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Tuesday, June 11, 2013 ( 6/11/2013 09:28:00 PM ) Bill S.   “WHY WAS HIS PAST ALWAYS CALLING? ALWAYS MAKING GRABS ON HIM?” Though primarily known and lauded as the author of short speculative fiction Harlan Ellison’s first book publication was Web of the City, a grittily empathetic look at gang life based on the author’s own experiences undercover researching as the member of a gang in Red Hook, Brooklyn. First published in 1958 under the more pulp worthy title Rumble, the writer’s debut novel has just been reissued under the Hard Case Crime banner. While clearly the work of a young writer, it holds fascination as a document of urban life in the 1950’s. Reading it, you can practically breathe in the city atmosphere and sense of adolescent despair.The book’s protagonist is Rusty Santoro, the former leader of a teenaged gang named the Cougars who is attempting to quit the life after getting into trouble with the law. Thing is: the only way you get to leave the Cougars is in a pine box (when you’re a Cougar, you’re a Cougar all the way), so our hero has to fend off challenges by the new gang chief Candle and the scorn of his high school peers who call him “chick chick.” Though Rusty has the support of a sympathetic teacher named Pancoast (a name that couldn’t help but recall Candide), Rusty’s is a world where adult authority doesn’t hold much sway. He’s pushed to defend himself in a bowling alley rumble and the inevitable game of chicken. But when his sister is found dead and sexually assaulted in an alley, Rusty’s focus shifts to finding and punishing her killer. If Rusty’s story reads like something that could’ve been shown on a drive-in theatre in its day, Ellison’s vivid and evocative writing lifts his material. At times, you can see the short fiction master struggling to keep his point of view consistent, shifting in places from his hero’s eyes and ears to that of a somewhat aloof adult narrator – as when the book critically describes the “vapid” music of a Jerry Lee Lewis song – and a few descriptive elements get reiterated more than necessary (I lost count of the number of times he pejoratively referred to the “fat” wives and mothers of Rusty’s immigrant neighborhood). But in a way, these youthful flaws mesh with the book’s still half-formed hero. I didn’t buy the scene where an adult authority figures shows to try and warn Rusty off his quest for vengeance and is revealed to be a dope addict. It wasn’t that the reveal was unbelievable, more that it takes the drug-savvy Rusty so long to recognize the character’s addiction. Web ends on a cautiously positive note, though Ellison appends three short stories to the reissue – rather like the added demo tracks on a CD remastering – one of which, “No Way Out,” brings the opening knife fight between Rusty and Candle to a much more despairing conclusion. The remaining two tales look at the scourge of juvenile delinquency through the eyes of adult protagonists and are much typical of hard-boiled pulp. No journalistic social realism here, just men coming up against young punks who deserve what’s coming to ‘em. You can only take this empathy business just so far. . .
(First published on the New! Improved! Blogcritics.) Labels: pulp fiction # |Friday, May 31, 2013 ( 5/31/2013 09:55:00 PM ) Bill S.   “HE WANTS TO KNOW IF YOU’RE A COWBOY.” The second volume in Donald Hamilton’s long-running paperback spy series, The Wrecking Crew (originally published in 1960) sees its hard-boiled hero Matt Helm out of civilian life for good after the events in Death of a Citizen pushed him back into the world of spycraft. In Crew, our counter agent hero gets sent to northern Sweden on his first mission to track down a mercenary hitman named Caselius. Divorced from his wife, who left after getting a first-hand glimpse of her husband’s brutal side, our hero hooks up with the spouse of a magazine writer who had written an expose on Caselius and was subsequently “accidentally” machine gunned by a border guard. The widow, Lou Taylor, has decided to take up her writer husband’s work, so Helm tags along as “hick photographer” in the hope that this will draw out Caselius.Helm’s initial assignment – to find but not take out the mysterious assassin -- puts him in sight of Swedish and American agents, most of who appear to have slippery allegiances. Then there’s the comely widow, whose survival from the shooting is itself viewed with suspicion. Though viewed as an out-of-shape old-timer by Stockholm agent Sara Lundgren, our hero doesn’t waste any time showing us that he’s still got it: whether dodging the attack of a sword cane bearing Swede, brutally ravishing the possibly duplicitous widow or rescuing said widow in a climactic showdown in the bad guy. While it’s his first assignment in fifteen years, we know our narrator hero will survive (he’s got twenty-five more books to go, after all!), though we can’t be too sure about any of his slippery allies. Even more than he did in the first Helm novel, Hamilton emphasizes his protagonist’s ruthless, almost anti-heroic nature. The Wrecking Crew of the title (criminally twisted into “Necking Crew” in the promo line for one of the abysmal Dean Martin movies) doesn’t refer to the book’s villains -- but the unnamed Cold War agency employing Helm. The writer (himself a Swedish transplant) gets plenty of good mileage from his Scandinavian setting, using it both for sinister atmosphere and to emphasize our lead’s role as a man on his own. If a few of his culture clash specifics seem very much of their time (e.g., a villain who sees American reliance on automatic transmissions as a symbol of Yankee decadence), they work in Helm’s noiry world. This is no tongue-in-cheek spy fare but gritty, occasionally discomforting period pulp.
