Burly Dames: Genevieve Bujold

Sometimes you see a woman who stirs in you the idea: If I could, I would love her forever.

Like most women who really knock me out in life and culture, I didn't think much of Bujold when I first saw her, in the movie COMA back in the 1980s. I had a whole alternate view of what beauty was back then.

Then I was watching a Sherlock Holmes flick with Christopher Plummer and James Mason, at some point in the early 1990s, called MURDER BY DECREE. Directed by the guy who made PORKY'S, believe it or not, a solid procedural about Holmes and Watson hunting Jack the Ripper. Bujold pops up in what amounts to a cameo, as a patient in an insane asylum who wasn't insane until her heart was broken and she was conspiratorally locked away from the eyes of Man. Plummmer's Sherlock Holmes essentially falls in love with Bujold's shattered character. And so did I.

In some other world, some other life, I kissed her ear while walking in tall grass. Aye, but I did.

Burly Living: What I Learned from Frank Frazetta

I was reading a huge interview with Frazetta just recently. I'd always had Frazetta in my periphery. I knew him for the Conan paperback covers. I remember as a kid being a little freaked out by his paintings. I was a bit of a poosy as a kid, so forgive me. I thought they were neat, but scary in a "I'm glad I'm not a f*cking Viking" sort of way. By chance, just a year ago or so, I somehow discovered Frazetta had been working in the 1950s, had been ground-zero for the pulp mags back in the Real Day, where it was REAL. I saw some of his work and thought, "Sheet, I've been missing out on Frazetta."

Soonafter, I stumbled across the Comics Journal Library edition with the massive Frazetta interview in it. Also some glorious discussions with the great Russ Heath and Russ Manning. In this interview, Frazetta points out where the strength in his figures, his Conans and Death Dealers, actually comes from. It's not about drawing body builders, whom Frazetta called "idiotic." It's all about the glutes. Strength, real strength in actual fighting men, is generated by the muscles of the butt.


And this was a revelation to me, for some reason. Frazetta was probably a better athlete than he was an artist. I think he was drafted by the San Franscisco Giants. He was a fighting street tough in the 1950s, and in the 1970s picked up martial arts with the same natural ease. Brilliant, but never pretentious, about anything he picked up. Frazetta enjoyed life. Until his health problems started to cloud his days, I get the impression Frazetta was 100 percent in on the game of life. Strokes reduced his drawing hand to a twisted claw, and he was teaching himself to draw left-handed. And it was still recognizably Frazetta.

So when Frazetta says a strong ass is necessary for a strong fighter, I believe him. His uncanny anatomy understanding made him a giant.

Recently I snatched up the only copy of a reprint title of Frazetta and Gardner Fox's THUN'DA TALES. Thun'da is Frazetta's Tarzan knock-off, in the 1950s. And when I say the art in this thing blew me away, I'm not kidding. It was like somebody took Joe Kubert and John Buscema and fused them into one god-like being. Thun'da is fantastic stuff, thoroughly pulptastic but unlike anything you've quite seen before.

I guess I'm trying to say, it's good to discover Frazetta, to really appreciate him at a time when he's passed on. Vikings beware...Frazetta is coming.

Burly Movies: ALONE IN THE DARK (1982)

I remember seeing this movie when I was a kid, in the 1980s. Back in those days, in order to get cable television, you had to order a black box programmed by the cable company to allow the cable channels to appear on the television. My mother only wanted "basic cable", the new gamet of channels that were one step above "regular television." Mind-expanding channels like Music Television and Turner Broadcasting.

The cable installer, some beefy local, informed my mother post-attachment of the beetle-like black box to our TV that he'd brought the wrong box. This box was programmed to allow access to all the more expensive cable channels, the ones we couldn't afford monthly, like HBO, Showtime, and the Movie Channel. So, with a wink, the cable guy said, "Well, you don't tell, I won't tell." And thus did my fatherless household become blessed with the Holy Trinity of movie channels. And it didn't take long to figure out that late night cable television was a haven of every early-1980s videotape horror/Alien rip-off/Italian zombie/Slasher movie made up to that point. This included a vast selection of softcore porn. The 1980s cable experience was everything a young teenage boy needed to become a man.

Among other mind-blowing movies like THE BURNING and THE SOLDIER, I recall anticipating ALONE IN THE DARK and being somewhat disappointed. The big draw was Martin Landau, a bit older and returned from deep space after his adventures as Commander Koenig on "Space 1999." Here, he plays a firebug/knife-wielding maniac known as "Preacher", because as the orderly explains, Preacher was a holy man who "likes to burn churches. Only problem, they usually have people in'em." Erland van Lidth, a hulking presence in the movie and far lesser known, plays a brutish child-molester by way of King Kong. A monster, to be sure, and yet not without some sympathy. Craggy, dependable, and menacing Jack Palance rounds out the crazies as a disturbed war veteran. Additionally, Dr. Loomis from HALLOWEEN, the inimitable Donald Pleasance, is again a quirky psychologist.

So the three lunatics escape Palance's asylum in order to lay siege to their new analyst's family, trapped in their farmhouse in a reversal of the previous status quo. I don't remember being riveted by this flick when I saw it as a teen, but I found ALONE IN THE DARK very effective as a middle-aged f*cker. Surprisingly, characters act with reasonable caution and understandable stress, but unlike most '80s horror flicks, logic is adhered to for the most part.

Topping it off, the ending of the movie shows one of the maniacs integrating into the subculture of a violent, twisted society. Turns out, ALONE IN THE DARK is making some very pointed accusations about culture, and the mystery of insanity.

