Happy Halloween!

"Your dates are here!"

Black Dynamite? Hell Yeah. Afrodisiac? Can I Have It Now?

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=23475

Jim Rugg's stories about super-pimp Afrodisiac are finally being collected and thrust hot and sweaty up against our funk flanks in what may turn out to be the baddest hip-bump of all time...if'n you don't get turned out first, b*tch!

I can only say I'm looking well and good forward to this thing.

The Horror, the Horror...Halloween Countdown 2009

So, despite all the terrible reviews (I feel like) I read, I pulled DIARY OF THE DEAD, the fifth "official" George Romero zombie flick, released perhaps a couple years ago. I'd had some trepidation about it, considering LAND OF THE DEAD (the fourth) was more than serviceable but showing some "strain" in Romero's attempt to navigate a "studio" zombie movie.


With DIARY OF THE DEAD, Romero is working more "independently" once more. The red flags for this movie, however, begin with Romero returning to the initial moments of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD territory, refitting his zombie mythos into our current society, with its hubris, its slavering consumerism, its shallowness.


Man, I wanted to like DIARY, and it's still better than most zombie ilk made in the wake of DAWN OF THE DEAD in 1979 (not the admittedly fun but excreable remake...which takes a premise and dumbs it down significantly--another strike for Romero in that he "embraced" the remake, which is like me "embracing" a Tarzan movie starring Zach Braff)...which is to say, DIARY OF THE DEAD is a monumentally pretentious movie that hamstrings Romero in a way I've never seen before.


I've loved most everything Romero has done (still haven't seen all of KNIGHTRIDERS), and I think he was and is still as good as ever. His movie BRUISER was a fantastic "idea" movie, probably the best of modern Romero. LAND OF THE DEAD suffered from a desire for Romero to create sympathy for the Walking Dead, accomplished in a method that fit Romero's more proletariat style...Romero may layered his stories with social commentary, but subtle he ain't. "Thinking" zombies was almost as bad as "running" zombies, but you couldn't argue Romero didn't know how to shoot the sh*t out of a good zombie slaughter scene, whether the eaters are eating or getting blown away.



DIARY OF THE DEAD strains credulity, sure, but worse it just heaps on the heavy-handedness with its characters. The idea is that a group of Pitt college kids are shooting a class-project horror movie and stumble into Romero's "new" Zombie Apocalypse. One kid, name of Creed, decides to document the events on camera, downloaded to his laptop and edited, for posterity and presumably to become "famous." This isn't a short-coming of the movie at all. I liked the set-up actually...the characters are really hard to stomach. Everyone is incredulous that Mr. Creed is filming death, moray decay and cannibalistic murder, but nobody tries to stop him. Romero never touches on the idea that perhaps, just perhaps, all these youthful bright lights want to be stars. Even if it's the movie about the end of the world.


Instead most of the flick is concerned with a bunch of pompous posturing by various characters, which does fit in with the modern mindset of "starring" in each and every one's own movie. The problem is that the Creed kid just simply has no strength, moral or otherwise, while the "center" of the movie is his girlfriend, a "college student" if she didn't look thirty years old. Her strength comes from constantly brow-beating her poor boyfriend for his sketchy ethics in the crisis, and as understandable as it is...well, the kid never has a good argument for his actions. Frankly his relationship with this girl doesn't seem remotely real...without any basis for emotion, we can't have the tense attraction as between Ben and Barbara in the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, or the strained need of Stephen and Francine in DAWN OF THE DEAD, or the playful pull between John and Sarah in DAY OF THE DEAD. In the fourth film LAND, the failing of DIARY's central relationship is also clear, a kind of muted charm without heat. The problem with LAND and DIARY lies wholly within their inability to make us care about the characters. This wasn't the case at all in the first three movies, but Romero's natural subtlety hinders inherent suspense.



