Pop Culture Gadabout

Pop Culture Gadabout

( 1/08/2012 04:00:00 PM ) Bill S.

“THIS MUST BE WHAT THEY CALL FATE. I GUESS.” It’s been a while since I’ve impulsively picked a new manga title to read, but a chance viewing of a YouTube clip from its anime adaptation got me seeking Oh!Great’s Tenjo Tenge (Viz Signature) recently. Fortunately for my manga explorations, the series has been reissued in large volume “Full Contact” Editions collecting two of the original smaller-sized paperbacks. A “mature” readers series about a high school heavily populated with fight clubs, the manga features gobs of gratuitous violence, obscenities, flashes of nudity and fulsome breasts that look like they’re yearning to burst free of their confines. Full-blooded entertainment, in other words.

Set at Todo High School, an institution where all of the students possess martial arts savvy, Tenjo Tenge focuses on the members of the Juken Club, which is “seen as one of the weakest martial arts clubs on campus.” This situation, we suspect, is about to change with the arrival of two new street-brawling students, spiky-haired Soichiro Nagi and dread-locked Bob Makihara. Their appearance on campus sparks more than one fracas and draws the attention of the Executive Council, a group of arrogant upper classmen who also have it in for the Juken Club. The first act of the aggression by the council is to send a bespectacled creep named Ryuzaki to kidnap and sexually assault Bob’s girlfriend Chiachi.

Though Soichiro at one point arrogantly declares, “I’m supposed to be the hero of this story,” the first two books of Tenjo Tenge devote just as much space to other members of the Juken Club. First, antenna-haired Maya Natsumi is the club’s leader: when we first see her, she looks like a little girl, but when it comes time to fight, she transforms into a scantily-dressed large-breasted woman with mega fighting abilities. “When you’re as skilled as I am,” Maya immodestly states, “it’s a piece of cake to pull of a transformation like this.” (We later learn that she’s not the only one capable of such transmogrifications.) Her sister Aya is a trace more modest -- in both personality and dress -- though she is the possessor of a great power known as Dragon Eyes, which enable her to see into the future and exert her will through humans and inanimate objects. As in Naruto, for instance, this great power itself has the potential of corrupting and taking over its wielder.

Aya falls in love at first sight with Soichiro when he comes crashing into her shower during a fight with Maya, much to the chagrin of Takayanagi, her straight arrow fellow club member. As the series opens, he meets the possessor of the Dragon Eyes for the fist time and himself is instantly smitten. “At that moment,” he narrates, “time stopped dead for me, and I couldn’t look away from her eyes.” The poor sap -- just one of the victims what looks to be an increasingly more entangled storyline full of star-crossed relationships.

In place of chapters, Oh!Great’s series is divided into “Fight”s, an apt label since each episode features at least one face-to-face confrontation. A lot of these are accompanied by imposingly titled moves (“Whirling Cuff,” “Mount Tai Avalanche,” “Heart and Mind Six Harmonies”) that may be pure nonsense but sure sound cool -- plus plenty of verbal posturing. Some of this is done tongue-in-cheek by the manga artist -- who wittily couples his martial arts melodrama with adolescent histrionics. In one scene, for example, Takayanagi’s head is pierced by a word balloon after Aya calls him a “second-rate martial artist.” The taunt pushes Tak into kicking the ass of his opponent, of course -- but the moment remains an amusing one.

Tenjo Tenge has seen two editions in the U.S. The first, published by the now defunct manga line CMX, was criticized by fans for being heavily censored. Viz Signature’s shrink-wrapped edition, in contrast, contains an abundance of sweaty naked female body shots and obscenities, along with lots of over-the-top violence. Not a series for younger readers or the prudish, but definitely a treat for those of us who happily cut their teeth on R-rated grindhouse kung-fu.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: sixty-minute manga

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( 1/02/2012 11:07:00 AM ) Bill S.

“SOLITUDE IS REALLY COOL. . . WHEN YOU’VE CHOSEN IT.” A charmingly illustrated French funny animal comic Renaud Dillies’ Bubbles & Gondola (NBM) recounts the “Adventure of Charlie the Mouse,” a would-be writer who is struggling to finish a book of “prose poems.”

When I first started reading this graphic novel and realized that one of its foci was gonna be the young mouse’s writer’s block, I have to admit my first response was, “Oh no, not another work about the struggles of being creative.” But Bubbles & gondola makes this concern secondary to its bigger theme: solitude and its dampening of the spirit. Introverted Charlie, the “solitary muridae,” spends his days holed up in an attic playing music for himself, watching television and futilely trying to eke out a few prose poems. When asked by his family what he’s writing about, all Charlie can tell them is “silence” -- because it’s all that he knows.

This changes when our hero is visited by a top hat wearing bluebird who calls himself “Solitude.” The bird’s first appearance prompts Charlie to leave his house and go into the village where preparations for a carnival are being made. There, the mouse is persuaded to ride a ferris wheel where he starts to engage in flights of fancy. Though the wheel’s gondolas can’t leave their moorings (“deprived of their liberty,” they’re “sad airships of an impossible adventure”), Charlie’s seemingly flies off into the clouds, the first of a series of sweetly surreal moments in this book.

Dillies’ art evokes the work of an earlier poetic penman, George (Krazy Kat) Herriman, though with a trace more detailed elegance. (The book’s carnival scenes are particularly splendiferous.) NBM is marketing this as an all ages graphic novel, but while the art is decidedly kid appealing, I suspect that the book’s language and thematic concerns will put it beyond all but the oldest child reader. (I’d love to be proven wrong on this.) Bubbles and Gondola -- the first half of the title refers to the ephemeral nature of art and beauty -- ends with our hero happily scribbling away, a conclusion that we knew we’d reach. It’s the delightfully imagined journey to arrive at that place which makes this whimsical graphic novel so appealing.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: art comics

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( 12/31/2011 09:49:00 AM ) Bill S.

FACE, MEET FAN! Most weekday mornings, I follow a fairly boring schedule: wake up worrying about finances, get up and feed the dogs, start the coffee machine while the dogs follow their morning outside routine, bring ‘em back into the house and head for the study to check email and perhaps do a little Blogcritics editing before getting ready for my day job. Pretty mundane. But Friday saw a major break in this routine: getting up to leave the study, I hadn’t noticed that one of our 75-plus pound pups was lying on the floor right behind me. I tripped over the big galoot, fell and did a header right into a pillar fan.

The lower half of my face made the most contact -- nose and mouth primarily -- though I also get a major gash on my right hand middle finger where I apparently struck the fan’s base. Some heavy bleeding ensued from both nose and finger. Wife Becky heard the commotion from bed and quickly got up to do the Florence Nightingale thing, retrieving the bandages while I worked to staunch the blood flow. Sat in a living room chair with rolled up pieces of toilet paper in both nostrils -- not a good look -- feeling like a clumsy idiot.

The end results could’ve been much worse: my lower face looks like I got into an argument with a belligerent drunk who passed out before he could do too much damage, my finger’s still bandaged and I have a very irritating slice of missing inner lip, but at least I didn’t connect with my forehead. Wound up going into work on time without any significant aftereffects, though I popped a lotta generic Tylenol over the course of the day. It's a heck of a way to end the year: battered and bruised.

I feel like a walking metaphor. . .

Labels: me me me

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( 12/26/2011 04:41:00 PM ) Bill S.

“JUSTICE TRAPS THE GUILTY!” The latest entry in Titan Books’ “Simon & Kirby Library,” Crime is a hefty 320-page collection of work predominately produced in the forties for the era’s “true crime comics.” Having already amassed an impressive body of comic book work in the super-hero genre (creating, among others, Captain America), Joe Simon and Jack Kirby turned to other genres when it looked as if costumed crime fighters were losing their young audience. Initially inspired by the success of Lev Gleason’s Crime Does Not Pay, these pre-Code comic books -- saddled with evocative names like Real Clue Crime Stories and Justice Traps the Guilty -- attempted to straddle the line between exploitation and moralizing much as earlier Depression Era gangster flicks reveled in the exploits of their anti-heroes. If S&K’s work for these titles lacks the over-the-top irony and bloody mindedness of later comics like EC’s Crime and Shock Suspenstories, they remain crackling entertainments.

Kirby’s pugilistic art is one of the big draws, of course: the guy had a knack for serving up believably ape-like thugs and cheeky dangerous dames, in particular -– in addition to his dynamic action images. There are plenty of wonderful panels in this opulently packaged color collection: one of my faves accompanies the flight and final gun fight of Babyface Nelson, who thinks nothing of running over one of his own men in his flight to escape the feds. One panel, showing a hunted John Dillinger surrounded by floating eyes, looks downright Steve Ditko-esque.