If you've never seen this movie, I recommend it highly. A solid, unassuming thriller with some nice jumps and solid "crazy" performances by a trio of genre veterans. Nobody will be calling for ALONE IN THE DARK to be referentially referred, but I'll call it a minor classic and leave it at that.

Burly Living (Burly Dead): Audie Murphy

Arlington National Cemetery, yesterday. I know everybody and their mother has seen Audie Murphy's grave, but I hadn't. It was a blast, considering Audie Murphy might jump out of the ground and kick my a** at any moment! Or at least that's how it felt.



Just that little grave marker, just like any other soldier. Pretty cool, I must say.

Burly Movies: ZOMBIELAND

ZOMBIELAND is kind of false advertising. When I think of a zombie, I think of a slow, shambling Romero zombie. Of course the remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD a few years ago moronically suggested zombies can run, jump, do all kinds of neat frenetic sh*t. Boring and stupid barely covers it. Anyway, even movies involving mindless flesh-craving maniacs, like the excellent 28 WEEKS LATER, who live only to spread their virus, has been classified as a "zombie flick."

Complaining gets us nowhere in the current culture. I won't call viral outbreak movies "zombie" movies, since a zombie is technically dead and "infected" people aren't dead. If someone was really clever, they'd make a movie about what happens when infected maniacs fight Romero zombies. That'd be kind of cool.

See, the running zombie will never frighten me. It's like making a movie about vampire teddy bears. It's ridiculous unless you're afraid of such things already. Since logically there should never be a running zombie, I guess I find them hard to take seriously.

Romero's zombies, of course, creep. They are easily escaped from by another who can run fast and far. Except there are a lot of Romero zombies, and they never stop creeping. Eventually they always catch up, because you have to rest, you have to sleep, you have to forage for food. And they'll creep up, and sooner or later they'll drag you down. Not only that, but one of them will probably be your dead old dad or your toddler. You'll know their name, which you get to scream while they feast on your intestines.

That's what scares the crimson butter out of me about Romero zombies. It's all contextual and social and, well, horrific.

Which brings us to ZOMBIELAND, which is a comedy. I didn't see this until recently despite being drawn to zombies of all types, Italian and Japanese and you name it. I fear the "zombie comedy" in the wake of SHAUN OF THE DEAD, which respected the sub-genre while still telling a smart, funny story. ZOMBIELAND doesn't fall into that category, since it isn't about zombies. It's about people infected by a virus, who develop into maniacal cannibals.

Which is keen. I can deal with cannibals, even cannibals who are called zombies even though a zombie can't be a "cannibal" any more than a shark can be a fisherman. They may both eat the same thing, but they aren't remotely the same species. Not when one of them are dead. Cannibalism is a conscious desire to eat human flesh. Zombies are driven by a mysterious primitive urge buried in their dim recesses.

The cannibals in ZOMBIELAND, like many in these "running zombie" times, lack "personality." With the creeping zombie you have a chance to identify the zombie by his clothing, his skin color, or the way he was killed. This is how you get "characters" like Clown Zombie and Butcher Zombie and whatever Social Caste Zombie you want to put forth. You can individualize the zombie within the mass of flesh-eaters, providing some kind of sad identification between the audience and that monster. The realization: the monster is us.

There's nothing like that in ZOMBIELAND, but you do get a comedy which plays off the new cultural recognition of the "zombie" tropes and pratfalls. You get a story that plays like a deft, self-conscious discussion about how great it would be if human beings turned into monsters. Because in that world, any man is king of his own fate. The choices are your own. There is an ideal of freedom in taking what you want, taking what you can carry, and taking what has always been denied you. That might be self-respect, or a new car, or a particularly hot girl who'd never have anything to do with you otherwise. But it would be good to be king, even in an imposed cannibal hell.

Burly Movies: PARANORMAL ACTIVITY

Like with anything where you know all the beats and all the outcomes, you still hope that the sum total of something is better than the parts which are rote.

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY does pull off something that hadn't been done to me in a long time. It kept me from sleeping. My skin crawled. About the only movies that still pull off that feat are THE EXORCIST and Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD. In the case of those two movies, you're in awe of the balls it took to make them in the first place. In PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, there isn't the kind of innovation of a really iconic horror movie, and yet afterward, in the dark trying to sleep, I understood how well the moviemaker's had managed to make me uneasy.

It's funny, too, that this movie is probably another example of "no athiests in foxholes." I'm not particularly pious, nor on the other hand incredulous of the existence of supernatural phenomenon. I'm a firm believer that something is out to get you, but it usually walks on two legs and bleeds. Still, when I was a kid, my mother found religion and used to scare me with devils and gods. The howling wind I envisioned as black wraiths, and striking lightning was delivered by the Lord's fiery hands. A man I knew described seeing THE EXORCIST when he was in his teens, high and drunk. The next day, he was fresh-combed and singing in church. THE EXORCIST had reached down into him and touched among his childhood terrors with a damp hand.

Despite the hype, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY is very much a movie in the vein of Tourneur's NIGHT OF THE DEMON, since most of that movie concentrates on what is barely seen. And like that 1950s flick, PARANORMAL minorly undercuts the suspense and terror with some obvious choices. Which wasn't the fault in the case of NIGHT OF THE DEMON, as the releasing studio wanted to splice some demon puppet action in. This was done to make sure the audience was properly horrified by an actual monster, and not just shadows and sounds. Forget imagination. PARANORMAL isn't forced to stoop that far, but has its share of the too-obvious. And yet, for the most part, it's almost impossible for anyone not to be tense watching this thing.

