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Thursday, July 07, 2005 ( 7/07/2005 02:39:00 PM ) Bill S. THE SMELL OF URBAN EXPLOSION – Of all the places in the world that I've wished to visit, London is at the very top – so listening to the news this a.m. on NPR about today’s morning bombings, I had a devil of a time tearing myself away from the ongoing news coverage of the atrocity. At one point, one of the reporters from London made reference to the fact that when the subways were first closed down, the first thought to cross people's minds was that there'd been some sort of power failure; it wasn't until the smell of what I probably misheard as "urban explosion" became more palpable that Londoners knew the true story. According to the reporters, it's been over ten years since the IRA did a bombing in London (I didn't realized it'd been that long ago – the Irish terrorist still looms large in our popular imagination thanks to Patriot Games). But some experiences, unfortunately, become deeply imprinted in our sense memories. Damn, but this is awful. . . # | ( 7/07/2005 06:59:00 AM ) Bill S. SUMMER MEDITATION – Just to show that we're not entirely unappreciative re: the glories of summerland, here's a haiku inspired by a recent trip to Starved Rock State Park in upstate Illinois: Cell phone chittering(Profuse apologies to Jim Henley.) # | Wednesday, July 06, 2005 ( 7/06/2005 10:54:00 AM ) Bill S. SUMMER FARE – A few brief comments engendered by the first month o' summer tube-sucking:
# | Monday, July 04, 2005 ( 7/04/2005 07:27:00 AM ) Bill S. "TELLING YOU ALL THE ZOMBIE TROOF" – Zombies, zombies, zombies. Sure seem to be a lot of 'em around these here parts lately, and with good reason. No whiff of musty Euro-culture about 'em or even much of the trappings of pseudo-science: just a bunch of ordinary folk like you or I, going about the country, chowing on their friends, family and neighbors. It's a template that lends itself to any number of stories – the more darkly satiric the better – so no wonder writers love it. Which brings us to Boom!/Atomeka’s new comic collection, Zombie Tales. Back in the late 80's self-described splatterpunks John Skipp & Craig Sector edited an anthology that encouraged writers in the horror field to do a story set in a world of cannibalistic walkin' dead folk. The nearly 400-page volume featured a lot of modern horror heavy hitters (King, Campbell, Lansdale, et al) having a go at the modern zombie mythos – the book was, as I remember, fun, and you could see its authors having a great time in the bloody playground they'd been given. But the sheer volume of the book and the overly consistent theme meant that a certain level of redundancy (both of tone and plotting) crept into the material. With a 48-page comic and six quick stories, that's less of an immediate problem, provided you have an editor who knows their bizness. With its first issue (a second planned issue, entitled Zombie Tales: Oblivion, is advertised on the back inner cover), Tales' uncredited editor works to keep the zombie stories sufficiently varied. We get several flavors of the cannibalistic undead: animalistic predators ("Severance," "For Pete's Sake," "If You're So Smart"), comically dumb zombies who speak like Bizarro ("I, Zombie") and living deadsters who still have their reasoning faculties ("Daddy Smells Different," "Dead Meat") even if their bodies aren't still pumping any fresh oxygen to their brains. Lots of dark humor in this book, of course, (I most enjoyed the seriocomic classroom test that Mark Waid creates for "Smart") and some plain ol' horror comics predictable twist stories, too. If the book's most successful piece is arguably Andrew Cosby & Keith Giffen's goofy serial story "I, Zombie" (which makes Ted, its dumb lummox of a zombie hero, appealing in his childlike attention span), the offering I keep returning to is Johanna Stokes & J.K. Woodward's more dramatic "Pete's Sake." Though its punning title is unfortunately chosen (hey, there, editor – why not advise your writer to come up with something different?), calling up memories of a mediocre Barbra Streisand comedy, the story and art itself strive to look less ironically at an aspect of the zombie storyline that has greater emotional impact: the core idea that these creatures are our family and loved ones and that their coming back to life so soon after dying totally fucks up the basic grieving process. This theme (which also drives one of Stephen King's most despairing novels, Pet Semetary) is a touchy one to negotiate within the confines of a horror story, and if scripter Stokes doesn't make it as devastating as it could be, I preferred the attempt over Keith Giffen's calculatedly crass consideration of the improbabilities of zombie sex. Still in all, I'll be looking out for the second volume of Tales. (Is "Meat" also meant to be a continued story? It reads more like set-up than finished tale.) What can I say? Looks to be a good decade for the living dead. . . # | Sunday, July 03, 2005 ( 7/03/2005 07:55:00 AM ) Bill S. A GERMANE QUOTE – Have an uncompleted posting on Boom!/Atomeka's Zombie Tales anthology on the C: drive waiting to be finished (yes, it's a Big Theme Weekend!) So here's a relevant quote I found from good ol' Clive Barker in Skipp & Spector's 1989 horror story collection, Book of the Dead: "Zombies are the liberal nightmare. Here you have the masses, who you would love to love, appearing at your front door with their faces falling off; and you're trying to be as humane as you possibly can, but they are, after all, eating the cat. And the fear of mass activity, of mindlessness on a national scale, underlies my fear of zombies."