Yep. I’ve been gone a while. Come on. You’re used to that.
Like the new digs?
Okay, Okay. Here’s the gory details: It hasn’t been a great year. In one of my Tweets I mentioned the Lesson Learned was not to say things on New Years like, “This one’s got to be better. No way could it be worse than last year.”
Ha. Ha.
We’ll start off with my twelve year-old son falling during PE and cracking his head on concrete, resulting in a severe brain concussion, two trips to the emergency room (sometimes symptoms wait a few days to show up) and multiple CAT scans, all without the benefit of health insurance.
Nope, still haven’t been able to find much beyond my current part-time job. Even if we could afford private health insurance, at that time, we couldn’t have gotten it anyway, having pre-existing conditions. My wife has diabetes and high blood pressure. I’m an asthmatic.
Concurrent with that joy, a very nice police officer did his job and noticed my car’s inspection sticker had expired. Getting the old hoss fixed to get said sticker cost over a thousand bucks.
To get to the crux of the story: we wound up missing a mortgage payment, and found ourselves in that rapidly expanding club of folks whose houses were in danger of foreclosure.
That’s behind us now, and things are more stable, but in the meantime sacrifices had to be made. And of all the bills that were also howling for attention, there was one that represented something we could survive without: the phone and Internet.
The landline phone is quite the artifact now; my wife and I both have cell phones, and I have a smartphone from another job, so I wasn’t completely cut off from the offline world; I could also access it from work (for the half-day I’m there). The major impact, besides not being able to maintain a couple of Websites or read my webcomics while I ate lunch, was that I had gotten very, very used to having all sorts of information at my fingertips, at a moment’s notice. That’s the sort of thing that makes writing very easy. Wait a minute – did anything like that ever happen? Hey, yeah it did! and What does a neutron bomb really do? I had a good reason for wondering that last one. Really, Mr. Federal Agent, and thank you for reading my blog.
Though I have to ask to ask where you were when my old Blogger account was getting overrun by comments in Chinese. I’d love to know what was going on there. My romantic side says they were communiques aiding some freedom-loving revolution, but more likely they were saying stuff like, “Hey! Who needs Viagra?”
I love my Crackberry, but the browser’s pretty pokey, and the screen is, well, small. It’s time for my eye exam, and I keep taking off my glasses and holding the phone up to my face to read the tiny print. Nothing sadder than an old geek, is there? Following weblinks in Tweets was problematic at best. The Crackberry is bloody wonderful as a field tool, but when not in the field…
I am optimistic that I’ll get broadband access back later this week. I’ve been fairly vocal on Twitter (probably much to the ire of my few followers), and wow, lookit that, WordPress allows me to blog from the Crackberry. I’m too fond of listening to myself rattle on in print, so I doubt I’ll use that function TOO much – this entry is being typed at home, and I’ll sneakernet it to my work computer tomorrow morning – but that is a heck of a thing.
I find that overall, I’m not enjoying the 21st century as much as I though I was going to – but there are parts of it that are pretty damn cool.
Yes, the peer pressure was starting to hurt my eardrums, Yes, the old, Blogger version is gone, the Comments being used for (I romantically assume) nefarious purposes by international provocateurs. Will I do any better at keeping this one updated? We’ll see.
I still have all the old blog entries in an .xml file. Maybe I’ll eventually figure out how to archive them here. We’ll see. I like new toys. That will help.
Another more-than-a-month passed, and our little clique thought itself ready once more for another evening of terrible, terrible cinema. The Greeks had a word for this: hubris. At least, as these things have continued, our choices in food for the evening have gotten better. We started with chips and dip, and have added more and more, until this night: a selection of fajitas, beef and chicken. Host Dave is a very good cook.
Last time, a surprise hit was the Christploitation flick, If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?, in which Southern preacher Estus Pirkle and reformed filmmaker Ron (Please Don’t Touch Me) Ormond showed us how Commies would take over a Godless America and proceed to torture and execute Christians, all with a cast composed of Pirkle’s congregation and a few actors from Ormond’s more heathen days.
In case you forgot that combination of bad acting and bargain-basement gore:
So of course we felt behooved to check out the next picture on the sadly small Pirkle/Ormond ouvre, The Burning Hell, which concerns, unsurprisingly, Hell. This one’s got some money behind it, as apparently Pirkle, Ormond and crew actually went to the Holy Land to shoot some footage; the Biblical sections, in which backgrounds of actual antiquity are cut against painted backdrops that would cause high school theatricals to shake their heads sadly, are quite astonishing. Pale-skinned Beduoins argue with each other in Southern accents, while gentlemen wearing buck-fifty Santa beards pontificate.