I think too you have to consider the economics of this movie. Not of the movie itself, but of the characters in it. Young protagonists, with a house, cars, a pool, a fairly average living. The house looks exactly like most houses, functionally a house but devoid of age. This is reflective of what most of America's Middle Class goes home to every night. The sinister haunting is an invasion of personal space and personal freedoms. The next generation is feeling the rancid breath of an invisible threat to their homes, their lives, but they cannot define it. I think this movie will continue to terrify people who live in such homes, who are helpless to stop encroaching darkness.

For those in poverty, the idea of their loved one entering their dark bedroom in the night and becoming a demon is not unheard of. The violence doesn't surprise the children of poverty. Their fear is more ingrained, more real, and they don't distinguish between monsters from hell and monsters from the bottle. I don't imagine poor people will be frightened by PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, but they might be comforted by it. The idea that abuse is demon-borne must be a solace.

For myself, the movie played out the way it should, complete with an ending straight out of BURNT OFFERINGS. Not a bad thing at all, mind you. There's something about being watchful in the dark that is hardwired into human beings I think. At least, I'm wired that way. We're all so happy we have our electricity and our gadgets, closed doors and locks. But we have to turn them off sometime. And then nothing holds back the dark.

It occurs to me, the Cro-Magnon in his animal skin tending his fire in his cave, awake while his family sleeps, he was cursed to stare into that darkness. He wondered what was there. He feared the creeping sensation of something watching him, waiting for the fire to go out. I think he was lucky to have the fire, to have to think about the fire and maintain the fire. No electric switch would turn out his shield against the night and the groaning things in it. No, the fire was logic, and courage.

If demons walk the Earth, it makes one wonder who put out the fire to let them in?

Burly Reading: OLD MAN LOGAN, or WHY MARK MILLAR WILL BURN IN HELL

Mark Millar may be a good man. Like the kind of good man Henry Fonda played in the movies, like THE GRAPES OF WRATH and 12 ANGRY MEN. He may be the type of man who gets other men to stand up when he passes, out of respect.

But as a writer of superhero comics, specifically superhero comics using the icons of Marvel Publishing, he's everything that's ever been wrong with Brit import writers who are too smart for the material they are working on. See Grant Morrison. See Bryan Hitch.

I read this here story free, from the public library. The public library I work for. I've never been into censorship, and I can't bring myself to want OLD MAN LOGAN off the shelves. It has to be a choice by people who have choices. But this is bad ju-ju, Mark Millar.

OLD MAN LOGAN is a project Millar worked on with Steve McNiven a few years ago. It appears as maybe the apex of the "alternate world" story, or future history, of Marvel Comics' icon characters like the Hulk and the Avengers and Spider-Man. And, to a lesser extent in my eyes, Wolverine aka Logan.

I'm going to spoil the sh*t out of this thing as I write about it. Because I can't not write about it. Like I can't not act to stop a woman being raped or an man beaten mercilessly.

In this future, the super-villains of the world and of other dimensions band together as one irresistable army. This includes gods mind you, like Loki the Trickster and brother of Thor. And Dormammu, overlord of his own dimension. Somehow, in the first of Millar's amazingly awful contrivances, the Red Skull inspires these villains to operate as a monstrous superhero extermination wave.

I'd like to say, right now, that Millar has ignored the one golden rule of superhero comics. Because, presumably, he's too cool to adhere to it. That rule is: villains, no matter who they are, super or not, simply cannot coexist under any circumstance. I mean real villains, like the Red Skull, who is a Nazi super-soldier psychopath. He is irredeemable, a murderous monster. We're not talking about the Beetle, a low-level burglar type who really wasn't ever a bad guy, just a poor one. Financially poor. A lot of villains are the crime element of the superhero ghetto, homeless and disenfranchised. Not evil, but desperate. Petty, small-minded, ect.

So this super-villain army decimates the superheroes, murdering most of them, miaming the rest, and taking over the United States. They split it into territories.

For some reason, even Dr. Doom has a territory in the U.S., even though he is a fierce jingoist for his country, called Latveria. But far be it for Millar to ever wonder why Doom would bother ruling land in a foriegn country, far from his nation. Why worry about character integrity?

Logan, former Wolverine, is a Pacifist after his experiences decades before. He was "broken" and refuses to use his claws on any living thing. Early on, Logan is living in California in the territory of the "Hulks." Yes, that's right, the Hulk rules his own territory with his family, which he sired by f*cking his cousin, Jennifer Walters aka She-Hulk. This has resulted in Bruce Banner, brilliant scientist, being the patriarch of a horde of green-skinned cannibal "greenneck" DELIVERANCE extras.


I guess it's supposed to be humorous. Logan receives a beating for not paying tribute to Banner. Logan is told his wife and children will be killed if he doesn't pay up in a week. Then a blind Hawkeye, the purple-clad archer Everyman of the Avengers, arrives looking like an aging hippie and offers the old man Logan money to drive Hawkeye across the United Super-villain Territories. Why? To deliver a suitcase filled with Super Soldier formula to a secret resistance movement on the East Coast. This resistance will become, via the serum, superhumans. They will form a new Avengers to take back the world.

A fairly pithy journey begins, with Millar showing off the grand sight-seeing tours of these territories. Lots of impressive McNiven visuals. I don't blame McNiven necessarily. He's a talented dude. He's under the mighty sword of The Writer. He's drawing what the Lord Writer has demanded. Still, McNiven contributed to this thing. He helped give birth to a deformity of everything superhero comics stand for.

