fell Apart by Ron Goulart
The Invaders by Keith Laumer
Exploring Other Worlds Edited bySam Moskowitz
Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison
The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
Telefon by Walter Wager (And,yes, Bronson is on the cover)
Garbage World by Charles Platt
Galactic Odyssey by Keith Laumer
Invaders From Rigel by Fletcher Pratt
The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles G. Finney
Swords and Deviltry by Fritz Leiber
Saga of Lost Earths by Emil Petaja
The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury
The Coming of the Robots Edited by Sam Moskowitz
The Monster Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Mooseheart, The City of Children by Robert W. Wells
A Collection of Stories by Edgar Allan Poe
Jewel of Doom by Nick Carter
The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells
Darwin's Blade by Dan Simmons
Synthetic Men Of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Mucker by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Master Mind of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Thuvia, Maid of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Savage Pellucidar byEdgar Rice Burroughs
Frankenstein by MAry Shelley (Cool Karloff style monster art on the cover)
The Age of the Pussyfoot by Frederik Pohl
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
Flash Gordon: The Plague of Sound by Alex Raymond adapted by Con Steffanson

I am really excited about the Henry Kutner books and the Flash Gordon book. The most bizarre one might be the Mooseheart book. It concerns the city of Mooseheart, Illinois and their link to The Moose Lodge and how they put children first in the city. There is a color section of pictures in the middle that shows how the children are being groomed to go into the world and educate everyone in the wy of the moose. Hilarious!

Carless in Savannah

2011-06-01T20:30:00.001-04:00

Downtown Savannah is so walkable, in deciding to move here, I decided to rid myself of the hassles and expenses of a car. Having lived in NYC and London, and happily done without a car in either place, this was nothing new to me, and I'm loving it as much here as I did there. This has a lot less to do with environmentalism than with simple quality of life for me. The next time you're in a car, just make a mental note every time something aggravates you--the price of gas, dealing with traffic, your service light coming on, parking spot issues, etc. All that stress adds up more than we know, I think, and I'm glad now to be free of it.

I have a great neighborhood Kroger literally around the corner; I've probably carried groceries farther in a Wal Mart parking lot than I do from this place to my own front door.

Absurdly, I used to have to drive to an ugly, boring quarter-mile track if I wanted to jog; now I just jog a few blocks over and I've got the stunningly beautiful Forsyth Park, which is an even mile around on each lap, and, you know, stunningly beautiful. And surrounded by gorgeous historic homes. And always full of people doing fun stuff. And there are friendly doggies getting walked everywhere. I also walk, jog, or bike to the gym, which only makes sense, though I never could have done it previously.

I ride my bike to and from work now, which is an astonishingly soothing way to both begin and end the work day (now that I mention it, there's something just as calming about seeing all these other people on bikes--it's almost like watching fish drift around in an aquarium). Admittedly, I haven't had to deal with a downpour yet, or extremes of heat or cold, but the truth is, I always had to deal with them anyway in walking from whatever parking I could find (one of the hassles/expenses I'm most happy to be done with) to my work, which inevitably was always quite a few blocks' distance.

Amanda Marcotte deals nicely with the ZOMG SWEAT!!1! issue in this reply to objections to her post on cycling: "Even in Texas, most of the year I did not sweat while cycling. The key is a leisurely pace. Do you run everywhere you walk?" On flat terrain, you can do a lot of coasting with little enough effort that you'd probably sweat more if you walked a significantly shorter distance.

It's nice, as well, to have no drinking/driving concerns at all any more. As Atrios points out:

A big reason people drink and drive is we put bars in the middle of giant parking lots far away from any human habitation. I'm not sure what they expect will happen, but I think the consequences are pretty predictable.

Part of what's great about downtown Savannah is how ridiculously many fun, cool drinking establishments are within walking distance for residents. I think I could go on a different pub crawl every night of the year without exhausting the possible combinations, and always stagger home on my own two feet.

The eating is fantastic downtown, too. So many great local places in every price range, and not a Crapplebees in sight.

As for live music, I'm where it's at. Bigger acts like Wilco (whom I saw last year) will go to the downtown Civic Center, and smaller acts will certainly end up somewhere else downtown, most likely on Congress Street. There's no place in Savannah that's not downtown where any live music worth mentioning would appear.