Then, of course, there is the Rev. Pirkle’s hyperbole:
The mod fellow looking uncomfortable is Ormond’s son, Tim; in the story that moves our atrocity footage forward, his friend (the one dressed in denim), just got his head ripped off in a motorcycle accident some twenty minutes earlier. Pirkle comforts Tim with the words, “Right now, your friend is burning in Hell.” Oh, yes, this is a scare film in every sense of the word, as every syllable is bent toward expressing how being in Hell sucks, heck, it supersucks. The makeup in the Hell sequences have a sort of raw effectiveness, but all the fearmongering and outright hatefulness get very wearing after a while.
Everyone then decided we were through with Mr. Pirkle forever, but when has that ever stopped me? Apparently Pirkle and Ormond had a bit of a falling out, and Pirkle’s next movie, The Believer’s Heaven was done partly or wholly without Ormond. Turns out Believer’s Heaven was excerpted in Diane Keaton’s excellent documentary, Heaven (The Ultimate Coming Attraction), which explains why I found Pirkle so eerily familiar:
Though it’s good to see that Pirkle had a non-yelly, even gracious side, I still wonder where he’s getting his numbers, especially since it seems Heaven should be infinite in size. Or perhaps not, as it appears, in this cosmology, that only a small percentage of people ever make the cut for Divine Residency. Ormond went on to make a couple more movies, the most notable being The Grim Reaper, in which it takes Jack Van Impe and Jerry Falwell combined to make one Estus Pirkle. YouTube appears to be sadly lacking in clips, but there is one photo I’ve tracked down:
Oh, my, yes. That must be Hell. And isn’t that Alan Cumming on the right?
We plunged into secular Hell after that, also known as Night Warning, or originally Butcher Baker Nightmare Maker. This was infamous, at the time, for starring Kristy MacNicol’s younger brother Jimmy, and for having some rather disturbing undertones. Susan Tyrrell plays a woman who’s raised her sister’s son son from a toddler after a (harrumph) suspicious auto accident. Now the boy is preparing to go to college, and she’s starting to unravel, plotting ways to keep him with her forever.
Psycho pictures like this are not my cup of tea, but I was kept entertained by a superb performance by Susan Tyrrell, a lady who never got the acclaim she deserved. Also impressive: Julia Duffy plays Jimmy’s teenage love interest (creatively named Julia). Yes, there is a nude scene. And she was 30 at the time. We had no idea until we started poking around in the IMDb and doing math.
And then we came to the corker of the evening. You see, one of our group – we’ll call him Rick – is the hand on the tiller of our torment. Somehow, he manages to choose one movie per outing, and somehow we still let him. He is the one who inflicted Dondi upon us. He is responsible for the psych-scarring Naked Ass of Clint Howard in Evilspeak; yet, somehow, when he sent a group e-mail that said, “I wanna see Myra Breckinridge!”, we did not hit the “delete” button as a man.
I had never seen Myra before, so my hand was complicit in its screening (not to mention that it was my DVD). This is an odd movie – I mean, look at that hat on John Huston – yet the surrealism never totally takes hold. Old movie scenes are cut into the action, possibly the first time that was tried in a major Hollywood flick. But really… this is not a very good movie. Had it been confident enough to be as brash as it wanted to be, it might have been much better; as it is…
Paul slinked out before Myra began, muttering something about an early morning. He was branded with the epithet “wuss”. Later, I’m sure he was envied. Rick kept up a constant barrage of pseudo-intellectual claptrap about the symbolism that was unspooling before us, possibly to maintain his fragile sanity, but more likely to keep an increasingly enraged Dave at bay. Finally, we reached a point at which Dave asked, “Now, what does that represent?” and I answered, “Rusty represents the audience, and Myra is about to represent the movie.” A look of slow-dawning horror. “No! NOOOOOOOOO!”
Ah, yes. The infamous dildo-rape scene, which supposedly ended the career of actor Roger Herren. Neither as explicit nor as shocking as you’ve been led to believe (you never even see the strap-on Myra uses on the jock). Farrah Fawcett and Tom Selleck’s careers survived, though, and Mae West went on to make Sextette, with which I have threatened our little group.
Here’s Raquel talking about Myra Breckinridge on the Dick Cavett show, and referring to it as a “smash”, at about the two-minute mark. Bonus: Janis Joplin.
About ten minutes from the end of Myra, Dave announced, “This movie has not broken me. I still have power. Do you have power?” I allowed that I did, and we set to looking through his collection. And that is how we came to end the evening with Robot Holocaust.
Robot Holocaust is bad. It is very very very very bad. It is legendarily bad. Post-apocalypse robots rule everything, the air is poison (except when it’s not), and some warriors fight the power that be. This YouTube compilation has boobies, and it’s still four and a half minutes of your life you’ll never get back.
