Burly Movies: What You Find in 50 Movie DVD Packs

DEVIL TIMES FIVE (1974)
I didn't expect much from this thing, but you get the whole enchilada with this one and then some. I was actually surprised to find myself riveted. Five psychotic children being transported through what appears to be the Canadian wilderness escape their seriously inept asylum orderlies. The children, including a kid Lief Garrett in bell bottoms, a teenage hottie in a nun outfit, a black "soldier" kid and a couple of other sad sacks go begging on Gene Evans' ski lodge home. Evans has a pile of people visiting, his daughter and her middle-aged stud boyfriend, his handler and his bimbo, and a mental midget in a powerful bod ala Frankenstein. The kids basically go to war on these folks, and what ensues is a plethora of 1970s mayhem.

This is an impressive little flick you'd miss while blinking, but it has guts to it. Actually pissed me off at the end, which means it got to me.

ABSOLUTION (1978)
Richard Burton aka "Swinging D*ck" was reaching his apex as a grimacing, thrashing actor with obvious drinking problems weighing heavy under each piercing blue eye. Here he's a priest running a boy's school in England, and one kid, Burton's favorite student and homoerotic fascination, meets a hippie biker in the woods (played by Billy Connelly and his Scottish accent) and accidentally kills him. The kid then reveals the murder in the Confessional, meaning Burton's priest cannot tell anyone what he knows. From that point on, there's a psychological battle between the kid and the priest, in which everything is not as it appears, and some of it is worse than either imagined.

A strange experience, well done no doubt. Burton's histrionics adds a kind of wretched excess to a story about repressed young people yearning for release.

CREEPER aka RITUALS (1977)
A pack of jaded, wealthy doctor types led by a surly and great Hal Holbrook go on a wilderness hike in a butt-remote area and end up facing off against a shadowy mountain man intent on killing them. Not only that, but the killer is giving the doctors symbolic clues as a way to terrorize them.

This is a great flick, with the proper 1970s' Existentialism and a heady dose of anger behind it, making it just as relevant today as it was then. Or relevant to the four or five people who ever saw this movie. Trust me, it's a strong movie with excellent performances that will leave you feeling exhausted and filthy by the end.

UNSANE aka TENEBRE (1982)
I haven't seen nearly enough Dario Argento movies, that's for sure. Every one of them I have seen is emblazoned in my mind like the Dragon scars on Kwai Chang Caine's arms in every episode of "Kung Fu." UNSANE joins that list, with the great Anthony Franciosa as an American writer of sexy murder thrillers who ends up in Rome for a promotional tour. The second he steps foot off the plane, people begin dying in the same methods as those in his novels. Mostly by straight razor, with the killer gleefully informing Fransciosa's character that more will die and he will know it's his fault. And that's only the beginning of the implements of death on display. About fifty people die onscreen, some twice.

Fantastic movie, with John Saxon prominently involved and a host of bloody murders and Italian boys in uncomfortably-tight jeans and Italian women with wicked evil eyes constantly pulling at your zipper, you cannot escape the allure of this thing. I defy you to even try. Magnetic, unique, and sick as only Italians can get away with.

Burly Movies: HOLLYWOOD MAN (1976), SHERLOCK HOLMES (2009) and THE WOLFMAN (2010)

I'll start with the best and work my way down.

HOLLYWOOD MAN is a story about a, well, Hollywood man who is trying to bankroll his latest exploitation Biker Movie. William Smith plays a man who is married to the sexy dame from EATING RAOUL (1982) and has the crazed Don Stroud for his main stunt man. Smith runs a tight shooting schedule to get the borrowed money back to the Mafia hoods, with percentages of the gross and anything else the mobsters can fleece him for. The Mob proceeds to send a psycho who looks like John Fogerty to ensure the shoot is disrupted and Smith doesn't get his movie made.

What happens is about 90 minutes of some interesting 1970s behind-the-scenes filmmaking, with emphasis on Smith and his old lady, the biker trash who seem way more fleshed out than usual in this type of flick, and a few subordinate relationships that are destroyed during the making of the movie. The main thing is Smith refusing to knuckle under while still "begging" for more money from the Mob, essentially cornering himself and his antagonist from Creedence Clearwater Revival. Though Smith nary pops a single bicep through most of the movie, by the last fifteen minutes, the William Smith "I'm Going to Kick the Living Sh*t Out of You" Face is broken out, mayhem happens. And then, a gut-punch ending out of nowhere, until you remember who Smith was dealing with the whole time. HOLLYWOOD MAN is worth seeking out.

