Out of the Vault - DK2: The Dark Knight Strikes Again, Part 1

As we've seen over the past few weeks, in 1986, Frank Miller blew the comics world out of the water with his amazing miniseries, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. He followed it up the next year with his "Batman: Year One" storyline. It would be 15 long years before Miller returned to the storyline that had helped redefine comics and superheroes for an entire generation.

In 2001, DC Comics and Miller came out with The Dark Knight Strikes Again, or DK2 as it said on the front cover. I eagerly snapped up the first issue to see where Miller's story would go next.

It's obvious from the first pages that this story will be very different from its predecessor. Dark Knight Returns (henceforth known as DKR) opened with Bruce Wayne in a car crash, then transitioned to TV news reports to give us some exposition and teach us about the world, with interesting details slowly and subtly filtered in.

DK2 opens three years after DKR, with intriguing full page layouts featuring several interwoven TV talking heads over Batman's face. But unlike the previous story, there's no subtlety here at all. Instead we get footage of President Rickard (who just happens to have the same last name as Prez, DC's teen president from the 70's) alternating with Jimmy Olsen screaming at us about civil liberties, as if Archie Andrews had grown up to become Howard Beale.


But don't think that just because Reagan's no longer President that things have improved. No, no. And that's why Batman is planning to end his self-imposed exile. He's done hiding while the world goes to hell.

Next thing we see is some dude in a loincloth battling a hideous tentacled monster in an endless sea. He manages to kill the thing, but is then grabbed by an even larger monster. All seems lost when he is bathed in light and begins to grow. Who is he? He's Ray Palmer, better known as the Atom, and he has been held prisoner in a petri dish for lo these many years. But now a 16-year-old girl in a cat costume (Carrie Kelly, the girl Robin from DKR) rescues him from his captivity, and we can see several more ways in which this story differs from its predecessor.


The artwork is cruder, for one thing. Miller did his own inks on this one, and while Klaus Janson had never been a graceful inker, he did manage to bring a certain consistency to Miller's artwork, and even occasionally managed to emulate a bit of the old Adams-Giordano flavor on certain pages (I sometimes wonder if the Giordano influence I think I'm seeing may not have been from Giordano pitching in to help meet deadlines--unfortunately, Giordano died recently, so I may never know). Miller's work in DK2 is very inconsistent, looking pretty good on some pages, blocky and rushed on others.

And unfortunately, Lynn Varley's colors don't help things this time around. In DKR, Varley's subtle use of airbrushing brought depth to Miller's chunky figures. By 2001, Varley had discovered the computer, so instead of subtlety, we get page upon page of flashy, garish color effects. DK2 is ugly.

And not just in art. After Batman sends Catgirl on another raid to free Barry Allen (the Flash) from federal custody, we learn the awful truth: the world's three remaining legal superheroes--Superman, Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel-- are all in fact helpless victims, working for the bad guys. Prez Rickard is a hologram controlled by the real power in America, Lex Luthor (portrayed by Miller as a Kingpin-sized ogre). Luthor, working in conjunction with Brainiac, is controlling the three most powerful heroes in the world by holding Mary Marvel, the island of Themyscira and the Bottle City of Kandor hostage.


Because, you know, it's not as if Superman didn't save Kandor from Brainiac in their very first encounter, back in 1958. No, this is the post-Crisis Superman, held hostage by fear of what Brainiac will do to those poor helpless Kryptonians. Superman's whipped.

Luthor's not happy about Atom and Flash being freed, so he sends his boy Superman down to take care of things once and for all. So Superman shows up in the Batcave, at which point we get a reprise of the climax of DKR, only instead of a tragic final battle between friends who are both convinced they are right, we get this extended brutal beatdown of Superman the stooge, because Supes sux and Bats rulz, y'all. Oh, and this time, instead of a simple cameo from Green Arrow during the battle, we get Atom and Flash and GA all taking great glee in beating the shit out of their former teammate before Batman steps in to take things to a whole notha' level with a pair of kryptonite Hulk Hands.


Yeah, you read that right. Batman hits Superman with a giant KOKK. By the end of this first issue, we see that Miller has managed to ignore almost everything that made DKR great. DKR took place in a larger world illustrated through media clips, but was ultimately about one man's struggle with aging and mortality and his place in the world. DK2 was Yet Another Loud Comic Book About Guys With Powers Beating Up On Other Guys With Powers. In DKR, what made Superman's final battle with Batman great was that Superman was a good-hearted guy doing what he thought was right, and Batman was a totally outgunned underdog using his wits to triumph, barely. In DK2, Superman was a chump working for the bad guys who never stood a chance against Batman's army. DKR worked political satire subtly into the background. DK2 had characters screaming polemics at the audience.

The other problem was that it just wasn't as fresh the second time around. DKR had succeeded in large part because Miller overturned the conventions that had been stifling a stale character, took things in a darker direction than most other comics of the time, and made a lot of clever changes to established characters and relationships. But 15 years later, Miller's darker approach had become the stale convention. And Miller's plot twists, like making Luthor the power behind the President, weren't fresh anymore (at the time in the DC canon universe, Luthor actually was President).

