The Left Hand of Death

So about a year ago, while discussing Worldcon, I mentioned picking up a book on the recommendation of the extremely cute Erin Evans. The book I picked up was titled The Left Hand of Death by Parker DeWolf; the cover notes that it is Book 1 of The Lanternlight Files. It was described by Ms. Evans (IIRC) as a fantasy noir, sort of Raymond Chandler meets Dungeons and Dragons.

Well, if you remember August and September of last year, I was reading through the Worldcon stack at a pretty good clip and posting my impressions here. Then I got to the DeWolf book, and bogged down halfway through. I set it down and didn't pick it up again for almost a year.

So what was wrong? Well, part of it was surely just that I'd read too many books in too short a time and was ready for something different. But another, bigger part is that the book just didn't succeed as advertised.

I mean, sure, it has the requisite Chandleresque stock characters and plot coupons. Ulther Whitsun, the main character, is a fixer, the closest thing the D&D world has to a private eye, apparently. People hire him to solve problems, especially problems that take place in the grimy underworld. Oh yes, Whitsun is a hard-boiled bad-ass, all right.

And yes, there's a MacGuffin, and a shady dame who hires him to find it and almost leads him to ruin, and there's a fat man who's also searching for it, and a hit man, and a gunsel (or D&D equivalent) who's got eyes for the dame and is jealous of Ulther. Ulther's search takes him from the chambers of the rich and powerful to the lowliest den of thieves and runs him afoul of crooks and cops alike.

It's got the elements, all right. But the tone, the atmosphere, are still Dungeons and Dragons, and for me, Dungeons and Dragons is pretty watered down and juvenile as fantasy goes. I mean, if you want me to take your story seriously, you've got to do better than halfling thieves. Halfling thieves? I mean, seriously, come on.

So anyway, I finished it, so it didn't beat me. But I won't be searching for the further adventures.

Movie Monday - Operation Scorpio

Movie Monday continues with more kung fu madness. This week's feature is "Operation Scorpio" from 1991. And although this week's movie is not adapted from a comic, comics do play a part.

"Operation Scorpio" starts Chin Kar Lok as Yu Shu, an aspiring comic artist. He idles away his time in class doodling battles between kung fu masters and daydreaming about being a hero, or at least telling stories about them.

His aspirations receive a cold dose of reality when he rescues Mei, a pretty girl who is being sold into slavery as a prostitute. Unfortunately for him, when he tries to set her free, Mei decides to become his servant to express her gratitude. He hides her out in his father's house.

One night, Yu Shu goes to spy on the slavers. The gang is led by an old man in a wheelchair; his will is enforced by his son (known only as Sonny and played by Korean Won Jun Kim), a master fighter who uses an unusual scorpion style.

Watching from outside the window, Yu Shu sketches Sonny's various techniques with an eye toward using them in his comics someday. When Yu Shu then asks his father if he can study kung fu, his father tells him to be realistic and gets him a job at an old friend's noodle shop instead.

From there on, things get really complicated. Fleeing from the slaver's men, Yu Shu meets Jean Paul, a Chinese proto-bodybuilder who has studied abroad and adopted Western methods of diet and training (so instead of eating rice and practicing Chi Gung, he advocates eating meat and lifting barbells).

Yu Shu begins to live a double life with Mei's help, working in the noodle shop and training his strength with Jean Paul.

Of course, eventually his duplicity is discovered when it causes a disaster. Yu Shu is forbidden to train with Jean Paul anymore, which is when his noodle-making "uncle" (played by Hong Kong movie legend Lau Kar Leung) reveals that he is a kung fu master and has been training Yu Shu all along. Like the "wax on, wax off" scenes in "The Karate Kid," all the work Yu Shu has been doing lifting and tossing huge, burning-hot woks has been training his strength, toughness, and reflexes. His uncle also begins to teach him a special deceptive kicking technique that he says is even more powerful than the Scorpion Tactic. Yu Shu becomes so enthused by his training that he even studies live eels to develop his own personal Eel Technique.