SHERLOCK HOLMES is a pretty decent movie. A "fun" flick, mostly, though kind of pointless too. Downey Jr. is fantastic as always. Rachel McAdams is so godd*mn cute and bite-able that I can barely stand it. There's nothing inherently wrong with HOLMES, but it isn't memorable. It's like something that was made so the studio could retain rights to movie Sherlock Holmes, perhaps.

THE WOLFMAN is another case in point. You have to know how much I want a Wolf Man movie to work. The Wolf Man is my favorite Universal Horror icon, barely beating out Frankenstein's Monster. While watching this update of the 1941 classic THE WOLF MAN, I kept thinking about AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, mostly because the Hall of Fame make-up artist Rick Baker is involved in the update, and somewhat because I'm not sure why the movie is a "period piece." The problem is that every cliche you can think of is so hoary as to be infectious. Ignorant villagers, muttonchop Inspectors, cobwebs and the British Moors. YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN glorified and ruined forever all those things. AMERICAN WEREWOLF was a fresh, upbeat, and human story about a dude who becomes a wolf when the moon shines bright. But THE WOLFMAN here is a drab, depressing, morbid tale in which no one, not a single personage in the movie, actually acts human. Unless Victorians were the saddest, sweatiest, dumbest people who ever walked, which this movie makes them out to be, I just don't see the point. I guess the moviemakers were shooting for something Serious, but instead they made a fable about how a computer-generated city cannot sustain human life or supernatural terror.

And even then, realizing this boredom, I could see some interesting stuff going on. In fact, I'm pleased to say the actual Wolfman himself is fantastic-looking, harkening to Jack Pierce's original make-up lovingly. And Baker's transformation, enhanced by the ever-present CGI, especially in the intial turn, is amazingly well-done. The Wolfman's first reign of terror is great. Someone complained about the Wolfman running on all fours. I thought it was excellently-done. Didn't faze me a bit.

What does faze me is the movie just after Larry Talbot becomes human again. It's like someone turned up the Retardo Meter and stood back to let it tilt every subsequent scene of this flick. What started off as a fairly-decent update quickly turns into a giant piece of poorly-written sh*t, culminating in "reveal" of a major character's eeeevil nature and a fight scene between two Wolf Men, which is good, but ending with a violent death that makes no sense. You'll enjoy it if you forget, as the filmmakers did, that a Wolf Man can only be destroyed by silver. For all intents and purposes, a f*cking Wolf Man is indestructible except by silver. That's what the f*cking Gypsy curse is all about. It's why becoming a Wolf Man is so tragic. You can only die by silver, and your soul can only be freed if that silver weapon is wielded by someone who loves you.

Of course, in this movie, all these poor English subjects seem to have silver coming out of their ears. They're able to have munitions of silver practically. How prevalent was silver to a bunch of villagers? That was kind of hard to swallow. I'd have bought the idea if you have a wealthy man in the town who offers up his silver cutlery to be smelted into silver bullets. But this plethora of silver bullets seems like a ham-handed way to tell the audience that Larry Talbot is Up Sh*t Creek. And you'd better start feeling the burn of sadness for his tragic plight.

Strangely, I think humor, not slapstick mind, but the humor found in human fallicy, might have helped this flick as it undoubtedly helped AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON. And weirdly, the only humor to be found in the movie is in the "Extended Scenes" showing the Wolfman crashing a costume party in a huge manse and coming face to face with a blind opera singer. It's actually a scene of character development for the character whom the f*cking movie is named for. Meaning, the Wolfman himself. There was opportunities to see the Wolfman as more than a savage, gut-spilling killing machine. A chance, mind you, to create an icon out of this character, that teens and children even would remember all their lives. Because half the fun of watching horror movies is being a kid sneaking a horror movie you know you aren't supposed to see. Being scared witless but never forgetting the experience and carrying it with you always.

The Wolf Man from 1941 had that power, that supernatural mojo, which kept the character alive for over sixty years. But no one will remember The Wolfman of 2010. And that's the shame of it.

Stuck in an Elevator with Burly Muzak: Rolling Stones "Hand of Fate"

Awesome song.

Burly Rant: Waiting for the Death-Ape

I imagine everyone has those moments, probably at strange times, that they know they are definitively going to croak. You hear the same crap from everyone you meet who has had these moments or lived through some trauma: enjoy every moment. Life goes by so fast. You'll wish you had all those minutes you wasted, at the end.