(First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: pulp fiction # |Sunday, May 19, 2013 ( 5/19/2013 08:21:00 AM ) Bill S.   “NO POINT MESSING UP ARMAGGEDON WITH PETTY FIST FIGHTS.” A swiftly catastrophic Apocalyptic comic, John Byrne’s Doomsday.1 (IDW) hearkens back to one of the first professional comics on which the fan fave writer/artist worked: a short-lived series done with writer Joe Gill for the poverty row comics company Charlton entitled Doomsday +1. Where the civilization trashing disaster in the first series was man-made, though, the dire events in .1 prove natural: a massive solar flare large enough to break away from the sun as a huge sphere hurtling Earthwards. Charting the impending doom is an international space station crew whose shielding protects them from the flare’s radiation.Byrne, in the opening issue, cuts between the station and a series of brief vignettes that will likely pay off in the future: a distraught Madam President who grimly jokes that her opponents had always claimed she’d preside “over the end of civilization,” a callous Pope fleeing the Vatican, the faceless crew of a submarine, inmates in a maximum security Texas prison. When we learn that the area most likely to escape relatively unscathed is northern South America (“a pity it could not be somewhere more civilized,” Byrne’s Pope sardonically notes), we know those nasty Lone Star inmates are gonna show up to bedevil the good guys. The characterization’s fairly sparse in this set-up issue, though a few figures promise to provide some meat in later issues: foremost among these are Benning, the cantankerous capitalist responsible for the space station, and that cynical Pope. The first reads like Byrne’s piss-take on Robert Heinlein’s competent geezer; the second should prove a prime source for sardonic one-liners. When one of his underlings, for example, offers the thought that the flare could be divine judgment cleansing the Earth for a portion of humanity to survive, his Eminence replies, “I suppose you could look at it that way. If you believe in that sort of thing.” A few of the rest are primarily defined by their nationality: the good-natured Canadian crewman (“I’m just a poor farmboy from Manitoba.”), for instance, though hopefully they’ll be given more to do in upcoming installments. Issue #1 concludes with the flare hitting Earth and our space station crew returning to Earth to find a burnt landscape and . . . ? Though much of the debut is – in the tradition of s-f disaster tales – primarily devoted to scenes of talking and desperate strategizing, the panels set in the space station provide some visual variety as writer/artist Byrne depicts his figures from a variety of floating angles in their gravity free environment. Aided by colorist Leonard O’Grady, the artist's handling of the firestorm and its aftermath prove suitably awe-ful. Ending the opener at dawn, howver, he teasingly holds back the full revelations of devastation until issue #2. Bring ‘em on, John!
(First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: modern comics # |Tuesday, May 07, 2013 ( 5/07/2013 10:10:00 PM ) Bill S.   SAVIOR OF THE UNIVERSE: I sometimes joke that Flash Gordon was in part responsible for my becoming a godless heathen. Back in the sixties when I was a nerdly teen, WGN Chicago ran showings of the Universal Flash Gordon serials from the 1930’s on Sunday mornings. In those benighted days before video or digital recording, if you wanted to watch something on television, you had to watch it right then. Flash Gordon was broadcast at the same time that my family typically attended mass – given a choice between having to sit dutifully through a Sunday service or staying at home watching Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, which would you think appealed to a somewhat ADD teen?The Larry “Buster” Crabbe serials were adaptations of a classic newspaper Sunday strip, of course. Written by Don Moore and illustrated by Alex Raymond, “Flash Gordon” wasn’t the first sci-fi swashbuckler to appear in newspapers – that honor belongs to “Buck Rogers,” which debuted in 1929 – but it was inarguably the greatest. Credit artist Raymond, who attacked his subject with a detailed fervor unrivaled in its day. Additionally, he was one of the sexiest strippers of his time: whenever an exotic alien princess (and there were a lot of them) set her lusty eyes on blond hunk Flash, you believed it.