Eventually Mei is discovered and captured again, and Yu Shu sets out to rescue her. Jean Paul battles Sonny, but is beaten. The Noodle Master then battles Sonny, and is on the verge of beating him when he is shot in the leg by Sonny's father. So it is all up to Yu Shu, who must combine Jean Paul's strength training, his uncle's Noodle Fu and Southern Shadowless Kick, and even Eel Style (which looks a bit like combat break dancing), coached by his uncle, who throws Yu Shu's comics pages into the air during hte fight, so that Yu Shu can see and anticipate Sonny's techniques.

It's amazing just how much of the free-for-all plot finally gets tied together in a final battle that lasts only a few minutes.

"Operation Scorpio" is the quintessential 90's kung fu movie. The furious fight scenes are bursting with wire work, which is obvious and unbelievable, but also dazzling if only because it's so crazy. The plot wanders all over the damn place, crams in all kinds of random shit, yet ties it all up and pays it off at the end. Compared to this whack-a-doo mess, an American film like "The Karate Kid" is a model of brutal simplicity.

Overall, I'd say "The Karate Kid" is a better film. But "Operation Scorpio" is way more fun, and given the choice on an average Friday, I'd much rather watch it again.

Out of the Vault - The Realm

Okay, I was planning to do Tony Wong's Oriental Heroes this week, but I'm a little kung fu'd out (although if you're desperate for a kung fu fix, come back for Movie Monday where kung fu is still the subject du jour). So instead, I decided to finally get around to covering The Realm.

I originally had planned to make this one of the very first Out of the Vault entries, but for some reason I couldn't get into it. The Realm was first published by Arrow Comics in 1986 as part of the big black-and-white wave of the mid-80's. The basic storyline, by writers Ralph Griffith and Stu Kerr, with art by Guy Davis and Tim Dzon, was simple and familiar:

Four college students, two guys and their girlfriends (Dom and Alex and Sandi and Marge), go on a trip to a cabin in the woods...


Where they find a mysterious book bound in human skin...


No, sorry, that's "Evil Dead."

Actually, they find a metal chest that promises some precious treasure inside. Yay!


But when they open it, they get zapped. Oh noes!


When they wake up, they are in a decrepit house deep in a mysterious forest, and Dom, the jock, has grown some massive muscles. When they walk outside, armored men on horseback ride up from out of nowhere, kidnap the ladies and knock out the guys.

When the guys come to, they are attacked by creepy goblin-type creatures. Dom beats up a couple of goblins while Alex fends off another with what seems to be magic. Then they are saved by a mysterious hooded archer who is revealed to be...


Silverfawn the Elf. And quicker than you can say, "Oh crap, it's yet another dude's D&D game written up as a comic book," they acquire more party members, including a dwarven fighter and a halfling thief. They manage to save Marge, who has manifested healing powers (cause every party needs a cleric), but Sandi is purchased from the slavers by the Big Bad, Mr. Mushroom Head.


Okay, his name is actually Darkoth, and that's actually a hat. Even though artist Guy Davis claims on his letters page profile that his main influence is Japanese animation, he also cites Nelvana animation as an influence. Therefore I think it's safe to say that Darkoth's look was inspired by Mok from "Rock & Rule," who shared Darkoth's big lips, jutting cheekbones and affinity for flamboyant headgear (although in Mok's case, it was poofy wigs).


Anyway, though it had a cliched concept and a shaky, amateurish start, The Realm actually developed over the first few issues into a decent adventure book. Though Guy Davis's art was sketchy, he matured quickly into a more confident storyteller. The first issue's layouts were actually by someone named Jim Miller, and they were a little blocky and dull. By issue two, Davis was apparently doing everything, and the layouts became much more vibrant.