Anyway, there's little in DIARY that is purely Romero, which is no good, and yet I can't dismiss it. I can say that Romero's reliance on CGI splatter is really grating. He might as well put the film reels of all his great movies in the bathtub and piss all over them. CGI in a Romero zombie movie is akin to watching classic 1970s porn in which all the full-bodied bush has been removed for the sensibilities of a shaved-beaver modern mentality. If you get my meaning. The whole point of 1970s porn would be the hairy genitals, hairy chests, and hairy upper lips topped off with white-man afros. Without those details, you don't have 1970s porn. And without squibs and Tom Savini make-up effects, you haven't a Romero zombie movie. It stands as a testement to the fact that every movie ever made is an accomplishment of many, not just one talent.


I can't recomment DIARY OF THE DEAD to anybody but the completist. Yet I can't say it's worthless, because there's never been a worthless Romero movie ever made. So there's that.




By the way, the top image is one of Travis Pitts' fantastic "Zombie America" 1950s retro posters. Go here http://www.imagekind.com/MemberProfile.aspx?MID=c3993939-15b1-45c0-bf80-904fb28bf10e for more such and others of brilliant magnitude.

The Horror...the Horror: Halloween Movies!

Ever since I was a kid in the 1970s, I've understood that Halloween for little kids is putting on a cheap plastic mask and rubber-smell (ahhh, how great it was) body vest with Frankenstein Monster or the Hulk on it, bought from K-Mart in those cool boxes with the transparent window so you could see the mask. The thing is, you can only do this until you're, like, nine or ten at the outside. Then you're a partial-grown thug bullying the small kids on Halloween night.

What happens is, you start having the Halloween Creature Feature type thing, movies throughout the evening and night. I feel like this was a serious part of Halloween when I was growing up. I think it was so wonderful and accessible because horror movies were all classics from the 1930s-1960s, so everyone knew them and loved them, and rarely did they need to be "edited for television." These days, with all the Jasons and Freddies and Aliens and Predators running around, it's hard to have a Halloween movie night where the kids and the adults can all watch.

That said, I'm not making a list for General Audiences. Just for me. And you, lover.

My favorite Halloween movies for Halloween, in no particular order!

Burly Reading: MARKET FORCES by Richard K. Morgan

I got turned on to this novel by a pal of mine, Scott Phillips, who figured it was my kind of book.

I'd heard of Morgan before, and his "Takashi Kovacs" novels ALTERED CARBON and BROKEN ANGELS. The novels are apparently "science fiction," the kind Joe Haldeman, Harlan Ellison and Fred Saberhagan write, with plenty of psychology and literary deftness. I haven't gotten to the Kovacs books yet, but I fully intend to.

MARKET FORCES, a non-Kovacs novel and thus less "SF" than the Kovacs books, is set in on an Earth or Earth timeline alternate to that of Takashi Kovacs. This is plainly evident when FORCES protagonist Chris Faulkner is reading a novel by an unknown author, about a "luridly violent far-future...a detective who could seemingly exchange bodies at will...it all seemed very far-fetched."

Faulkner's world, in MARKET FORCES, concerns a future where global corporations dominate every aspect of life and vie for "primitive" footing among Third World wars and revolutions, all in order to layer profits for a wealthy upper class. There is no middle class in this London of tomorrow, only an underclass feeding on itself in the "Zones".

Chris Faulkner is a corporate warrior, literally, as public competitions between corporations involve personal turbocharged automotive duels between representatives. The duels are held at hundreds of miles per hour, and they are to the death.



Faulkner is a product of the Zones, and he's risen to a high-profile position at Shorn Associates, one of the top companies. The novel concerns his gradual moral disintegration, his inner conflicts between being human and squalid, or being corporate and successful. Faulkner is a man of rage looking for a cause to believe in, no matter how small. When he finds it, in the form of an aging Revoluntionary, Faulkner begins to set precedents of violent honor, in which his extremes can only further the hold of corporate power on the world.



MARKET FORCES is a fascinating book, dense with a lurid literaryness that I enjoy. Richard Morgan knows how people think and act under social pressure, and when he sends Chris Faulkner to shatter the binding spells of "civil" society, it's a writer revelling in being free of them. At least in fiction.