British publishing company Titan Books has recently initiated a reprint series of this classic strip; first volume, Flash Gordon: On the Planet Mongo Moore and Raymond’s strip opened in a rush: first panel we see is a newspaper headline trumpeting “World Coming to End” as a strange new planet appears to be on the verge of colliding with planet Earth. When Yale grad and “world renowned polo player” Flash and comely brunette Dale Arden survive a plane crash near the lab of mad scientist Hans Zarkov, the accidental couple are forced to board a rocket designed to deflect the planet from its collision course. (How this actually is supposed to work is never made clear.) The trio land on the planet Mongo, which proves to be as populated with as large a population of feudal humanoids and hybrid creatures as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars. Evil overlord of Mongo, of course, is emperor Ming the Merciless, a “yellow peril” inspired Fu Manchu type who would be a more racist creation if he weren’t established as an alien. Ming instantly lusts for our heroine Dale (“The beauty of the female pleases me. . .”), but muscular Flash quickly seizes the attention of Ming’s daughter Princess Aura, who impulsively follows him down a trap door into a pit packed with “hideous water dragons.” As a Sunday strip, “Flash Gordon” episodically zipped along, typically ending each Sunday with a cliffhanger in the final panel. The structure made it ideal movie serial fodder, though at times reading several months of continuity in a single sitting, you can’t help wishing that writer Moore slowed down enough to tie up all his loose ends. If its storyline ever appears to be finding new ways to unravel, Raymond’s art is a model of control. It truly becomes splendid in the summer of ’34 once he breaks away from the initial four row structure and starts moving in closer to his characters. The larger panels gave the artist room to show off the planet’s varied kingdoms – whether it’s the airborne city of the Hawkmen or an undersea coral kingdom of merfolk – with a grandeur that neither the Depression Era serials nor the Camp Era 1980 feature film could fully capture. Titan Books’ reprint shows off this justly lauded art to good advantage, the one editorial glitch being a duplication of strips on August 18 and 25, 1935, that fortunately doesn’t screw up continuity. It’s a small flaw in a beautifully mounted volume that – had it been available when I was a teen – might’ve kept me from whining about my churchly obligations.
(First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: classic comic strips # |Thursday, April 25, 2013 ( 4/25/2013 05:52:00 AM ) Bill S.   “I AM TALKING ABOUT FUNNY BOOKS, KIDS.” The title to Max Allan Collins’ latest period detective novel will ring familiar to most readers of comic book history. Seduction of the Innocent (Hard Case Crime) shares its title with a notorious anti-comics screed written in the fifties by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham. Railing against the then prevalent crime and horror comics of the day – and not incidentally castigating superhero mainstays like Batman and Wonder Woman – Wertham linked comics consumption to juvenile delinquency and was a media hero in his day. His Seduction sparked a Senate investigation led by Estes Kefauver into comics and youth crime and nearly led to the demise of the entire industry.In Collins’ Seduction, set in 1954 New York, Wetham’s fictional twin, Dr. Werner Fredrick, himself becomes victim of a murder seemingly influenced by someone “reading a bunch of sick sick sick comic books.” Among the suspects is a cast of characters inspired by comics creators of the day, most notably EC comics publisher William M. Gaines (here known as Robert Price), who proves a prime suspect after having an amphetamine fueled flameout testifying before the Senate, a moment inspired by Gaines’ real-life diet-pilled testimony before Kefauver and company. Here to solve the crime are Jack Starr and his stepmother Maggie, The World’s Second Most Famous Striptease Artist. Jack is vice president of Staff Syndicate, a newspaper syndicate with close ties to the comic book industry; boss Maggie was his late father’s third and final showgirl wife. A canny businesswoman, Maggie uses her stepson as a troubleshooter, looking out for the syndicate’s best interests. Brokering a deal with Robert Price for a syndicated version of his satire comic Craze, Jack and Maggie have a proprietary interest in uncovering Fredricks’ killer after the horror comics publisher has been seen publicly threatening the psychiatrist. As the narrator of Seduction, Jack proves reminiscent of Rex Stout’s Archie Goodwin or Erle Stanley Gardner’s Donald Lam, though the wisecracking former m.p. also offers an amusing Mickey Spillane ref in the book. (“He sounded like the disappointed villainess at the end of I, the Jury.”) Suspects include writer and editor Hal Feldman (based on EC writer/artist/editor Al Feldstein), sultry female cartoonist Lyla Lamont (inspired by one of the era’s few woman artists, Tarpe Mills, and her superheroine Miss Fury), Fredricks associate Garshon Lehman (based on an associate of Wertham’s who reportedly had a hand in the writing of the anti-comics polemic), as well as an explosive comics addled city kid and a gangster with ties to the comics distribution biz. Each chapter in the book is graced by an illo designed by longtime Collins collaborator Terry Beatty in the style of famed EC artist Johnny Craig. The novel even, amusingly, features a two page strip just before the solution is revealed where the detective talks to the reader a la Ellery Queen’s “Challenge to the Reader.” I didn’t have any difficulty with the solution, but the prime pleasure in Seduction comes from Collins’ smooth recreation of a time in pop culture history that still has resonance in a day where today’s scolds focus on violent videogames with the same misguided fervor that Kefauver and his subcommittee displayed in the fifties. Per Collins’ afterword, Seduction is the third in a trio of Jack and Maggie Starr mysteries centered on comics; the first two books are presently out-of-print, though there are plans to reprint them under the Hard Case imprint. Having not read the earlier entries, I’m looking forward to their reissuing. If they’re anything like this book, they should prove extremely satisfying for both comic and mystery fan-addicts.
