2009 About Done, And About Godd*mn Time!

I still haven't gotten so old that I start to wax nostalgic about all the past years that have come and gone in my 39 pulse-pounding years of life.

No, I still see the end of 2009 and say, "F*ck it! Let's get to 2010!"

Frankly, there's nothing about 2009 to hold up and study, or reflect on. No Horatio's Skull to be found here. A whole bunch of people crying over the economy. A blizzard in Virginia for the first time since 1996 or whatever it was. I busted up with a girl. I injured the tissues in my chest and thought I had a heart attack, but it was just a sign of getting older. I'm nearer the end of my life than the beginning. These are high points in an otherwise non-detailed year.

Nothing I saw or read as entertainment utterly changed me, though I had some mind-boggling moments. The best thing I read all year was Darwyn Cooke's adaption of Richard Stark's THE HUNTER. It's a fabulous taste of severe criminal. I can't say Cooke is doing anything but the Lord's work in his endeavor to reproduce Stark's blocky, uncompromising prose into illustration. You just cannot imagine two things going together better than Cooke and Stark.

Other notables are the ongoing SCALPED trades, each one of which gets more sweaty and desperate than the last.

One of the best things I watched all year, for certain, is this made-for-Internet video from some flick called 500 DAYS OF SUMMER. It's magic, no joke.



Though not movies released in 2009, some of the more memorable, flat-out fun ones were:

PUNISHER: WAR ZONE, which illicited all kinds of pissing and moaning from "fans" of the property. I dislike the Punisher visually and in conceit, in comics, but this movie provided mounds of action value. WAR ZONE is homage movie about the 1980s action genre, without all the snide self-awareness.

David Mamet's REDBELT, a well-done movie about Mixed Martial Arts, for all intents. Mamet always goes over the top and doesn't hesitate to do so here. But it's Mamet and it's almost impossible not to be thrilled by Mamet-Speak and the strong assured hand he brings to directing his own work.

Another solid action entry is TAKEN, about Liam Neeson doing what you know Liam Neeson can do: give an intense goddam stare in the seconds before beating down on a man until you hear the man shit his pants. The whole movie is just that, and I had a wonderful time. I might have shit my pants while watching it, in fact.

I watched a Chinese ecological "animals gone wild) horror movie from the early 1980s called CALAMITY OF SNAKES. If you have an aversion to hundreds of real "attacking" snakes being killed, don't watch it. If you're ready to freak out, do watch it.

Mario Bava's BAY OF BLOOD was another head-slapper. Some things have to be seen to be seen.

MORITURI with Marlon Brando and Yul Brenner was the best Man on a Mission movie I saw. Fantastic production and Jerry Goldsmith score. Just superb.


The one flick I did see released this year, CRANK 2: HIGH VOLTAGE, was so insane and visceral that, again, it was hard to tell if it was really happening or if it was all in my head. Again, like WAR ZONE and most of the other high-point flicks here, not many are expected to love these movies. I loved them because they all did something different and affected me in different ways. They created unforgettable images, and wonderfully fun quotes, and I can't thank most of them enough.

So anyway, I'm ready to be done already with 2009. Like I was ready to be done with 2008. And like I'll be ready to move on from 2010. But at least there is the hope, the geniune hope, of some kind of unknown disaster or critical happiness or essential success, somewhere in the future. Or if not, at least the ability to say, "F*ck it! Next year will be better!"

And maybe it will.

Wishing Everybody a Better Than Swell Christmas!

Had a pretty enjoyable Christmas day. Unlike real people, I'm not burdened with a wife and kids, but sometimes that can be considered a good thing. Like, I get to sleep in more than most people my age. And during gatherings, I get to split whenever the mood strikes me. But I must say, I got some cool swag from friends, some good food as well, watched RIFIFI (Jules Dassin heist movie from 1955) for a movie evening. And for me, that's damn near a perfect day.

Blog Called on Account of Novel

Sometimes I don't know what the hell is wrong with me.

I guess everyone could stand to say that to themselves now and again. I seem to say it all the time. I'm lazy, but not in the usual way. It's more like I'm obsessively lazy. I'll do anything instead of the most important thing. So I'll spend too much time reading about old baseball players from the 1970s instead of writing my novel(s).

I haven't put anything on my page here and it depresses me. It's like when I keep putting off doing the burpees/shadow-boxing exercise which keeps me (in my mind) in fighting shape. Actually not really in fighting shape, or much shape, but at least I feel like I'm not a flabby blob. Which when you're 39 is something you can turn into fairly quickly.