Though not a populist page-turner, MARKET FORCES drives forward with split-second decisiveness, leaving nothing and no one untouched by the grime of a future existence perhaps all too realistic. Richard Morgan is a strong burly writer with some chops, so check him out.

Images unrelated to MARKET FORCES, but appropriate, IMO!

Hell's Squeaky Spinner Rack

Read the Chris Claremont X-MEN FOREVER, first five issues or however long it is so far...I haven't read any kind of X-Men comic since John Romita Jr. drew the thing in the twilight of the 1980s. Because in general the X-Men represented the worst developments in superhero comics and comics in general. Because the art was godawful. Because I can't take pretentious Grant Morrison. And whatever else. You'd sooner have found me rolling in broken beer bottles before I'd read an X-Men book of any kind.

That is, at least for now, until X-MEN FOREVER.

The experiment is that Claremont, the writer so associated with the success of the X-Men today, picks up his long run on the title exactly where it left off (sometime in the 1990s?) As if no time had passed, and no changes had been made over all this time. Interesting, I thought, if you really want to go back to the 1990s. Which I don't.

But throw Tom Grummett into this mix?


Grummett is an artist who has been around for some time. His style reflects his views, a straight-forward, dynamic and most importantly clean art. And Grummett flat-out knows how to draw everything from an incredulous look to a towering superpowered uppercut.

The other aspect of Tom Grummett is that he's worked on two of the most entertaining recent runs of books I've had the pleasure to read, one being the criminally-short POWER COMPANY (2002) with Astro City's own Kurt Busiek (a series created by Grummett), and the other NEW THUNDERBOLTS (2005) with Fabian Nicieza and the beginning of 2006's plain THUNDERBOLTS before giving way to Marvel's plan to have all of their titles become one overarchingly tepid melodrama via "Civil War." But that wasn't Grummett's fault, thankfully.

Throw in Grummett's SECTION ZERO (2000), with Karl Kesel (another Grummett-created series painfully short), and I can say I actually had to swallow my pride and read X-MEN FOREVER. Unnerving prospect, obviously.


In comparison to other superhero comics released today, and maybe as a response to "decompressed" story-telling (stretching out a plot and ladling exposition while de-emphasizing physical action and development...soap opera plotting in other words), writer Chris Claremont kicks off with the death of the biggest X-Men star in the world and doesn't stop to breathe as he unleashes one crazy event after another. It looks like Claremont said "F*ck it, you want change? You want character development? You want your socks knocked off?"

I can't say I'm an X-Men fan, but Claremont and Grummett are doing some cool new stuff, and it's worth seeking out. Hard to believe, but there you go.

Man on a Mission Movies

I just saw MORITURI (1965) for the first time, starring Marlon Brando and Yul Brenner. Really well done flick, not the least due to the performances, and the music by Jerry Goldsmith. This is a "man on a mission" movie, where a man or men are put in a position to carry out a mission of some kind, at any cost. Usually this involves the military, during some World War or Cold War, and often involving espionage. In a lot of cases, the man on the mission is in mortal danger, sometimes from both sides of a conflict, and most of the time the man on the mission can only achieve his goal at the closest instant of death.

I love a good man-on-a-mission movie, which are basically extinct today. The adult audiences of the 1960s/1970s for whom the sub-genre emerged, had a clear understanding of the stories. They perceived, as veterans and children of War, that the man-on-a-mission story has a depth and width modern audiences cannot see. Past audiences grasped the undeniable forces which thrust ordinary people into extraordinary circumstances, as a responsibility and duty, and an oppression of their individuality. "The needs of the many..." sometimes outweigh the individual in a man-on-a-mission flick.

Modern audiences understand catalysts only when they are personal, which is why revenge is such a time-honored excuse for a mission of any type. The secret agent must break the Communist stronghold on a tiny nation not because democracy demands it, but because the secret agent's wife was raped and murdered by the General in charge.

A military personality can easily understand the "mission" as it pertains to the greater good, while the movie-going audience mostly expects catharsis. The deft handling of the two, in a man-on-a-mission scenario, is how some truly original movies got made.