I'll put it to you this way: Logan turns back into his feral berserker self and kills everybody he meets. This includes Wolverine hacking up a bunch of retarded Hulks and the main Hulk himself, who has devolved into a giant retarded fat guy. Oh, and Bruce Banner is superhuman before he transforms into the Hulk the final time. Just because. And when Wolverine kills the Hulk, we forget that the Hulk shouldn't be killed. He's invulnerable, and he heals from anything, just like old Wolverine. At least if you buy into Marvel Comics' bullsh*t.

But what the hell. No reason to dwell on such things. Wolverine kills everybody. Except for one of Bruce Banner's little babies, whom Logan is going to raise to be a "good" Hulk. The idea is Wolverine is the hope of Mankind and superhero kind as well. He's going to make it all right again.

Fine. Wolverine wankery. Everyone hypes the Wolverine. I don't much care, as it's a product of a lot of fans who can't let go of their badass identifier.

But Millar commits yet another crucial sin: he treats all the characters with vicious contempt, but saves the most loathing for the Wolverine fans. As well he should, but the problem is he surrenders logic to pull it off.

There's an internal mystery to Logan's "breaking" that fuels the early part of the story. Logan as Wolverine, along with the X-Men, were attacked in their Westchester mansion home by a unit of super-villains, including Sabretooth and the Blob, Doctor Octopus and Klaw. Keep that in mind. Klaw. Master of Sound. Klaw is a being who is made of sound. Do you dig that? He's not flesh and blood.

Back to the mystery: Wolverine in his younger costumed version slaughters all these attacking super-villains by himself. Every one of them. He guts Sabretooth and decapitates Mr. Hyde. He cuts off Klaw's weapon hand and stabs him through the throat. Wolverine wins, of course, but is torn up and injured.

At the end of the fight, Mysterio shows up. Mysterio is the Master of Illusions. He lifts his illusion to show Wolverine the battleground, and the true victims of Wolverine's savagery.

The X-Men! Wolverine killed the X-Men!

All of them. Mysterio was so good with the illusion, Wolverine couldn't smell his friends, couldn't tell it was them. Oh god.

But I keep coming around to Klaw, the dude made of sound. Wolverine killed him with his claws. The thing is, Klaw isn't alive. He's sound. Everyone knows that. And if I was a superhero in the Marvel Universe, and I knew I might run into guys like Klaw at some point, I'd be a scholar of super-villains and other superheroes. I would know what their basic thing was. I would at least know enough to survive against them.

I guess the suggestion is Wolverine doesn't care about that stuff. Facts about super-villains who might kill you. Not a big thing. It's only Klaw, a longtime classic villain, a member of the Masters of Evil and mortal enemy of the Black Panther and the Fantastic Four.

But Wolverine doesn't know this sound construct isn't Klaw. He's a rube. He's a dupe. He's taken advantage of by Mysterio, who used him to kill the X-Men. And Mysterio just shows up for that deft manuever. He never shows up again. Wolverine breaks. And Millar's insanely stupid story keeps on trucking.

Mark Millar. Stick to obvious analogues of superheroes, like your new NEMESIS series. All the blood and gore and embarrassing dialogue won't bother me so much there. Because your superheroes were not designed, created, to be extensions of empowerment for children. They are not teaching tools, symbols of the moral and ethical education of kids. Because that's what superheroes are, Mr. Millar. I hate to break it to you, but superheroes are not for old c*nts like me and you. They're for young people to perceive the way to see the world, its adventures, its fears, its horrors, without being scarred forever by the experience.


Mark Millar, you're what's wrong with superhero comics. You're at the core of the corruption that is superhero comics today. Nobody else is going to tell you. I'm nobody, so I'm here to say: you're a corrupt writer. I know you've made good money on this tripe, but you're destroying the medium, one of the few legitimately great American mediums. If this is revenge for the Colonies, I can understand that. But OLD MAN LOGAN is a turd, whether it sinks or floats. It's still a turd.

I feel awful after reading this thing. And so should anyone who cares about comics.

Burly Movies: BLACK DYNAMITE!

Michael Jai White, scripter/star of BLACK DYNAMITE, will be referred to as "King" Michael Jai White on this blog from this day forward. As in King of the Wakandas. King of the Jungle. King Black Bolt. Elvis the King. He's not who would be King, he is the King.

BLACK DYNAMITE isn't a send-up of Blaxploitation movies such as SHAFT and TRUCK TURNER. It's more like a flipbook of the B-movies of the 1970s, one of those little books where the flipped pages show the same character, drawn over and over, seemingly moving as if by magic.

White, and his co-writers and crew, know they have a hell of a flipbook. They keep showing it to you throughout this movie, over and over. It's fun the first time, it's fun every time. Until the end of the movie, you don't get a sense of watching a movie. It's more like seeing the dreams of Fred Williamson, Richard Roundtree, Jim Brown and Isacc Hayes. We're plugged right into their experience as stars of B-movies in the 1970s. Dreams of the cool, the ludicrous, and the miserable conditions they worked under.


I was so happy during BLACK DYNAMITE, with a grin so big the top of my head might fall off. Not everything works well in BLACK DYNAMITE, but the stuff that does is unsurpassed by any contemporary treatment of Blaxploitation. BLACK DYNAMITE glories in the shoestring budget, the poor audio/visual, the stilted dialogue and the random lost extras whose delivery and expressions reveal amateur realism you just can't teach. The wonder of the B-movie is in its struggle to survive, onscreen, right in front of you. In that, the B-movie and your average Joe Schmuck are in much the same boat: lacking talent, money, and good looks. And yet sometimes brilliant, sometimes beauiful, sometimes sexy as hell. That's the average.