It's a shame how flatly impossible this kind of life is for the vast majority of people in America. Part of that "impossibility" is the weird hostility the very idea seems to bring out in many motorists. The track I used to jog on was visible from a fairly active road, and it never ceased to amaze me how many morans felt compelled to shout something at me from a passing car (or usually truck), just because I was doing something--anything--on foot. In downtown Savannah, such an asshole would have to yodel nonstop to the point of hoarseness long before he insulted every pedestrian or cyclist in his path. That must be why nobody ever seems to bug me downtown.

By the way, I understand that cyclists can be exasperating to motorists when they have to share road-space that's really designed exclusively for cars. Downtown Savannah does a good job not only with bike lanes, but also with channeling cars along certain straight-on one-way roads, and leaving the more circuitous streets around the squares a lot more pedestrian- and bike-friendly.

I also got a big, bad taste of how impossible/utopian this kind of lifestyle would be for most people when I ventured by bus to "southside" Savannah--the part that's like every other comparable-sized city in America--and tried to get around on foot between a Wal Mart, a mall, and a Target, which are all right across the street from each other. Atrios has the right of it again:

One thing that's been puzzling me lately is just how unconcerned parking lots are with the pedestrian experience. I get that parking lots are about, you know, cars, but people still have to travel from their cars to the Wal-Mart somehow yet there's almost nothing in their design to appropriately accommodate people.

Any parking lot designed for ultra-mega-gonzo-Black Friday capacity has no human scale whatsoever. Which essentially means none of them do. When the bus doesn't have a stop near the entrance, but instead drops you off at the ass-end of one of these gargantuan lots, it's a long, boring, ugly, possibly hazardous walk to the shopping center or store. What's more, I've found these places tend not to have much in the way of sidewalks anywhere in their vicinity. The traffic signals near them often don't have crosswalks. The number of lanes and speed of traffic render them, again, practically inhuman. These places are downright anti-walkable. Considering how far they are from anywhere residential, I guess it makes sense to assume that anyone visiting them will come in a vehicle. And the other side of that coin is, most people live not walking but driving distance from any grocery stores, retail shopping, services like hair salons, etc. So, lots of cars, and lots of exclusively car-friendly spaces.

The one downside to downtown living is, there's no place where you can just go get home products or furnishings that aren't antique or hand-crafted (and priced accordingly). I understand why they'll never, ever let a big box downtown, but it would sure be nice once in a while if I could get to one safely and conveniently by foot or bike, if I just need an ironing board or pack of dvd-r's or whatever.

RIP Jeffrey Catherine Jones

2011-05-28T08:40:00.001-04:00

Tom Spurgeon's obituary is the one to read, though Steven Ringgenberg's at TCJ is also certainly worthwhile, and Johnny Bacardi offers a more warmly personal remembrance of the artist.

For myself, I'll just say that Jones's cover illustrations were among the most vital in making me want to start collecting vintage paperbacks. Each is like a window into another world of mystery, beauty, and danger. Without them, without Jones, there might never have been a Groovy Age of Horror.

Interview with Cavanaugh Lee

2011-05-26T22:05:00.001-04:00

I often say that interviewing creators is one of the great pleasures of blogging for me, and here's another great example of that. Cavanaugh Lee is the author of the novel Save as Draft, which I just reviewed. Here's her author bio (relevant for the interview):

After graduating top of her high school class in San Francisco, Cavanaugh Lee decided to "go for it" and moved to Los Angeles to become an actress. After graduating from UCLA School of Theater, she worked steadily as a "wactress" (waitress/actress) for four years, writing and producing an autobiographical play called ROCKSTARNERD and authoring a screenplay. True love (or so she thought) then led her to the deep south of Mississippi, but when the relationship crashed and burned she changed course and soon found herself graduating from UNC School of Law.

Now, by day, she works as a prosecutor in Savannah, Georgia. She writes, of course, by night. After recently toying in the world of cyber-dating, finding true love, becoming engaged, and then becoming unengaged (yes, he's got the ring, she's got the dress), she decided to parlay her modern romance experiences into a hilarious, heart wrenching novel that all young women (and men) will relate to and enjoy.