There was still some cool stuff in there. It was nice to see Ray Palmer getting some play, because he was a character that no one at DC had known what to do with for a long time. The scene where Catgirl shoves him into her mouth was icky, but clever. The action scenes had some punch, and there was still hope that Superman would join the side of the angels again and help justice triumph.

What I'm saying is that, though it appeared as if Miller was betraying the characters as they had always been portrayed and as he had previously written them, there was still a chance that he could pull it out and make everything turn out all right. You couldn't just write him off after one issue. Sure issue one wasn't great, but it could have been worse.

It got worse. But that's issue 2, next week.

Big Game Wednesday - The Satanic Panic

In 1979, a year before I ever played Dungeons & Dragons, a college student named James Dallas Egbert III went missing from Michigan State University.

The case made national headlines, because not only was Egbert a young genius (started college at 14, a 16-year-old sophomore when he disappeared) but police were speculating that his disappearance had something to do with a game called Dungeons & Dragons. Not only was Egbert supposedly an avid player, but there were rumors that some students had been playing a live-action variant in the steam tunnels below the campus, and a push-pin map of the steam tunnels was found in Egbert's room. Perhaps Egbert had been injured in a game, or perhaps he had become despondent over the death of a favorite character and decided to kill himself. Perhaps he had become so obsessed with the game that he had lost his grasp on reality. Speculation ran rampant.

When Egbert was found some time later (as detailed in private investigator William Dear's book, The Dungeon Master), the truth was much more mundane, involving drugs and issues of sexual identity. But those details never received the press that the D&D speculation did, especially when Rona Jaffe wrote a novel inspired by the idea called Mazes and Monsters, which in turn was made into a crappy TV movie starring Tom Hanks. When Egbert killed himself the next year, in August of 1980 (about the same time I was first being introduced to the game, in fact), the truth no longer mattered. In the eyes of the world at large, Egbert was a D&D suicide.

If he had been the only one, there wouldn't have been a problem. But in 1982, Irving Pulling killed himself, and Pulling's mother, Patricia, claimed it was because a curse had been placed on him during a D&D game. Pulling sued TSR, the publishers of the game, and founded a group called B.A.D.D. (Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons, intentionally copying the initials of Mothers Against Drunk Driving).

When Pulling's group hooked up with the National Coalition on Television Violence, she was able to get her message to newspapers across the country. According to this article, Dr. Thomas Radecki was NCTV's only member, but as someone who sorted mail at a newspaper in the 80's, I can tell you he put out a lot of official-looking press releases and got the organization's name in a lot of papers. Radecki even lobbied the FTC and the Consumer Protection Agency to prevent the game from being sold.

Meanwhile, religious groups had been objecting to the game's content from the start, and after two suicides, they stepped things up. Dungeons & Dragons was just another element of the general Satanic panic that really got into gear when the McMartin Preschool trial hit the headlines. They just seemed to fit so perfectly together, a shadowy international conspiracy of Satanists using an addictive game as a recruiting tool.

I remember being in a game store, watching a teenager try to wheedle money out of his grandfather to buy some fantasy wargame, with the kid saying, "It's not Dungeons & Dragons, Grandpa," to which the old man replied, pointing at the illustration on the box, "Well, I don't know. That sure looks like a dragon right there. Isn't that a dragon?"

One summer when I was home on vacation, my mom called me back to her room to listen to a letter they were going to read on TBN (the Trinity Broadcasting Network) about the game. It went something like this:

Dear Paul and Jan,

A dear friend of mine has two teenaged sons and recently got married again, to a man who is not a Christian. He has recently taken to calling himself the Dungeon Master and started playing a game with the boys called Dungeons & Dragons. When my friend and the boys came to stay with us for a couple of days, they brought the game with them. As soon as I saw the books, I knew they were from the Pit.

The boys went into another room to play the game, so I sat down with their mother and told her how wrong the game was. We prayed about it together, then brought in the boys and told them what we had been discussing. They are good Christian boys, so eventually they agreed with us that the books should be destroyed.

We dumped the books into a metal trash can to be burned. When I touched a match to the pages, the books screamed.

At which point my mom wanted to know what the hell it was I was doing every Saturday up at college. And the hits just kept on coming. After Egbert's disappearance in 1979, his suicide in 1980, the TV movie and Pulling's suicide in 1982, and the McMartin trial in 1983 (which was unrelated to D&D, but helped crank up Satanic hysteria to new levels), some douchebag named Sean Sellers had to go and kill his parents in 1986, then offer D&D as a defense at his trial (Sellers later backed away from blaming the game per se--that was just something his lawyers had hyped up, he claimed, because the real reason he'd killed his parents, demon possession as a consequence of Satanic rituals, wouldn't fly in court).

And that brought it all together nicely--Satanism, Dungeons & Dragons, and violently deviant behavior all in one package. Sellers became the poster boy for everything bad about role-playing games, and helped contribute to the image of the D&D player not as socially awkward genius, but as loser outcast hanging onto sanity by the thinnest of threads and ready to snap. [And then, of course, I ended up marrying one of Sellers's closest friends, but that's a different story]

It kind of sucked to be a gamer there for a while, when every time you mentioned the game to non-gamers, the reaction was, "Oh yeah, wasn't there a kid who went crazy and killed himself?"

