God Hates My Mother-In-Law

She watches two (2) shows a week, both on the same night--Survivor and Lost. And it seems like every Thursday for at least the last two months has had some kind of severe weather alert, so that there's always a weather graphic on-screen and the breaks are always full of cut-ins by the weather guys showing radar images and saying, "It's not serious yet, but we're cutting in to tell you it might be." In fact, Lost was completely preempted last night because of tornado coverage.

Seriously, every Thursday. I'm sure she thinks it's like this all the time anymore, because that's all she ever sees.

Lost Blows Up

I know, I know. I promised myself that April was going to be a big month for this blog. I was going to post new stuff almost every day. But it hasn't worked out very well this week.

I'm almost through the DVD's of Lost Season 3, but I'll wait till I'm done with them to write more about that. Last night, Lost returned to hiatus with a ferocious episode that seems to be setting up a mad rush to the season finale. Characters die! Characters we thought were dead improbably survive! Expectations are thwarted! Expectations are met!

And watching last night's episode, it occurred to me how much of Lost is an exercise is cute structural tricks. The opening flash-forward sets up a mystery that we know we'll probably see answered by the season finale. The first scenes at the beach set up another mystery that will probably be answered soon. ABC's promos have told us that at least one character will die in this episode, so when Sawyer gets caught out in the open with snipers shooting at him, we think, "Oh no, not Sawyer!"

But he dodges a hail of bullets trying to save Claire, only to have her house blow up before he can get to it, and we think, "Oh no, not Claire!" but we're also thinking, "So this is why she didn't escape with Aaron," so mystery solved. But turns out she's okay, and the real death, when it comes, is a shock.

Meanwhile, the flash-forwards answer a mystery from a previous episode: why did Sayid agree to work with Ben?

Meanwhile, previous episodes have told us about the Oceanic Six, the six crash survivors who made it back to civilization--Jack, Kate, Aaron, Hurley, Sayid, and Sun. But those six are still separated. So when we get a scene late in the episode which sets up their reunion, we think, "Okay, finally, they're all getting together." But it's not to be. By the end of the ep, they're still separated, and one's heading in the wrong direction.

But the thing that makes Lost work for me (and it doesn't work for lots of people I know) is the way the writers are able to work really good character moments in among the tricks. The scene which teases at getting the Oceanic Six together segues into a really nice confrontation between Locke, Sawyer and Hurley that works because of the layers of character development that have occurred over the past three-and-a-half seasons.

Out of the Vault - The One

This week's Out of the Vault was a hard one to write for some reason. I made the scans, knew the kinds of things I wanted to say, and yet, it just never seemed to want to come together the right way.

It's hard to remember the way things were in the mid-80's. If you believed the media, there was widespread paranoia about nuclear holocaust. Ronnie Ray-Gun was in the White House, and he was craaaaazy, man. He had this silly idea about putting satellite-mounted weapons in orbit to shoot down the Russkie's nukes, and this, along with his general belligerence toward the Evil Empire, was going to push us into global thermonuclear war. We were doomed.

You saw this in movies like 1983's "War Games" with Matthew Broderick and the TV movie, "The Day After," also from 1983. Songs like Nena's "99 Luftballons" also conjured up the specter of nuclear holocaust. Even comics got in on the act.

Everybody remembers Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen, both of which play off of nuclear paranoia are generally regarded as ushering in the grim-n'gritty comics of the 90's. But before either of those comics came Rick Veitch's The One.

Veitch, along with Steve Bissette, was one of the first graduates of the Kubert school. Veitch and Bissette collaborated on several stories for Marvel's Epic Illustrated before Bissette moved on to draw Swamp Thing for DC. Veitch would take over the character when Bissette moved on, but first he made this six-issue adult-oriented take on nukes and superheroes for Marvel's Epic Comics imprint.

In issue 1, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. launch nuclear strikes at each other. Before the missiles can strike, however, they are stopped by a mysterious flying figure known as The One. A large proportion of the world's population is unaware of this, however, since they were catatonic at the time. In the aftermath of the failed nuclear strike, both the Americans and the Russians release super-powered soldiers as the next generation of the arms race. The superhumans come into conflict, ultimately destroying the world. However, before the world can end, the good souls of the world complete the next phase of our evolution. Turns out The One was an oversoul created by the merging of humanity's collective soul. While the evil humans struggle to survive on the blasted, barren earth (merging into giant snakelike piles of wretched creatures struggling to reach the top of the pile as in the illustration at right), The One flies off to explore the universe.

It's an odd duck, this story. Unlike the classic stories soon to come from Miller and Moore, The One is quite clearly a product of its time, straddling a delicate line between drama and satire. This was during that strange period on the mid-80's when you could literally play rape for laughs. In addition, Veitch was one of those guys who seemed to think you should relate to unpleasant nihilistic characters as if they were just like you.