The stories in this collection shift between obvious fictions (e.g., an incomplete series featuring a dapper hero named the Gun Master, as well as another series of tales narrated by “Headline Comics’ super-duper snoop ‘Red Hot’ Blaze”) and quasi-historical retellings of famous criminal exploits. A few of the latter (as with the story of Chicago serial murderer H.H. Holmes and his infamous murder mansion) are predominately accurate, while others (“The Last Bloody Days of Babyface Nelson,” for instance) are as true as to the facts as Brian de Palma’s version of The Untouchables. Crime writer/comics fan Max Allan Collins touches on a few of scripter Joe Simon’s factual filigrees in his intro to this collection, but he doesn’t try to catch ‘em all -– nor should we expect him to. Best to treat the whole she-bang as an outsized display of two great comics creators working at their boyishly most exuberant.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: golden age goodness

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( 12/17/2011 11:31:00 AM ) Bill S.

“BLOODTHIRSTY VAMPIRE LIVES AGAIN!”Though it doesn’t by any means claim to be a definitive history of the influential British horror film company, Marcus Hearn’s The Hammer Vault (Titan Books) serves as a tantalizing overview of Hammer Films. Following the company’s releases chronologically -- from its earliest sci-fi releases (Quatermass Xperiment, X - the Unknown), its bloody gothic remakes (Curse of Frankenstein, Horror of Dracula, et al) and their multitude of sequels through later hits like the Raquel Welch break-out One Million Years B.C., Hearn’s coffee table book devotes two pages apiece to depicting publicity material, script pages, and props to each film, with text providing historical context for each release.

While much of the company’s oeuvre looks tame today, it’s amusing to see how much outrage they generated among British film critics back in the day. Hammer cannily took advantage of this notoriety (placing the letter “X” prominently in two of its earliest title, for instance), later making a practice of hiring Playboy playmates as heroines in their films -- and trumpeting this fact in their promo material. Among the collectibles included in this book, Hearn amusingly includes some scathing contemporary reviews. 1957’s Revenge of Frankenstein, for instance, drew a newspaper piece lamenting its release -- and ending with a plea for gentler movies (“the films longest remembered are the ones in which truth is coupled with the warmth of kindness.”) Though the company made periodic bids for critical respectability (e.g., the Bette Davis stage-based black comedy, The Anniversary), its origins as a manufacturer of gory gothics repeatedly worked against it.

Prudishly critical nay-sayers aside, to lovers of old-fashioned horror, just the Hammer brand name conjures up a body of richly filmed genre works. The company made the careers of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, who both appeared in its first two gothic remakes, Frankenstein and Dracula. That first is particularly noteworthy for the way scriptwriter Jimmy Sangster treated Cushing’s Baron Frankenstein, changing him from an obsessive misguided scientist to an amoral s.o.b., a reconfiguration that would characterize Hammer’s anti-hero through a number of sequels.

Going through Vault, I was happily reminded of some lesser-known flicks that I first saw as a teen at the drive-in (Plague of the Zombies, Countess Dracula, Vampire Circus) and took note of some that as far as I can tell never saw release in the states (The Brigand of Kandahar?) Though its primary reputation resides in its horror fare, Hammer regularly put out other types of genre works: pirate movies, H. Rider Haggar-styled adventures (including the Ursula Andress version of She), prehistoric women yarns and black-and-white girl-in-peril suspensers. There was even a misguided attempt at creating a white Shaft (named Shatter) starring Stuart Whitman that went nowhere -- plus a fiscally disastrous stab at blending vampire flicks with Shaw Brothers kung-fu entitled Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires. Vault covers ‘em all, but the image that inevitably achieves cover prominence is a poster shot of Christopher Lee’s fanged Dracula hovering over a comely damsel.

At times, Hearn’s accompanying text seems to focus more on production minutia than necessary -- occasionally at the expense of telling the reader what each movie is actually about. We’re never told the meaning behind the title of Satanic Rites of Dracula, for instance, though the book notes that screenwriter Sangster was apparently drafted to craft the film’s base storyline and today has no memory of that commission. There’s a nice photo of Rites heroine Joanna Lumley smoking a cigarette between takes, though, looking very Ab Fab.

Though the company went through a period of prolonged invisibility, more recently it has re-emerged with a trio of stylish horror films (Wake Wood, The Resident and Let Me In) that has brought back fans’ attention. Considering this resurrection, I found myself recalling a droll poster that was used in America to sell the 1968 movie Dracula Has Risen from the Grave: featuring a photo of a full-breasted girl with two pink Band-Aids on her neck, the poster followed the movie title with a smaller lettered “Obviously” parenthetically included underneath it. In horror films, nothing stays dead forever . . .

Not even horror movie companies.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: psychotronic psinema

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( 12/10/2011 01:54:00 PM ) Bill S.

“SHE IS A RUMOR. A WISP OF SMOKE.” A posthumous “collaboration” between the late best-selling pulpster and one of his most vocal admirers, Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins’ The Consummata (Hard Case Crime) is a follow-up to Spillane’s 1967 best-seller, The Delta Factor. Introducing a new Spillane creation, Morgan the Raider, a “robbin’ hood” who “never took any spoils from anyone who didn’t have it coming,” the debut novel served as the basis for a rote Christopher George action flick that so dissatisfied Spillane that he put aside the start of a sequel. Forty years later, Collins has completed the ms., resolving the storyline that had been introduced in the first book.

The book opens with hero Morgan on the lam from federal agents after he’s been falsely accused of stealing $40 million in currency. Hooking up with a group of Cuban expatriates in Miami, Morgan divides his time between dodging federal agents led by the smarmy special agent Crowley and tracking down the sadistic Jaimie Halaquez, a former soldier in Castro’s army who has swindled $75,000 from the Miami Cuban community. Halaquez’s sordid leanings take our hero through the seamier side of Miami – and ultimately to the awkwardly named title figure, a near-mythic madam who specializes in sado-masochistic tricks for the powerful – sort of the Lady Heather of her day.

Through the course of his pursuit through the brothels of Miami, Morgan comes up against more than one beddable working girl along with the inevitable dumb and vicious thugs: the kind of guys who think nothing of blowing up a hotel just to stop our hero. In the end, Collins brings it all to a perhaps-too-tidy conclusion, but you can understand his urge to do so. Our hero, after all, has been left out in the cold for a good forty years.

Though not as visceral as some of Spillane’s earlier Mike Hammer novels, The Consummata moves snappily through its period terrain. Collins, who has done his share of solid historical crime dramas, wisely keeps the action in the late sixties where Spillane initially placed it. If a few period references come across more Collins than they do his late collaborator (e.g., a reference to “Catwoman in the old Batman funny books”), that’s a small plaint. In general, the book reads true to the voice of Spillane’s wise-cracking hero. I’m thinking Morgan’s creator would be happier with Collins’ treatment of the character than he was with Hollywood’s.

(First published on Blogcritics.

Labels: pulp fiction

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( 12/03/2011 05:22:00 PM ) Bill S.

“MY HOME IS THE REGIMENT.” The eighth volume in Titan Books’ continued reprint of the hard-nosed British war comic, Charley's War: Hitler's Youth opens with an intriguing plotline. Chronicling the Great War adventures of young Charlie Bourne, serving as an assistant sniper on the Western Front at this point in the storyline, the series imagines a young Adolph Hitler as a corporal in the regiment on the other side of No Man’s Land. Moving between Charley’s unit and the Germans, delving into the psychology of the future Nazi who self-reportedly survived several major attacks during WWI, the strip works to avoid the cartoonish portrayal of Hitler that has characterized so many boys’ war comics – and to a large extent succeeds.

As reported in an intro by Steve White, the facts behind Hitler’s actual participation in the Great War have since become clouded by propagandistic efforts to either elevate or debunk his involvement along with the Gestapo’s destruction of many paper records from the first war. Still, research-minded scripter Pat Mills’ treatment of this monster-in-training rings believably. Though Titan Books’ description of the set gives the impression that our hero Charley will have a confrontation with the man, this never really happens: instead, we’re treated to sequences depicting Hitler as a fierce young soldier. When the rest of his fellow soldiers take advantage of a Christmas armistice celebration, for instance, the corporal remains behind, hunting rats in the trenches, stubbornly refusing to fraternize with the enemy.

Even with the temporary truce, Mills does not let the reader forget the grim realities of war; despite its appearance in a weekly boys’ war comic, “Charley’s War” decidedly did not indulge in gung-ho fantasizing. Thus, as both sides return to their trenches, the strips narration notes each soldier who won’t make it out of the war alive. “1918 would be the last and most terrible year of the war,” we’re told before the strip leaves Hitler and young Charley to follow the latter’s brother Wilf as he serves as P.B.O. (Poor Blinking Observer) for a half-mad bi-plane pilot named Morgan. Artist Joe ("Johnny Red") Colquhoun clearly relishes the opportunity to get out of the mud: his flying battle sequences and lavished with loving boyish detail and explosive impact.

In writer Mills’ hands, the world of the P.B.O.s and their glory hungry pilots has its roots in the British class system, with observers being treated as expendable proles in the air. Captain Morgan, we’re told, has already lost three observers, and we get to see a fourth fall to screaming death in the course of battle. Just another poor blinking observer. . .