As per my rules of interviewing, here are other interviews with other questions:

That Happened To Me (May 2011)
Commitment Now Featured Book (April 2011)
Cupid's Pulse (March 2011)
The Chick Lit Bee (March 2011)
Podcast: Connecting Women (March 2011)
TrèsSugar Interview (February 2011)
WTKS Radio Interview (February 2011)
The South Magazine Blog (February 2011)
Savannah Connect Q & A (February 2011)
Gynomite e-conversation (February 2011)
Date Night Magazine Q & A (February 2011)
Cover to Cover (Jessica Lawlor) blog interview (February 2011)
Building a Life blog interview (January 2011)
Read an article about Cavanaugh (Summer 2010)

And here's her website/blog.

And now, the interview:

1. You're often asked how you juggle the time demands and workload of being a full-time attorney and also a novelist, but I'm more curious how you strike an emotional balance. Power, toughness, and self-control must be very important to you as a prosecutor, and yet Save as Draft explores a lot of vulnerability, feelings of powerlessness, and loss of control.

I always light-heartedly say I have the best of both worlds with my day job and my night job. By day, I get to serve justice, put the bad guys behind bars, and make the streets a safer place. By night, I get to write about my love life (or lack thereof these days). Really though if you delve deeper into that analysis, you are right – there are glaring contradictions between my two jobs. One is very serious work in which I can’t afford to make a mistake or a misjudgment. As a prosecutor, I have to be early, prepared, and right. Too much is at stake. I can’t lose my cool or my nerve. One error can result in tragedy. Writing contemporary fiction, on the other hand, is the opposite. It’s fun and frivolous at times. It’s also, as you correctly point out, therapeutic and confessional. Honestly, (yes this may seem corny) I strike an emotional balance by keeping it real. I love both of my jobs, probably because I get bored so easily (I’m a Gemini, hello?) and they are the perfect contrast to each other. Who wants to spend her entire day being so serious? But who wants to spend all of it pouring her guts out on the page? You need both. Balance is the key to life – and compartmentalizing. I put my two jobs into two very different boxes and they rarely bleed into each other. When I’m working at the office, I’m 100% in that mode. When I’m writing, I’m 100% writing. And when I’m not doing either… well… I’m still trying to figure out what I’m doing then!

2. How has the novel affected your day job, and your dealings with your colleagues? In such a competitive profession, where Rose-types rise to the top, does writing a novel in the first place mark you as somehow less serious, dedicated or ambitious? Has putting a "softer side" out there so publicly affected the way anyone perceives or relates to you? When you have big cases, does opposing counsel probably assign some intern to read Save as Draft and summarize it with bullet-points and charts?

I wish I knew the answer to this question. I have no idea what my colleagues are saying about me. I do know that some opposing counsel have read Save as Draft. I’m always initially horror-struck when I find out over a conference call or in court. After I get over the shock, I then remind myself – that’s another sold book, right? The funniest experience I’ve had so far though is worth sharing… A male co-worker told me he was reading SAD. After he finished, he came down to my office and stood in my doorway with this odd expression on his face. I said, “Hey! Come on in! What’s up?” To which he responded with a smirk: “Oh no, I’m not coming into your office. I know what goes on in your office…” At first, I was confused. But then I remembered the fictional (yes, fictional – if only my life were that sordid) scene in SAD where Izzy has a rendez-vous in her law office. I was like, “Oh seriously?! It’s only loosely based on real life! That never happened!” He was like: “Yeah… right…” To this day he’s never stepped back into my office – he’ll only stand in the doorway.

3. In a blog-post a while back, you mention a SO's negative reaction to something in Save as Draft, and a complication that arose in that relationship as a result. How does having this romance novel out there, and admittedly based on your own experiences, affect your dating and love life? When you first meet someone or start to become involved with them, how important is it to you that they read the novel, what exactly does it mean to you when they read the novel, and what thoughts and feelings do you experience while waiting for their reaction? On the other hand, has it drawn any unwanted attention or advances or over-familiarity? Overall, so far, is it a bigger or smaller deal than you expected?

It’s a bigger deal than I expected – on several levels.

On one extreme, a guy I (briefly) dated read SAD immediately – before we even went out. So by our first date, he was convinced he knew everything about me. He was analyzing this and that, quoting from it, thinking he was really adept, and it was really annoying because I wrote this book three years ago when I was a different person in many respects.

On the other extreme, another guy I (briefly) dated waited to read SAD. He was emphatic that he not delve into the book until after our fourth date so he could get to know me the good old fashioned way. Well, the moment he did read it and got to Chapter 3 (the most romantic), he threw a fit. He was not happy and his reason was: “It was so hard for me to see you that happy with someone else.” I was like: “But it didn’t work out with him!” It didn’t matter. We had already lost something at that point – I think it was the innocence of a potential new relationship.