This was also early in Marvel's Epic line-up, when they were still trying to establish proper boundaries. This is a story about the death of hte entire world, after all, featuring widespread destruction, graphic dismemberment, drug use, rape, incest. Yet the only nudity I can remember is one partially revealed nipple, and the entire book uses the rather silly euphemism "shuck," as in, "I'll kill you, mothershucker!" It's hard to take it seriously as adult drama when you read dialogue like that.

And yet, in a lot of ways, The One was ahead of its time. It anticipated the deconstruction of the superhero that would continue apace into the 90's. What's more, Veitch pushed his super action over the top in ways that would look very familiar to later fans of Japanese manga and anime, say, Dragonball Z. For instance, look at the scenes below, first of Cell in Dragonball powering up his chi and causing devastation without lifting a finger. Then look at the sequence from The One, in which the Soviet super destroys a building merely by flexing his muscles really hard.



Another even more startling example: This scene, in which millions of souls merge into The One before leaving Earth...

reminded me rather forcefully of this scene from "End of Evangelion" when all the souls on Earth merge into Rei Ayanami (starting about 5 minutes in).



Veitch later took over not only the pencilling duties on Swamp Thing, but the writing as well, and later returned to satirical over-the-top super action with Maximortal and Brat Pack.

Lost Season 3

So I'm finally working my way through the Lost Season 3 DVD's, and I've got to say, so far, the season hangs together much better without the long gaps in between episodes (if you don't know or have blocked out the memory, they tried an experiment with Lost last season--responding to complaints about reruns, they aired the first 5 or 6 episodes at the start of the fall season, then put the show on a mini-hiatus, returning in February or so to air the rest of the episodes).

It's still a pain to have them separated into multiple groups, which means we don't even find out whether Locke's alive or dead, for instance, until episode 3. But being able to watch the episodes back-to-back really keeps that annoyance to a minimum and makes it easier to notice the good things going on. There was a lot of stuff going on under the surface in those early episodes when the Lostaways were being manipulated by the Others. Elizabeth Mitchell as Juliet turns in an incredible performance every episode. There always seem to be about three layers of thought and deception and self-control going into every twitch of her face.

She scares me.

I love this show.

After I get through Lost, I'm going to start going through 30 Rock on Hulu.

Movie Quote Madness

So I'm visiting the Livejournal of my writing group friend Sargon the Terrible and he has a challenge going where he lists a bunch of movie quotes and you have to name the movie. And one of the quotes he has is this:

“She is curvaceous. Not as pleasingly fat as I prefer them, but at night a cottonseed is the same as a bell.”

And the quote sounds really similar to a line from "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad," except I've always heard the line as "...at night, a stone is as good as a pearl," which has the advantage of making, you know, sense, since in the dark, a smooth stone and a pearl feel just the same. So I tell him he has the line wrong, and he adamantly insists it's cottonseed/bell, which, what the hell does that even mean?

But I don't have the movie on video, so I can't prove it. But I do have the novelization written from the screenplay, so I bust it out and look up the line, and in the book, the guy says, "...but at night..." and then leaves it hanging.

So apparently the actor, Gregoire Aslan, ad-libbed it and he has taken the secret to hte grave with him.

Oh well...

The Huge Hunter

Just finished reading a short novel from the 19th Century: The Huge Hunter, or The Steam Man of the Prairies, by Edward S. Ellis. I first heard of the book from Jess Nevins at a convention panel a couple of years ago. Nevins is the author of te Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana, an exhaustively researched book full of fascinating stuff. According to Wikipedia, The Huge Hunter was the first U.S. science-fiction dime novel, and the first known example of an Edisonade, a story based around a brilliant young inventor and his inventions. The illustration at right is from another Edisonade, a Frank Reade Jr. adventure featuring an electric man, inspired by The Huge Hunter.

In The Huge Hunter, the genius inventor is Johnny Brainerd, a hunchbacked dwarf who builds a steam-powered walking robot that he drives like a train. He hooks up with some prospectors in the American West, and they use the steam man to pull a wagon and scare off Indians while they try to get rich from a lucky gold strike. The writing is stiff, and the plotting is less-than-ideal. For instance, at one point, a man appears who is the nemesis of one of the prospectors. He shows up for about two pages, and then he's gone, never to be heard from again, which is too bad, because his presence could have brought some real dramatic tension to the book. As it is, there's no real drama in the entire story.

Which is not to say it's plodding or boring. It's fast-paced, and there is a lot of action. But as far as action that requires commitment and sacrifice and involves true jeopardy and moral choices, there's none of that. The boy builds a machine, the prospectors fight through a series of adventures, and they live happily ever after. A fun, fast read, but not an absorbing one, or one could say, a dime novel, not a real one. But I'd like to read more like it.

In fact, this book directly inspired the Frank Reade series, in which Reade first builds his own steam man, and later builds an electric man.

If you're interested in more information, start here and here. You might also be interested in reading about the real-life inspiration for the steam man, here.