And now, because dammit, I deserve it – and so do you – More Raquel:
I’ve been away from the movies for a while., concentrating my nerdlight elsewhere. I reveled in the world of crap cinema for quite some time, and in fact got a small amount of notoriety from it. But after a certain amount of time rubbing your own nose in a highly questionable pursuit, you start asking yourself questions. Hateful, hurtful questions like, Why am I doing this to myself? Wouldn’t I rather be watching something good? What am I doing with my life?
So, yeah. You try to distance yourself from the once- defining pursuit that has become toxic. You try to watch those movies you think you should be watching, but even then you steer away from Bergman and Fellini, no, you watch Key Largo and Kiss Me Deadly and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Eventually, though, you just need your entertainment in a different form. In my case, you start reading. And even then, if you’ve looked at the past few entries, you’ll know it wasn’t what the world at large would define as “real” reading.
The last week, however, I ran to the precipice and did a cannonball back into the world of the crap cineaste. My pal Dave did one of his Bad Movie Nights on Sunday, and the following Saturday was the fifth iteration of T-Fest, a small semi-official gathering started by three of the B-Masters and a gaming legend. But let us take this in order.
Dave began this odyssey of ordure with the classic If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? It was not one of the scheduled entries, but at 58 minutes or so, it was a …”pleasant” surprise, a movie I had only heard of, but had never seen. Exploitation filmmaker Ron Ormond, legend has it, walked away unscathed from an airplane crash and found Jesus waiting for him, which is a very understandable conversion experience. Ormond then fell in with Baptist preacher Estus W. Pirkle, who was having quite a bit of success with a sermon of the same name, already turned into a book and one of them fancy long-playing records the kids like.
In the sermon – of which the movie is basically an illuminated version – Pirkle warns of what will happen if America as a whole does not turn to Jesus in the next 7 years, which is that horse-riding Communists will take over the country. And it is all the fault of TV, Saturday morning cartoons (which apparently encourage fornication – I was watching the wrong damn cartoons, let me tell you), sex education, dancing and beer.
Now where Ormond’s exploitation chops come in is during the depictions of the various atrocities which are visited upon the god-fearing folks by those damn Commies. Low-budget gore abounds, as well as some Sunday school acting.
This is crap cinema at its finest. You actually feel the trap door open underneath you and you find yourself in Pirkleland, a land of starched dogma and crazed horror movie tropes. Highly recommended.
This was followed by Evil Town, which is not so highly recommended. Evil Town is constructed, Frankenstein-like, from at least two unfinished movies (some claim three or even four). One stars James Keach and a post-stroke Dean Jagger, and is about a town of old people who waylay unsuspecting travelers to harvest their pituitary glands to extend their own lives. The other movie features Lynda Wiesmeier’s boobies, and that’s about the only notable thing (or two, actually). The experience was made more tolerable by trying to keep track of what movie was what (made easier by the difference between 70s and 80s car models and fashions) and the expectation of the return of Ms. Wiesmeier’s ta-tas (in which we were disappointed).
The evening closed with Dondi. Yes, the escapee from one of the Medved’s Fifty Worst books. Based on a comic strip which ran from the 50s through the 80s, about an Italian WWII orphan who is semi-adopted by an Army unit, and who then stows away to America. Oh, yes, it is supposed to be charming, cute and heart-warming. And we all know how badly that can turn out.
David Janssen stars, about six years before The Fugitive, and appears to be drunk in every scene. Arnold Stang is in the unit, but as there are already two over-acting goofballs in the barracks, Stang elects to underplay everything. The kid who plays Dondi was the result of a nationwide talent search, and appears to have an eternally stuffed nose, because that’s cute.
You know, the last B-Fest I attended showed what was theoretically a Lassie movie, but was actually three episodes of the TV series strung together (and the reels in the wrong order, to boot). I think I was the only one in the auditorium during that; it was refreshing to find myself in an irony-free zone.
Dondi would love to be irony-free, but it had the misfortune to be directed by Albert Zugsmith. Anyone who has seen Sex Kittens Go To College knows what that man does to comedy. Now apply the same ham fist to family-friendly fare. My God, what an inferno.
But at least at T-Fest I was able to say, “Suffer, bitches! I’ve seen Dondi!”
T-Fest was held at SMU’s legendary Guildhall, where Sandy Petersen is currently teaching Game Design, and interested students swelled the attendance to a record 50 or so. Not bad for a bunch of friends who wanted to get together in the Summer and create something to replace the late, lamented New Orleans Worst Film Festival.
Things kicked off before the coffee had totally kicked in with Hausu, a 1977 Japanese movie chosen by Sandy.
Hausu is about some Japanese schoolgirls spending the holiday at one girl’s auntie’s country home. Alas, auntie is still waiting for her beau to come back from World War II, and has become a demon, and her house has a tendency to eat young ladies in the most bizarre ways. Actually, I probably could have just stopped at “It’s Japanese”.