“Charley’s War” first appeared in three-page installments as a part of the black-and white British comic magazine Battle from 1979 – 85, a remarkable run for so unglamorous a war comic. This current volume ends with two sequences returning to our title hero in the trenches. Hitler’s regiment, we’re told, has left, but there are still plenty of Jerries to fend off. To add to Charley’s woes, he’s also accidentally roused the enmity of a former comrade recently raised to officer’s rank. “He’s jealous of my success,” this new antagonist thinks, “the way I worked my way up from the ranks!” At times, it seems like the Bourne Boys’ war is less against the Germans and more against undeserved rank and privilege.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: classic comic strips

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( 11/24/2011 11:10:00 AM ) Bill S.

“THEY SAY A HEART’S NOT QUITE A HEART UNTIL IT’S BEEN BROKEN.” Of all the eighties groups to affix the word “human” to their name (League, Sexual Response), Ohio’s Human Switchboard were arguably the most deserving of the moniker. A garage-y threesome who combined the boho sensitivities and sounds of early Velvets and Patti Smith with a more poppish flavor, the group released one great album in 1981, Who’s Landing in My Hangar?
It was the only studio album this unit would release (a ROIR cassette of an in-concert performance came out in 1982), but it stands as a major moment in the early days of indie rock. After years of being out-of-print, the disc has finally gotten its long-deserved CD reissue courtesy of Bar/None Records.

Composed of Reed-y vocalist/guitarist Bob Pfeifer, keyboardist/singer Myrna Marcarian, propulsive drummer Ron Metz -- and a revolving set of bassists -- Switchboard specialized in relationship songs that primarily alternate between pissed off and desperate. In the title song, Pfeifer rants against an unfaithful lover, pushed along by Marcarian’s sparkling Farfisa, while “(I Used to) Believe in You” uses the singer's striking guitar to emphasize his sense of betrayal. In two of the album’s tracks, Marcarian takes throaty vocal lead to portray the wounded distaff side of the relationship wars. In “(Say No to Saturday’s Girl,” she and the boys recall the late-night melancholy of “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” while “I Can Walk Alone” pits our beleaguered heroine against a presumably unfaithful, overly needy storytelling lover.

It’s in Hangar’s magnum opus, “Refrigerator Door,” where the band’s keen-eyed and unsentimental take on missed connections gets its fullest delineation. Called “the ‘Stairway to Heaven’ of punk” by band admirer Kurt Cobain, the track features a duet with Pfeifer and Marcarian singing at cross-purposes in both English and Slovenian over a slowly building rock backdrop. When Marcarian gets the last word, plaintively waiting for the ring-ring-ring of the telephone, we know she’s doomed to disappointment.

All is not complete doom and gloom on this disc, though. Another album high point is Pfeifer’s sax-fueled “Book on Looks,” a full-bodied bragfest with the singer rhapsodizing about how hot his girlfriend is -- even as he chastises his friends for their “locker room talk.” It’s a surprisingly playful moment in a predominately pessimistic take on modern romance.

Sparely produced by sometime bassist Paul Harmann, Hangar favors an Exiles on Main Street readiness to bury its vocals within Pfeifer and Marcarian’s compelling guitar and keyboard work. I’ve been listening to this platter since its initial release as a Faulty Products long-player, and there are still moments when I don’t know what the hell its singers are saying. Still, the band’s sound is so solid and compelling that even when you don’t get the specifics, you get the point.

In addition to the album’s original ten tracks, Bar/None’s reissue also features eleven more tracks that will get the group’s admirers wishing that the trio’d been able to hold it together long enough for a second polished studio disc. The band’s sound expands over the four years repped on these tracks: from sixties-ish dance rock (“Shake It Boys”) to country (“Always Lonely for You”) to a song that wouldn’t sound out of place on a John Hughes movie (“A Lot of Things”). But in a way thoughts about What Might’ve Been are apt for this band -- since you know their songs' protagonists are spending much of their days and nights pondering that same unanswerable question.

(First published on Blogcritics).

Labels: art-pop

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( 11/17/2011 09:57:00 PM ) Bill S.

”HE HAS ROUSED IN ME A MOST TERRIBLE ENEMY!” The first in a four-volume series by the creator of Vampire Hunter D, Yashakiden: The Demon Princess (Digital Manga Press) is an agreeably lurid yarn set in Demon City Shinjuku, an earthquake ravaged burg where reality is mutable and monstrous types roam the streets with impunity. It is, author Hideyuki Kikuchi explains, “a city where life was lived and death dealt without regret,” where the landscape can shift without warning (the walls of a department store “mutating into the shape of a female human pudendum,” for instance) and vampires inhabit their own housing project in a shaky truce with their human neighbors.

Into this unsettling setting, a quartet of sadistic Chinese vampires sails to take control of the city. A series of vamp attacks ensues -- both bloody and sexually explicit -- led by a preternaturally beautiful demon princess. Countering this unholy quartet are two womanishly handsome leads: private investigator Setsura Aki, who possesses the ability to channel his chi as “devil wire” capable of severing anything it contacts (think we’re gonna get at least one detached limb in this volume?), plus Dr. Mephisto, the city’s “demon physician” who utilizes both magical and medical knowledge to heal his patients. Our dashing duo spends most of the first book catching up to the bloodsuckers, who pick off sundry victims for our entertainment.

Author Kikuchi, who displays a Stan Lee-like flare for self-promotion (calling this series “the masterpiece of all vampire works I have ever created”), tackles his bloody tale with a ten-in-one talker’s enthusiasm. If at times, Eugene Woodbury’s translation comes across a bit clunky, that only contributes to the series’ overall pulpish feel. Added to DMP’s paperback package: a series of moody looking black and white illos by Jun Sue Mi, which gives us more than one nekkid shot of the depraved Demon Princess. Looking at these striking images, I can see Yashakiden morphing into as enjoyable a manga adaptation as Saiko Takaki's version of Vampire Hunter D.

“Masterpiece” or not.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: pulp fiction

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( 11/10/2011 06:36:00 PM ) Bill S.

"WHEN ONE'S MESSED UP, EVEN THE STUPID FISH KNOW IT." From its very opening -- police find a junked out vehicle with two bodies, a long-dead male and a more recently deceased dog -- you know that Takashi Murakami's Stargazing Dog (NBM) is going to end on a melancholy note. And so this best-selling manga does, though writer/artist Murakami also manages to imbue his effectively sentimental dog tale with enough lightness to keep it from bludgeoning you.

The story of Daddy, a somewhat dim patriarch who loses his job, home, and family -- but never the company of his loyal pup Happie -- Stargazing Dog tracks Daddy's misfortunes through the canine's naive eyes. To Happie, all that matters is the time he spends with his owner. When Daddy loses his job, for instance, the dog is overjoyed to have walks in the daytime; when the two travel south, living out of Daddy's car, all the dog sees is a “fun road trip.” Just being in Daddy's presence is sufficient. Everything else is just details.

With its opening panels of dragonflies buzzing around the trashed car to its penultimate scene where a bedraggled Daddy and Happie look up at the night sky, Stargazing Dog has a visual sweetness that carries you through even its saddest moments. The key to it all proves the title character, of course, who views Daddy's downfall through a childlike/canine perspective. As Murakami notes in an “Afterword,” the tragic flaw of Happie's master proves his inability (or perhaps unwillingness) to adapt to the changing world around him. Yet, ironically, it's the constancy of his dog who provides his salvation. “I lost everything,” the human tells his companion at one point, “but as you are sitting next to me, I'm strangely happy.”

The title story is followed in NBM's edition by a 50-page sequel, “Sunflowers,” about a social worker named Okutsu who is driven to learning the story behind the nameless vagrant and his dog. In so doing, he recalls his own life living with a pair of elderly ailing grandparents and the dog they'd given him for the day they passed away. In this piece, the meaning of the book's title is explained. “It's an expression for a person who hopes for too much,” Okutsu notes, adding that it's human nature for all of us to do so. In the end, the companionship of Daddy and his dog stands for something that is attainable in our lives -- even in an era when so many other dreams are being dashed. No wonder this book resonated so much in its native land.

“I myself was also saved by my own dog,” Murakami writes in his “Afterword.” We don't doubt him at all.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: sixty-minute manga

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( 11/08/2011 06:43:00 AM ) Bill S.

WHERE I’VE BEEN: Where I’ve been is in the nether zone between one mailing address and the next. Four years after our move from IL to AZ, it became increasingly apparent that the place we’d called home had gotten too expensive for us. When we first moved to Safford, AZ, the town was still in the midst of a mining boom (copper being the ore of choice) and housing was at a dear premium. One long recession and two job changes later (not to mention several major budget cuts to behavioral health services where I work), and we found ourselves looking for a cheaper place to rent. Found one two towns over in Pima, AZ, home to pima cotton, and so the past month has been spent boxing and storing and ultimately lugging all our goods to their new spaces. Once we moved, it took over a week to get our ISP transferred over to the new home – we definitely live out in the frontier.

But we’re quasi-settled now (still a lotta stuff in boxes, of course), so hopefully I’ll be able to get some reviews and commentary up on this here blog. Got a pile of material that’s demanding to be attended to.