(First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: pulp fiction # |Friday, April 12, 2013 ( 4/12/2013 05:50:00 PM ) Bill S.   “AFTER ALL, COMIC MAGAZINES ARE AN ART FORM.” For many comic book fan kids of the Baby Boom generation, the early sixties were a magical time: with much of the industry nearly beaten into irrelevance by the juvenile delinquency panic of the fifties, comic book creators worked to pull themselves back into quasi-respectability, primarily through the revived super-hero genre. John Wells’ American Comic Book Chronicles: 1960-64 (TwoMorrows Publishing) provides a year-by-year account of the companies and titles that spurred the Silver Age boom. The first in a proposed series of hardbound histories covering the major moments of comic book history, Chronicles provides a journalistic trek through the industry, its overseers and creators, starting with DC’s introduction of the Justice League of America.It’s DC’s success with the JLA (a revamped version of an earlier company team, the Justice Society of America) that sparked comics publisher Martin Goodman into charging writer Stan Lee with the task of creating a new super-team that would become the Fantastic Four. With the FF’s debut in 1961, the Marvel Age of Comics was beginning, though it took many comics fans time to actively notice: understandable since, as Wells points out, the cover to the premiere issue looked indistinguishable from the rampaging monster comics that Lee and collaborator/artist Jack Kirby had been cranking out to a modestly loyal readership since 1959. Lee and Kirby’s biggest storytelling innovation at the time was to do something that DC – who had built its team with already established characters – didn’t dare do: make its team fallible and frequently bickering. In so doing, they established the Heroes with Problems template that would arguably find its greatest symbol in the Amazing Spider-Man. The only way that DC could force its super folks to break their mold at the time was through alternate world “Imaginary Stories,” a ploy that many slightly older comics fans pooh-poohed. Marvel’s flawed figures had an air of “realism” to them that the canny Lee hyped to the company’s benefit. Chronicles doesn’t limit itself to the Big Two’s super-hero titles, though. Wells’ overview examines all the other comics publishers of the day: Dell and its successor Gold Key, Archie, ACG, Harvey, Charlton – along with the cape free titles produced by DC and Marvel: romance, western, war comics. If a few lines don’t receive as full a focus as others, it’s generally because their titles were largely inflexible: a 1959 Caspar, the Friendly Ghost wasn’t much different from one in 1964, after all. Wells does capture the story innovations that some long-standing characters experienced: the establishment of a non-imaginary DC multiverse in Gardner Fox and the recently deceased Carmine Infantino’s “Flash of Two Worlds,” for instance, which gave DC’s writers the opportunity to place modern versions of their super characters alongside their Golden Age incarnations. Wells notes those current events that were reflected in comics of the day: appearances by John F. Kennedy and the Beatles in sundry titles (including the quirky superhero satire, Herbie, the Fat Fury), Cold War references that were particularly prevalent in Marvel’s early series like Iron Man.. He even considers the somewhat anachronistic sixties era pleas for racial tolerance that appeared in both DC and Marvel’s war comics: mild fare today but commercially risky at the time. Chronicles also considers comic magazines spin-offs like Mad (originally a four-color EC comic book) and Creepy, the first and most successful attempt to transplant pre-code horror comics storytelling into a black-and-white format. To a comics reader too young to have caught the original Tales from the Crypt and its ilk, Creepy and its spin-off title Eerie were as profound an influence as the original demonized ECs. In 1960, Wells notes, Mad was the highest selling comics title in the U.S., just ahead of Dell’s best-selling titles Uncle Scrooge and Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories with a yearly average of over a million copies sold per issue. Both Dell and Mad managed to bypass the strictures of the Comics Code Authority set up to appease parents worried by the Eisenhower Era comics scare: Dell because its affiliation with family-friendly companies like Disney carried its own tacit seal of approval (“Dell Comics Are Good Comics.”), Mad because its status as a black-and-white magazine set it outside the bounds of code authority. Along with the comics themselves, the early sixties proved a fertile period for the comics fandom that was starting to come into its own. Befitting TwoMorrow’s status as a fannish publishing company, Chronicles also documents the first appearance of the first big name fans and their zines – which would have an impact on the industry in the years ahead. Some might argue whether the “fanboy” voice, which certainly was heard by attentive editors at DC and Marvel, helped or stunted the industry over time, but the fact remains that names like Alter Ego’s Roy Thomas would themselves find a place as comics creators in the years to come. “It is our intention,” Marvel voice Stan Lee wrote at the end of the period covered in this volume, “here at Marvel, to produce comics which are so well-written and well-drawn, that they’ll elevate the entire field in the minds of the public!” Within that characteristic bit of bombast was a sentiment that spoke for the industry. After a period of the creative and economic doldrums, the comics industry was starting to revive – Wells' Chronicles does an admirable job capturing that era.