For my money, some of the best examples of the man-on-a-mission are pure action movies based around specific time periods and the fields of Wars, such as FORCE 10 FROM NAVARONE (1978) and THE DIRTY DOZEN (1967). Espionage sweats out in such movies as OPERATION CROSSBOW (1965), THE CHAIRMAN (1969) and FIREFOX (1982).

DAY OF THE JACKAL (1973) introduces the concept of Terrorism and counter-Terrorism, while THE DOGS OF WAR (1981) displays the vicious cycle of mercenary involvements in Third World countries post-Vietnam.

Thematically, the man-on-a-mission relentlessly pursues his/their objective in other varied movies. RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981) follows the set-up of the professional civilian impressed into service by U.S. Intelligence, centered around the pre-World War retrieval of a golden trump card from the nefarious Nazis. And THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)twists the concept, as the faceless powers behind the politicians carve their ideograms and dogmas into the national consciousness.

Some odd admissions into man-on-a-mission movies are the "Disaster Movie". THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (1972) in particular relays the impossible course taken by survivors on an overturned ocean liner. The survivors are given little hope, but the one hope they have is to reach the bottom of the ship, which is on the surface of the water, in hopes of being saved.

Another variation is ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981), in which the man-on-a-mission takes on a nihilistic future society. SORCERER (1977) gives us the cumulative stories of men on the edge of civilization assigned a brutish suicide mission of transporting nitroglycerine through almost-impassable jungle, in military transport trucks.

Perhaps the most odd version of the man-on-a-mission would be BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (1974), which begins as an incidental plot to obtain money by people with no hope, and ends with one man's appropriation of the mission (referred to in the title) as his only remaining goal in life. A kind of madness descends on the broken man whose only sympathetic listener is the rotting head of a corpse. But in a way this is the most obvious symbol of resistance to the imposition of the mission, and the last rebellion of the hopeless.


It's interesting to note that the man-on-a-mission movie hasn't been revisited much since the early 1980s. I'm sure there have been, and I'll probably remember them soon enough. But the sampling of movies above show the deterministic streak of popular culture of that time, the will to individualism. It wasn't necessary to fully explain the consequences of the mission, just that success was survival, and failure a certain death. This is almost an incidence of existing in a chaotic world, and modern audiences are less inclined to be "put upon" for a greater good. The hope of accomplishing a secret mission, a vital struggle unseen by the public and perhaps forgotten in time with the protagonist dead in some unmarked ditch, does not set well with an audience raised on the ideal of money and fame for the most incidental and insipid accomplishments (reality television anyone?)

So it doesn't surprise me that the man-on-a-mission movie holds no interest today. Such a movie requires a internal check, a question of accepting the greater good, a fearless examination of how far an individual will go to ultimately remain an individual, even while being ground into pieces by the gears of military politics or ill-fated timing. And beyond that, to confront the fear that even the most supreme act might be meaningless. Or again, immeasurably forgotten. Submerged beneath all good intent, and all greater good.

Halloween Cover Calvacade!

Probably my favorite monster/weird comic book covers. There's never a time not to show them off!

Burly Reading: NIGHT OF THE PHOENIX by Nelson De Mille

Sometime in the heyday of 1975, Nelson DeMille, or De Mille as it's spelled on this book, had a paperback release of a novel called NIGHT OF THE PHOENIX. The publishing house is "Manor Books Inc. God knows what became of Manor Books Inc. It looks to be a Brit company. The cover shows a yellow police badge graphic with the name "Keller", with the startlingly cool image of a hardened police dick (who bears more than a physical resemblance to Bruce Dern in THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN and THE DRIVER) shoving his .38 revolver right into the reader's face.
The cover copy has the title (smaller than "Keller", which indicates this is a Keller Novel, part of a series) and beneath that: "Life is hard for a cop like Keller. If he caught a bullet in the head, it could ruin his whole day."

That's why the 1970s was so cool, folks. Stuff like that.

So that's even before you crack open this 224-page gem, which also has a seal of approval on the cover in the form of "BRUTALLY AUTHENTIC." The publishers are obviously letting the reader know that this isn't going to be an Agatha Christie book.