Labels: me me me

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( 10/16/2011 12:25:00 PM ) Bill S.

“I’M YOUR BAD GUY.” Not too startling to see Max Allan Collins popping up on two titles (one a posthumous “collaboration” with his idol Mickey Spillane) as a part of Hard Case Crime’s new re-launch -- the man has been a hard-boiled fanboy and a prolific pb pulp craftsman for years now. With Quarry’s Ex, Collins takes us back to the mid-career of his brutal hero, a Vietnam vet and former hitman now hiring himself out to rich targets to kill their would-be killers. In Ex, his client proves to be a low-budget action film director who also turns out to be married to Quarry’s betraying ex-wife Joni.

Taking a cover job as unit publicity manager for Hard Wheels 2, a piece of video store fodder being filmed in Las Vegas, our hero seeks out Nick Varnos, a contractor who specializes in kills that look like accidents. Quarry’s task becomes twofold: figure out how Varnos intents to off director Arthur Stockwell and identify the person responsible for putting out the hit on the director in the first place. The suspect pool includes a variety of dubious movie types (former Playboy centerfold actress, gay “tough guy” movie lead, mob-indebted producer) and, of course, his shapely, duplicitous ex. The only one of this quartet who doesn't try to seduce Quarry is the producer.

Collins tells his cynical little tale with plenty of tough wit; he especially has fun with his narrator’s take on the dying days of drive-in moviemaking. As a storyteller, Collins has a knack for capturing period with a few succinct details; he also has a pithy way with violence that at times reminds me of Robert Bloch at his nasty punchline best. A while back, reviewing Collins’ first Ms. Tree novel, Deadly Beloved, I criticized the book for not being as dark as the best Hard Case entries. No such plaints with Quarry’s Ex, though -- it’s every bit as mean as you want it to be.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: pulp fiction

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( 10/10/2011 02:31:00 PM ) Bill S.

“THE WORLD NEEDS A VILLAIN AT PRESENT.” The idea of centring a series on Sherlock Holmes’ arch-enemy, Professor James Moriarty, is nothing new. British writer John Gardner (who also successfully commandeered the James Bond franchise for many years) wrote a trio of Moriarty novels in the 1970’s, though his approach was not as fantastickal as the crew who put together Moriarty: The Dark Chamber (Image Comics). Scripted by Daniel Corey with a dash of sci-fi plotting and more than a trace of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen pastiche-ry, the four-ish mini-series provides an entertaining riff on Sherlockian lore. If Corey lacks League creator Alan Moore’s penchant for complex literary play, he does construct an enjoyably slam-bang divertissement.

Set at the start of the Great War, twenty years after Moriarty “bested” his detective adversary at Reichenbach Falls, the series follows our anti-hero as he is pressed by British intelligence into uncovering the whereabouts of Holmes’ brother Mycroft. Hiding under the name Trumbold, Moriarty has seemingly lost much of his reason for living after vanquishing Holmes: now he ekes out a living as “a sort of investigator for the criminal element” and an import/exporter. His enquiries pit him up against a cultish group named the Sons of Chaos and a mysterious box that Moriarty calls “A Dark Chamber of the Mind.” What this device can actually do is never concretely explained, but we know it will be monstrous.

Author Corey brings in other figures from the Holmes canon, of course, but the most engaging secondary figures to be a Sax Rohmer-esque queenpin named the Jade Serpent. Teaming with, betraying, then re-teaming with the Professor, she’s just the kind of lithe-limbed action-ready anti-heroine that this story needs.

Artist Anthony Diecidue’s ink work captures the milieu, though at times comes across a mite too sketchy to convey the full weight of the action. There are times (a confrontation between Jade and Mata Hari, for instance) where his figures look more like manikins, while in other sequences his lines look like they’re about to fly apart. Throughout Dark Chamber, you can see him striving for League artist Kevin O’Neill’s blend of caricature and more straight-laced comic art without quite getting there. Still, I like his basic visualization of the series’ anti-Holmes (who’s given more than one opportunity to display his own style of deductive reasoning), even if he looks nothing like Conan Doyle described him in the stories. This, we’re told is the real Moriarty, not the figure pictured in those published Strand stories.

When Watson shows, though, he’s much as we’d expect him to look even if Jade flatteringly states that he’s “not nearly as rotund as the illustrations in The Strand would lead one to believe.” Some genre figures, happily, remain visually unassailable.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: modern comics

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( 10/06/2011 08:21:00 AM ) Bill S.

“I WAS THINKING IN A SOFT-PEDAL MODE.” With the latest entry in Titan Books' ongoing series of “Modesty Blaise” reprints, Million Dollar Game, Spanish artist Enric Badia Romero returned to the strip after Britisher Neville Colvin's six-year stint. The largest running artist to assay Peter O'Donnell's adventuress, Romero was also the most unabashedly sexy. His Modesty was more voluptuous and exotic, with eyes that in particular hinted at realms of experience to which we were never privy, and he wasn't the least bit reluctant when it came to drawing either his heroine or any other comely damsel topless. Which still remains startling to American readers unaccustomed to this sight in a newspaper comic strip format.

The three offerings in Game come from 1986-7, and though the strip was over twenty years old by this time, Blaise creator O'Donnell's enthusiasm still showed no signs of flagging. These are solid little action yarns, ranging in setting from Tangier to the American West to Transylvania. In the America story, our heroine and her loyal knife-throwing companion Willie Garvin run up against a modern gang impersonating the Butch Cassidy band; in “The Vampire of Malvescu,” O'Donnell combines Transylvanian lore with a would-be terrorist plot. (If you find yourself mentally hearing Lionel Atwell's voice in bad guy Sebastian Clegg's dialog in the latter story, you're not alone.) The title yarn teams an old flame up with our gal to take on a ruthless gang of poachers.

Most intriguing from a character stand-point is the vampire tale, which introduces us to a former member of Modesty's old crime network, a techno wizard named Hans Braun who is married to Hilde, a sweet young thing so innocent that it temporarily rubs off on our hard-nosed heroine. “Somehow Hilde and guns don't mix,” she says, placing herself at a momentary disadvantage when she comes up against her kill crazy antagonists in Europe's Fist. Fortunately, Modesty snaps out of it. “A really lovely girl with a really lovely nature, like Hilde, just isn't the right company for bad types like us,” she finally tells Willie. And though we may disagree with this reformed crime chief's self-characterization as a “bad type,” we can see her point.

If there's any flaw in this zippy set of three, it's in the antagonists' reliance in two separate stories on impersonating classic villains. You'd think that these guys'd want to be a little more surreptitious with their dastardliness, but, then, in the still-potent pop world of Modesty Blaise, a little flamboyance is definitely part of the show.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: classic comic strips

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( 9/29/2011 07:08:00 AM ) Bill S.

“NO POINT SECOND-GUESSING YOUR FIGHT AFTER THE BELL’S ALREADY RUNG.” Having announced their new beginnings with the hardbound publication of a new Lawrence Block novel, the folks at Hard Case Crime have happily recommenced releasing fresh paperback pulps. One of the first of these, Christa Faust’s Choke Hold, is the second in a series featuring Angel Dare, a hard-bitten former porn star on the run from Croatian mobsters. When Hold opens, our heroine is working as a waitress down in Yuma, Arizona, after her WitSec cover has been violently blown. A chance encounter with a former industry flame, Thick Vic Ventura, forces her out of hiding after Vic is gunned down at the diner where she’s been working.

The catalyst for this sudden burst of gunplay turns out to be Vic’s son Cody Noon, a dumb-ass would-be fighter beholden to an Arizona businessman with ties to south of the border extreme fighting and drug trafficking. Teaming up with Cody’s trainer, a somewhat addled former pugilist named Hank “The Hammer” Hammond, Angel comes up against Mexican thugs and also winds up drawing the attention of the aforementioned Croatian mobsters. It all comes together in a high body count set of showdowns that ends in Las Vegas, where the auditions for All American Fighter are being held.

Having not read her debut, I initially wondered how well I’d be able to get into Miz Dare’s sophomore escapade, but Faust’s tough gal heroine and punchy way of delivering her violent plot quickly grabbed this reader. The opening action holds two-thirds of the book, and by the time the Croatians make their appearance I was sufficiently attached to Angel and her punch drunk pals to wonder who would manage to survive this secondary menace. Found myself wanting to go back and read the first book once I’d finished, of course, which is also a testament to Faust’s sexy and damaged narrator -- a character who isn’t above using her porn experience to get what she needs even as she recognizes all that she’s lost in doing this. A definite hard case heroine.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: pulp fiction

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( 9/27/2011 06:37:00 AM ) Bill S.

“YOU DON’T HAVE THE SLIGHTEST IDEA WHAT’S GOING ON HERE, DO YOU?” An energetic low-life comedy of noir, Viktor Kalvachev’s Blue Estate (Image Comics) follows a large cast of schemers and patsies through a convoluted crime plot involving real estate scams, drugs and Russian mobsters. Though the twelve-issue comic mini-series opens on the narration of Roy Devine Jr., a clueless nerd of a would-be p.i. who we first think is going to be our window into this neon lit world, Roy quickly vanishes from most of the first four issues of the comic (collected in trade paperback as Blue Estate: Preserves.) Instead, we’re shown the sordid and bloody double-doings of a variety of hard-edged So Cal types.