By the way, a "burpee" is a particular kind of exercise which is really good for your bod. Seen here in action:



But as I was saying, blogging ain't exactly an easy job either. Yet it's sort of necessary, if for nothing else to have a "place" in this current world. Which is sad, but true.

One of the problems I have is how ready I am to quit. Quitting is a disease. "F*ck this, I'm out of here!" type quitting, for you Will Ferrell fans. I'll quit in this aggressive manner in order to put all the blame on everyone else. Which works wonders when you have to live with yourself.

I'm writing the latest incarnation of my novel series, which is like saying I've built my new rocket to the moon. I'm not an astro-engineer, if you understand, thus my "rocket" won't exactly make it to the moon. The same could be said for being a writer.

A "writer" really is a state of mind. It's a general statement about a position in life, a career choice once dominated by very romantic notions. With the surging Internet populace, and blogs, everybody is a "writer." Saying you're a writer in today's world is like saying you're a biped. The classification has lost whatever romance it ever had, and we aren't marveling at being able to stride upright. Not since we first did it, way back when Arthur C. Clarke's Monolith from outer space taught our Neanderthal ancestors how.

A writer of novels is nearly anachronistic, considering the death of the written word (again, Internet). People say there will always be novels as long as there are stories, but is that really true? I just saw the "official" sequel to Bram Stoker's DRACULA in a bookstore today. Did that story need to be "official"? Whose ego was stroked by being the one to write a sequel to DRACULA? Isn't that like writing the sequel to MOBY DICK? Does this "official" sequel officially cancel out all other incarnations of Dracula ever seen in print, television and the movies?

So what I mean is that I feel antiquated before I've even had a chance to succeed with a writing career. I'm no dummy, wooden head and heart. But it doesn't take a genius to be a writer. It takes craft, and determination, and at least respecting the genre being operated in. If you're not writing genre, you aren't interested in being published. Which still doesn't mean you have to write the 500th knockoff of "CSI" or some zombie thing or, god help us, DRACULA. But you can write the genre with an eye toward an evergreen approach. Used to be, writers like Richard Matheson, Harlan Ellison, Stephen King, Ross Macdonald, Richard Stark and John D. MacDonald did exactly that. They defeated expectations by producing original work of high craft, but genre stories all the same.

I'm a little weak where the novel is coming from, in this case. My case. THE HUNGERING DOORWAY is the first in a series. Same protagonist, Thurman Dart, who is in fact never the same man in any of the books. He may look the same, sound the same, and have the same fighting style, but he's different every time. He has a new identity. Or rather, a new identity to him. He's a little bit Len Wein and Carmine Infantino's comic book character "the Human Target", a little Cordwainer Bird (see Harlan Ellison), and a shake cheese of "The Prisoner." I want to pull off having a character who is motivated only by what he pretends to be. More importantly, Thurman Dart exists in a world where the Pulp characters like Tarzan and Doc Savage and the Shadow have actually lived and influenced the culture, and history. I want to focus on a man like Dart who is "more" than human, as the Pulps tend to be, and yet he can only function when he is one of "us." Any of us would want to be Thurman Dart, but Dart spends all his time trying to be "ordinary" in order to fulfill his mission. He's a sasquatch trying to wear a suit. And of course his jobs often bring him into direct conflict with other Pulps, who seem to have withdrawn into their own secret society in recent decades.

If all this sounds derivative, then I've actually accomplished part of the goal. At any rate, my blogging may suffer at times, but I feel it's important not to quit. Keep doing burpees, keep doing the blog, and finally accomplish the goal of forging this series of books I've always wanted to do. Plus, with the gauntlet thrown here, I'll be expected to carry through. God knows I rarely expect it.

Dave Flora Illustrates "Varney the Vampire", And All That That Implies

http://www.feastofblood.com/


The man behind Ghost Zero and Doc Monster takes on the original vampire epic, transmuted from "penny dreadful" to "webcomic." Two hundred and thirty-plus episodes heading our way! Dave Flora is doing us a solid, so pay him back with a gesture of love!

Burly Movies: THE MANITOU

I saw THE MANITOU (1978) last night and it felt wrong.

That's not to say that's a bad thing. THE MANITOU is based on a book I've never read by Graham Masterson, who has made a habit of making money off of the gory horror craze of the 1980s. Again, I've never been drawn to his work.

But I'm a Tony Curtis man, who stars here as a huckster Tarot reader who has an ex-girlfriend who woke up with a huge lump on the back of her neck. This woman goes to some doctors who discover the rapidly-growing lump is, in fact, a f*cking fetus!