Out of the Vault - Tales From the Tomb

When I delved into the vault last week, I pulled out three boxes of comics and one box of magazines. And in the magazine box was a rather unusual treasure from 1970-Tales From the Tomb.

Most comics fans are familiar with Seduction of the Innocent, the book by psychiatrist Dr. Frederic Wertham that accused comics of causing juvenile delinquency, and the Congressional hearings that followed. The hearings basically had two outcomes. First, like the movie studios before them, the comics publishers agreed to set up a private governing body to guarantee the decency of comics content (the Comics Code Authority, whose seal ran on the cover of every book from Marvel, DC, and other newsstand comics publishers).

And second, EC Comics pretty much went out of business. What was regarded by some fans as the best comics publisher of the 50's shut down their entire line of titles with the exception of Mad, which they then reformatted into a magazine so that they could skirt the CCA.

Mad's move to the newsstand paved the way for others to do likewise, like Warren Publications, who published Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella, and Marvel Comics, who experimented with more adult content in B&W magazines in the 70's and 80's.

And then there was Eerie Publications.

I didn't actually buy this one. My stepbrother didn't buy many comics, but he did buy a lot of magazine-sized ones, mostly Petersen stuff like Hot Rod CARtoons and the occasional horror mag like this one.

The cover above sums up Eerie's approach. Look at how pretty much all the text on the cover drips. Let's take a closer look at the illustration (you can click on the picture for a larger view). Note the lurid colors (I've brightened all the scans a bit to account for the overall dinginess of the magazine). Notice how the drooling monster is an odd amalgam of Dracula and the classic Universal Frankenstein Monster (flat head and stitches running up his forehead where his brain should be). Note how he's ripping the clothes off this lovely blonde for no discernible reason. And this is just plain weird: not only is she bleeding from the fang wounds in her neck, but she is also bleeding from the spiders' feet. Those are some freakin' scary spiders!

When I opened up the magazine to look inside, I got a huge surprise. The editor was a guy named Carl Burgos. For those who don't know, Carl Burgos was the guy who created the Human Torch for Timely Comics back in the 30's. Marvel Comics #1, which was once (and may still be) the most valuable single issue on the face of the planet, featured the Torch on the cover. The man was a legend. I was disappointed, though, that there weren't any other art or writing credits in the magazine. I'm sure I would have recognized some of the names.


When you get into the stories, however, you're in for a mixed bag. Though there is lots of lurid stuff, there's nothing to match the cover. And in some cases, like this opening splash panel for "Food For Ghouls," this little bit of titillation with the buxom girl in stockings is as spicy as it gets. The story itself is a pretty standard EC rip-off about a chef who abuses his family while lavishing money and gifts on his mistress and suffers a pretty gruesome final revenge from his wife. The first panel teases you into 5 pages of build-up for a gory three-panel payoff. But at least it had a payoff, which is more than can be said of some other stories in the magazine. Several of them are tame enough to fit comfortably inside a Code book like DC's House of Mystery.

But there are stranger things in the magazine, like this story of Kolah the Jungle Girl. The muddy grays are typical, but what is a jungle girl story doing in a horror magazine, apart from the grotesquerie of the teeth showing through the torn cheeks of both women? It sort of looks as if the wounds may have been added after the fact just to give this bit of jungle cheesecake some horror cred. And why is the lettering in just this story in that cheap typeset font?

Turns out, one way Eerie maximized profits was by repackaging old stories from pre-Code comics. The muddy grays are a result of translating color comics to black-and-white. The variations in lettering and the odd juxtapositions of subject matter give away their origins in different publications.

Of course, no story about Eerie Publications is complete without their trademark: the popped eyeball. I remembered this from some of the other Eerie mags my stepbrother had bought, but I had to look long and hard through this particular issue to find one. In fact, on my first runthrough, I couldn't find any. I knew they had to be pretty common though, not just because of my memories, but because of the remembrances on this page, where Dick Ayers, former Marvel artist who also drew stories for Eerie Pubs, said,

When Carl and Myron asked me to do the "eye-poppers" I said no-way and Myron told me to go see the movie just out -- "The Wild Bunch." I did and went along with Myron and Carl. When I draw at my table I give whatever my best so's I can enjoy what I do... and it looks like I had fun popping those eyes.

So I looked again, and sure enough, I found one. Actually, I may have found two: the bottom corpse on the left clearly has an eye popped out of its socket, but in the panel on the right, it also looks as if the girl has clawed an eyeball out of her attacker's face. Two panels later, though, the character's face appears with two healthy eyes, so I'm not sure what this panel is actually supposed to depict. It may be another case where the art was edited to add a little extra gore.


If you're interested in learning more, visit the link above from which I drew the Dick Ayers quote. Lots of examples of the Eerie style there. And for more information on the publisher, Myron Fass, see this profile of the "Demon God of Pulp." I think I have several of the magazines depicted on that page, including the Space Wars Heroes, maybe the Space Trek, and a couple of the UFO ones.