Chief among there are Rachel Maddow, an alcoholic Hollywood wife whose direct-to-video action movie hubby Bruce appears to be involved in money laundering; her brother Billy, in the middle of a disastrous house flipping scheme for the ill-tempered mobster’s son Tony Luciano and Vadim Radow, Don Luciano’s Russian mobster rival (“The most dangerous Russian this side of Rasputin.”) fronting as a “legitimate” Hollywood producer. Also adding to the show are a cover-stealing fake-breasted pole dancer named Cherry Popz, a 12-stepping hitman and a hopped-up drug dealer who calls himself the King of the Jungle. That last has an unfortunate rendezvous with a meat grinder, though he isn’t the only minor character to meet a bloody demise in the first four issues. (Two nameless college jocks buy it after jumping the stage in Luciano’s club -- strict rules in that joint!) Once we get a gander at the casually gory doings in Blue Estate, we can’t help wondering how the amiably ineffable Roy Jr. is gonna survive this mini-series.

Though its sprawling cast may initially throw some readers, Kalvachev’s story (co-written with Kosta Yanev and scripted by Andrew Osborne) and setting should prove plenty entertaining to those attuned to the violent excesses of moderne Pulp Fiction. Kalvachev’s art, abetted by a shop’s worth of additional artists, proves cacophonously expressive. Watching one pen style collide against another in adjacent panels, at times I found myself recollecting the acid-drenched storytelling of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, though Kalvachev and Osborne don’t indulge in the heavy-handed theme pounding of Stone’s ultra-violent road trip movie. Morality tomorrow; dark comedy tonight. . .

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: pulp comics fiction

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( 9/21/2011 05:43:00 AM ) Bill S.

“THE UNIVERSE IS SO MYSTERIOUS.” Having taken on stats, calculus, even the theory of relativity, the crew behind the Manga Guide series have elected to think bigger. Kenji Ishikawa and Yutaka Hiiragi’s The Manga Guide to the Universe (No Starch Press) tackles the huge huge questions: the theoretical origins of the universe, its shape and size, the possibilities of extraterrestrial life. As with other titles in this series, the lessons are presented via cute manga teens and a wise teacher, though unlike The Manga Guide to Statistics, our teacher isn’t as comically nerdy.

The typically negligible plot serving as a set-up for our manga lecture centers on the Kouki High School Drama Club’s efforts to put on a performance for the school’s arts festival. If the small club can’t cobble together a show, the school will shut down the club, so brainy senior Yamane, headstrong junior Kanna and new American exchange student Gloria strive to work up an adaptation of “The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter.” An ancient folk tale about a princess from the moon, the story leads our drama-minded threesome to try and concoct an “outer space romance.” To research the play’s sci-fi elements, they enlist the aid of Kanna’s older brother Kente, who takes them to one of his professors. It’s Prof Sanuki who schools our quartet on the nature of the universe: the first question is whether the Earth is the center of the universe.

As in the other Manga Guides, the professor’s lessons are presented through comic interactions and histrionics on the students’ part, plus sudden costume changes and metaphors. The professor uses more than one sports prop to demonstrate size and distance, which particularly appeals to the athletic Yamane. The usual heavy text pages are interspersed between each manga segment; in several instances they consist of play-like dialog between the students as they hack out topics like Heliocentric Theory, the Big Bang and our expanding universe. Since the book culminates in our cast putting on their play, this approach seems apt.

Yutaka Hiiragi’s shojo art is light and amusing, capable of portraying his winsome characters as well as the theoretical visuals used to convey the professor’s take on the universe. Kenji Ishikawa’s script examines the history of scientific thought from Galileo to Hubble -- also appropriate since so much of what we “know” today remains largely theoretical. Unlike many of the earlier volumes in this series -- which focuses on topics so specific (e.g., Databases) as to push away many manga readers, Manga Guide to the Universe has plenty of broad appeal.

A strong entry for this charming and informative EduManga series.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: sixty-minute manga

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( 9/16/2011 01:53:00 AM ) Bill S.

“I’VE BECOME A REAL ROAD WARRIOR.” Cartoonist, world traveler and observer of comic minutia, Lewis Trondheim returns with a fourth volume of Little Nothings (NBM). Subtitled “My Shadow in the Distance,” this newest set of funny animal autobiographical one-page strips follows our man/bird hero as he travels with his family on vacation in the U.S.A. (spying a “real cowboy” out west, he’s disappointed to see the cowpoke wearing a baseball cap), then hits a variety of European and South American locales for book signing and comic con appearances. Unlike some autobiographical alt cartoonists, Trondheim has a global range of tiny li’l experiences to illustrate. Walking the streets of Prague, dismayed at the “string of tacky souvenir shops” dotting the promenade, he looks up at the old architecture and thinks “from 8 feet up, it’s very beautiful!”

The fourth volume’s most enduring sequence takes place closer to home, however. Told that his sinuses have polyps and advised to avoid flying, Trondheim ultimately has to go under the knife. The strips capture our hero’s pre-op dread and post-op processing with a sharp and distinct wit. Clearing his nose in the aftermath, he describes getting a “gigantic monster” out of his nostril. “I should have taken a picture,” he tells his spouse. “I’m sure your artistic talent will be able to give us an exact idea of it all,” she responds. And, sure enough, the last image we get in the book is of Trondheim standing in the bathroom, a large red glob dripping out of his beak.

Yet for all the anxieties and small annoyances catalogued by the writer/artist in these self-deprecating strips, he ultimately knows he’s got a pretty good life. Advised that sea bathing is highly recommended during his recuperation, the cartoonist tries snorkeling in the ocean off Mayotte (an island near Madagascar) but is unable to get any seawater in his nose. “Right. . . feel sorry for yourself, you poor dear,” he tells himself as he sits back in the water. Sometimes life’s little nothings really are little nothings.

As with the previous entries in this series, Trondheim’s animal world plays the French artist’s cartoony figures against frequently detailed backgrounds (he loves rendering old European streets) and a soft water color-y palette. The latter is especially well suited to the cartoonist’s understated punchlines: these are the kind of comics more likely to elicit a nodding smile than a laugh. Those reading these strips for shockingly frank autobiographical confessions are hereby advised to look elsewhere. For the rest of us, Trondheim’s ongoing Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Bird continues to charm and deliver.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: art comics

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( 9/13/2011 06:26:00 PM ) Bill S.

“WHAT CROOKED GAMBLERS SAY DOESN'T MEAN MUCH TO ME.” A prolific crafter of genre fiction and TV/movie novelizations, Richard Wormser's writing life was ironically encapsulated by the man himself in a posthumously published memoir, How to Become A Complete Nonentity. Yet Wormser (not to be confused with a younger filmmaker of the same name) had a full career writing westerns and crime fiction for the pulps and Hollywood. Horse Money (Black Dog Books), a slim 108-page collection of four novelettes from the 1930's, resurrects a too-short Blue Book detective series set in the world of horse racing. If Wormser's stories aren't exactly Dick Francis, they do provide a breezy snapshot of the pari-mutuel life circa mid-thirties.

The quartet of tales are narrated by Chief Van Eyck, a racing commission cop who hangs around the tracks, thwarting bookies and race fixers, catching the occasional killer. Described as “fat” by both Van Eyck and his seen-it-all secretary/girlfriend Elizabeth, Van Eyck is himself an inveterate gambler with a rep for honesty, though he's not above playing fast and loose with his good name if it can sucker some bad guys. In one memorable moment, he even plays at going “blood simple,” threatening to gas both a straight-laced homicide detective and a suspect to get the latter to confess to a killing. Fortunately, the homicide detective is a somewhat forgiving type.

Three of the pieces in Horse Money are set in an undisclosed, probably West Coast city; the title tale places our hero on his own in NYC. In “Right Guy,” Van Eyck's attempts at stopping a race fix are waylaid when the culprits kidnap his gal pal Elizabeth; in “Heat of the Moment,” our man gets between a machine gun toting gang of crooks and the tong, which leads to gun play and a few twists on period stereotypes. In “Horse Money,” Van Eyck has his own betting winnings stolen with the help of a shapely chorus girl. Though he has his own brief night on the Wonderful Town, we never doubt that our hero won't be riding the rails back to his girlfriend at story's end.

Wormser doesn't slather on the race track lingo as much as a Damon Runyon, though he can craft some snappy, if decidedly un-PC patter. Confronted with a knife-wielding thug named Snapper McGill, for instance, the racetrack copper tells the mug, “Guys named McGill ought to confine themselves to bricks. Racially, the knife is not your weapon.” Like all good hard-boiled dicks, Van Eycks is a hard-ass smart-ass. When one of his wounded underlings manages to crack wise, he even affectionately grouses back: “Stop trying to steal my stuff. The boss makes the jokes.” And so he does.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: pulp fiction

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( 9/10/2011 09:09:00 AM ) Bill S.