(First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: comics history # |Friday, April 05, 2013 ( 4/05/2013 07:00:00 AM ) Bill S. EBERT: My senior year at Illinois State, I and a batch of my fellow ISU Film Society officers had dinner with Roger Ebert before an on-campus presentation. I remember him as being convivial and approachable, willing to talk about any movie that we brought up. I also remember several of us considered bringing up Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, a movie that none of us had seen at the time but knew by its exaggerated reputation. None of us did, though, because the man was just a nice guy to sit at the dinner table with. R.I.P., Roger.
(I've since seen and grown to love Dolls, by the way.) Wednesday, March 27, 2013 ( 3/27/2013 06:35:00 AM ) Bill S.   “THERE WAS NO RATIONAL EXPLANATION FOR WHAT HE THOUGHT HE SAW.” Mention the term “steampunk,” and the first thing that’ll come to my mind are mildly irritating cosplayers in Edwardian garb – unfortunate because as a literary sub-genre, “steampunk” has produced some damn fine entertainments. Among the acknowledged originators of the form, James P. Blaylock is one of the best-known, and his latest offering, The Aylesford Skull (Titan Books) shows him at the top of his game. Subtitled “A Tale of Langdon St. Ives,” the rousing yarn reads like something that could have been serialized in The Strand at the end of the 19th century. Not for nothing does one of its supporting characters turn out to be a young Conan Doyle.The book concerns a battle of wits between scientist/explorer Langdon St. Ives and his longtime nemesis, the loathsome hunchback Dr. Ignacio Nardondo. Narbondo has retrieved the skull of his young brother Edward, murdered by his own hands as a child, to use as an otherworldly projector. When he kidnaps St. Ives’ four-year-old son Eddie from the professor’s idyllic home in the English countryside, a chase ensues that leads to the darkest streets of London and an assassination plot designed to frame the British prime minister Gladstone. Hovering around the proceedings: the ghost of the young boy Narbondo killed, who not incidentally shares the same name as St. Ives’ son. Much of the book is devoted the search and rescue of Eddie St. Ives, the action divided between the professor and his chums (among which includes the aforementioned creator of Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger); Mother Laswell, a matronly figure who runs a nearby commune named Hereafter Farm, who shares a biological connection to both ghost and villain; and Finn Conrad, a scrappy former circus boy familiar with the Dickensian streets of London. Blaylock keeps the action – a series of near fatal encounters and escapes – diverse enough to keep you reading even if the Lovecraftian specifics surrounding the titular skull never fully gel. His period details and non-ironic use of 19th century imagineering (Is there an airship in the story? Of course there is!) prove engaging, while his straight-faced heroes and more-than-dastardly villains are colorful and distinct. Though at core a peril-packed actioner, Aylesford Skull also displays a concern with the nature of family and friendship which also provides its heart. And when young Eddie also effects his own (short-term) escape, you can’t help cheering for the little scaper.
(First published on Blogcritics.) Tuesday, March 26, 2013 ( 3/26/2013 06:33:00 AM ) Bill S. SO WHERE'VE I BEEN? After several weeks being unable to get into the Blogger template following some sort of Google apps upgrade at my ISP, I finally was able to wend my way back. Wotta pain . . . # | ( 3/26/2013 06:27:00 AM ) Bill S.   OF MAUS AND SUPERMEN Originally published in 2003 and revised to accommodate the decade since, Stephen Weiner’s Faster Than a Speeding Bullet (IDW) is a slim 74-page consideration of “The Rise of the Graphic Novel.” Written as an intro to “how the comics industry grew up, took itself seriously and made enough noise so that mainstream readers were finally forced to pay it serious attention,” Weiner’s book is bound to stimulate comebacks by the cognoscenti ever eager to pick nits or bemoan any “major” omissions.For this reader, for instance, I couldn’t help noting the absence of the noir-y Truman Era “picture novel,” It Rhymes with Lust or the later publication of underground giant R. Crumb’s Yum Yum Book in 1975 (three years before Will Eisner’s A Contract with God, typically acknowledged to be the first modern graphic novel.) Too, while Weiner discusses the role of comic strip collections in leading the way in the sixties for later trade collections of comic book material, he fails to single out Walt Kelly’s “Pogo” paperbacks – which frequently featured extended storylines every bit as “novelistic” as later superhero collections (cf. Prehysterical Pogo (In Pandemonia), which took much of the strip’s cast to a dinosaur inhabited lost world in Australia) – a glaring omission to this fan’s eyes. Still, Faster than a Speeding Bullet does capture the recognized landmarks of the modern graphic novel: Contract (less a novel, as Weiner notes, than a thematically connected quartet of short stories a la Winesberg, Ohio), Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor and much that followed. Though its title gives the impression that the book’s focus will be on superhero GN fare like Knight or Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Weiner provides a broader view of comics’ maturation as a storytelling form. If at times he comes across a bit timorous when dealing with some of the more challenging sources of graphic novels (discussing Maus, for example, he bypasses the work’s nascent version in an underground comix book), he doesn’t downplay their significance. As with too many American comics fans, Weiner is overly brief in regards to European albums and manga (perhaps a better subtitle for this book would be “Rise of the North American Graphic Novel”), but considering the book’s length this isn’t surprising. He does manage to pull in some of the extraordinary recent GNs by women artists (Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home) in this new edition. More than just speeding bullets, in other words.