If there is one thing I learned from Hausu, it is that if you are confronted by demon disguised as a roadside fruit vendor who demands to know, “Do you like melons?”, answering, “No, I like bananas!” will reduce him to a smoldering heap of bones. Unfortunately, you will then turn into a pile of bananas.
Like I said: Japanese.
This was followed by Ken Begg’s choice, R.O.T.O.R. Anyone who has known Ken for any length of time could have picked that one out of a lineup; Ken has a perverse love for all things R.O.T.O.R., and this time it was especially apt, since R.O.T.O.R. was made in Dallas.
Generally R.O.T.O.R. is referred to as a Robocop wannabe, as the story concerns an attempt at constructing a robot policeman; but since the prototype is accidentally activated and proceeds to shoot a man for speeding (and attempting to offer him a measly $20 bribe), and then spend the rest of the movie chasing his girlfriend, it is more appropriately a Terminator wannabe.
R.O.T.O.R. ain’t terrible, but it’s not particularly good, either. The budget is definitely low, and there’s plenty of touches guaranteed to trigger audience hoots (an earlier comic relief robot, a “Sensor Recall” mode that allows R.O.T.O.R. to see event that transpired when he actually wasn’t there, and an incidental character that defines the term “muscle bitch”). Ken was hopeful of looking up the director while he was in town and encouraging him to produce R.O.T.O.R. II. The sick bastard.
Then, to everyone’s dismay, came my first choice: the 1932 Island of Lost Souls, which I had ripped from my laserdisc, since for some reason it has never been given a DVD release. Heads crane to quizzically look at me. “What a minute… isn’t this supposed to be a good movie?” What can I say? I’m a nice guy.
Charles Laughton’s Dr. Moreau effortlessly upstages everyone else in the cast, and the presence of The Panther Woman (Kathleen Burke, though the credits don’t seem to want you to know that) guarantees many furry/catgirl jokes. Good times, good times.
Then the first of Chris Holland’s choices: Big Man Japan. Chris had intended to substitute another film, but apparently the kvetching about another of his choices – two years ago! – the utterly bizarre and frequently disturbing Funky Forest, convinced him to go with his first choice.
Japanese comedy is, I suspect, an acquired taste, and I don’t think the audience was interested in acquiring it. The buildup to the monster fights were protracted interview scenes, which provoked much shuffling and some unfortunate remarks about not enough bombs being used in World War II. Overall, like Funky Forest and Titanic, I’m glad I saw it, but won’t be revisiting it.
Somewhere around here, there was a horror movie trivia test. I only missed two, and won a DVD of Weasels Rip My Flesh. I think that was a win.
After dinner was supposed to be my second choice, an Indonesian horror movie called Mystics in Bali (“If you see only one movie about the penanggalen this year, make sure it’s Mystics in Bali!). But the disc wouldn’t work, so we used my fallback movie instead: the 1974 blaxploitation zombie flick Sugar Hill. Another flick that’s evaded DVD (though one is rumored in the works) I had a nice widescreen print pulled off Turner Classic Movies.
I’ve always considered Sugar Hill a fun but somewhat middling horror movie; its major plus is Don Pedro Colley’s turn as the voodoo god Baron Samedi, a death god who reaaaaaaaally enjoys his work. The fact that former Playmate Marki Bey as Sugar is hella cute and Robert Quarry is, as usual, wasted are icing on the cake. As is the fact that the movie became a crowd favorite by not causing any suffering. Like I said, I’m a nice guy.
I returned from the restroom to find a familiar sight upon the screen: it was a short film about Lapland, which can be found on the Something Weird DVD for Attack of the Animal People. A bunch of young, attractive Laplanders, dressed in traditional attire, herd up the reindeer for the yearly ritual. We are told that “Some will be slaughtered, some will be bred, and some will be castrated in the traditional way.” And we are then treated in the traditional way, which is handled by the Lap women, using their teeth.
Chris, mad genius that he is, was at the front of the room, taping with his iPhone:
And I still feel the best part of this whole folderol is that we expected to believe that the men then lasso the woman of their choice, magically causing them to be married, and these young folks then take to the hills to fornicate madly even though the men know that these gals just bit off a reindeer’s wang.
Things were running long, and Ken sacrificed his second movie, Cat Women on the Moon, so that we could, alas, watch Sandy’s second choice, Nightmare City, which is an Umberto Lenzi Italian zombie movie. Which should tell you all you need to know about it.
Yeah, a plane disgorges a bunch of zombies that either do or do not infect you when they suck your blood (see, they’re not total cannibals. That would be derivative!) Society collapses, a journalist and his panicky girlfriend try to get out of town, nobody seems to notice that the only time the zombies stay down is when they get shot in the head, and in the end the journalist wakes up and it was all only a dream.