“BIG THINGS ARE HAPPENING, MAN.” A bit fat round-up of martial arts madness and seventies drive-in delirium, Kagan McLeod’s Infinite Kung Fu (Top Shelf Productions) is a massive 464-page graphic novel crammed full of chopsocky goodness. Set in an alternate Martial World, the sprawling epic centers on Yang Lei Kung, a low-level soldier in the wicked emperor’s army who is recruited by one of the Eight Immortals to become a “spiritual fighter.”

In the Martial World, we’re told, there are two main paths to mastery: the first, Poison Kung Fu, is efficient but corrupts its practitioners; the second, more enlightened path requires the student to take a long journey of self-discovery. In the book’s opener, we see two students -- one of whom will become a major villain in the piece -- fight zombies using the forbidden poison techniques; as a consequence, they’re left to fend for themselves as the army of undead grows more plentiful. As the first chapter ends with generation after generation of fighting corpses surrounding the twosome, the reader’s left thinking, “Maybe that ‘infinite’ in the book’s title isn’t an exaggeration, after all.”

As for our hero Lei Kung, he’s forced to un-learn his brutish soldier ways and advance in the emperor’s army at the same time. The ultimate goal of this is to stop the emperor from destroying the universe in his pursuit of ultimate power. Along the way, writer/artist McLeod introduces us a colorful crew of secondary characters. Foremost among these are Moog Joogular, a former funk guitarist who looks like he could’ve played for Parliament and who tells Lei Kung the first time they meet that he’s seen the student’s king moves in the future, and Windy, a tough girl general who strives to fight for right within the emperor’s army. Primary antagonist is Li Zhea, a second general who not incidentally was one of the two students we saw getting corrupted by Poison Kung Fu in the opener. With his porn star ‘stash and penchant for laughing long and villainously, you can readily imagine him commandeering an outdoor movie screen as his poorly dubbed laughter crackles through the speakers.

None too surprisingly, Infinite Kung Fu contains a ton of fights between human opponents, supernatural ones, and a squadron of robotic bronze statues. McLeod plays this genre mix-and-match relatively straight. Unlike more obvious seventies inspired send-ups (Greg Houston’s Vatican Hustle, for instance), McLeod lets the material stand for itself without falling back on excessive cartoonishness. Which is not to say his art is deadly serious: at times, there’s a sense of EC Era Jack Davis in his expressions and brushwork, which helps keep the artist’s tribute grounded in its comic book frame. In crafting the Infinite Kung Fu “movie” of his dreams, Kagan McLeod has created one entertaining slam-bang comic.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: modern comics

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( 9/05/2011 10:04:00 AM ) Bill S.

“A GIRL DIDN’T WANT TO OVERSTAY HER WELCOME.” Like a good many professional storytellers, Lawrence Block has written under more than one name over the years: perhaps the most startling nom du plume is that of “Jill Emerson.” The authoress of seven prior novels that include “sensitive lesbian fiction” and “candid erotica,” the pseudonymous Miz E. has now crafted a Hard Case Crime novel entitled Getting Off. Subtitled “a novel of sex and violence,” the pulpy thriller tracks a shapely serial killer who goes by many names, traveling across the country to pick up unsuspecting men that she can bed, kill and bed again. A creepy character, to be sure, but Block/Emerson make her an enticing one.

Our anti-heroine has gone for years, living off horny dupes, and she’s only had five male survivors throughout her murderous career. When a chance remark gets her thinking about the Ones Who Got Away, she decides to track each one down to achieve complete closure. The bulk of Getting Off, then, follows our gal on her man-by-man quest, turning this book into a twisted variation on Cornell Woolrich’s The Bride Wore Black. You can see Block having fun with his diverse crew of victims: one of ‘em, for example, turns out to be a recovering sex addict in a 12-step program, which allows the writer to fiddle around with the tenets that bolster his more famous recovering alcoholic hero, Matt Scudder. In another, the murderess cleverly makes use of her victim’s religious beliefs to slay one of her targets by proxy.

Befitting its non-too-subtle title, Off is open in its sexual content -- unsurprising for a writer known for earlier works of “candid erotica” -- and in considering its protagonist’s twisted sexuality. As she embarks on her quest, she connects with a slightly older, somewhat shapelier dame named Rita. The two attach to each other by talking progressively more sexually (lots of use of the “c-word”), and as the relationship builds, both our anti-heroine and the reader begin to wonder. If these two consummate their relationship, will Rita have to become the next victim? To test this out, our inquisitive killer starts to frequent lesbian bars, looking for a suitable hook-up.

Block/Emerson deliver this material in a suitably lean style not much different from Block’s usual Scudder work. In this, we can see “Emerson” as an heir to pulpish women pioneers as Leigh Brackett, who had her hands in the first movie adaptation of The Big Sleep and was herself adept at tough-as-nails narration. While you can understand the commercial reasons for doing so, in a way blowing Block's cover takes away some of the fun in this book: seeing his bearded visage on the back dust cover, you can't help wondering how it might've read if we still believed this wonderfully seedy exercise was written by a real "Jill."

Though portions of this episodic book originally appeared as short stories in a quartet of noir collections, the full novel is making its debut as part of the Hard Case Crime series. A line of new and reprint pulp crime novels that originally appeared in paperback form, Hard Case now appears to be affixed to British publisher Titan Books’ hard cover catalog. Got to admit that seeing Gregory Manchess’ suitably seedy cover (nekkid girl holding a knife suggestively down her backside while another femme -- Rita, perhaps -- undresses the duo’s impending victim) attached to a hardback dust cover was a little bit odd, but it’s great to see this sturdy line of crime fiction enduring in print form.

More Hard Cases, please.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: pulp fiction

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( 9/01/2011 06:45:00 AM ) Bill S.

MIDWEEK MUSIC VID: Here's an intriguing video from arty rockers The Veda Rays, cut to some classic images from underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger:

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( 8/30/2011 09:57:00 PM ) Bill S.

CONQUEROR WORMS AND PESTULANT REVELERS: It makes sense that American author Edgar Allan Poe would have been the first writer to receive a “Graphic Classics” collection. His fiction has inspired a vast amount of adaptations over the years, including prior comics art retellings -- so many that one suspects a sizable majority are more familiar with the adaptations than they are the prose original originals. To a certain extent, this is understandable: Poe’s voice -- for all that he helped to kick-start genres like the formal detective story -- was very much a 19th century one. I remember it being fairly daunting myself when I first tried tackling it in the fifth grade, though once you got to the good grisly stuff, the effort seemed worth it.

“Graphic Classics” editor Tom Pomplun has returned to this most fertile of storytellers for the 21st volume in his still strong trade paperback series. Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery (Eureka Productions) contains ten of Poe’s short stories plus a smattering of poems. The tales run from the familiar (as with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” a work which provided a template for the detective yarn; “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Masque of the Red Death”) to the obscure (darkly comic “King Pest,” “Berenice,” and “The Man of the Crowd” among them). Editor Pomplun and his collaborators all strive to remain true to the author’s distinct narrative style, and, in general, they succeed.

Highlights in this collection of gothic treats include Pomplun and Nelson Evergreen’s “Berenice,” which takes a potentially ludicrous concept (haunted by the image of a dead love’s teeth!) and invests it with a convincing level of dread; Antonella Caputa and Anton Emdin’s version of the bleakly comic “King Pest,” which benefits from its Punk! magazine cartooning; and Ron Sutton’s modernized version of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” which reconfigures its mad narrator as a girl punk. (Hey, if Lisa Simpson can hear “the beating of his hideous heart,” so can our mohawked anti-heroine.) Almost as strong are Pomplun and Michael Manning’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” and Ron Lott and Lisa K. Weber’s “Hop Frog,” both of which faithfully reconstruct their stories without quite attaining their full level of horror.

Back when I looked at an edition of Pomplun’s first series of E.A. Poe tales, I remember commenting about the fact that the collection didn’t include any of the writer’s “ratiocinative” tales. After reading and reacquainting myself with “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” though, I can understand the delay. While it may be a historically significant genre piece, Poe’s "Rue Morgue" proves rather tedious in comics format. Its prototype hero August Dupin and its Watson-esque narrator never are never quite interesting enough to hold this far-fetched mystery, and while Caputo and artist Reno Marquis capture the material, the fact remains that it’s hard to make two guys standing in a room and talking about deductive reasoning all that riveting. Perhaps if Marquis was a more stylized illustrator (as with the woodcut-inflected Brad Teare in the otherwise trifling “The Man in the Crowd”) the results might have proven more memorable.

It’s the shorter poems that provide their respective artists the most room to fly beyond the fringe, whether it’s Maxon Crumb providing a Basil Wolverton-y illo for “Alone,” Neale Blanden’s suitably surreal cartooning of “A Dream within a Dream” or Malaysian artist Leong Wan Kok staging a grisly interpretation of “The Conqueror Worm.” If the stories remain the prime draw for these “Graphic Classics” volumes, the poems add an art comics feel to the package that’s especially apt for this magnificently depressive genre pioneer.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: classics illustrated

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( 8/26/2011 07:14:00 AM ) Bill S.