(First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: comics history # |Monday, February 18, 2013 ( 2/18/2013 10:10:00 PM ) Bill S.   “YOU WANT TO GO ON A QUEST?” Collecting the first arc of his funny animal post-Apocalyptic web comic into two print packages, Aaron Neathery's Endtown Volumes one and two (Jarlidium Press) provides a welcome intro for those readers who prefer to see their comic art slapped down on bright white paper. The format suits Neathery’s expressive cartoon style and makes lingering over his artwork all the more enjoyable. Call me a twentieth century geezer, but, dammit, comics work best on paper.For those unfamiliar with the science fantasy strip (now in its fourth year and currently running on Go Comics), “Endtown” is set in a future world decimated by an arm race catastrophe which resulted in most its of survivors being transformed into either anthropomorphic or monstrous mutations. The former look like funny animal characters down to their three-fingered hands; the latter turn out to be well-fanged, multi-robed nightmares with no trace of their humanity intact. A few humans survived without changing – most of them seemingly turning toward a neo-Nazi obsession with genetic purity – and take control of the “topside.” The mutant animals and their few still-human allies take refuge in an underground city, the “Endtown” of the title, occasionally sending out foraging expeditions topside to look for canned goods.
Told by an oracle to seek a dying mutant tree aboveground, Gustine and her loyal lover head up to a decaying city where they’re confronted by the maddened scientist responsible for the disaster and swarms of mimicky pixel creatures called Dittos. The latter recreate a flashback to the Apocalypse, resulting in a memorably grim sequence: Neathery’s ability to switch from whimsical Carroll-ian satire to more disturbing fare is reminiscent of Walt Kelly’s “Pogo” during that strip’s memorable Simple J. Malarkey/Joe McCarthy takedown. Since the story arc in these two volumes, “Endtown” has switched its focus to other animalized denizens of the underground outpost, providing some clues into the origins of this mysterious hideaway along the way. As a fan of the Albert/Gustine partnership, I have to admit initially being a bit hesitant in embracing the newer cast, though the big-hearted mouse Holly has since won my heart. Recently, the online strip concluded an engaging second arc featuring our girl and Wally, a feline newcomer to Endtown. Here’s hoping the first two books do well enough to encourage print editions of the second story line. And now that we’re in a new ‘un, maybe we could get a glimpse of how Albert and Gustine are doing these days?
(First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: modern comics # |Wednesday, January 30, 2013 ( 1/30/2013 10:05:00 PM ) Bill S.  “HOW CAN WE GIVE YOU A DISCHARGE WHEN WE DON’T EXIST?”
The hardest boiled of the Cold War spies, Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm has long languished in undeserved obscurity, mostly remembered for a series of cheesy spy “comedies” starring a thoroughly tiresome Dean Martin. But the pulp connoisseurs at Britain’s Titan Books (who have also been aligned with Hard Case Crime) have sought to bring the real Matt (a.k.a. “Eric”) back into the searchlight – and good for them. First two books in Hamilton’s 27-volume series, Death of a Citizen and The Wrecking Crew, are being published by the company, with the next five titles also announced throughout the next year.
As a teen in the sixties, I read as many of Hamilton’s Helm novels -- initially released in paperback by the legendary pulp line Fawcett -- as I could. The character debuted seven years after James Bond, but he quickly established himself as a grittier alternative to the dapper secret agent. For one thing, he took his role as a government sanctioned killer more seriously, ever aware of just how much the act changes a person. In the novel which introduced Helm, Citizen, there are no grandiloquent criminal masterminds for our hero to best; if anything, the affair in which our temporarily retired ex-spy finds himself reads more like something one of Dashiell Hammett’s p.i.s might have encountered. In fact, from the way that he describes himself it’s easy to visualize the man as a physical mirror to the Continental Op. When Helm’s debut opens, we see him as a softened married man in New Mexico -- the author of a series of western novels (which Hamilton also wrote) -- who has done his best to forget his history as a ruthless American agent during the Second World War. That past returns to bite him on the ass, however, when his old spy partner, a fur-bearing babe named Tina, shows up at the cocktail party of a neighboring Los Alamos researcher. When our hero finds the body of a self-proclaimed fledgling authoress in his writer’s studio, he’s forced to deal with Tina and her thuggish new partner Loris. Unsure if he is being pushed back into the spy biz by his former boss Mac, he leaves his wife and child to re-partner with Tina, who may or may not have his best interests at heart. Pursued across the New Mexico and Texas desert, our hero faces two big questions: why was he brought back into his old life and can he trust a single word out of his sexy ex-partner’s mouth? Lovers of noir fiction already know the answer to that second question, of course, but watching the formerly settled Helm slip back into his old self is a treat. As a narrator, Helm is mannishly opinionated: his take on the styles and mores of the Eisenhower Era are engaging at times, though a few of his thoughts on married life and what used to be called the Battle of the Sexes may bring some modern readers up short. This ain’t cuddly ol’ Dean Martin “slaygirl” territory by a long shot: Helm is the real bloody pulp deal. Great to have him back.