Yes, you read that right. In the end the journalist wakes up and it was all only a dream. Then he goes to the airport and it all starts over again. I believe a petition began circulating to prevent Sandy from ever choosing a movie again. I’m not certain, as the document was likely suppressed. Especially after what came next.
You see, it is traditional that every year, T-Fest end with a movie featuring a Tyrannosaurus, or something close (the “T” stands not only for Texas, but Tyrannosaurus). It was apparently Chris’ turn to choose the end film, and what he came up with was Theodore Rex. You remember Theodore Rex, doen’t you? Here, let me jog your memory:
Apparently the most expensive movie ever released direct to video at the time. Any movie that begins with a text screen detailing the plot is going to hurt. In the future, some genetic genius has managed to revive dinosaurs, but instead of opening a park, he’s given them intelligence and turned them into muppets. One gets murdered because it gets wind of the plot – I guess it read that opening text – and Teddy Rex and Whoopi – who is some sort of cyborg cop – get the case.
Theodore Rex is one of those movies where you wonder why somebody didn’t pull the plug on it sooner, like in the script stage. When a movie makes me think fondly of Howard the Duck, you know you’re in trouble.
So that was my week. In closing, just let me say: suffer, bitches. I’ve seen Dondi!
In our last loopy entry, I alluded that the Current Madness began with the Fantastic Four, and now that we have dispensed with the age-before-beauty schtick with poor, early Silver Age Superman, we can perhaps speak a bit more generally.
The best thing about the Marvel Essential books is that they start at the very beginning, not at an arbitrary point in the comics’ history, as do some of the Showcase books spotlighting older properties. Thus, you get to see a book founder and flop about, trying to find its own voice. The Mighty Thor is a fair example; he starts out fighting the Stone Men of Saturn, and goes on to a fairly mediocre career, up against Zarko The Tomorrow Man (twice!) and sundry menaces the thunder god seems to sort of shrug off, like those damned Reds (oooooo! Curse them!).
It’s in Thor, in fact, that we see rather starkly the impact of what has come to be known as the Marvel Method: the artist, after a story conference, goes off and draws the story, and Stan Lee would later write the captions and dialogue. When Jack Kirby is doing the art, Thor is engaging and dynamic, when he’s not… well, there’s a fallow period in the center of Volume One that, so to speak, illustrates the outcome. When Kirby returns to the title, the storytelling crackles; colorful adversaries like the Grey Gargoyle, Mr. Hyde and the Cobra fairly leap off the page, not to mention the back-up feature “Tales of Asgard”, which allowed all sorts of fanciful derring-do, at which Kirby excelled.
Killraven is another example . It starts out as “Amazing Adventures presents War of the Worlds”, the central conceit being the Martians put in a repeat appearance at the beginning of the 21st century, and this time they brought antihistamines and conquered the world. The Killraven we’re talking about is a guy raised in the gladiatorial pits of this un-brave new world, who escapes with a group of like-minded individuals who set to becoming freedom fighters. The series is kind of entry-level pulp adventure until writer Don F. McGregor signs in, and not too soon afterwards artist P. Craig Russell joins, and what is now called “Killraven – Warrior of the Worlds” starts to sing its own song.
I recognized Don McGregor’s name from some stories he wrote for the Warren black-and-white horror books (you know, Creepy, Eerie) which, almost without exception, I disliked. McGregor was a painfully earnest writer in a painfully earnest era, and would stop a decent horror story dead in the water for a sermon. For instance, here’s Sidney Portier telling it like it is while the guy behind him turns into a werewolf in Creepy #43’s “The Men Who Called Him Monster”. Don’t those word balloons look like they’re about to pop?
McGregor’s work on Marvel titles, though, is incredible. Perhaps a bit overwritten… a better description would be densely written… but maybe his editors at the big M kept his more self-indulgent tendencies in check, with the result that his talent shines. He also did a stint on “Luke Cage, Power Man” which is more multi-layered than Mr. Cage usually got, and I seem to recall a stellar run on “The Black Panther” that I’ve got to dig back out, one of these days.
Marvel Essentials Killraven is one of these books that presents the entire run of a character, including a somewhat muddy black-and-white version of a Marvel Graphic Novel that at least wrapped up one storyline left over when the book was cancelled. Then it ends up with a well-intentioned (and undeniably pretty) but ultimately pointless attempt to revive the character in the Marvel Knights line. As such, it’s more like reading a novel than most such books, with a couple of well-sustained story arcs and some great character work. McGregor is also one of the few writers in comics who seems to appreciate and employ running gags well.