The bad publicity didn't kill the game's popularity, though. Dungeons & Dragons is now in its fourth edition and is still the 800-pound gorilla of the RPG world, and nowadays, when you tell people you're a gamer, the reaction is either, "Oh yeah, I played that for a while when I was 13," or maybe "Is that like WOW?", or else they just think you're a socially maladjusted loser (which, to be fair, may be true). But at least they don't think you're an incipient Satanist just one bad die roll from murder/suicide.

That honor has now passed to video gamers courtesy of Doom.

Random Jumble

So this is once again mainly an excuse to post another pic I threw together of Smeaton overseeing the construction of a sub he designed, but there's a lot of other stuff to mention as well. For instance, one show that I'm really loving right now is Archer, an animated spy comedy on FX.

But here's the thing: I don't usually like this kind of show. I'm not into really crude sexual humor, or cursing for its own sake. Homo jokes don't automatically make me giggle. I can't stand any of Seth Mcfarlane's shows, I'm not a big fan of Venture Brothers or Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and it took me forever to appreciate the subtleties of South Park.

But Archer has pieces of all those shows. It's probably closest to Venture Brothers in spirit, but Venture Brothers just made me uncomfortable, while Archer makes me laugh out loud. I don't understand why, but I still love the show. I'd post the link to Hulu, but because it's a mature show, you'd have to sign in anyway, so I'll just say, if you have a Hulu account or are up to starting one, you'll be able to find Archer pretty easily.

Second, I'm changing schedules at work again, so I have no idea whether I'll be at Conestoga or not. And I'm discreetly keeping my ears open for another job, which is soon, I know, but I'm not cut out for phone work for the long haul.

Third... I'm actually not ready to talk about Third yet. Maybe soon.

So here's the Smeaton pic.

Dougal Smeaton is the big fella directing the Atlantean worker while a woman watches from the background. Is she the bloodthirsty Victoria Sterling-Drake perhaps, or could she be the mysterious sorceress whom Dougal was associated with, the infamous Amyce Belden? Behind the woman, you can see the half-finished submersible craft Mr. Smeaton designed.

So if anyone's interested in crunchy details about the making of, the pic is pieced together from several pieces. The background was a color photo of a train factory from the 40's, found on this Library of Congress Flickr page. The sub in the background came from this collection of submarine photographs (it's the Grampus, BTW). The woman in the background came from this collection of Victorian era cartes de visite. Smeaton is taken from two other cards in the same collection: his head from one, and his body from another. I had to cut out the arm, reposition it and clone-paint the hand from resting on a table to pointing a finger. The Atlantean is a screen capture of a Babylonian extra from D.W. Griffith's silent epic "Intolerance."

So I pasted everything together, the color background and the sepia-toned Victorian photos and the black-and-white photos of hte sub and the Atlantean. Tweaked the brightness and contrast and got everything sepia-toned and matching pretty well. Spent more time putting in grungy elements to simulate the damage you'd see in an old photo like that and not being very satisfied with the results. And finally, as I'm looking through tutorials to try to find the missing element, I see a reference to a Photoshop filter that will do much of that for me.

So I check GIMP and sure enough, there's a script-fu that will age and damage a photo, make it sepia toned with a ragged, faded border. So I run that, and it's the final element I needed to tie everything together. I think this one turned out much better than my last one.

See you tomorrow for Big Game Wednesday.

Movie Monday - Hook, Line and Sinker

No relation to the 1969 Jerry Lewis movie of the same name, "Hook, Line and Sinker" was an early talkie comedy from 1930 starring the vaudeville team of Woolsey and Wheeler. They were apparently fairly popular in their day, though they're mostly forgotten now, with pretty good reason.

They're not funny, and neither is the movie.

The movie opens with the scene above, unusual for a comedy of the time. There's no merry music, just a motorcycle with its siren going. The cop pulls over two guys on a tandem bicycle, Wilbur Boswell and Addington Ganzy (Wheeler and Woolsey). As the opening scene unfolds, we get a sense of how the entire movie will play out--Boswell is the innocent moron, while Ganzy makes a lot of wisecracks, with l-o-o-o-n-g pauses between lines to allow for the gales of laughter that will supposedly ensue from each joke. As they talk the cop out of a ticket and into an insurance policy, lovely Mary Marsh (Dorothy Lee) pulls up and joins the conversation.

Mary is running away from an arranged marriage to her mother's lawyer, because she suspects the lawyer is just after her mother's money. She has a hotel that she plans to run to prove her independence. Wilbur immediately falls in love with Mary, and Ganzy is brought on board by the irresistible lure of money, so the boys decide to give up the insurance game and become hoteliers.


Unfortunately, the Hotel Ritz de la Riviera is a dump, with an ancient, grumpy bellman and an inept house detective. The detective is played by Hugh Herbert, whose low-key portrayal here is miles away from the fluttery, stammering persona he would become famous for later in his career.