# | Saturday, July 02, 2005 ( 7/02/2005 07:18:00 AM ) Bill S. "I ALWAYS WANTED TO SEE HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES. . ." – When I told folks I was planning on seeing George A. Romero's Land of the Dead as a part of July 4th weekend, I was being more than a little facetious. ("What could be more American than flesh-eating zombies?") But after viewing the fourth entry in the writer/director's groundbreaking horror series, turns out my half-assed joke may've been more on target than I knew. There are loads of fireworks in this movie – they even have a plot point – and enough nods to the notion of revolution 'tween the haves and have-nots to guarantee that more than one right wing screedster will be relying on this flick as another example of Hollywood's so-called "left wing bias." (Even if the proudly Pittsburghian Romero has never exactly been a Hollywood guy.) With its opening in an all-American park (where a trio of befuddled zombies are seen tunelessly and comically fumbling with their instruments in the band shell) to its trek across the river and a sharply divided city, this Land is plainly meant to be yours and my land. The set-up is fairly basic: we're a few years down the road from the events in Night of the Living Dead and living humanity is holed up in a few heavily barricaded cities across the country. Within these enclaves, life has devolved into a more severe class-based system, with the wealthy living the lush life in a heavily guarded building called Fiddler's Green and the proles living in the kind of raggedy-assed slums that'll put you in mind of Mad Max's Thunderdome, right down to the presence of a sinister midget. Across the river, the dead are stumbling around, waiting for some fresh meat to stumble their way – while the wealthy's hirelings regularly venture into the 'burbs in a heavily armored and accessorized vehicle (called Dead Reckoning) to forage for supplies. There obviously ain't a whole lotta family farming going on these days. Some zombie lovers (Franklin Harris among 'em) have observed that Land's class-based culture – with hammy kingpin Dennis Hopper holding tight to his position as the wealthiest man in the city – doesn't make a whole lot of sense when the currency he is shown hoarding so zealously won't amount to a hill of beans. But I accepted his (and sleazy underling John Leguizamo's) irrational adherence to the idea that Money Matters, even in a land where the dead are ever-ready to pull your head off, simply because crisis frequently fosters a strong dependence on old structures. Much as the structural dynamics of racism have lingered long after its prime economic motor (slavery) ceased to exist in this country, the mechanics of a class-based culture have sufficient autonomous life to survive past the death of currency. Gotta admire the writer/director's willingness to stage his own internal political debates so openly: while the recent remake of Dawn worked overtime to be All Frights to All People, Romero doesn't muffle his proletarian sympathies one whit. Where the movie's clearly left-leaning politics (at one point Hopper calls Lequizamo's extortionist Cholo a "terrorist;" in another Leguizamo threatens to do a "jihad" on Hopper's ass) grow confusing for me at least is in the muddled way Romero sets up his polarized society. Who, exactly, are supposed to the class-based victims? The slum-dwelling urbanites who are kept out of Hopper's glistening sanctuary? Or the ever-hungry zombies? Perhaps it's both? There's a not-quite-convincing statement made by one of the survivors near the end of the flick, expressing commonality between zombies and the regular folk, but I'm not sure I bought it. One thing is clear: the illusion of safety that's been maintained within the city isn't going to hold forever. The zombies, exemplified by a large black undead man in a mechanics' suit with the name "Big Daddy" (Eugene Clark, giving the best one-man monster performance in a modern horror flick since Jeff Goldblum turned into Brundlefly) emblazoned across his pocket, are growing smarter and more persistent. Though earlier Dead flicks gave lip-service to the idea that these revived creatures were growing more sentient and learning to use tools, in Land we get to see this happening. When Big Daddy shows up to ultimately do in both Hopper and Leguizamo, you can't help but feel proud of the big fella; it took a lot of thought and effort for him to get to Fiddler's Green. Class-based dichotomies aside, perhaps the primary political message of Land is a little bit broader: that, even with the threat of an irrefutable outside menace clamoring to get in, too many of us are looking for ways to feather our nest to pay enough attention to the very real dangers surrounding us. The only major characters to survive this particular outing are part of a small band of stick-together survivors (Simon Baker & Asia Argento among 'em) planning to split for – where else? – Canada. Decades away from the sixties that spawned the first Night, our neighbors to the north still signify as the modern equivalent to Huck Finn's "territories." I had a good time viewing Land, even if I can't say that I was ever exactly caught up in it the way I was with Romero's original Night and Dawn. Too many intervening years of xeroxed zombie films, comics and bad rock bands swiping EC imagery have definitely diluted the impact of Romero's redefining genre tropes. And, as with George Lucas' final three Star Wars flicks, you really wish that Romero the auteur had the sense to pull in a writer/collaborator to retool some of his lamer lines. (Is John Russo still alive?) Still, Romero knows what we're all really looking for in these films – great gore effects and lots of 'em – and is still enough of the psychotronic pshowman to keep 'em in the forefront. (My favorite is a walking corpse that appears headless because it's nearly decapitated until – surprise! – the head flips back onto its neck and the creature chomps down on a hapless