This sort of, what do you call it, opinion? Whatever it is, I find myself responding not with resignation of the truth of the matter. No, I'm pissed off.

If indeed our lives our designed toward some kind of goal, whether we were scarred-back slaves in Eygpt contributing to the pyramids, or a composer who created an iconic tune for some 1930s adventure hero, no one can accurately measure how much time was wasted against how much time was useful.

I think it's little wonder most people spend their "free" time getting tattoos and getting high. What else can they do, with death curling about their spines?

I'm big on people Having F*cking Jobs and contributing to society and, if they can, promoting the cultural art. That would include entertainment. Gene Kelly kicking off a wall with a smile. e.e. cummings showing you words that smell like the skin under a girl's ear. It's possible to enhance life with intellectual grandeur. If you don't think men in football uniforms aren't a physical poetry, you aren't paying attention.

I realize I'm waiting to die. It's there, a King Kong staring at me from the cover of the tallest trees. Yellow , bloodshot eyes big as windshields. Fangs embedded with old blood stains grinding with anticipation. I'm just a helpless little Faye Wray tied to totems by my wrists, aware of the death-ape and shrieking in the most unmanly way.

As we get older, the shadow of this great beast draws closer. Unlike the "real" Kong, you can bet this death-ape hasn't any desire to hurry his advance. That's old-age in a nutshell.

The more I hear people tell me to enjoy what I won't have on my death bed, still bound by vines on my aged little bruised-skin wrists with my big square bifocals and tiny old man head with hearing aid jammed in one ear, hoping there's a heaven so my Grand Soul will find peace, I have to admit: I lose the inherent survival instinct.

In a world where some attractive woman is followed home, raped and murdered and set afire by the human monster, or some tw*t kid is bitten by a bear at the zoo while trying to feed the Do Not Feed kodiak and resulting in the animal being destroyed in order to test it for rabies, I find myself incredulous. Am I expected to really hope for the best for Mankind? Am I supposed to assure all of you that Death Kong is not watching you from the shadows of the trees?

Shall I come down with cancer and spend my nights rolling among my intravenous tubes, weeping at the unfairness of it all, why me, why is this happening to me, I'm not one of Those People?

Do I get a moment to tell some uncomfortable teenager trying not to look at my horrible patchy skin and infected mouth that she should live life, enjoy every moment as if it's your last, the sunlight on your cheeks should be savored?

Who gets to tell all the f*cked up homeless people we all avoid and grimace at that they're going suffer until the death-ape comes? That they're going to suffer because the death-ape sort of enjoys watching them suck off sociopaths for cigarette money. The homeless maniacs talk to the death-ape. That's who they're talking to, when they pass you gibbering. They're intensely aware of the presence of Death Kong. They've made a kind of friend to ease back the sexual heat of bitter loneliness.

Personally, I'm not interested in platitudes about living in this world. I think it's too easy, a basketball lay-up, to derive comfort from all this hubris. No one deserves anything they have coming to them, and yet here we are. Smell the death-ape? His fur? The stench of his carrion breath?

I think this is why Apocalype appeals so much to me: a collective realization that every summer afternoon swimming with a pretty girl and her friends doesn't protect you from the final flesh-eating jungle nightmare. Some virus comes to engulf every happy moment you've ever had. A monster laughs while you squirm.

So what's the point? Tell the Death Kong f*ck you? Submit to a terror of living? Become the totem pole which binds you?

I don't know. Why not look around, like Captain Kirk in that episode where he was getting chased on a barren planet by a big superhuman lizard commander intent on killing him. Kirk found some bamboo, and some orange dust, and some black flint rocks, and he made himself a little cannon to shoot the sh*t out of the lizard guy. You can try that with Death Kong. It won't work, but it'll give you hope.

But regardless: do something. Get down with accepting that you're no more important than that poor son-of-a-bitch in ancient Eygpt who lived for maybe sixteen years if he was lucky before his heart burst lifting those f*cking carved boulders up those totems to reach the gods. That starving African kid with death-hollow eyes with the fly on his lip? That's you. Grasp it like it's the last sharp object between you and the rampaging hunger of the death-ape. Do that.

Burly Movies: INCEPTION (2010)

You'll hear a lot of people complain about how INCEPTION defies its own logic in order to have the plot plod on. Like Chris Nolan is just painting himself into a corner script-wise and has to shat out a deus ex machina to make it work.