BLACK DYNAMITE has a couple of off-setting cameos from more established performers, and some welcome lost stars as well. The cameos, particularly the "big reveal" villain's wife in the Honky House, grates a bit, steals some of that authentic delight. But King Michael Jai White stays so iconic and regal in his role as Black Dynamite that you just can't care.


Sign me up to become the first Afronaut to orbit King Michael's hair and moustache. I just can't imagine anyone having a better time than with BLACK DYNAMITE.

Burly Movies: Hollywood, Suck, and Atoms

I believe that society can only be as good as its movies.

This kind of thinking might not seem clear to you. But after watching more movies than I have hairs on my body, and that being a lot of movies over the years, I see a pattern.



Short-sighted people can proclaim all they want about this being the "greatest" time in which to live in human history. Those people drive big gas-guzzling suburban vehicles while chatting on cell phones on their way to getting their hair coiffed properly. I speculate.

I don't think you can proclaim any time to be the "greatest" time in which to live. Frankly, I'd think our time would look like a chaotic hell to our past selves. People in the past used to start wars just to escape boredom. So life was pretty docile comparitively. Once the Industrial Age began, war moved beyond territory right into technological superiority. You can thank long-range war rocket capability for getting Mankind as far into space as he's gotten.


At some point, Hollywood became the focal point for an alternate world, in which mundane death, love, and sex had little reality but far more poignancy to the culture. Moving pictures represented a way to experience a new reality. A penetrating crater of far-reaching inclusion, we all could see life's high points without being vaporized by the meteor's impact.

Not only did Hollywood recreate reality unrelentingly, it recreated reality artfully. This enabled culture to bear itself, endure the ooze of time, and withstand the awful certainty of mortality.

Movies have done more than reflect or ponder their time, their era. I have begun to sense their true importance. The act of attending a movie, in a theatre, with other human beings, had a meaning to it once. When I was a kid in the 1970s, you wore your better shirt and clean pants to go to the movies. Older men and women wore evening clothes, or their Sunday-go-to-meetings, with the women in earrings and men in hats. Social responsibility extended into a movie theatre. It wasn't just you and a horde of other people. It was an audience.

The movies showed all kinds of events, square-jawed, or skeletal, but agreed as an honest assessment of time and space. The important aspect of movie-going in the past was more than escape, more than belief. The images toppled across the screen in such a way that the atoms of our bodies responded. In truth, we were shaped by the images as much as the images were shaped by us.

In the last fifteen or twenty years, Hollywood lost the shiny silver star of the authority of Earth. Among a horde of cockroaches and declining vision, Hollywood's producers suffered the alienation of the inbred. Without exposure to the outside world, to us, the regular human being, Hollywood had forgotten the simple atom.

I think people today believe society is going to get all "Star Trek" and find its higher moral/ethical balance, erasing racism, depravity, sexism, and so on. Like, somehow this enlightenment is just going to happen from the core goodness of all humanity. Which isn't going to happen. Not ever.

We need Hollywood to produce the movies it once had, with that understanding of the atom. How we, the audience, need them to show us once again what we are, truly. As ugly, petty, and vile as humans can be, they can be noble, righteous, and brave. Without the movies to remake us, redefine us, how can we hope to be reminded? With all these people thinking themselves better than any, in a time more enlightened and worthwhile, who is going to show us we are wrong?

Who is going to show us ourselves?

Burly Webbing: No Idea But Some Idea

I have no real idea what this is. I caught it on the smoothly cool blog http://arthurignatowski.blogspot.com/

I can't tell you, but I can tell you it is a kind of magic.

Burly Fun With Paint: The NEW Doom Patrol!

Obviously not the whole Doom Patrol.

Over yonder http://www.byrnerobotics.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=34606&PN=1&totPosts=65 there is talk about what characters would you swap between DC Comics and Marvel Comics, and who would work best in the others' Universe?

I postulated that Machine Man, a Jack Kirby creation from the late 1970s, would work great at DC Comics.

The idea is that Cliff Steele, known as Robotman after his only living tissue (his brain) is transferred into a robot body, is destroyed in the fatal explosion which killed the original Doom Patrol circa 1969 http://earthboundburlyman.blogspot.com/2010/01/friday-night-fights-villainous-victory.html

However, as happened in "actual" history, Cliff's body was salvaged and a new robotic body built to house his brain. Here's where the Machine Man design steps in, complete with Kirby's badass "Hand Weapons System" which means the right hand has an entire arsenal of weaponry inside it. Powerful destructive force, on top of being super strong and durable.

I think Cliff would be digging this more "human" robot design, complete with plastic "mask" of his own human visage!

The Broken Grunt

An ex-Special Forces soldier/medic named Robert Coffman lay down in his bed sometime around 11:30 pm, March 7th. He placed a .38 revolver to his temple and fired. His body was discovered by police in his dingy apartment the next day. His employers had been unable to reach him. Coffman's behavior, his very persona, had made it clear he was wounded long before the final shot.

I worked with Robert Coffman for eleven years at Central Rappanhannock Library in Fredericksburg VA. I won't pretend to have been friends with Robert, but eleven years is eleven years. Coffman was an aging man, within weeks of turning fifty years old. His years were complicated by a distinct loneliness of being. He had no family that he claimed, yet spoke of abuse and neglect and injustice as if they'd happened yesterday. He had no wife or girlfriend, yet remembered fondly a slender, shiny-eyed Panamanian girl he'd known during his service in the 1980s.

