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 Reading: TALES OF THE ZOMBIE

Transported from my previous blogsite, "Pulp Hero", from February 2009:

Introduced in a one-off story in 1953 by the esteemed Bill Everett (creator of Marvel Comics' headliner Namor the Sub-Mariner in the 1940s, and then co-creator of Marvel's headliner of today, Daredevil, bridging a gap for Everett that will reach into the far future,) Simon Garth was a coffee magnate in New Orleans already "soulless" in his dealings, brutal to his employees and dismissive of his daughter Donna who is all the family he has since his wife divorced him.



Garth takes out his failed marriage on subordinates, and smacks around a groundskeeper named Gyps at one point. Gyps is heavy into the voodoo however, and later kidnaps Garth to be sacrificed by a local Mambo priestess, Layla, who happens to be Garth's secretery at the coffee plant and is in love with him.



Freed by Layla, Garth almost escapes before being killed by Gyps. Gyps then forces Layla to reanimate Garth as a zombie, eventually to be under Gyps' personal enslavement. This is managed by the Amulet of Damballah around the Zombie's neck, which enables the holder of another Amulet to mentally control the dead man. As a Zombie, Garth cannot feel physical pain or sensation at all, and is unstoppable due to having "zombie strength" wherein neither pain nor fatigue are a factor, and any wounds he receives "heal" after a time. This is due to the curse of being a zombie, that he will never rot away. His soulless body is magically "protected" from the ravages of time and physical damage, except for the basic zombiefication of the tissues at hand. Garth also has no thought processes of his own. At least, that's the way it appears.



Hot for Garth's daughter, but knowing she'd never give him the time of day, Gyps sends the Zombie to attack Donna, which Garth refuses to do. The cloud of mindlessness dissipates, and Garth returns to Gyps and slays him.

After this, the Amulet of Damballah worn by Gyps ends up in the possession of Donna Garth, as she senses a connection through it to her father. Donna influences the Zombie to follow her, without her knowledge, all the way to Port-au-Prince in Haiti where she is seeking information about her father's disappearance (not realizing he is dead, natch.) The Zombie instinctually finds one of his oldest friends in life, Anton Cartier, who vows to help Garth return to human life. It's here that Garth exhibits enough intellect to actually communicate with Cartier, convincing Cartier the soulless Zombie is not so soulless after all.

This leads to a series of adventures for the Zombie, who encounters mad scientists and giant spiders and rampaging voodoo priestesses. At some point, Donna Garth loses the Amulet of Damballah, which is found by a ruined, bitter homeless man named Philip Bliss.



Bliss inadvertantly called the Zombie back to New Orleans, and once discovering his control over the dead man, uses him to savagely attack the "lawyers" responsible for destroying his life, leading to a mass slaughter in a Bayou courthouse.

Subsequently, agents of a strange wealthy man named "Mr. Six" find Bliss and steal the Amulet, which leads the Zombie to his new master, a cultist named Papa Shorty. Bliss and a couple of friends attempt to save the Zombie from his fate, and in the resulting carnage, Garth is freed from Papa Shorty's sway and gets revenge for Bliss' ultimate sacrifice.

Soonafter, Garth ends up back with Layla, who had tragically initiated his zombiefication to begin with. Determined to help Garth find final peace, she takes him to Papa Doc Kabel, her voodoo grandfather. Along the way, Layla and Garth are continuously stymied, as the Amulet of Damballah is found by other bystanders, luring the Zombie away to eventually do their bidding (and usually resulting in their violent deaths by Garth's hands.)

In a real twist, Garth is responsible (under the control of an evil man) of mortally wounding Layla. Papa Doc uses Layla's fading life force to grant Garth twenty-four hour reprieve from his zombie curse. Again himself, Simon Garth wraps up his affairs as quickly as he can, gaining whatever vengeance he needs to (on Mr. Six, specifically) and redemption via his ex-wife and daughter, insuring financial security by selling his business out from under his corrupt underlings. After that, Garth becomes the Zombie once more, and his story ends in an odd, "real-world" way. Editors at Marvel claim the art of Pablo Marcos for what turned out to be the last issue of TALES OF THE ZOMBIE was lost in the mail, somewhere in Haiti. One imagines today a gris-gris seller's family home still containing a penciled Marcos Zombie story among the practitioner's aging files and books.



The bulk of Simon Garth's extraordinary "life" is chronicled by Steve Gerber, one of Marvel's better writers of the 1970s (MAN-THING, THE DEFENDERS) and the kind of writer who could pull off stories about a zombie.

Using the formula from MAN-THING, about a mindless shambling monster who cannot communicate or show emotion except by his actions, Gerber does the same thing with Simon Garth. Primarily, Garth is a judgement of sorts called down to bring home the point of the stories. The characters drive the story elements while the Zombie acts out his mission, and eventually collides with the holder(s) of the Amulet of Damballah. Most of Garth's clashes are driven by forces outside of himself, but the final penance comes from Fate, as always Garth brings about the definitive end to evil people seeking to manipulate him. They never last long, that's for sure.

For the final two entries of the Zombie's story, fellow Hall of Famer Tony Isabella scripted. All in all, the nine black and white mags containing Simon Garth's trials are consistently well-written, and because of the magazine's more "adult" orientation, Gerber and Isabella could touch on violence and moral degradation and horror much more explicitly. Of course tame by today's standards, the violence in the stories still holds up today.



The real star of the show is Pablo Marcos, one of a horde of Fillipino artists working for the major comics companies in the 1970s. Presumably from a shack in a tree in some jungle environment with only a small rattling fan to cleave the oppressive heat, Marcos' art on this title is nothing short of brilliant.

Luckily for me, and for all of us, this stuff has found its way to modern readers via the ESSENTIALS format. Because it was meant to be in black and white, the reproduction is solid, and Marcos' gorgeous art leaps off the page so you can almost smell the rot of Haiti, the sexuality of the priestesses, the desperation and the blood leaking onto the hungry earth.

Also, it cannot be ignored the impact of the covers of these magazines, by no less than fantasy/sword and sex painter Boris Vellajo for the first five, and the brilliant Earl Norem for the last five. The covers are frame-worthy before you even get into the Marco's swoon-inducing work inside, and the Steve Gerber story insanity to follow (though certainly not as insane as some of Gerber's work, for sure.)

This is a must-read for anyone and everyone who loves good horror stories told through a tragic Pulp Monster like the Zombie. Everything you'd ever want or need is right here in this volume. Truly a masterpiece of the 1970s and one of the reasons the decade's better moments are exquisite counterbalances to its, and subsequent unfortunate decades', excesses.

Find the Zombie, before he finds you.

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!

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/!