(First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: pulp fiction # |Sunday, January 27, 2013 ( 1/27/2013 03:04:00 PM ) Bill S.   “DARE SHE EVEN CONSIDER A LIFE WITH A HUMAN?” A contemporary fantasy romance, Constance Phillips’ Fairyproof (Crescent Moon Press) centers on Monique, a fairy princess who has fled her world to escape a forced marriage to a slimy piece of work named Eero. Pursued by her Protector brother Keiran, who is beholden to the duplicitous Eero, she winds up in Elgin, Illinois, where she meets handsome, if somewhat OCD, financial planner Daniel Elliot. Expecting to be able to use her fairy charm to immediately win him over, our heroine is startled to discover that Daniel appears to be resistant to her magic. Accustomed to surviving on the human plane by using her magic to control humans (“especially the men”), she finds Daniel’s unknowing immunity both challenging and frightening.Though impervious to her paranormal magnetism, the recently jilted Daniel is of course intrigued by our girl’s seemingly human attributes. Though he presents as a button-down type, we quickly realize (thanks to his taste in jazz) that he’s more than an emotional match for our heroine. As their romance blossoms, Keiran and his Protector partner Veronica get closer to uncovering Monique’s whereabouts. Behind all this, the villainous Eero is engineering a coup against the fairies’ governing council, as an increasing number of fairies visiting the human realm appear to be disappearing. Though her initial start-up reads like something you might find in a romantic comic fantasy (something that Thorne Smith might have concocted in his heyday), former Blogcritic Phillips takes her story seriously. If we don’t see as much of the fairy realm as we might like, Fairyproof depicts a believable modern fantasy world with sufficient recognizable subtext to ground her story. The fairies inhabiting our realm, we learn, have differing degrees of attachment to the humans that they live alongside: Keiran, we quickly see, is scornful toward humans, while other fairies have managed to successfully intermingle with them. One of these, a hipster-esque club owner named Billy, proves a dubious ally for Monique. Apart from the Machiavellian plotting in the realm, the world of fairies is facing a larger crisis as the number of its folk has been dwindling. The attempts of one of its council members, Leal, to increase contact between the fairy and human worlds have seemingly resulted in the deaths of Monique and Keiran’s parents, which has added to the Protector’s bigoted perspective. Also figuring into the plot is a mysterious piece of jewelry once owned by our hero Daniel, but apparently taken by his ex-fiancé. Not everybody is who they first appear to be in the story: more than one character from the realm has a prior connection to the “fairyproof” Daniel, and at least one who you expect to betray our heroine doesn't. While Phillips isn't as explicit with the anti-fairy crime subplot than this urban fantasy reader would like, she is deft in laying out the political machinations that fuel it all. And for those readers coming to this book primarily for its romantic elements, be assured that author Phillips lets it build with plenty of believable evocative detail. If heroine Monique shows perhaps one too many flashes of jealousy in regards to the clearly loyal Daniel, let’s just chalk it up to time spent in the Chicago ‘burbs. I've lived there; it could throw anyone off their stride. Phillips leaves room in her book for a sequel: good news for readers wanting to see the unresolved fairy population crisis get addressed – preferably with one or two hot sequences.
(First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: fantasy romance # |Saturday, January 12, 2013 ( 1/12/2013 08:06:00 AM ) Bill S.   “IF YOU WANT TO BE APPRECIATED, DIE OR TRAVEL.”
At turns whimsical and melancholy, Renaud Dillies and Regis Hautière’s Abelard (NBM/ComicsLit) is a French “magical graphic novel” about innocence lost and the immigrant experience. Its title protagonist, Abelard (any connection to the tragic lover is there for the reader to find), is a small bird who ventures out of his cloistered Russian marsh after he is smitten by a beautiful girl named Eppily. Told that the only way he will be able to get her attention is to offer her the moon, he decides to travel to America after he learns that the Wright Brothers have successfully invented a flying machine. “I’d like to gather a bouquet of stars for her,” he explains.Though repeatedly warned that the object of his affections is unworthy of this quest, Abelard sets off on his road trip, anyway, first accompanying a band of gypsies, then teaming up with a surly bear named Gaston. Along the way, he encounters bigotry and dishonesty and experiences the punishing steerage voyage to America, regularly engaging in philosophical debates with Gaston and reading aphorisms that magically appear in his hat. Though he doesn’t usually comprehend their meanings/warnings, the bird gets pleasure from reading them, anyway. “I like that,” he tells a gypsy companion at one point. “It doesn’t mean anything, but it’s pretty.”