I keep dropping the Fantastic Four name, and never get around to them, do I? Maybe it’s because of the total seven volumes currently available, I’ve only read five. More likely it’s just my scattered disorganized brain. Even more likely, I’m just too lazy to organize these slow-motion essays. I find that, overall, the reason I love the Marvel Essentials books is I didn’t read that much Marvel when I was really young. I expected lofty stuff from my regular, text-based books, but for my funny books I went for the more easily-digested DC and Gold Key fare.
Anyway, here goes: I think the aforementioned Fantastic Four, and that other mainstay that pulled Marvel out of the poorhouse, Spider-Man, never went through the initial, ungainly phase as did Thor and Killraven. Their basic concepts and characters seem very solid from the get-go, even though it would take years for the Invisible Girl to realize her potential (to paraphrase William S. Burroughs, “She could kill anybody in the room, and that was a good feeling.”)
Going through the first five volumes of Fantastic Four is quite the trip down memory lane; this is the blueprint for what would become the Marvel Universe, introducing the Kree, the Skrulls, the Inhumans, Galactus, the Silver Surfer, the Negative Zone, and, of course, my favorite comic character of all time… Dr. Doom.
It’s also well worth noting that, with rare exceptions, it’s almost always Jack Kirby at the drafting table for these stories. With the last half of Volume Five, John Romita takes over the art chores, which is a damn fine choice; while his design sense is not as over-the-top as Kirby’s his sense of drama is just as exceptional. It’s possible, at a quick glance, to mistake Romita’s art for Kirby’s, but a closer examination reveals that Romita shines in his own, special way. Romita had a good track record at Marvel for stuff like this: he also took over Spider-Man after Steve Ditko left Marvel.
It tends to dismay my friends who are also comics fans that I’m not a Spider-Man fan. Everybody is a Spider-Man fan, it seems, but me. I’ve never seen the allure, but my pal Dave was able to put it in terms I could understand.
A) Most of the Spidey super-villains, if they met Peter Parker on the street, would not even be bothered to nudge him out of the way. He’s that much of a schlub. So, yeah, I can see the Everyman aspect. And
B) Spider-Man’s actual super power isn’t the wall-crawling or the proportional strength of a spider; it’s the fact that he can piss off anybody. Dave loves to relate in detail, with appropriate voice acting, his favorite tales of Spider-Man pissing off Mr. Hyde, for instance.
This should tell you something important about the personality of my pal, Dave.
Nonetheless: I own a cope of Marvel Essentials Spider-Man, Volume One. Why? It was at Half-Price Books. I picked it up. And I realized, “Wait a minute – this is over 500 pages of Steve Ditko art!“
I may swear allegiance to writers, but those artists I love, I love unreservedly. And here is the most gorgeous comic cover evar (click to truly appreciate).
In the early part of the decade, I landed a dream job: I was paid some very good money to write. The odd fallout of that lucky win: I stopped any extracurricular writing. I’m trying to get back into the swing of non-deadline-oriented writing, writing for pleasure, and you – you lucky lucky taxpayer – have stumbled upon the result. Try not to hurt yourself on the sharp edges. And there will be plenty, as I attempt to get my muse back on her game.
Now back to my waxing rhapsodical (well, waxing something) about my digging back through beloved comic books.
You’d think that I’d start at the beginning, that would be easiest. That would probably mean starting with Superman, the ground zero of superhero-dom (although my current madness really started with The Fantastic Four… but enough of that). Well, I’ve got one of the Showcase Presents Superman volumes – number one to be precise – and I had it down for my recent reading rotation. I was halfway through it before I realized I had read it cover to cover when I first bought it months ago and just simply did not recall any of the stories. My failing, aged memory? No. They just weren’t very memorable.
Supes has always ranked pretty high in my super hero listings, yet he’s one I’ve never had the typical fanboy yearning to write. Even in his more modern, down-powered state, he’s still awesomely overpowered, and that can’t be easy to build a story around. (watching some of the Filmation superhero cartoons of the 60s, I was amused to see Supes pushing the Earth out of orbit again. At least they made it look kinda hard – I seem to recall in the Super Friends days, he could pretty much do it by accident. Then again, the Super Friends always did five impossible things before breakfast, anyway).
There are two things that contribute to the lightweight quality of most of these stories. The first is a stolid, hidebound editorial stance alluded to by Mark Evanier in his book Kirby: King of Comics – a very strict view of “this is how comics is done”. Apparently a commercially viable stance, but it led to practically every DC comic being written in the same voice – which starts to be truly irksome in the early Justice League stories), with only different costumes and utility belt contents to differentiate characters.
It’s also this editorial stance that apparently led to a much commented-upon propensity to feature frequent gorillas on the covers of comic books to boosts sales. Yeah, I scratch my head, too, but this has given us such evergreens as Titano the Super Ape and Gorilla Grodd. Not to mention, I suppose, Congorilla and Beppo, the Super Monkey.
Heh heh. Monkey! Heh.