What begins, in the novel, at a point in Vietnam of 1972 and ends in New York City 1975, is a vicious little pulp novel worth every pound you might have paid for it. A CIA assassin named Morgan is left to die by his superiors in 'Nam, and reappears years later to exact revenge by nauseating torture. A Dirty Harry-Plus Det. Sgt. Joe Keller is drawn into conflict with Morgan, with no punches pulled.

Nelson DeMille is one of those Name Authors people recognize. Movies have been made from his books. He's done good. Back in 1975, he wrote this series of books about Det. Sgt. Joe Keller, and like a dirty secret you can barely find any information about them at all. DeMille's website doesn't even mention them. You'd never know they existed. No one even mentions them much online. Surely somebody read these books. Sometime in the late 1980s, the books were reprinted under DeMille's "Jack Cannon" pen name.

In America, Det. Sgt. Keller becomes Det. Sgt. Joe Ryker, which sounds much tougher to American ears. I own one of the official Rykers, but haven't read it yet. "The Sniper" (RYKER # 1) was published by Leisure Books in August of 1974.

NIGHT OF THE PHOENIX would be RYKER # 4 of the five books in the series. Smack in the middle of the paperback is an ad for Kent Deluxe Length Cigarettes. I'm not a smoker and that makes me nostalgic as hell. It verfies a man read these books. They were written for men with long sideburns to enjoy, while smoking a Kent.

I urge you to strike out and find yourself NIGHT OF THE PHOENIX. As an artifact of the 1970s, my version of the paperback is fascinating enough. The actual story is a tight, ground-glass thriller, as ugly as it sounds but pulled off with the grace of an uppercut in the scrotum.

Why DeMille seems disassociated with these lurid roots is a mystery, or rather not much of a mystery, considering where he is. Who knows? Lawrence Block (8 MILLION WAYS TO DIE and other suspense thrillers) has stated he wrote porn novels in his formative years. I imagine a fleet of lawyers keep those books from ever seeing the light of day again. It's understandable, I guess, but kind of sad as well. Still, I think DeMille and Block probably figure there's nothing particularly interesting about these works. You can find a plethora of such novels and movies all through the decade, some better and some a lot worse. No need to dredge up more, per se.

But I kind of wish we could, when reading something as cool and tough as NIGHT OF THE PHOENIX.

All images of badasses courtesy of the 1970s (and notable posters from http://www.wrongsideoftheart.com/!

What Should Have Happened: Gil Kane's WEREWOLF BY NIGHT!

"You know What Should Have Happened?"

This is a question that I use to torture myself when I consider how events might have gone in the past. Like you imagine what John Carpenter's CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON might have been like, had that movie ever been made back in his prime (as rumored). Or you imagine a The Shadow movie directed by Sam Raimi (could happen.) Or you think you came up with, like, the greatest comic book fight ever (Fantastic Four Human Torch vs the 1940s android Human Torch), only to find out it was done a couple years before you were born.


In that vein, "What Should Have Happened?" considers, well, what could have happened if the looking glass had gotten tilted just a little more, if the chicken bones had landed just another way. We might be reading/seeing something more different, more fantastic, than we could imagine.

So in the spirit of All Hallow's Eve, I thought I'd mention the underrated WEREWOLF BY NIGHT comic of the 1970s and what it might have done to become mentioned in the same hallowed breath as TOMB OF DRACULA.

And his name was Gil Kane.

Kane had been a superhero standard for DC Comics throughout the 1960s, pencilling classic runs on THE ATOM and GREEN LANTERN prominently. His dynamic compositions were unrivalled, though Kane certainly had detractors. He leaped onto the Marvel bandwagon at some point in the late 1960s and plugged away at various titles like AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, THE INCREDIBLE HULK and CAPTAIN AMERICA AND THE FALCON.