The worst and best effect SAD will (and has) had on my love life is that I have given a manual of myself and my romantic quirks, vulnerabilities, fears, and baggage, if you will, to any guy who may want to ask me out so he’s got a head-start in figuring me out. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing…I guess I’ll just have to wait and see. Every guy though strenuously states: “I’m going to be the happy ending to your sequel.” Uh, yeah right – I dare you.

4. The internet affects dating in so many ways, I don't think one novel could ever address them all. Here are a few others you didn't quite get into, and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts about them. Google, of course. It's probably the first thing anyone does once they've got someone's name, meaning there's no way to spin or control the pace of sharing any information available online. On the other side, learning certain things that way can put the googler in a variety of predicaments about what to do with the information they've found. Then, stat-counters give us the chance to see who's been looking at our websites, when, for how long, and what exactly they looked at. Do you have any funny stories along any of these lines? Are there any other ways the internet affects romance that you're planning to explore in the sequel?

You are right. First thing I did when I got this email from you was Google you and read some of your blog. Then I tried to find you – to no avail – on Facebook. Most of my funny stories (or my friends’ stories) regarding internet stalking, etc. are actually in the book. For the sequel, I’m exploring the opposite side of Save as Draft – what would happen if we really did say everything we meant and Just Hit Send all of the time instead? Would we be using the internet as a communicator or a weapon? What is the happy medium? Of course, the sequel explores the complexities of love in general too… because really love in this day and age is just so damn complicated.

Thanks for a great interview, Cavanaugh, and best of luck with both careers!

SAVE AS DRAFT by Cavanaugh Lee (Simon & Schuster 2011)

2011-05-24T00:56:00.002-04:00

This is a romance novel told entirely through various forms of electronic communication--primarily e-mails, but also texts, tweets, Facebook status updates, and even eHarmony profiles. That's not as tedious or distracting as it sounds. I got used to it pretty quickly, and because such forms of communication have really exploded into constant ubiquity in the last few years, it doesn't seem contrived for the relationships to be chronicled so exhaustively through these digital trails. The title names the twist--there's a lot that these characters write to each other, but decide not to send. They want to say, "I love you," but know it's too soon. Or they go on rants that they know would do irreparable harm. I like the way this reviewer puts it:

More telling than the e-mails sent are those that are not, the missives relegated to the "Saved as Draft" folder for further consideration. Some blow off steam, and while they should never be sent as they stand, the emotion they exhibit should be acted upon. Some should be shared, just not with the intended recipient. Others, particularly those saved as drafts meant for Peter, Izzy or Marty, should have been sent instead of repackaged into a breeziness that hides the original emotion.

The story concerns a love triangle between the heroine, a guy she met through eHarmony and had a great first date with, and a guy who's been "just friends" with her for two years despite mutual attraction and a few drunken almost-hookups. This turns out to be almost straight-up roman a clef/memoir. Lee even addresses, in the Dedication and Acknowledgments, the men with whom she was involved by the names in scare-quotes of the characters who represent them! I've mentioned before how little I like the "write what you know--all about yourself!" approach to fiction, but Lee actually crafts a pretty solid narrative here, that works as a story and doesn't reek of self-indulgence. Though the characters are all revealed through forms of communication not particularly known for warmth or richness, they do, for the most part, come convincingly alive.

Obviously, this is pretty far removed from my usual fare; if you want a second opinion, other blogs more devoted to that genre seem to rave about it. The reason I picked it up is because it was voted "Best New Local Book" by Connect readers in Savannah, where I now live. For that reason, I was disappointed to find it set in Atlanta, though I'm not sure a Savannah setting would have made much difference, filtered through all those e-mails and tweets.

One minor but recurring source of irritation was Lee's use of dashes and asterisks to spell profanities. I can't imagine why she did that, rather than spell them honestly or skip them altogether. The "List of E-mail Abbreviations" in the beginning also perplexed me. I suppose I could understand if someone's grandmother would need to be told what LOL stands for, but does anyone really need to be told that "blah blah blah" is "used as an expression for words or feelings where the specifics are not considered important to the speaker or writer for emotions"?

Overall, this was a quick, entertaining read. If this review has piqued your interest, you might want to check it out.