So anyway, Ganzy comes up with a brainstorm: he calls a newspaper to give them the exclusive scoop that the hotel is the new secret favorite of the wealthy celebrity crowd, who love its beautiful views and its ultra-secure safe for storing their valuables. And soon the hotel is booked solid. The hotel is a success! Wilbur and Mary are blissfully happy and make goo-goo eyes at each other.


But there's a fly in the ointment. Several of the guests are crooks who have read the newspaper and figure there's lots of money to be made by plundering the jewels from the safe. What's more, the lawyer Mary's mother has engaged her to is actually a smuggler who has a ton of contraband stashed away in the hotel's basement.

Which leads to such hilarity as gangster moll "The Duchess" trying to seduce the safe combination out of Wilbur by holding him at gunpoint and forcing him to kiss her, a trick Wilbur then tries on love-of-his-life Mary.


High-larious, isn't it? The Duchess has more success with Ganzy. By the way, if Ganzy looks a little familiar, it's because the glasses-and-cigar look calls to mind George Burns in his later career.


Otherwise Woolsey's character operates much like Groucho Marx's characters: a wisecracker who insults everyone around him, waggles a cigar for emphasis and romances a wealthy society matron (Jobyna Howland, a large, flouncy woman without the dignified bearing of Margaret Dumont).

Unlike the Harold Lloyd comedies I wrote about the last two weeks, the story here is a hopeless muddle, an excuse for a series of skits that don't fit together at all. It all builds up to a climax in which two rival gangs have a shoot-out in the lobby with our heroes caught in the middle. And these are really heavily armed gangs. Not only do they have pistols and Thompson submachine guns, but also dynamite, grenades and a freaking tripod-mounted WWI machine gun.


If Wilbur's face looks a little odd through the smoke, it's because he's got a half-eaten apple shoved in his mouth. Why the apple? Who knows? It appears in his hand halfway through the climax with no explanation. The entire final sequence is like that, looking as if a lot of material was left on the cutting room floor. What's left is choppy, badly timed and incomprehensible.

Like the rest of the movie. Sure, part of it may be explained away by changing tastes in comedy, and another part excused by the fact that talkies were still new, resulting the sorts of technical problems that plague pretty much all movies from the period--stilted performances, slow timing, little to no incidental music.

But contrast this film to "Animal Crackers," starring the Marx Brothers, which came out the same year. Both films feature famous vaudeville acts, both films revolve around doings at a hotel catering to the rich and famous, and both films suffer from technical complications surrounding the early talkies. But there's no comparison. "Animal Crackers" is a classic, the two Harold Lloyd films I covered previously are hidden gems, and "Hook, Line and Sinker" is a stinker.

Out of the Vault - Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Pt. 4

So here it is, the big climax of Frank Miller's 1986 miniseries, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. Previously: Batman returned to Gotham after a 10-year absence, drawn out by a city riddled with violence and corruption, the return of an old nemesis and a world teetering on the brink of war. After bringing Two-Face to justice, Batman defeated the leader of the Mutant Gang just before Commissioner Gordon's retirement. Then the Joker emerged for one last fiendish plot, which Batman had to stop, despite dire warnings from Superman that the federal government would not tolerate his activities and being hunted by Gotham's new commissioner. As issue three ended, the Batman was slumped against the Joker's corpse, bleeding from multiple stab wounds as the police closed in on him.

With the help of some well-placed explosives and the armaments on the Batcopter, Batman escapes the police. Robin takes him back to the Batcave, where Alfred performs emergency surgery to save his life. Meanwhile, the news is full of reports about the effect he has had on Gotham, both pro and con, including the fact that some of the mutants who saw Batman take down the Mutant Leader have now restyled themselves as the Sons of the Batman. They are acting as street vigilantes, in some cases fighting other splinter groups of the former Mutants. The opening of Nolan's "The Dark Knight" was inspired by this, with shotgun-wielding vigilantes in makeshift Batman costumes fighting drug dealers.


Then it turns out that the Soviets aren't giving up Corto Maltese so easily. They launch a nuke.


Superman diverts the missile into the desert, but the bomb is no ordinary nuke. It's called Coldbringer, and it generates a massive electromagnetic pulse, large enough to shut down electronics worldwide. It also throws a huge cloud of debris into the sky, bringing on a temporary nuclear winter, which doesn't sit too well with Superman.


See, one of the changes John Byrne had made to Superman in the reboot was to tie his powers more closely to the sun. Superman didn't just receive his powers from being in the vicinity of a yellow sun; he absorbed power from it like a battery recharging. So Miller, in a brilliant little scene, has Superman absorb the stored solar energy from the surrounding plants to regain his strength for the battle to come. It vaguely resembles the Genki Dama from Akira Torayama's Dragonball three years later, in which Son Goku absorbs chi energy from all surrounding lifeforms to power his attack.

The blackout, meanwhile, has thrown Gotham into chaos. There's rioting in the streets and an army of Mutants has escaped from jail. The police are helpless to stop the anarchy engulfing the city. But to the rescue rides the cavalry, in the form of the Batman on horseback, stitched up and barely alive.


He inspires the Sons of the Batman and the escaped Mutants to follow him and bring order to the chaos. Gotham survives the night.