I never cared much for Kane's artwork. That's a fault in me, folks. I never approached a Kane comic and thought, "Hot damn! Gil Kane!" like I would other artists. Latter years Carmine Infantino and Frank Robbins fell into that category of bringing out my apathy, both as a kid and an adult. But, as with everything, it's basic ignorance that is shown up in the end, and after seeing Infantino's seminal THE FLASH work from the early 1960s, and Frank Robbins' feral renderings of THE SHADOW in the short-lived 1970s venture, I had to stifle any misgivings. So it was with Gil Kane and WEREWOLF BY NIGHT.

The short summation of WEREWOLF BY NIGHT: the series lasted three years, centered on a young teenage dude named Jack Russell (yeah, terrible pun in the name) who has inherited a lycanthropic curse once he hits eighteen years of age. Every phase of the full moon he turns into a ravaging Wolf Man, and the bulk of the series involves him trying to break his curse and save his younger sister before she, in turn, suffers the same curse.

WWBN's art chores were handled by the great Mike Ploog initially, and then workman Don Perlin (above) arrived for the bulk of the series. Doug Moench wrote almost all of the series, but for most of the first issues it was Gerry Conway and Len Wein writing. There were some good stories there, but nobody seemed to get a solid handle on WWBN. Marv Wolfman ("Finally! A Wolfman writes a Werewolf!") came onboard in strong fashion, with the aforementioned Gil Kane for the two-part "Hangman" arc.

Gil Kane only penciled those two issues of WWBN, 11 and 12, with the fantastic splash presented above. The next issue was Kane inked by Don Perlin, who would take over art chores soon. The story concerns the "Werewolf" (okay, I'm going to call him "Wolf Man" because a werewolf is a man who turns into a literal wolf, as in folklore, while a Wolf Man is a wolf/man hybrid created by the movies in the 1940s...which is what WWBN's adventures are about, a Wolf Man) and a masked avenger called "The Hangman" duke it out in Gil Kane-rendered dynamism. The Hangman is a vigilante who not only saves women from being robbed and raped on the city streets, but he kidnaps those victims himself and imprisons them in his secret lair. Why? So he can protect them. This was quite a story, one of the many gems at the beginning (and at the end) of the series.

Aside from Tom Sutton's artwork on another two-parter (and who knows why that association didn't take off...Sutton never seemed to work on anything at Marvel or anywhere else very long, far as I know), Kane brought a new kind of sensibility to his bombastic superhero style: the art of terror and suspense.

Some might say it wasn't a good fit, but I don't know. I see some interesting stuff going on with Kane's Wolf Man.

I know Don Perlin was a solid artist, the kind who, like Don Heck and Sal Buscema, kept churning out the comics on schedule for Marvel in the 1970s.

Not to say Perlin wasn't good, but when compared with the beautiful power of Gene Colan and Tom Palmer's classic TOMB OF DRACULA work (and you see their version of the Wolf Man of WWBN above), WWBN suffered in comparison.

I'll probably say WWBN never acheived the "classic" status due to the art, mostly (though admittedly writer Moench never quite hit on a solid formula for WEREWOLF...the secondary characters didn't have the same life as in his subsequent MASTER OF KUNG FU series. To be honest, WEREWOLF BY NIGHT and Moench's other creation Moon Knight suffered the same lack of interesting subplots, which TOMB OF DRACULA scribe Marv Wolfman excelled at). Still in all, WWBN is a solid read, even if Perlin's art looks mechanical at times. It's still good, but not as good as some of the other stuff of that era that critics hold up as pure gold.

So I was thinking about Gil Kane and what might have happened, had Kane been the artist of WWBN beginning with issue 11. He certainly did some covers for the book, reproduced here. All I keep thinking is how Kane's work looked at that time, how the art had a sensual richness to it that would prevade Kane's work the rest of his career. Couple that with Kane's obvious desire to "break free" of superhero comics (with his dabbling in Richard Stark-esque hard crime stuff with his "Savage" stories for independent publishers), and I just wonder if an opportunity was missed.

I wonder if Gil Kane might have produced one of the best comics of the 1970s in those years. Who knows?

But there's something, something savage and watchful, hiding in those covers. Something that will attack, and tear, and rip, if given the chance. I mean, something is there.

Isn't there?