So, worse than that, every time the doctors try to operate and remove the growth, some malevolent invisible force possesses anyone in reach to hurt and even kill themselves.

This doesn't sit well with Curtis, who proceeds to use his contacts in the more legit supernatural circles to discover that the fetus is a 400-year old Tribal medicine man (and, it turns out, the baddest-ass of them all). The medicine man died in the past, but sent his "manitou", or spirit force, into the Beyond between time and space, to attach itself to a person or animal and become corporeal once more. Of course, the problem is that the innocent victim providing the medicine man's re-entry will die.

Curtis and another Tribal medicine man played by the great Michael Ansara embark on a remake of THE EXORCIST, to rid the world of the evil medicine man. And if you think you know what that means, visually, I'm here to tell you you don't.

The end of THE MANITOU is a feast of crazed late-1970s special effects, complete with 1970s tape reels, naked boobs, outer space, fireballs, killer meteors, midgets, Star Wars laser effects, boobs, midgets, psychedelic-effect Cthulhu Dark God, and explosions.

If that sounds like the greatest ending of all time, it isn't. But you cannot blame THE MANITOU for trying. And if nothing else, you will have a blast trying to imagine how freaked out people were when they first saw it. Or how embarrassed. I mean, the composer god Lalo Schifrin (MAGNUM FORCE and the greatest television theme of all time, "Mission: Impossible") does the soundtrack for this thing. Burgess Meredith appears in one of his many latter-years cameos, absolutely taking over the screen. And Tony Curtis looks like he's there to have fun and lay some dames. Which you know he did.

A crazy flick, and well worth seeking out for that Friday night when you can't imagine anything better than watching a woman give birth to a midget out of her back.

Veteran's Day: the Two Best Things to Come Out of WW 2

A dead Hitler, for one.

For another, this guy:

Sports Attack: Burly View on Warren Moon

I grew up and still live around Fredericksburg, VA, and the one thing I got sick of hearing about pretty quick was how great the Washington Redskins were.

The first Super Bowl I ever even partially watched when I was a kid turned out to be the game where Marcus Allen and the Raiders wiped up the field with the Redskins, circa 1983. And I for one was happy about it.

My old car mechanic grandfather didn't seem to give a wet one about sports in general, outside of Nascar, which back then was a totally different animal than today. And boxing, back when you could catch a championship fight on the television live.

The Redskins were one of the top franchises of the 1980s, winning two Super Bowls out of three and coming back for a third win in 1991. Lots of Virginia born and bred followed that team...the Baltimore Colts had deserted the area, but the Redskins and their racially-divisive name and iconography remained.

The Carters, the male side of the two halves making up me, had a vested interest in the Dallas Cowboys. Don't know where they picked it up, but the fanmanship for the 'Boys probably stems from Dallas' general popularity since their inception. I don't think any of the Carters ever set foot in Dallas, Texas, but then that's true of many Cowboys supporters.

Now, the idea of supporting the "local" team never really occured to me, partly due to this alienated behavior among the Carter uncles, sons of my grandfather. My own father had about as much interest in sports as the man in the moon, but the uncles laid down the greenbacks in heavy fashion when the inevitable Redskins-Cowboys showdown occured. This was a standard conversational prodding among all younger men, and being a kid I was basically frightened by the intensity and anger which flowed from them. It didn't help that my 16 year old first cousin, Alan Carter, was a high school football star for the Courtland High School Cougars in the waning 1970s, early 1980s. The Carter men responded to the ritual of professional football and the wagering with drunken, bearded strangers. I just considered it all a part of something I'd never be part of: sports.

True to my word, I didn't think about or play sports throughout public schooling. In fact I "failed" gym class three years running. How one manages to do this is as complicated as Houdini escaping the watery coffin, but it was done.

Sometime after high school, working around the working men of Morton's Garage in Spotsylvania, I was again besieged with the banter of the sports enthusiasts around me. Something about the ferocity and humor, and the esoteric knowledge of players, coaches, and the colleges which had borne them, interested me. I recall asking one grizzled Redskin fan about the NFL game, and what it was all about.

I was instructed to watch a game on television, November 3rd, 1991, between the Redskins (undefeated halfway through the 16-game season) and the Houston Oilers, a 7-1American Football Conference underdog with a black quarterback named Warren Moon, captain of one of the most explosive offenses in the League.

When I watched the game, I had no idea what was going on. I watched it alone. I didn't know how many downs for a first down. It was like watching a fire, out of control. I couldn't relate to it.