If the cartoon images of birds and bears – and the addition of the word “magical” to the book’s front cover – give the impression that Abelard is a children’s fantasy, be assured that it isn’t. Think of it more as an anthropomorphic piece of magical realism in the manner of Joanne Harris’ Chocolat, a reflection on hope and dreams that may surprise you by just how affecting it all is.
(First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: art comics # |Thursday, December 27, 2012 ( 12/27/2012 04:11:00 PM ) Bill S.   GIRLS AND LADIES: Mention the name Matt Baker to most generations of comic book fans, and chances are you’ll only get a blank stare. But to those readers enamored with what has become somewhat condescendingly known as Good Girl Art, Baker is the Man. Matt Baker: The Art of Glamour (TwoMorrows Publishing) is a fannish attempt to bring this unduly neglected artist back into the spotlight.Good Girl Art flourished in the late forties/early fifties and focused on heroines who were strong but also gorgeous in the manner of WWII pin-ups. Two of the foremost practitioners of this art were Baker and Bill Ward (who would later go on doing his distinctive penwork for men’s magazines and Cracked). Baker, initially working for a comics shop known as the Iger Studio, drew a variety of spunky heroines, some with “girl” affixed to their title (Sky Girl, Tiger Girl). The Art of Glamour includes sample stories from this period, including two featuring a scantily clad crime-fighter known as the Phantom Lady. If the stories ultimately prove slight, the art is anything but. Baker had a knack for rendering his leggy characters with a sensual naturalness that was unmatched by any other artist of his day.
That the man isn’t better known today can be attributed to several factors: the studios he worked for typically peppered their stories with pseudonyms in place of legitimate credits, while the comics fandom that would work at unearthing so many uncredited artists didn’t really burst in full-blown action until after his untimely death from a heart attack in 1959. Too, much of the work that he did in the early fifties was for comic book genres – romance titles and westerns – that wouldn’t receive much fannish attention for years. An anthology of fifties romance comics, Romance Without Tears Baker himself also had several personal strikes against him in the early days of the industry: an introvert who was one of the few black artists in early comics, he also (though The Art of Glamour soft-pedals this suggestion) appears to have been gay. Whether any of these factors kept him from working more high-profile projects, one thing is clear: he inspired an army of imitators even as he was still working. Baker’s natural way of draping clothes on his voluptuous femmes was especially noteworthy.
Matt Baker’s editors, Jim Amash and Eric Nolen-Weathington, structure their appreciation by opening with a quartet of color stories: two featuring the vigilante Phantom Lady, two centered on more comic dames like waitress Ginger Maguire, a former ferry pilot in the Pacific theatre who gets demoted to waitress “serving mustard to the better class of pilots.” An opening essay by Alberto Becattini provides a chronological overview of the man’s career with appreciative commentary by some of the artists who worked with him in the forties comics shops. One interesting snippet for fans of EC comics: both the line’s editor Al Feldstein and mainstay artist Jack Kamen worked as inkers on Baker’s work – you can definitely see Baker’s influence in the latter’s work for EC’s crime comics, though I don’t think that Kamen ever drew a woman as provocatively as Baker’s. A series of reminiscences with family, friends and colleagues follows, the volume concluding with three more reprinted stories, two of which are presented as the original pencil and ink pages. Throughout the rest of this lavishly packaged book, of course, are Baker covers, panels and pages from both his comics and short-lived attempts at newspaper syndication work, as well as illos that he did for men’s magazines. (In this last, he and fellow Good Girl Artist Bill Ward followed similar paths.) While some of the remembrances focus more on the mundane aspects of the artist’s life than necessary, the art speaks for itself. Now where’s the full-blown Baker anthology? (First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: comics history # | |
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Abelard is a wide-eyed naïf, and we know early on from the tears in a gypsy fortuneteller’s eyes that his quest is not going to end happily. But Dillies, bringing the same sense of “Krazy Kat” fancy that he brought to his earlier graphic novel tone poem 
, makes it all a visual treat. His scripting collaborator brings a high level of wit to the proceedings: one of my favorite moments is a two-page map showing Abelard’s meandering progress toward “the rest of the story.” Among the stops along the way are the “happy memory of a sunny afternoon” and “a circumlocution in the story.” Hautière’s dialog between our title hero and the cynical Gaston is particularly engaging.
, which featured a hefty selection of Baker art is unfortunately out of print.
His way with (comic art) women led to his involvement in one particularly intriguing project: one of the first graphic novels, a paperback “Picture Novel” written by fledgling comics pro Arnold Drake and Les Waller entitled 