Coffman was a courier, his tasks involving the menial labor of transferring library materials of all kinds, placed in large transport bins, from one branch of the system to the others. The job is of core importance to the function of a healthy library system, menial or not. Coffman had a degree from Mary Washington College, obtained after his military service. He had a keen mind, if a humorless one. He had no definitive endeavors, yet longed to use his degree, his learning, as a professional of some kind. He perceived himself as intelligent and unwavering in his individuality. He considered the social rites and tribal manipulations of his fellow white Anglo-Saxons to be trite and deceptive, and yet he'd go out of his way to offer a good-morning greeting.

Despite his nostalgic memories of his military life, he eschewed discipline. He wore sweat pants at all times, with boots, and baggy over-long shirts designed to obscure a swelled middle-aged paunch. He feared growing old, his medical background conspiring against him as his mind preyed on the pains of age. Prostate issues and alienation mocked him with pointing, twisted fingers. He perceived an end to his life, an end lacking nobility, and self-respect.

Without loved ones, who adored him or were adored by him, he could never escape the insistent tug of mortality. We are buoyed by our relationships. We live for others. Robert distrusted women on a personal level, but he was comforted by their offerings of a hand-knit scarf. His views of women were probably informed by his mother, who by Coffman's account had been a doting, invisible woman full of platitudes. Tortured by his relationship with his father, Coffman seemed to gravitate to men with violence in their pasts, especially other veterans. He had no forum with which to discuss his own experiences, and yet the most periphery discussion of his life made him glow with satisfaction. He had been of use once, in Panama, and his life had deteriorated since. He had allowed himself to falter, had ceased to be relevant, had instead chosen momentary comforts--a good 12-year old Scotch, for instance--to get him through the night.

Robert Coffman struggled with life like a man without hands trying to build a kite. Devoid of the basic tools of any natural life, he could only sift the tangled debris that amounted to a wreckage. Eventually this wreckage ceased looking like a kite to him. The wreckage was just pieces of things, and he had long lost any idea why he possessed it.

If all goes well, Coffman will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. I don't know if he qualifies for the distinction. The remnants of his life, movies about war and books with photographs of life in the 1950s, are packed and piled into his tiny apartment. A keen mind seeking meaning, Robert collected unrelatable bits and pieces, seemingly useless to anyone else, disgorging from his filing cabinets, clamoring on shelves, impermeably static within a gun safe. Somewhere in the wreckage were probably his most prized possessions. This includes, I hope, his medal for heroism, campaigned by another ex-military man who believed Coffman deserved the distinction decades after the act.

I didn't treat Robert Coffman with the kind of respect he probably deserved. He was an acidic, frustratingly monotonous man, yet also affectionate and loyal. His contrasts were like the sun shining on one side of a massive, seabourne iceberg, and on the other a vast, glassy shadow from a primordial past. Our lives are full of damp moments of regret, but I can only say Robert and I had many times mocked death, and talk of suicide was our way of whistling past the graveyard. We shared a bond of loneliness, the kind of loneliness that seperates an adjusted, silent majority and a gruff, disappointed man with a broken heart. Coffman had let himself down, and had never forgiven himself for it.

As far as I know, Coffman was a decent man who had never intentionally hurt anyone. His strange phobia of germs gave him an expression of wary disgust, and people seemed to be giant amoebas created by children with construction paper. He wasn't sure whether to believe people would infect him, but he was certain that they were infectious. He had no one to turn to, he was too intelligent to be fooled by warmth and generosity, and he had no desire to crave what did not exist.

Robert Coffman was alone two days ago. He was fully dressed, perhaps just preparing to stand up and get ready for bed. Instead he ended his life. I can only imagine his final moments. I feel a cold terror of Coffman's struggle. Or is it merely a realization that we are all bound for a moment, a struggle, in which we are alone one last time?

Go with God, Sgt. Coffman. If such would please you.

Burly Things I Want to Write: Stop F*cking With the Doom Patrol!

The Doom Patrol is a comic book. The first incarnation of the DP happened in 1963, at DC Comics, who had just realized the upstart "rival" company, Marvel Comics, had hit upon a new formula for success with mags like FANTASTIC FOUR and THE UNCANNY X-MEN. Those books had come in response to DC's own JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA of the late 1950s. Marvel had kinked the formula of the superhero team to reflect then-current moods and tensions, such as the Cold War and racial pressures. So DC wanted their own version of Marvel's success, and thus was born DOOM PATROL, by writer Arnold Drake and artist Bruno Premiani, with a few issues drawn by strong journeyman Bob Brown. The 1960s stories all involved the Doom Patrol core of original characters:

Robotman, a pro racecar driver named Cliff Steele whose body was destroyed in an accident, his brain salvaged and placed in a special robot body, giving him superhuman strength and durability. The drawbacks are, Cliff as a robot cannot sleep, taste food, feel a breeze, or make love to a woman ever again. Definitely not good times.

Negative Man, Larry Trainor, an Air Force pilot who becomes fused with a strange ionic shadow being of unknown origin, which leaves Larry's body for 60 second intervals to fly around at impossible speeds performing all kinds of incredible feats. Larry dies if he's seperated from the Negative Being for longer than a minute, it's theorized. Worse yet, Larry Trainor is a "radioactive" man, his body's radioactive levels deadly to anyone near him. Only by wearing mummy-bandages, "specially-treated" by the Chief, is Larry able to even be in the same room as his comrades.