But my general distaste for the Redskins' villainy (perceived in the inescapable hatred of their marching band, who all wore Indian garb and Chief's headdresses, in a display which disgusted me), and the gorgeous, angelic white of the Oilers uniforms, formed the good vs evil dynamic I'd grown up on, in superhero comic books, movies, and the like. Warren Moon, a smoothly handsome black man (and a rare non-white at the position of QB, for those long-ago days) and a rock-solid persona on the field, standing tall and brave, made him iconic. Like many sports fans, I perceived the innate heroism of the game...because it was not just a game. It was a battle of ideology as well, the evils of a titanically racist NFL regime vs the bold integrity of the underdog. Who, by the way, fought to the end, taking the superior Redskins into overtime before Moon threw a gorgeous interception to Hall of Fame cornerback Darryl Green, leading to a Redskins field goal and victory.

In total, at 2o years of age, I had seen the perfect football game, touching on all the important themes I'd developed my whole life. For all my dislike of the Redskins, it was their role as villain which simplified the game enough for me to understand. For the Oilers' part, and Warren Moon, they drew me to their bright potential, like a moth to flame.

The Oilers are defunct as a franchise today. In their day, they were considered perennial disappointments...a team of great potential never fulfilled. In fact, they were termed "chokers", never having the fortitude to win against what might be considered inferior teams in the Playoffs (and blowing a 35-point lead to the Buffalo Bills in the greatest team collapse in Playoff history). The Oilers were moved to Tennessee in the late 1990s, changed by Bud Adams into the Titans with a new draft pick black quarterback named Steve "Air" McNair, who would in time come within a yard of winning a Super Bowl some years later. Like the Oilers franchise, Steve McNair is no longer, but when he played he had a physical resemblance to Warren Moon, though without the smoothness and intelligence of Moon. But in the end, Warren Moon failed to win a championship; he's a Hall of Famer, the most prolific passer in professional history, but he didn't win it all. As one of those hard working men told me, Moon "would trade every yard he passed for to win a championship. Ask him." I have no doubt of it.

The Oilers broke my heart, and Moon for all his ability would fail with other teams as well. You could take the player out of Houston, but never take the Houston out of the player. As good as Moon made his teams, they never won consistently when it counted. Watching Moon proudly stand in the haze of another Playoff loss with his helmet hanging from his hand, preparing to talk to the media and, in mere weeks after, appear in the Pro Bowl, the annual celebration of The Best in the game, I could only feel agonized. That helmet must have been as heavy as an asteroid, and in those moments of loss as alien to our atmosphere. I can only say that many of today's players, in all sports, would learn much from watching Moon in those moments. To carry oneself knowing that young men, like me, looked up to you, expecting more than the player could possibly give, was a weight no ordinary man is comfortable with. But enduring? Yes, always.

Hell's Squeaky Spinner Rack: 11-1-09

There's a new Fantastic Four comic book in town, drawn in a very cool, very evocative style by Dale Eaglesham. The writer is Jonathan Hickman, who's had success in smaller "independent" comics, I guess. I've never read anything by him. In the first three issues of his FF run, he pretty much asserts the cosmic granduer of the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby years fused with the core values of family, loyalty, love and poignancy found in that same 100-plus issue run.

Hard to say how this will all shake out. Dwayne McDuffie and Paul Pellitier's FF run from a little while back was probably the best FF I'd read since John Byrne's seminal work in the 1980s, but McDuff's run didn't last nearly as long. A true shame. So it's hard to get excited about any comic book run in this day and age. Even with Hickman, in a text piece at the end of his third issue, assuring us there are "years" worth of adventures ready to be told.

I haven't bought an ish of FF since the late 1980s. I've read some since, I've bought some back issues and marveled over the mediocrity of what came after I jumped ship. But just Friday I bought FF 572 and was, well, happy about it.

I mean, Hickman and Eaglesham have even brought back the cool retro logo that I grew up with in the late 1970s, complete with new icon heads.



And in purchasing FF once more, I felt good about it, like something was right. Who knows how long that will last?

On another Marvel Comics related note, Agents of Atlas is having a two-issue crossover with the Evil Empire of the Uncanny X-Men comics, to soon become a back-up in the same X-comic.

The horrible fate I feel may befall me is being forced to buy X-MEN if I want to continue to read Jeff Parker's great pulp-adventure series. But it's impossible to avoid at this point, since I love AoA, and nobody has a better grasp on this iteration of these Pulp archetypes than Parker right now. So I'm stuck. About the only good thing I can say is that Parker is also writing the X-focus book. So at least I can stand to read that as well.

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/!