The second thing? I note that the stories in Volume One all hail from the years 1958-59. The Comics Code Authority was formed in 1955, and it has to be admitted that these stories are pretty dang unprovocative, with nothing to insult anyone. Unless you’re a woman, or a man with a lick of sense. But as we all know, these are okay to insult.
Yeah, we’re getting to the era that’s mined for sites like Superdickery or What Were They Thinking. There’s much that’s risible here – Lois Lane is so Superman-hungry that you wonder when she’s got the time to be such a highly-regarded journalist, and Superman is, to say the least, extremely gullible. He blabs his secret identity to people in disguise at least twice in the first half of the book, which would lead Batman to smack him upside the head with a Kryptonite-lined glove and bark, “Clark, you moron! You have X-ray vision!!!”
I suppose I regard these stories as more or less dispensable because they have no effect or impact on Canon, with a capital “C”. Then, Supes has been rebooted at least twice in my lifetime, so how could they? For what it’s worth, I love the happily-married Lois/Clark dynamic, and the fact that Lois is currently a strong enough character to hold her own amongst super-types. Which makes the story in Vol. One where Supes, believing himself to be marooned for life on a tropical island with Lois, reveals his identity and marries her in a native ceremony, all the more quaint. Especially since Supe then has to pull off an exceptionally lame series of explanations how Clark managed to fake super powers when a way off the island is figured out. Because, you know, girls have cooties.
Cue Batman with that kryptonite-filled sap glove again. Maybe Superman is a dick.
Then again, Batman has it easy. His Showcase Presents starts in 1964, into the “New Look” period that brought Batman more or less back into the “real” world (or at least as real as Gotham City ever gets), and not gallivanting off into space every issue to fight alien menaces that Flash Gordon would have refused to take seriously.
Which is too bad, really. I was looking forward to some Batman and Robin vs. the Mullet Men goofballery that filled the 25 cent 80-page Giants of my youth. Then one has to admit those, like these Superman stories, were definitely slanted toward the juvenile demographic. No way adults would ever be caught dead reading this stuff. No way at all.
This is likely the charm the stories hold for me: their very milquetoast, workmanlike quality. I admit that a few years back, when Grant Morrison was writing the JLA, I actually got very tired of the universe coming to an end every month. That was the only way to manufacture any dramatic tension, given the amount of power on that satellite – but would it have killed them to have the JLA stop a bank robbery once in a while? Those idiots in the Royal Flush Gang seem to pull one a week, at least…
So really, it’s kind of a relief to read a story where Superman is trying to teach Lois a lesson by wearing an Alfred E. Newman mask.
Ah, youth, sweet youth. That joyful time when I regularly tackled the tough stuff. And by tackling the tough stuff, I mean reading the really thick books. You know. Ulysses. Remembrance of Things Past. Gravity’s Rainbow. Nova Express (which wasn’t thick but was no less scarring). Yes, by God, I was stretching my mind.
And truthfully, I remember very little from any of them, outside of enjoying them. Proust, especially. Maybe I stretched out the brain cells too much (though admittedly, not purely through literature. Chemicals may have been involved).
But you know what I do remember, with great clarity? The death of Jean Grey. Doctor Doom killing his right hand man rather than let him destroy the art treasures of Europe in an attempt to kill the Fantastic Four. I remember when Terra betrayed the Teen Titans.
If you look back over the card catalog of everything I’ve read in my life, this would not surprise you. By fourth grade I had chewed my way through most everything H.G. Wells and Jules Verne had to offer, but I had also read through almost the entire Tom Swift, Jr. series as well as every Doc Savage reprint paperback Bantam could toss on the market. This is pulp, you might say, this is trash.
To which I say, pfui. Big Deal.
I’m past the age of being evangelical about what I like. I’m also long past the age of being apologetic about it. And into the age where, if you ridicule me about it, I can smile easily, gently urge you to commit a physically impossible act, and then command you to get off my lawn.
I loves the funny books, you see. If you don’t, that’s fine. But you’re prolly gonna get bored here very quickly.
Funny books are what enabled me to read Verne, Wells, Heinlein and that damned nightmare-inducing Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum while my classmates were still struggling to step outside Dr. Seuss. My grandmother read to me every day from comic books when I was wee – Herbie was a big favorite – and thus did I learn to read before my first day of school.
There was a brief attempt to stop me from reading comics early on, fearful that I wouldn’t read “real” books – but that turned out to be a groundless fear. Sickly child that I was, reading was one of the few pursuits I could easily perform. I loved books. Still do. Love the smell of them, the feel of them, heavy in my hand. Love the portability. No batteries required.
I find myself gadget-curious about the Kindle. But I hunger for the smell of dusty paper, and the tactile joy of physically turning that page of pressed wood and dead ink. I don’t think an e-reader will ever truly be for me.