“HOME OF THE HOPELESSLY NETWORKED BRAVE” You know you’re in for some post-Apocalyptic hi-jinx when a comic opens on an image of a trashed-out California highway and the first narration says simply, “The Emptiness.” The hero surveying said emptiness (which we’re told is Apache Junction, AZ, even though an interstate sign is clearly marked “California”) is Sgt. Drake McCoy, a lone wolf type scouting the desolate landscape for retrievable technology to take back to one of the few surviving cities, New San Diego. (Home of the New ComiCon, mayhaps?) Drake, by his own admission, gets a charge out of the desolation as it’s far removed from the trappings of so-called civilization. “It makes me feel like they’re not looking and listening over my shoulder,” he explains in interior monologue even as, ironically, an unseen band watches him from afar.

Within a few short pages of Marksmen #1 (Benaroya/Image), our hero runs into an ownerless dog that he names Chewbacca, a band of cannibals, plus a group of refugees from one of the other extant western cities, Lone Star. The last are fleeing the cultish community for the more scientifically minded New San Diego, though right behind ‘em is an army that’s looking to loot NSD for its techno goodies. Even though its leaders give lip service to overseeing a faith-based community, they’re not above a little old-fashioned pillaging. Typical religio hypocrites, in other words.

Scripter David Baxter takes this Road Warrior set-up and smoothly sets it up (doesn’t tell us the significance of the title in the first of this six-ish mini-series, hwever). At this point in pop history, post-Apocalypse yarns are as formulaic as westerns -- a fact of genre that is heightened by this familiar-but-diverting story’s southwest setting. Penciller Javiar Aranda (aided by inkman Gerry Leach) convincingly depicts the tale’s landscape and players, even if his headshot of a grim-faced Drake at times looks overly reminiscent of Judge Dredd. Must be an unwritten rule which sez that futuristic hard-asses have to have a jawline Bruce Campbell would envy.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: fifteen-minute comic

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( 8/20/2011 06:11:00 PM ) Bill S.

THOSE DANGEROUS CELL PHONES: For a taste of "Kinky & Cosy"-ness, here's a promo set of animated strips:

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( 8/20/2011 01:21:00 PM ) Bill S.

“YES, I SEE THAT CLOUD OF BLACK SMOKE.” The shiny die-cut cover to Kinky & Cosy (NBM) provides a strong indication of where this collection of comic strips is coming from: featuring google-eyed headshots of the book’s eight-year-old title twins, the collection opens to the image of two grinning death’s head skulls. A series of gag comics by Belgian cartoonist Nix, the strip is being compared by its publisher to the “Katzenjammer Kids on speed,” which is fair enough, particularly in a strip which ends on the image of our trickster girls rolling on the ground. I also detect elements of the manga/anime series Shin Chan, particularly in the strip's (mis)treatment of our heroines’ parents.

Like South Park (which is name-checked in one of the strips), much of the humor in Kinky & Cosy stems from putting foul-minded thoughts and deeds in the heads of eight-year-old kidlets. (In one memorable strip, for instance, Kinky responds to a teacher’s request for a debate-worthy declaration with a statement about fisting; in another a young boy neo-Nazi engages in Holocaust denial.) One of the series’ secondary plotlines revolves on the girls’ mother and her unsuccessful attempts to relieve her sexual frustration. In an extended comic story, Mom has an unrequited love affair with an illegal alien living in a recycling bin; earlier, we see her calling customer support on a malfunctioning vibrator.

The two prime male adult figures, beer-swilling Dad and an ineptly authoritarian teacher named Mr. Deeds, prove equally feckless when it comes to taming our little girl hellions, who think nothing of setting a skyscraper aflame to divert parental attention from failed test scores. When the strip imagines our twosome grown into adulthood, it’s as a pair of gun-toting reservoir dogs. “We had an unhappy childhood,” they explain over the body of a bloody victim. “They made us play with educational toys.” As good an explanation of modern generational malaise as any I’ve read.

In addition to the regular strips -- and a two-page photo feature wherein cartoonist Nix and an unidentified friend get remade as our heroines -- the first collection features fifteen pages of comic visual brain teasers (e.g., a maze in which a hung over Mr. Deeds strives to make his way to school). Though the book includes an answer key, it omits the solution to two of its puzzles. Could be an editorial flub, but I like to think it was more deliberate, the provocative Nix telling his readership, “You’re on your own, gang.”

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: modern comics

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( 8/20/2011 06:45:00 AM ) Bill S.

“YOU AIN’T NO VICTIM; YOU’RE JUST BEING NAÏVE.” The idea of an alt-Americana band from Helsinki may sound a bit incongruous, but with Finland’s the Latebirds, the results are more convincing than you’d initially expect. Last of the Good Ol’ Days (Second Motion), the band’s U.S. debut, states the ‘birds’ case clearly. An enticing collection of rock and folk sounds smartly delivered, Days mixes melancholy self-help entreaties with more angry socio-cultural plaints to decent effect.

Led by the sweetly weedy vocalist Markus Nordenstreng -- and abetted by “honorary Latebirds” like ace keyboardist Benmont Tench, Minnie Driver, Levon Helms and Kris Kristofferson -- the new release casts a tunefully critical eye toward our modern “broken world.” In the title track, for example, Nordenstreng reminds us of a truism Hank Williams would recognize, “we’re all born to die eventually.” In the follow-up mid-tempo paean to carrying on, “Among the Survivors,” the singer croons over an ear-tickling fuzzy guitar line to someone “lucky to still be alive”

Experienced geezer music, in other words, sung from the perspective of someone who’s more than a little surprised to still be around. If at times, the poppy vocals seem to bump against the music’s grizzled sentiments, the bands’ (which even includes a former member of the cultural instrumentalists Laika & the Cosmonauts) instrumental smarts keep you coming back to the disc. Ain’t a lot of groups who’d think to add musical saw to a gospel-tinged closeout, but these guys do.

Stand-out track to these ears proves one of the angriest: “Fearless,” a tribute to murdered Russian journalist Anne Politkovskaja, with a ragingly orchestrated hard-rock backing and lyrics that noodge the dittohead listener to think for themselves. Good ol’ didactic pissed-off protest rock -- we could use a lot more of it these days.

The current release also features an EP of five tracks cut at Levon Helm’s Woodstock studio. Three of these prove to be covers of singer/songwriter mainstays Steve Goodman, Kristofferson and Townes Van Zandt alongside two new Nordenstreng numbers. Though the band’s slowed-down remake of “City of New Orleans” won’t make you forget either the original or Arlo Guthrie’s cover, their folk-rocky Van Zandt track is worth a listen, while the sound of a croakin’ Kristofferson taking “In the News” over from the soft-voiced Latebird lead provides a telling contrast. One of the survivors, indeed.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: folk-pop

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( 8/17/2011 06:22:00 AM ) Bill S.

MIDWEEK MUSIC VID: Been playing a lotta John Prine lately. Songs like this are the reason why:

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( 8/14/2011 11:00:00 AM ) Bill S.

“THE SEA CONCEALS A MONSTROUS, UNIVERSAL CANNIBALISM.” An action fictioner in the early years of the pulp magazines, H.D. Couzens is not a well-known name a hundred years later, a situation that the pulp revivalists at Black Dog Books hope to redress with King Corrigan’s Treasure, the first publication of Couzens’ short stories. Subtitled “The Collected Adventures of Billy Englehart,” Treasure gathers seven tales of South Sea escapades starring Couzens’ one recurring character, a canny and hard-bitten customer who sails the seas around Hawaii in the early 1900’s.

Couzens, who himself worked as an Internal Revenue agent on the then Territory of Hawaii, was familiar with both the region and the men who skirted the laws of the day. He brought this first-hand knowledge to his fiction, which captures its rough-and-tumble characters so distinctly that you barely notice the blanked-out swear words. The majority of these fictions appeared in Adventure, a long-running pulp where Couzens had quickly picked up a devoted readership. (His novelette, “Brethren of the Beach,” is one of the highlights of Black Dog’s earlier The Best of Adventure.) With the Englehart stories, Couzens came up with the closest to a Conan as he would in his too-short career as a fiction writer: a sturdy man’s man protagonist who survives a variety of hair-raising scrapes, including a shipboard encounter with an orangutan.

Within Treasure’s six short stories plus its title novelette, our hero takes on mutinies, pirates, cannibals, a ghost ship overrun with vicious beasts and sundry duplicitous fellow sons of the sea. The title piece, “King Corrigan’s Treasure,” best shows the grizzled salt in his element. Told from the perspective of a shanghaied young would-be adventurer named Harvey Winthrop, it recounts the battle of smarts and might between Billy and a vicious crew of treasure hunters that includes a malevolent doctor who has honed his interrogation skills torturing children on the “Model Prison” in Tasmania (“the most pestiferous hole the British Government ever maintained,” we’re told). Said doctor gets to demonstrate his skills in the story -- you don’t introduce a detail like that and not follow it up – but we never doubt that Billy won’t prevail.