Elasti-Girl, Rita Farr, an actress exposed to weird gases in a volcanic region, she is able to shrink to ant-size or grow to King Kong mass in an instant. Rita can be "normal", unlike the other DP members, despite her powers, but her lost film career has left her with only an undying loyalty to the Doom Patrol. A kind of compensation as the field leader and matriarch of her new family.

And their leader, wheelchair-bound, bearded super-inventor The Chief. He had rescued them from the despair of their accidental marrings by Fate, giving them purpose and meaning. The Chief pushes the Patrol to be more than they are, stronger than the sum of their powers. He gives them meaning.

The DP considered themselves "freaks", and with good reason, but within the stories they were viewed by DC civilians as a benefit to Mankind. In fact, the Doom Patrol are the hardest working superhero group ever created. They didn't go off dimension-hopping for no reason, like the Fantastic Four. The Doom Patrol maintained a far more blue-collar ethic. They saved normal people from natural disasters, averted accidental man-made mass destruction, as a primary reason for being. In the DP's world, early on particularly, they faced off against the ocassional weird freakazoid, like the Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man, or Mr. 103, or some alien invasion menace. Only later in the run did their mirror-image rivals, the Brotherhood of Evil, consisting of a disembodied genius brain called The Brain and an intelligent French gorilla, Mallah, deviate the DP's focus from their service to Man by providing a constant superhero threat.




Strangely, DOOM PATROL for all its reputation hadn't nearly the strangest stories to be found at DC Comics. Because in those halcyon days, DC had cornered the market where weird was concerned, starring much more prominent/respected characters like Batman and Superman. Almost anything could happen to a DC superhero at any time, like traveling eight billion years from Earth or having their head turn into a giant ant's. By the end of the story, the superhero was normal again, returned to the status quo to return for another opium-induced plotline the next month.

But DOOM PATROL did something that had never been done before. With cancellation looming in 1968, Drake decided to blow up his Doom Patrol, literally: the heroes sacrifice their lives to preserve a small Maine fishing town. The ploy was designed to get readership to write in and "save" the DP and thus the DP's comic. You know how that went. The Doom Patrol stayed "dead" for almost ten years. Then the revivals began. And then some talented people started f*cking up the Doom Patrol.

There's plenty of places online to read more. Writer Paul Kupperberg has decried his 1977 revival Doom Patrol comic, which brought back Robotman in a new robot body, along with several new characters, one of which took on the "Negative Being" once belonging to Larry Trainor and became Negative Woman.

After that short series, the second DP revival happened in the mid-1980s. Starting off as a typical superhero yarn, with mediocre results, DC Comics brought in Brit intellect and writer Grant Morrison. He decided to completely alter the comic book landscape in order to appeal to the adult readers of the 1990s who replaced the 8-16 year old comic book reading demographic. DOOM PATROL wasn't the first comic book property to be distorted by Brit writers, or Morrison specifically. Morrison turned the DP into a nearly-impentrable puzzle, devoid of the formula trappings, which were replaced with myriad intellectual references and symbology. DOOM PATROL became "cult", establishing itself as the canon by which many pretentious college students would proclaim the comic book to have "grown up."

This version of the DP was the most impactful with a certain reading public, and it's this version which the characters and conceit have yet to shake. After Morrison and his successor Rachel Pollack had their way with the DP, the comic again was cancelled. The cult status, however, did not end.




There have been several more attempts to revive the DP, none lasting very long. The DP has continued to vex talents trying to produce tales about them. Writer/Artist John Byrne attempted to reboot the Doom Patrol from scratch, but the comic suffered from a kind of inexplicable antipathy. Just last year, another DP comic began, and has strained through a dozen or so issues, unremarkably. This version has steepled itself in the conceit that all of the various histories of the Doom Patrol are, in fact, wholly extant. Drake's, Morrison's, Kupperberg's, Byrne's and Giffen's lukewarm take.

Meanwhile, the DP twist in the wind, prepared as always for extinction and eventual resurrection by the next whims of talent.

The essential core of the Doom Patrol is evident in the original stories from the 1960s. Prior to the ascension of the Brotherhood of Evil, and the superhero melodrama they represented to the DP, the comic was about something fundamental. The nobility of Man, overcoming the "worst" Fate had to offer. The Patrol members are "handicapped", but they continue on despite their tragedies.

For the record, if I was writing the Doom Patrol, I'd know exactly how to create a successful version of the team. And it wouldn't be yet another quirky take derived from the unfortunate Grant Morrison-ization of the comic. Because anything less is just f*cking with a great conceit and great characters.



Many people believe if you went back to the original DP series and began it seconds before the DP are "killed" by an exploding island off the coast, you could ignore all the versions of the DP which have come since. All of which are as different from one another as the members of the Doom Patrol themselves.

But I'm here to tell you, this is unnecessary. You have to go back further in Doom Patrol history. You have to return to the core of the conceit. Which is not how strange the DP are in relation to the world around them, but how strange they think they are. The Doom Patrol is a comic about noble pursuits, and the odd love between people who feel they have no one but each other.

The Doom Patrol are treated like the Addam's Family of the DC Universe. There's nothing inherently wrong with the idea, as the DP themselves believe they are the strangest team of all. But again, it's only perception by the Doom Patrol themselves. Their very name suggests a fatalism, an acknowledgement that without "normal" life they will risk their lives again and again until they are dead. There is nothing else for them to do, no children they can raise who are not irradiated and suffering, no husband who could endure his wife's superior mammoth size and strength. Even poor Cliff Steele hasn't enough tissue left to create a clone he might transfer his brain into.