For one thing, I don’t think comics will read especially well on them.
It’s like one of those sudden conversion stories they love in evangelical circles. You see, I once hated on those “Marvel Essential” and “Showcase Presents” phone books. They don’t have color! Where is my four-color fury? Bah!
Of course, then came the day I saw Marvel Essential X-Men Vol. 3 at Half-Price Books and figured “What the hell.” What the hell indeed. Not to diss any of the hard working colorists who labored in the trenches all those years, but the color was the least of the strengths of these stories, and I have gotten really hooked on an easy, affordable way to read through huge hunks of history.
To digress – which surely you’ve come to expect from me by now – These days, the computer-driven coloring in comics is extraordinary. There is a recent re-issue of the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby Tales of Asgard in which the only change made was re-coloring, using modern methods, and the result is gorgeous to behold. I like to think Kirby would have approved whole-heartedly.
This is too long already, and I have rambled so far afield from what I originally intended to say, I hear search parties in the distance trying to find that intent. More on what I’ve been reading and why in the days ahead, I hope.
You know how I love going on and on about stuff nobody cares about.
In all the trials and drama and blah blah connected to my extended period of unemployment, there eventually reached a time of sweaty desperation when, if one were to be exceptionally kind (or to indulge in more than a little whitewashing) anything that did not involve finding work or making some sort of money had to go by the wayside.
Let’s get real. The truth of the matter is, depression was the flavor of the day and it was on clearance. There was a 10 foot doom field radiating from yours truly. So really, nothing was getting done, and I’m pretty sure I was not pleasant company.
That all changed in early February, when I caught wind of a part-time job at the local campus of Houston Community College. True, it was part-time, but hell, certainly better than nothing; they wanted to see a demo reel of my video work. I had thought that such things were past me, since most of my work happened in another decade, which causes most producers to suddenly become very interested in something else happening in another room. Nonetheless, I scraped together what I had, managed to actually get the stuff from VHS tapes – how primitive! – to DVD. And I guess they liked what they saw, because they hired me.
The official title is Media Videographer. What this means is every week I turn in a five minute story of either local interest or related to the college. I research it, make the contacts, shoot it, write it, edit it and it goes on the weekly newscast of Stafford Municipal Educational TV, Comcast Channel 16.
Which means it is only seen by those residents of the tiny suburb of Stafford who are also Comcast subscribers. That doesn’t even include me, since one of the things that got lost during the tribulations was cable TV.
I try not to dwell too hard on the shouting-into-a-deaf-teacup aspect of this; it is a job, and an enjoyable one, at that. I work with nice, likable people who don’t mind too much that I am a Mac noob (Final Cut Pro is amazing, incidentally), and basically learn one Hard Lesson a week.
We’re a curious hybrid here, a partnership between the college and the city; most of the other Channel 16s seem to be creatures of either the city or the college, either Municipal or Educational, but us, we’re both. That actually allows us some unusual freedom, mixed in with a lot of strange shibboleths, as there are two bureaucracies involved.
And here we are in the summer. The college is eerily underpopulated, and the part-time staff’s hours have been cut down. (Disappointing, yes, but the alternative was laying someone off for the summer, and since that someone would have been me….). Hand in hand with that, the weekly newscast becomes a monthly newsmagazine during the summer, and filling in those hours can be… tricky.
So currently, in between trying to get someone in authority at a local museum to call me back so I can start on next month’s story, and transferring old VHS tapes of programming onto DVD, I find myself… O most pernicious neologism! … cyberslacking. And now the network is down, so here I am roughing out a blog entry. What a country!
I await the premiere of the Watchmen movie with trepidation. First, I didn’t care for 300, and I loved Frank Miller’s original almost as much as I love the Moore/Gibbons Watchmen. Then again, I found much to like in Zack Snyder’s version of Dawn of the Dead…
Then, it seems (if the innernets can be believed) Snyder fought to keep the parallel comic story of The Black Freighter in the movie – though God knows how. It has apparently been cut, and will surface in the inevitable deluxe DVD version, released six months after the initial bare-bones release. Not that I’m a bitter consumer, or anything.
Then, it is apparently common knowledge that the ending of the story has been changed. On the one hand, I can hope to be surprised by this new ending. On the other hand, how can a new ending hope to match the punch-in-the-gut impact of the original? On the mutant other, third hand, I will be glad that I will not be subjected to endless misspelled tirades on those same innernets that Watchmen totally ripped off the first season of Heroes, dude. Bad enough we’re going to be getting enough of what the webcomic The Rack so insightfully predicts.
The viral video campaign has begun, and though it’s about as tepid as the fake news segments for The Dark Knight, it still shows promise:
As usual, I reserve judgment until I see it with my own myopic peepers. But hell, I’m the guy who had nice things to say about Robocop II.
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