A week later, it's still dark, and Bruce is preparing for the final showdown when he gets a visitor in the form of leftist radical, eco-terrorist Ollie Queen, a.k.a. Green Arrow.


Yeah, that's right. After three issues in which Batman has battled crime and corruption and the worst of his rogues' gallery, along with the new menace of the Mutant gang, the final showdown of Miller's series is not with another villain, but with Superman, the biggest big gun of the DC Universe, its most incorruptible hero, and (before the reboot at least) his former best friend.

And once again, at least for me, seeing this fight was like seeing something I didn't know I wanted to see until Miller showed it to me. I mean, yeah, comics fans love to speculate on fantasy match-ups, but it was usually something that you knew you would never see--who would win in a fight between Superman and Hulk? Answer: probably Superman, but you never knew, because Hulk gets stronger when he gets madder. Who would win in a fight between Superman and Thor? Answer: pre-Crisis, probably Thor, because Superman is vulnerable to magic, so Mjolnir would crush him. Post-Crisis, who knows? (in the actual crossovers between the two companies, the answer came out Superman, both times).

But I don't remember ever speculating about Batman vs. Superman, because number one, they were buddies so it would never happen, and number two, it was ridiculous. Batman would have no chance. At least, the 70's Batman who relied on his fists and his Batarang on a rope would have no chance. And before the fight, even Batman acknowledges it in his farewell to Robin, which brings us back to the theme of Batman's impending death that has been hanging over the series since page one.


But here was Miller's Batman, smarter, more ruthless, and using his vast fortune to compensate for his mortal limitations. Batman taking on Superman, pulling no punches and actually winning. Good God!


At least until his heart gives out. Batman gets the good death he's been pining for. At the funeral, though, as everyone else is leaving, Clark Kent hears Batman's heart begin to beat under the ground and realizes this was all part of a plan to kill off Batman for good and allow Bruce to start a new life. And with a wink at Carrie/Robin, Clark shows that he's on board.

Bruce ends the book in subterranean exile, with Ollie and Carrie and a force of former Mutants, building an army, establishing a legacy.

All in all, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns was a remarkable achievement. On the one hand, it brought a new depth and interest to the character of the Batman, who had grown stale and bland over the years. This new Batman was nothing like the staid Super Friend or camp icon of years previous. And this newer, darker Batman has influenced every depiction of Batman since, from comics to TV to the big screen. It was also a meditation on age and regrets, life and death, the invulnerability of youth and the inevitability of death.

And on another level, it was a story about heroes and myths and the power of symbols. Batman stands outside society, above it, not a god like Superman, but simply a man who refuses to compromise or submit or play by the rules. The villains can't corrupt him, and the police can't stop him ("He's too big," says Gordon, a view that his successor Ellen Yindel comes to appreciate when the blackout hits and the institutions fail and there's only Batman to bring salvation). And it stands in really interesting contrast to Alan Moore's Watchmen, in which Ozymandias similarly sees himself as above and outside the rules.

And then there's the final battle between Batman and Superman. This is not your average hero vs. villain slugfest, but a philosophical debate rendered in punches, Batman's refusal to compromise pitted against Superman's go-along-to-get-along philosophy. And what makes it powerful and tragic is that each man is right in his own way. There's no hero, no villain.

It was a powerful story, a tour-de-force of comics storytelling, perhaps the best thing Miller had ever done, and it helped change the comics business forever.

And then, 15 years later, Miller came out with a sequel. More on that next week.

Big Game Wednesday - Catching Up

For this, my 666th post, I have to make what may be the most embarrassing admission a writer can make.

I wasn't always that much of a reader.

Not that I couldn't read. I read above my grade level from the time I started school. I just didn't read. At least not much.

It may have been Verne who did it to me. I was ambitious when I started 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, perhaps too ambitious. And it wasn't just Verne. In my enthusiasm for the classic Universal horror and science-fiction movies, I attempted Bram Stoker's Dracula as well, and also hunted down a copy of The Invisible Man.

Well, I made it through to just past the death of Lucy in Dracula before giving up, and it turns out I had checked out the wrong Invisible Man from the library. It was Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man I was reading, a depressing wade through racism and crap that I barely remember, except for one throwaway moment where there's a boxing match or something with a bare-breasted ring girl, so being a good Christian boy, I sensed the book was going into places I didn't want to go and quit.

The Hardy Boys I liked, and Lester Del Rey's The Runaway Robot I read over and over. But every time I tried to read a "classic," I was disappointed. I made it through Ivanhoe, though thinking back, I think it may have been some kind of movie adaptation or something. Plus, I had a major problem with it. The Sword in the Stone, which I tried to read after seeing the Disney film, shocked me mainly because it was full of cursing--damned this and damned that--so I never finished it. Nor did I finish A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which I found grungy and ugly compared to the comedy of the movie.

So by my young teens, I had sworn off books, at least books that were too "mature" for me. Because I didn't like being disappointed and I didn't like losing.

I got really good at faking my way through English classes without reading the "classic" novels I was supposed to be studying. Barely read a sentence of Great Expectations. Didn't read Silas Marner twice, once in seventh grade and once in eleventh or twelfth. In high school, I read Dune and The Lord of the Rings, the first couple of Anne McCaffrey Dragon novels, and a ton of Bradbury, but that was about it. Oh yeah, and some early C.J. Cherryh, but that was just because she was local. I liked to write, but I didn't really like to read.