victim.) Lots of good work from Greg Nicotero and the gang at KNB, and, aside from the Big Whoa moments, they also pull off some neatly creepy visual poetry. The sequence when the army of undead creatures rise from the river may recall a similar moment from Pirates of the Caribbean (not to mention, Coppola's Apocalypse Now), but that doesn't diminish its own dark beauty. Though they may stumble and around moan like the nearly brain-dead creatures they are, Romero's living dead still get the moments of gothic grandeur that they deserve. . . UPDATE: Sean "Outbreak" Collins has posted his deservedly anticipated take on Land, and in the process he links to a whole bunch of other thought-provoking examinations of this well-stuffed film, including Ian Brill's and Jon Hasting's. Check it out, all you zombie buffs. . . # | Friday, July 01, 2005 ( 7/01/2005 03:49:00 PM ) Bill S. "JUST THE WAY TO START THE DAY." – Any consideration of Larry Young – or, more specifically, the books Young writes for his own indy comics line, AiT/Planet Lar – must inevitably be as much about the practice of self-advertisement as it about the work itself. Reading the first issue of Young’s new color comic mini-series, Black Diamond On Ramp, a neatly hard-edged series set in a dystopian near future, I was reminded how much canny marketing can add to a pop experience. Taken by itself, the "story" to the opening chapter is markedly slight. We barely get a sense of the story's futuristic setting, for instance (just a pair of hovering spy cams that appear in one panel), while two of the story's major figures, one of the 'em the story's antagonist, don't even appear in the chapter. If the first issue of Black Diamond had contained just its graphic story, without the five pages of supporting text accompanying it, all we would've had is a well-made mildly Tarantino-ish (check that conversation 'tween the two henchmen about the "two types of plots") genre piece that may or may not've brought us back for a second issue, depending on our affinity for stories featuring the image of a sweet li'l ol' lady getting flattened by a falling car. But Larry, bless his Barnumesque soul, knows the value of good hype, and he pays as much creative attention to the rest of his packaging as he does the work itself. This may rub some art comics types the wrong way – when you're building a line on personality as much as product, there's always a part of the audience who just ain't gonna dig your personality – but for many of us it's an appealing part of the line. Contrast Black Diamond with the recent debut issue of the new Mr. T comic. That work simply gave us an opening chapter utterly devoid of the character we expected to see – with nary a hint that he'd emerge as the story progressed. If Young had been writing the series, he'd have given us a four-page discourse on the elements of T-ness that first attracted him (and by extension: us) to the character as well as a series of teasing hints on where he planned to take the mohawked one. Per the book's text backgrounds, Black Diamond's story is set in a future America where the country has been firmly divided into two groups of people: ground dwellers (repped by the Cleaver-styled inhabitants of a quiet Cali suburb) and literal highwaymen, who live off a massive system of eight-lane roads that are elevated above the sleepy 'burbs. Young's tale opens by flipping between one of the suburbanites, "Doctor Don," as he wakes and goes through his morning ablutions, and a chatty pair of shotgun toting henchmen as they tool along the freeway overhead. These two are no ill-read dummies, since they even manage to slip in a ref to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (as both seen by Shakespeare and by Tom Stoppard) along the way, though the exact nature of their current undertaking is not explained. As we watch Doctor Don floss his teeth and read the sports section, we see the duo embark on a high-speed chase with another driver ("Jesus! What a way to start the day," the second driver sez, a line that's repeated with minor variations by nearly every other character in the book.) One of those two vehicles winds up flying off the road and landing in that quiet suburban neighb. Jon Proctor's art captures this blend of the mundane and pulpish beautifully (though I've gotta admit I was a little bit disconcerted by the shifting patch of chest hair he gives his buck nekkid hero), while his use of early morning, half-lit color in this dawn-set entry is particularly fine (lots of brown and khaki hues in this issue). We may be in the future, but the type of cars on the sky-high-highway aren't anything we wouldn't have seen in a Paul Bartel Death Race movie. (Young makes the high-concept comparison to Mad Max: me, I see the David Carradine vehicle, Cannonball, which incidentally is not to be confused with Cannonball Run.) It has, in other words, the appropriate low-budget feeling for a story you might've watched at the drive-in if drive-ins weren't an endangered species in this country. (Perhaps they exist off Young's eight-lane highway?) Aside from the roadway violence and that shmushed-up grandma, we don't get too much plot in this opener, just the careful accretion of contrasting moods. Don's wife, we're told, is on a "business trip," so neither he nor we know from the first chapter what is made clear in the afterward text: that she's been kidnapped and will need to be rescued by her orthodontist (Oh, so that's the kinda doctor he is – which explains the flossing, eh?) hubby. So what about what Paul Harvey would've called the Rest of the Story? That's for Larry & Jon to reveal in the months ahead. Based on the snippets doled out in this great big teaser of a first issue, I'm eager to see if the series lives up to its promises. . . # | |
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