I love the Doom Patrol. The stories that worked the best with the Patrol presented these odd, broken people with an impossible situation to overcome, and they managed to overcome it. Not because they were more powerful, more intelligent, or more savage. They were simply more unified and strengthed by the love for each other. DOOM PATROL is a love story unlike any you will ever read. A true love story, devoid of the worst cliches, and full of all of the hope and dreams of Mankind.

Burly Movies: SHUTTER ISLAND Plus One

Two movies I'd been looking forward to, one I missed last year and one I caught on its opening weekend recently: INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS and SHUTTER ISLAND.

Because of its immediacy, I'll talk about SHUTTER ISLAND first.

SI is a strange movie experience, perhaps a bit frustrating. It's not the same kind of strange/frustrating mixture as a David Lynch flick, but it's an odd combination of Pulp heart and obsessive direction by Hall of Famer Martin Scorcese. When two Boston cops in 1954 proceed to investigate a patient disappearance on a fortified island insane asylum, we're assaulted by some very stylized Hitchcock themes and muscular acting by a bunch of talented people. Which is all great.


Without spoiling the thing, SI belongs in a movie sub-genre that could be called "psychovestigation", which I've just coined here. This means the mysteries behind the events you're seeing are psychologically layered to deceive and ultimately to reveal a crushing truth. This psychovestigation begins with broad strokes and eventually peels away until all that is left is a single, quavering musical string. This one note will devastate everything that has come before. This is nothing new to anyone who has read a novel since the mid-1950s, let's say around the time Jim Thompson got the idea to turn a small-town deputy sheriff into a psychopathic killer in THE KILLER INSIDE ME (1952). The narration slews reality all over the place, and is often much more subtle than in the movies. Novels get it right by virtue of hard work. Movies just set up flimsy cut-outs of various symbology like targets at a shooting range, knocking them down one by one until nothing is left. It's the timing and execution of the targets which gives the audience the satisfaction of a psychological tale well told, or a complete fabrication forcing them to bleat for their money back.

Examples of "psychovestigation" in movies are widely varied, and has become more prominent since the iconic USUAL SUSPECTS circa 1995, when Keyser Soze revealed himself as a devil of inordinate imagination. This sub-genre has surrealistic elements which play to the strengths of the visual medium. JACOB'S LADDER pre-dated USUAL SUSPECTS by five years, yet works half as well and doesn't reinvigorate the psychological drama. The two movies represent, to me, opposites of measured success where the psychovestigation is concerned; SUSPECTS works, even though its revelation is sloppy, while LADDER is tightly-wound but pretentious. The psychological drama is hard enough without an overexertion of earnestness.

Other movies have played in this arena: the excellent IDENTITY (2003), the classic MEMENTO (2000), and the horrid THE VILLAGE (2004). If you're looking for older experiments of the same kind, you can find a grim Gregory Peck in MIRAGE (1965), or a masticating Michael Caine in Oliver Stone's THE HAND (1981). Both are great films, whether you can agree with their final revelations or not.

Often, it isn't what the revelation is so much how it's pulled off. Because the audience viewing the movie, "sucked in" by the psychological layering which often gets right to the heart of being human, can feel betrayed if not played "fair" with. This has been true of most "mystery"-type genres, but in this particular movieland sub-genre, the audience backlash is instant electrocution for those responsible. M. Night and THE VILLAGE being a prime example, as no one can trust that guy ever again. Not only did the revelation suck, but the way it was handled had hackneyed pecked into it by crows.

Getting back to SHUTTER ISLAND, it's hard to argue that Scorcese and Co succeed with their psychovestigation. And yet the movie is deft, precise, and superb. Watching SHUTTER ISLAND is like watching a girl in a parade juggling a flaming baton: the feat is nothing new, but you still marvel over the execution. You know what you're getting, but it isn't something you get every day. Least not all of us are lucky enough to have flaming baton twirlers in our mundane lives, anyway.

Oh, and don't forget that the inimitable Max Von Sydow has a role in SHUTTER ISLAND. That's right, the same man who starred in all those fantastic Ingmar Bergman movies in the 1960s. Great great man.

Speaking of movies with surreality at their core, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS starts off with director Tarantino's usual flair for alluringly silky-smooth genre-play and turns into a superior revenge fantasy that makes no apologies whatsoever. It's impossible to describe the movie, other than to say there is a World War Two combat unit of killer Jews running around Europe disguising themselves as Nazis and slaughtering unsuspecting Nazi troops. And then they scalp them and perform other horrendous actions to the bodies, to create utter fear among the Germans. There's a Nazi detective/officer nicknamed "the Jew Hunter." All of the Nazi high command ends up in this flick, along with a German war hero known as the "German Sgt. York." Tarantino doesn't even begin to worry about whether you have any inkling of who the Basterds are, as people. Because they aren't people, they are the rage of the murdered Jews led by a Tennessee-born hardcase named Aldo Ray (after the actor
from BATTLE CRY and THE GREEN BERETS, among many movies War and otherwise) with a hanging noose rope-burn on his throat. Or perhaps a near-strangulation scar or knife slice. The thing is, you don't know, but it's fun to speculate on exactly how Captain Ray got his scar. Because in between what we see and what we think is the truth. And no matter how critical we get of Tarantino, the man knows how to provide just enough detail to create a scarecrow worth getting excited over. And INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS turns out to be a very well-made scarecrow indeed.