And then I got to college. And it wasn't the classes which got me into the habit of reading. It was gaming.

I would sit around the table with the other gamers, and they would start discussing some favorite book or another, Elric or Corum or Conan, and I would just sit and nod silently, because I had no idea what they were talking about. I felt stupid next to these guys who had a wealth of knowledge that I just didn't have. So I started reading.

And maybe it was just that I was reading more modern stuff, but I actually started to enjoy it. I read a bit of sword and sorcery, mainly Moorcock and Brian Daley's Coramonde books, but I also branched out to read quite a lot of horror and science fiction. This was before media tie-in books started crowding the shelves; there were no Dungeons and Dragons novels, nor Battletech, nor Star Wars (apart from the movie novelizations and Alan Dean Foster's Splinter of the Mind's Eye). Instead I was reading Fred Saberhagen and Stephen King, Peter Straub and Alfred Bester.

And the game tie-ins, of course. M.A.R. Barker wrote a tie-in to his Empire of the Petal Throne game, The Man Of Gold. I read it even though I had never played the game. I read Raymond Feist's massive Magician, based on the Midkemia series of game supplements. I read Joel Rosenberg's The Sleeping Dragon, about a group of gamers who are drawn into the fantasy world they've been playing. I didn't read Rona Jaffe's Mazes and Monsters, which had been made into that awful TV movie starring Tom Hanks, but I did read John Coyne's Hobgoblin, about a disturbed teen who gets obsessed with a role-playing game and then thinks a monster from his game is stalking him and his girlfriend. And of course, I read Niven and Barnes' Dream Park several times. Loved that book.

College was ultimately not a successful endeavor for me, but the love of books and reading I developed, which grew out of gaming, shaped my life later. And as an added bonus, the friends I was making in the gaming club I could relate to much better than my high school friends back home, with whom I had never really fit in. Gaming was giving me an actual life, or at least a fuller, more well-rounded one.

So of course, some assholes had to come along and ruin my good time, starting with a guy who actually died before I started gaming. A guy named James Dallas Egbert III.

But that's next week.

Movie Monday - The Milky Way

Sorry for the muddy pics. The print wasn't in the best shape, but I cleaned up the screen caps as well as I could.

In the 20's, Harold Lloyd was the biggest thing going. His films outgrossed both Chaplin's and Keaton's. He didn't have Chaplin's artistic sensibility, nor Keaton's pure physical skills, but he was a solid, prolific filmmaker, and his regular guy persona was more appealing than both of them put together.

Unfortunately, the one thing he had in common with Chaplin and Keaton is that his career didn't survive for long after the introduction of talkies. Which is too bad, because last week's "The Sin of Harold Diddlebock" and this week's film are okay. Both feature clever scripts, funny gags, and Lloyd's trademark appeal. They ultimately fall a little flat compared to the best comedies of the time, but they compare well to, say, the Three Stooges' pictures, whose iconic status is a little mystifying.

In "The Milky Way" from 1936, Harold Lloyd plays mild-mannered milkman, Burleigh Sullivan. The script is pretty good, based on a Broadway play, so the plot structure is more solid than most movie comedies of the time, and there's lots of clever wordplay. Lloyd makes an appealing leading man, and the scenes where he gets to play physical comedy work well, but his timing isn't so sharp when it comes to dialogue as his castmates.

The plot: Burleigh's sister, Mae, works as a hat check girl, where she catches the eyes of a couple of drunks.


Mae is played by Helen Mack, well known to fans of Famous Monsters of Filmland as Hilda from "Son of Kong." The two drunks are Speed McFarland (William Gargan) and his friend Spider, played by Lionel Stander (who also had a small but memorable role in last week's Lloyd film).

The two drunks accost Mae outside the club when milquetoast milkman Burleigh comes to the rescue.


There's a brief fight, and somehow Burleigh stays on his feet while Speed is knocked out, which causes quite a sensation. You see, Speed is the middleweight champion of the world.

The next day, Burleigh visits Speed and his manager, Gabby Sloan (Adolphe Menjou) to set things straight. Burleigh explains how his highly developed ducking skills enabled him to dodge Spider's punches with ease, which led to Spider knocking out Speed. The demonstration ends with Speed being knocked out a second time, just before a horde of reporters rushes in, making Burleigh an overnight celebrity.

So Gabby, desperate to rescue the reputation and income stream of the former champ, convinces Burleigh to be a fighter. Burleigh takes the job because he needs the money for his sick horse, Agnes.


Oh yeah, and in the process of calling a doctor for Agnes, Burleigh ends up in the boudoir of lovely and wholesome Polly, a manicurist with whom he falls in love.


Gabby's plan is to have Burleigh win a series of set-ups, paying fighters to lay down for Burleigh so as to get him a title fight with Speed, where Speed will knock Burleigh out and rescue his reputation. There are a couple of problems with the plan. Number one is that Burleigh is not a natural fighter.