Nothing like that really happens in the movie. You're asked to buy that a team of mind-heisters will risk their own minds and sanity and lives following their leader dude who may be leading them toward certain doom. But outside of that, nothing is contrived to the point where you can't accept it. Or at least, I did.

It's easy to read a description of INCEPTION and kind of know what you're getting. Too many are probably weighing the movie down with MATRIX-like depth it doesn't have, which THE MATRIX didn't have either. What it does have is a sterling conceit told in the most general way possible. The world of INCEPTION is a world in which technology has become emblematic instead of specific. We don't need to know how a machine that fits into a suitcase enables other human beings to enter consciousnesses that are not theirs. It's just not important, just as it's never been important with any important science fiction that has come along. And when I say "important SF", I am not talking about "Star Trek" and STAR WARS.

In movie terms, INCEPTION belongs in interesting times for sure. It's a 1960's SF movie made today. In fact, this is a "mission movie", where all the characters have a mission and must overcome every obstacle to its success. In science fiction terms, FANTASTIC VOYAGE and "Mission: Impossible" are key here. "Mission: Impossible" is pretty much the core plot structure of the movie: leader (DiCaprio) is introduced, the team is assembled, the mission is go, the audience is held suspended not by the crucial life/death dynamics nor whether the team will pull it off, but how they will pull it off.

This is not to say the stakes are not high, but they are most at their epicenter when DiCaprio as "Cobb" is forced to confront what is certainly the deterioration in his own mind. The mission is compromised by this insecurity, which the audience is privvy to early on. I've heard criticisms of DiCaprio's performance, but I'll say he's transformed himself into a Burly Man. It's official. He knows what he's doing, he knows the power of how he moves and how his words are spoken. He's a consummate male presence, an identifier, proven here and in SHUTTER ISLAND. Kudos to DiCaprio.

Everyone in the movie is dynamic without obvious cliches. As you can also read elsewhere, Jason Gordon-Levitt is a blossoming stud who owns this movie with its most incredible sequences, particularly the "anti-gravity hotel." Gordon "Don't Hate Me for Being a F*cking Stud"-Levitt is a strong, personable character within his own skin. He doesn't reach out to the audience, he lets them come to him. He seems like background fodder and yet this and BRICK, the "high-school Hammett" movie, reveal this guy's intense attention to great acting: he knows how to move, how to present thought without speaking. Great work by him, and a dude I will hopefully be enjoying for decades to come.

It also has little Ellen Page. She must taste like a dreamsicle, which is one of the two or three greatest things the Lord ever gave us.

INCEPTION is the best movie of this year, easily. Chris Nolan, the writer/director of MEMENTO, THE PRESTIGE and a couple of superhero movies, and now this thing, is producing good work time after time, undeniably. He's probably an insufferable arteest type, far as I know, but you can't argue with the effect of his movies. It's getting to the point where a Nolan movie is guaranteed to be interesting and arresting, as great movies should, just as M. Night's movies are guaranteed to stink on ice. Nolan can start chalking up a filmography right up there with some of the best. Even a second movie with a guy dressed in a Bat-dildo suit hasn't derailed him with its success. I think Nolan deserves some credit for not making a couple of arty movies and a couple of Bat-dildo movies, then spending the rest of his time on Earth snorting coke off some Hollywood skank's mons pubis. I'm sure he does some of that, but somewhere in there he does the work and we get INCEPTION. Which is fantastic for us.

Tuesday's Burly Rant or I Was Born to Love Latinas

So, what is everybody going to do when the Earth sh*ts the bed, a great big hole opens in the sky, and we're living on a cinder?

Here in Virginia, we've been experiencing over 100 degree temperatures pretty much daily, until just today. 100 degrees with an index of 116. Does it really matter whether it's 112 or 116? I'm a man, I don't even use AC in my vehicle. I use it sparingly, because I feel it's a challenge to the whole human race hiding indoors with their AC units cranked up, blowing their hot fumes into the environmental carnival tent and causing untold damage to my heart. I don't necessarily blame people I suppose, though it'd be nice if they gave a sh*t about anything except "not being hot." In another fifty years, when your grandkids are outside playing in environmentally-controlled space suits because the air quality is about the same as a Viet Cong rat hole doused in Agent Orange, and your clean water supplies and all evidence of it have to be hidden so your neighbors won't potentially kill you and steal it, you can pat yourselves on the back for a job well done. Nobody has lived through this kind of heat before, because People of the Past didn't have the ecological nightmare of carbon monoxide mixed with acidic humidity from charbroilled clouds or seeping up from a crumbcake Earth.