But it’s not before Winthrop gets some hard lessons in the evil that men can do. Couzens doesn’t belabor the point, but at one level “Treasure” is as much about Winthrop’s schooling in the harshness of South Seas life as it is a treasure hunt. Not incidentally, our young man is the only character in the book to be provided a full romantic interest. The title treasure, we’re told, was once the accumulated property of a “hard-bitten, close-fisted, mean-souled Irishman, with no more conscience than a conger-eel,” and his comely daughter Anita, who’s been brought into the conflict by Englehart’s nasty rival Paul Anson, is the lass who catches Winthrop’s eye. That we’re not quite sure which side Anita is taking in the treasure dispute adds a complication to the story.

One thing we do know that is that self-described “trader, ‘recruiter,’ pearler and dabbler in various other forms of activity” Englehart has no time for romantic tomfoolery. Dames and sea – nuthin' but trouble, right?

Edited and introed by pulp scholar Doug Ellis (who seems to have a preference for the more straight-faced action pulps as opposed to the outré horror and s-f work that Black Dog also revives), King Corrigan’s Treasure provides a needed introduction to an engaging yarn-spinner who might have been better known if he hadn’t died too soon from tuberculosis in 1914. As with many writers who toiled in the not-entirely-reputable pulp fiction industry back in the day, Couzens’ bibliography is admittedly incomplete but packed with enough tantalizing titles to get this reader hoping for a second collection of his seafaring exploits. A second volume in the The Best of Adventure promises another single Couzens’ piece, “The Chang-Hwa Pearl.” Sounds like the kind of MacGuffin that Cap’n Billy would pursue.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: pulp fiction

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( 8/06/2011 05:15:00 PM ) Bill S.

“FREEDOM IS THE OBSTACLE THAT STANDS BETWEEN US AND THAT PERFECTION.” With a title like The Homeland Directive (Top Shelf Productions), you might immediately assume that this Robert (Surrogates) Venditti/Mike Huddleston graphic novel has its roots in post-911 angst. That it does, though the political thriller also looks back to earlier shadow government cautionaries like The Parallax View. Its opening epigram from Ben Franklin (“Those who give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”) is familiar, if still pertinent, while its central act of terrorism is an all-too-plausible one.

Directive’s protagonist is a CDC researcher named Laura Regan, who has been targeted along with her colleague Ari Musa by the Secretary of Homeland Security Albert Keene. Doctors Regan and Musa obviously Know Something that the Machiavellian Keene wants covered, and the attentive reader quickly realizes that it must have something to do with bio-terrorism. Our heroine is nearly iced by a red-nosed assassin, but a group of government agents gone rogue (“We work for the them, not with them.”) rescues her. From then on, Laura and her saviors are on the lam -- as a series of Homeland Security news bulletins portray her first as her colleague’s killer, then as a child abductor. “We’ll know they’ve exhausted all their options when they mention the kids,” one of the savvy government rogues notes.

Venditti paces his story strongly for the most part (the finish seems a bit rushed) and even leaves room in his full-blown conspiracy for a few good men and women. The faceless president (are those Obama-esque ears?) is even left out of the shadow government work, and when he learns the truth of what Keene has been up to, takes matters into his own hands -- ironically employing the same red-nosed killer to tidy things. Our primary window into the Way Things Really Work is our idealistic young doctor, of course. Since one of the rogue agents is from the (fictional) Bureau of Consumer Advocacy, we’re treated to several glimpses at the ways our paperless society has made us all vulnerable.

Artist Mike Huddleston provides a variety of color and background schemes to differentiate this suspenser’s settings. His scenes in government buildings, for instance, are rendered in washed-out grays, while segments with Laura Regan are primarily done in earth tones. A series of one-page montages showing the cross-country victims of the bio-terrorism plot is brightly colored (as if to emphasize the diversity of the effected population), as the sequences set in BOCA get rendered on blue-lined graph paper. What could be distracting proves effective, largely through the artist’s tight control of his characters -- and the strength of Venditti’s crisp conspiracy yarn.

If you don’t finish this GN feeling just the slightest bit paranoid, you haven’t been paying attention.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: modern comics

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( 8/02/2011 05:59:00 PM ) Bill S.

“THERE. THAT IS THE REVELATION.” Look at the cover to the first issue of Image Comics’ The Vault (Image Comics), with its skull face looming over an unwary skin diver, and the first thing long-term comics lovers will think of is the EC series, The Vault of Horror. But on the basis of the first issue of this Sam Sarkar and Garrie Gastonny (both responsible for Caliber) mini-series, The Vault has more in common with an s-f movie like James Cameron’s The Abyss than it does the fifties era walking corpse fest. It’s a deliberately paced tale about a group of undersea treasure hunters who pull up something from the ocean depths that they probably shouldn’t have.

As such, the opening issue of the three-part mini-series is devoted to establishing the characters of the crew and the technology that they use to get themselves in trouble. Looking to explore the Oak Island Treasure Pit located off the coast of Nova Scotia, our gang races an approaching hurricane to enter a previously unbroachable underwater vault, using a dog-like robot named Macula. Scripter Sarkar devotes a lot of the densely dialogued first issue to establishing the financial stakes each lightly distinguishable crew member feels over the ultra-pricey expedition, though one suspects once things start popping in the second ish, money will take a back seat to simple questions of survival.

What our intrepid six-person crew uncovers proves to be a sarcophagus containing some distinctly unusual remains. This somehow connects to an opening two-page spread of angels battling demons, potentially turning what has started out as a straightforward sci-fi tale into something a trace more metaphysical. A sign of the times: where we once would’ve gotten our kicks from Things from Another World, these days we look to more medievally inspired terrors.

Artist Garrie Gastonny renders all this with clear-lined distinctness, the comic book equivalent of a big-budget summer blockbuster. How drive-in summery is The Vault? We even get a panel of shapely archeologist Gabrielle Parker in the shower. Never saw that in the old EC comics . . .

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: fifteen-minute comic

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( 7/30/2011 05:02:00 PM ) Bill S.

“NO LONG-HAIRED ANARCHIST FROM CALIFORNIA CAN RUN THIS COURT.” The latest entry in cartoonist/historian Rick Geary’s “Treasury of XXth Century Murder,” The Lives of Sacco and Vanzetti (NBM) tackles a still-disputed trial from the 1920’s. On April 15, 1920, two employees of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company, carrying $15,776.51 in payroll envelopes were robbed and murdered in the streets of the quiet industrial town of South Braintree, Massachusetts. Two Italian immigrants, Nicolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were arrested for the crime, tried and ultimately executed. The case itself became a world-wide cause celebre, which spurred riots and protests across the globe.

Though writer/artist Geary refuses to come down on either side re: Sacco and Vanzetti’s guilt or innocence, he does establish several salient points, chief among these being the idea that the duo’s immigrant status and political beliefs (anarchist) were prime factors in their conviction. Judge Webster Thayer was well-known for his antipathy toward “parlor radicals” and made more than one unguarded statement away from the courthouse about getting “those bolsheviki bastards good and proper.” Anti-Italian sentiment also played a strong part in the case, and the prosecution was shameless in taking advantage of it.

When the only witnesses capable of establishing that the defendants weren’t near the scene of the crime proved to be fellow immigrants, for instance, D.A. Frederick Katzman either used their halting command of English to confuse and rattle them -- or simply asserted that their veracity was questionable because they were either “Italian or anarchist or both.” To be sure, many of Sacco and Vanzetti’s political compatriots didn’t exactly help their cause. This was the era that gave birth to the stereotypical image of the bomb throwing anarchist, after all, and Geary duly depicts two bombing incidents that occurred in the aftermath of the twosome’s sentence, one at the house of a Dedham juror.

Guilty or innocent, the system was clearly stacked against Sacco and Vanzetti. One of the more dubious features of the Massachusetts legal system at the time, as Geary notes, was the fact that all legal appeals in a case were overseen by the same judge who initially tried it, “thus asking Thayer to rule against himself.” As a result, none of the defense team’s attempts at appeal went anywhere: Judge Thayer remained recalcitrant.

If the book has any failings, it's in insufficiently establishing the reasons West Coast attorney Fred H. Moore would later be accused of mishandling the defense. Still, Geary, with his coolly detailed and wry visual style, does his usual superb job laying out both the facts of the case and the distinct world in which it all occurs. It’s a world not much different from our own, of course -- only the nationality and beliefs of the Dangerous Other have changed. “We practice law, not justice,” Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes once noted of this controversial case. In The Lives of Sacco and Vanzetti Geary clearly illuminates his sad distinction.

(First published on Blogcritics.)

Labels: art comics

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( 7/30/2011 12:44:00 PM ) Bill S.

WEEKEND PET PIC: Here's a shot of our Southern belle Savannah:

THE USUAL NOTE: For more cool pics of companion animals, please check out Modulator's "Friday Ark."

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