Number two is that Speed falls in love with Mae and refuses to fight his brother-in-law. When Gabby suggests that Speed delay the marriage until after the fight, Speed declares "We can't, I mean, we don't wanna." Burleigh's sister got busy!

But success has gone to Burleigh's head, which leads to a schism with Polly, a conflict with Mae (who convinces Speed that her brother needs to be punched out), and a brawl with a society matron.


Okay, actually not that last one. In fact, Burleigh's teaching Mrs. Winthrop Lemoyne how to duck, in a pretty good scene that gets referenced a couple of times later in the film, as when Mrs. Lemoyne ducks a swing by the announcer as she takes the ring before the big fight.


As I said earlier, though the movie ultimately falls flat, it really shines in spots and makes me want to look up some more of Lloyd's talkies. I also want to look up "The Kid From Brooklyn," the remake from 1946 starring Danny Kaye.

Oh yeah, a couple of things that really struck me. Besides having Lionel Stander in common, there are a couple of scenes in "The Milky Way" that call to mind "The Sin of Harold Diddlebock." In one scene, Burleigh terrorizes a hotel lobby with a pet lion on a leash.


And in another, Burleigh busts out with a Diddlebock yell.


So yeah, the first couple of classic comedies were pretty pleasant surprises. But they're not all gems. Not by a long shot.

As you'll see next week.

The Horror... The (Dunwich) Horror...

Last night was another bad movie night, and this time, the subject of evisceration was "The Dunwich Horror," the 1970 low-budget film starring Dean Stockwell ("The Boy With Green Hair") and Sandra Dee ("Gidget"). The film is a very, very loose adaptation of the 1929 horror story by H.P. Lovecraft.

The film was elevated above the standard exploitation fare being churned out by Arkoff and Nicholson's American International Pictures by the big-name celebrities in the cast and the classic horror nature of the source material. Unfortunately, there are two big strikes against it. Number one, this was exec-produced by Roger Corman, who had pretensions to quality, but never the patience nor taste nor attention to detail. And number two, it was unlucky enough to be made during that unfortunate interstitial time after the optimism of the 60's had curdled into drug-addled pretension, but before the "fuck it, let's have fun" backlash of the later 70's.

True to the AIP formula of mixing sex and horror to attract teenage audiences, "The Dunwich Horror" overlays a goofy rape-drug-plus-fertility-rites "love" story over the bones of Lovecraft's plot. Former child star Dean Stockwell brings his porn star 'stache to bear on the role of Wilbur Whateley, oddball son of an insane mother and demonic creature from another dimension. Wilbur has a fondness for pinky rings and likes to pretend he has gills.

Wilbur wants a copy of the Necronomicon like the one in the Miskatonic University Library. So he seduces librarian Sandra Dee, drugging her and taking her into his weirdo house, where she has psychedelic hallucinations of being groped by hippies.

Everything builds up to the big climax where Wilbur lays the librarian across a big stone altar and uses her as the centerpiece of a ritual to summon Yog Sothoth back to our world. But before he does the summoning, he opens his shirt to reveal that his body is covered with pseudo-hieroglyphic tattoos (which just coincidentally form a clown face with a propeller hat in the middle of his chest).

A professor of antiquities or something faces off with Wilbur during the ritual and uses his own knowledge of the Necronomicon to abort the ritual. At least, that's what I gather was supposed to be happening. The budget didn't allow for any special effects, so imagine the beam duel between Lo Pan and Egg Shen without any actual magic happening, just two guys shouting nonsense words and making weird gestures at each other like two wino street preachers in downtown Los Angeles at 6 a.m. on a Sunday.

Okay, that metaphor got a little too detailed, which makes me think I'm remembering more than I want to about my sojourn in the City of Angels.

Anyway, the point is, the film sucks, but it's funny, too. Oh, and as a point of trivia, the screenplay was co-written by a guy named Curtis Hanson, who went on to become a fairly respected director of films like "L.A. Confidential." Which doesn't really mean much, but on another hand, means a lot.

Because although you can say, "Well, everybody has to start somewhere," which is true, it's also true that he'll always have that in him. No matter how many times Akiva Goldsman writes something like "A Beautiful Mind," he'll always have "Batman and Robin" and "Lost in Space" lurking inside him, waiting to ambush us. You'll never know with John McTiernan whether you're going to get a "Die Hard" or a "Last Action Hero." Life is a crapshoot and even the best produce some turkeys.

And "The Dunwich Horror" is worse than a turkey. It's like a diseased, undead turkey. Ick.

ETA: Oh yeah, almost forgot. Go here and watch the trailer for the movie, not only to discover the badness for yourself, but also to hear the narrator intone, with all seriousness, "He believes the history of horrendipity written here..."

Horrendipity? Seriously?

Out of the Vault - Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Pt. 3

As our in-depth look at Frank Miller's 1986 Batman: The Dark Knight Returns continues, Batman has appeared once again in a corrupt and frightened Gotham, drawing the attention of both the criminals and the law. And in chapter three, "Hunt the Dark Knight," they close in on him from both sides like the jaws of a trap.