The recent trend is to "Go Green." It's nice to see. People are changing out their 100 watt bulbs for energy-saving ones, and recycling. All that saved money goes right into their SUV's gas tank.

I recycle. I'm not "environmental." That would suggest I want there to be a planet for people to inhabit. The only people I like are in Ray Bradbury stories. They are good, fundamentally, dreamers with adventure in their hearts and a romantic interest in the passage of time. I still believe all people living west of Elvis Presley's house and north of the Red River and southeast in a diagonal line from Portland, Oregon are just like the people in Ray Bradbury's books. Those people have been to Mars and have strange stories told to them by an Illustrated Man on a lonely country road. Those people have never heard of the Black Lagoon of the Gulf BP Oil spill. Those people think American Idol is what the best college football player in Iowa wins. Older adults whittle sticks with pocket knives, creating little rockets they give to kids to play with. Porn hasn't been invented. It's just love between a girl and a boy looking up at the stars.

I saw a Ray Bradbury person today, or at least someone who would have inspired Bradbury. She was a beautiful Latina with her dark hair tied back, in a sleeveless brown dress with those folded layers over the legs like Carmen Miranda used to wear. She lifted the skirt part so she could walk fast, showing off good strong legs. She was a mature woman on a city street trotting barefoot across hot tarmac. I nodded to her while driving past and in the rearview she smiled with her face tilted back as if she was actually happy. It was a moment that made the very atomically-small Bradbury portion of my brain wonder if I'd somehow contributed to her happiness. I'm just a thick-armed creep in a work van, but maybe she sensed I thought she was beautiful in that moment. Maybe she knew I was born to love women like her. It pleased her to know this. She continued jogging toward some destination, low-striding like she was about to be joined by two lines of shirtless dancing boys for an impromptu paean to the Bronze Gods of Heaven and Earth.

It strikes me that only Ray Bradbury people can make me care about the Earth. We all know tigers are being slaughtered and unique plant/insect species are being eradicated every single day. This leads to a black bear chewing the intestines out of some hunter in Alaska and the fearful platitudes of a culture praying to be assured Nature is not coming for revenge.

But when we come to the proper conclusion, we find that human beings are the worst thing that ever happened to Earth. Agent Smith is right: humanity is a virus. The Cosmos, or God/Jack Kirby's Celestials/Lovecraft's Cthulu, would probably let us alone for millions more years. At least until the next five-mile wide meteor devolves the planet into a roiling mass of lava and disposable diapers. The Cosmos has no real interest in Man's fate, so Man has decided to apply an endgame to His Own legend. Every great hero needs a great end. Mankind has decided to writ large using vast ecological disasters to drive home the point: there is no future. Every child born into this world is on the verge of becoming Soylent Green in a boiling raw-sewage sh*tpond in what used to be Denver, Colorado. And if that's so, what becomes of the Ray Bradbury people? The obvious? They burn, just like everyone else? At fahrenheit 451? Or fahrenheit 600?

And once it gets that hot, does it really matter if it's 451 or 600?

Three for Thursday: Burly Dames

Angie Dickinson. And melon. What God hath wrought, let no man put asunder.

Tuesday's Burly Rant or I Love You Harlan Ellison

I'm thinking of trying to maintain a purely misanthropic theme by forcing myself to raise hell over something.

It's hard to be angry and not be petty. But I'm angry most of the time. I have no real reason to be angry, other than that I haven't acheived my career goals. And people suck, along with the culture of f*cking stupidity they have wrought.

Is this the best time, or the worst time, to be alive? Well, it smells infinitely better than it did a thousand years ago, I'm sure. At least when you had a bunch of people together who didn't have the benefit of being slathered in fine oils because they were born into royalty. Human beings are foul because we're walking germ infestations. I won't touch anything in a public restroom. Yet I'll eat the ass out of a woman with no compunction whatsoever. That's called "Getting Your Groove On." Does the music sound as sweet on a dusty record? Well, once you've blown it off, it does. I can't verify the smell thing, by the way. Considering the stench of carbon monoxide and Axe cologne, it might be a close race with a thousand years ago.

I was trying to think of why I've had such a hard time finishing projects in recent times. I mean, a real apathy like when you know you have to wipe out the bathtub. I was trying to figure out why I'm writing. Writing anything. These days, any coffee-cake hair mom can sit at a computer and knock out an article or novel. It's not like back when people had to scribble on paper with blocky lead pencils then transcribe their own f*cked up handwriting, or sit at a manual typewriter in a crappy room full of cigarette smoke ramming those keys down. God forbid you have to break out the carbon paper. Jack Kerouac used paper rolls he fed into the typewriter which allowed him to keep typing non-stop with the manuscript coiling up on the floor like a snake. F*ck hitting SAVE before you lose a day's work. His work was a real thing at his feet.

So to figure out writing, and you're not a poet with his index finger up his ass, you have to figure you're writing for an audience. The audience can be like one in a movie theatre. Or it can be your wife. Or your College Preparatory English teacher in high school. Or the faceless masses you imagine lining up with your novel or book in hand, who hand it to you facing themselves but upside-down for you, so you have to turn the book around to sign it, and this is the 40,000th time you've had to do that, and you've become annoyed that you have to small talk with a reader who can't even hand you a book turned around right, to make your life easier.

This faceless reader asks, "Where do you get your ideas?"

And all I can think is, "I fundamentally hate that question you just asked. Because you know where I get my ideas. I steal them from more brilliant people, dumb them down so I can understand them, put a title to it and get some limited thinker like yourself to wonder how I came up with it. I must be a genius! And I don't like your face."

Everyone should admit they steal. It's the most sincere form of love. The originality stems from how to display that love of those ideas--not your own ideas, because everything is played out sorry to tell you--so that everyone who reads your book understands your love. The only true love story is between a writer and his inspirations. That's a fact.

Coming back to Audience, I realized that I really started writing because I was influenced by Stephen King, first, and then writers like Harlan Ellison. I wanted their approval, their respect, just as King had earned from Ellison. The brotherhood of the writer is Freemasonry. You want to be entertained from within, and keep the riffraff out. King may be the most down-to-earth writer who ever lived, a family man with a sharp sense of humor and natural story-telling ability. Ellison, in contrast, is the fiery lone wolf in the forest banging models in Hollywood in the 1960s. One man was beloved by millions of readers. The other received death threats on a regular basis while working for the Los Angeles Free Press. Nobody wanted to kill Stephen King because they hated him, like they hated Ellison. No, the schizoids wanted to kill Stephen King because they loved him too much.

I think people in general are a harsh disease. Too much of them is doom. I'd sign books under duress, but I wouldn't belittle people for loving the work. As long as they can distinguish between the work and my humanity. Because I'm not looking for friends. Readers, yes.

But I mostly have to admit I just want to read or hear somewhere, even in a blurb, that Harlan Ellison said my novels were like getting mauled by a half-bear, half-orca that smelled like Raquel Welch after a good workout. He's saying he loves my work, and I loved his work, and by god that's good recycling right there.

Three For Thursday: Burly Dames

Three for Thursday! Burly Dames!

Hardman and Parker and the Green Goliath

I can say with authority that I hate every Marvel comic produced today except ATLAS, which is hands-down my favorite ongoing series.

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2010/07/it-may-not-be-official-but-parker-and-hardman-are-the-new-hulk-team/

Gabriel Hardman is a "new" favorite artist of mine. He's done nothing but impress since he began with short jabs on filler-type material for ATLAS, graduated to the main artist, and handled the Hulk in a very old-school way during writer Jeff Parker's Avengers crossover. I never thought Hardman's Hulk would ever be the kind of Hulk the awful Suits at Marvel would gravitate toward. I can only assume that hot-ticket Parker convinced somebody up at the top of Hardman's acumen.

And now, I can say I'm actually excited about who's working on probably my favorite Marvel character ever. As you can see by Hardman's sketch, instead of drawing the Hulk like a steroidal psychopath, he goes back to the Kirby roots of density as the core of strength. This actually looks like the Hulk to me.

So I guess the fact is, in this world, if you live long enough, something good is bound to happen. And I thought the return of the 3D Man was great. This is balls-deep news, folks.

Three for Thursday! Burly Dames!

Three for Thursday: Burly Dames

Angie Dickinson doesn't count as part of the three. She's the spearhead.

Comic book covers, pulp magazine covers, movie posters, ads, photography, who doesn't love a dame? We're lucky that the men of yesterday captured them with such aplomb.