The book opens with a couple of former Mutants (who vaguely function as Miller Batman versions of C-3PO and R2D2) having joined up with a woman named Bruno, who is a fusion of the triple Miller fetishes of Amazons, Nazis and leather bondage gear.


Batman, disguised as a bag lady, fights with Bruno (from whom he wants to learn something important), but is on the verge of losing when Bruno's bullets melt in midair, her gun grows red-hot and she is suddenly tied up in steel pipes. A voice says, "Bruce, we need to talk," but Batman puts him off until the next day.

Meanwhile, TV news is abuzz with talk of a number of unexplained incidents in Gotham which seem to indicate the presence of a certain figure who's faster than a speeding bullet but cannot be named lest they lose their FCC license.

Next day, Bruce and Clark meet in a field, and it is clear they don't like each other much, which was a huge change from the former characterization of these guys as best friends.


I mean, they had shared a monthly book, World's Finest Comics, for over forty years (the book was cancelled in 1986, the same year as the Superman reboot and Miller's graphic novel). They had known each other's secret identities and covered for each other seemingly forever. Now suddenly here was Miller, changing not just Batman's characterization, but a central relationship of the entire DC Universe.

Also notice that the President of the United States is depicted as a decrepit Reagan. This story was published during Reagan's second term and was taking place over ten years in an imaginary future, which gives it another point of similarity with Alan Moore's Watchmen--both postulated imaginary Americas in which a Republican president somehow refused to give up office and stayed in power long past the two-term limit prescribed in the Constitution. I don't know how that meme got established, nor why it endures (during W's term, it was constantly bandied about by leftist paranoiacs that Bush would somehow declare martial law rather than give up the presidency), especially given that the only President in history who actually served more than two terms in office, and actually inspired the 22nd amendment, was liberal icon Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Before Clark leaves, he delivers a warning to Bruce that he may be sent to bring Bruce in. And on a completely unrelated note, the new Commissioner of Police, Ellen Yindel, has also issued a warrant for Batman's arrest.

Which is unfortunate, because the Joker is planning something big. He's appearing that night on David Letterman, to show how harmless he is or something. When Batman shows up at the studio, he gets in a massive battle with the cops on the rooftop while the Joker and his fat flunky Abner kill everyone in the television studio. The Joker escapes downstairs as Batman barely gets away from the cops in his voice-activated Batcopter, which inspired the voice-activated Batmobile of Burton's movie.

Yeah, Carrie Kelly aka Robin is a computer genius who reprogrammed the chopper, but Batman doesn't mind a little initiative if the results are good.

So Batman searches for the escaped Joker, leading him to madam Selina Kyle, who has been beaten and tortured to help the Joker in the next stage of his plan. Meanwhile, Superman is battling enemy forces on the island of Corto Maltese (a name taken from an Italian comic strip from the 60's and referenced in Burton's "Batman" as the location where Vicki Vale had taken her pics for Time magazine) in a sequence that takes visual inspiration from the Fleischer Superman cartoons of the 40's.

Batman races to the county fair too late to stop the Joker from murdering sixteen Cub Scouts, but is determined to end the Joker's murderous ways once and for all. And once again, the Batman uses his bat-shuriken to painful effect...


which, by the way, inspired the use of similar implements in Nolan's "Batman Begins."


The battle between Batman and the Joker builds to a final savage confrontation, with the Joker knifing Batman in the ribs multiple times just before Batman breaks his freaking neck!


Of course, he doesn't kill the Joker, just paralyzes him. But the Joker, with one final act of superhuman will, kills himself, knowing that the Batman will be punished for his "murder." As the third issue comes to a close, Batman collapses next to the Joker's corpse, bleeding from his belly as the cops close in and the world goes dark.

And what you may not realize at this point is how unprecedented all this was, how Miller was literally breaking all the rules--Batman fighting the police, Batman and Superman as enemies, or at best uneasy rivals, Batman breaking bones, maiming, Batman being hurt (Batman got knocked out a lot in the 70's, but broken arms and stab wounds were on a different level).

And then there were the satirical jabs being taken at politics and media, the alternate takes on stagnant supporting characters like Lana Lang as the chubby managing editor of the Daily Planet and James Olsen as the head of Galaxy Broadcasting, the cursing (which had been absent from both comics and filmed versions of Batman prior to this, but which was present in Burton's "Batman"), the usual Miller fetishes of bondage gear and prostitutes among others, and perhaps most disturbing of all, the weird, almost sexual relationship between Joker and Batman (the Joker keeps calling Batman "darling" and "dear" and "my sweet" throughout the entire book, at least until he dies).

And because all the rules were being broken, we really had no idea what to expect in the next and final issue. Batman appeared mortally wounded, his reputation ruined. Everything had grown progressively darker, more brutal, with every issue. And let's face it, Bruce Wayne had been pining for death since literally the first page. If this were any other book about Batman, we would have said, "No way he could actually die," because DC would clearly not allow that.

But this book, this Batman, had done all sorts of things already that DC would not normally allow. Miller was coloring outside all the lines, so for the first time in literally my entire life of reading comics, I had no idea what was going to happen in the next issue and was preparing to accept what seemed at once inevitable and unthinkable: the death of Batman.