Like so many independent books of the time, The Realm ended up jumping around from independent publisher to independent publisher. I stuck with the book for 11 issues. After issue 12, they moved from Arrow Comics to WeeBee Comics and then to Caliber. The first major arc ended with issue 15, after which the original creators left, and the series fllailed after that. Two different creative teams tried their hand (including current Marvel writer Brian Michael Bendis doing penciling duties), but didn't last long. Another team had better success with the spin-off/reboot Legendlore, which lasted 17 issues.

Crappity Crap-Crap-Crap

I'm unemployed. I'm broke. I have bills due. I need new glasses, a chipped tooth repaired, and an oil change for my car. I have my microwave on my coffee table and my toaster oven next to my TV because the wiring in the back half of the house is shot. I need a job, and when I get that job, I have hundreds and thousands of dollars worth of things I need to spend that money on.

So why am I upset?

Because Champions Online launches in a couple of weeks. The preview videos look awesome, several steps up from City of Heroes. And they're offering a lifetime subscription for about $200 bucks, with all sorts of cool free swag to make your gaming experience more fun.

This is the last thing I need to spend my money on. But as a Champions gamer from way back, damn, I want this.

Movie Monday - Saviour of the Soul

So yeah, I was originally going to be going over superhero movies based on American comics. I will still get back to that eventually. But I realize that right now, it's more fun to hunt down obscure Hong Kong movies that intrigued me and maybe introduce them to an audience that might also find them interesting.

So today's movie is "Saviour of the Soul" from 1991, starring Andy Lau (apparently not the same person as Andrew Lau, who directed last week's featured movie), Aaron Kwok and Anita Mui (best known to American audiences for her roles in Jackie Chan's "Rumble in the Bronx" and "Legend of the Drunken Master" aka "Drunken Master II"). Once again, while I had large portions of this movie on VHS, I ended up reviewing the entire film on Youtube, from which I pulled the fuzzy scans. Sorry.

I first discovered this movie while channel-surfing in Korea on my second tour there. It was the craziest mish-mash I'd ever seen, part romance, part comedy, part kung fu action (with cartoonish moments). I taped about half of it, but as it was broadcasting on a Chinese language network with no subtitles, I had no idea who these people were or why they were fighting. I only knew that it was like nothing I'd ever seen before, almost like a live-action cartoon.

And through the miracle of the Internets, I find out that the movie is apparently based on a Japanese manga, although it's hard to determine which one (a review on Amazon says it's inspired by City Hunter, but if so, it's one of the loosest adaptations I've ever seen). I guess I shouldn't be surprised, given that one of the main characters looks as if he stepped right out of a Final Fantasy video game.


That's Aaron Kwok as the villainous Silver Fox. The film opens as Fox breaks his master Eagle out of the World's Weirdest Prison; he defeats dozens of machine-gun wielding guards with only his sword and a bullet-proof poncho. Eagle relates the story of how he was captured by a woman named May, a city cop/assassin(?) who blinded him with thrown knives. Eagle makes Fox swear revenge before dying.

Turns out, May works with a couple of guys named Chin (Andy Lau) and Koo (Kenny Bee), who are both in love with her. Koo has proposed, but May has been putting Koo off, hoping Chin will find the courage to declare his own feelings. Meanwhile, May's crazy sister (both roles are played by Anita Mui) tells her that Fox is coming for revenge, and that May should send both men away for their own protection until Fox is dealt with.

May rejects her sister's advice. Shortly thereafter, Fox kills Koo, but is forced to flee when May blinds him in one eye with a knife. May decides to protect Chin by telling him she has no feelings for him and was going to marry Koo. She then goes into hiding, leaving Chin to care for Koo's teenage sister.

A year later, May's sister (tired of Chin constantly questioning her as to May's whereabouts) tells Chin that May is posing as Pet Lady, who hides behind a mask and for whom a contest will be fought later that night. Chin heads off to the Pet Palace and fights for the hand of Pet Lady, who has legendary powers of healing. When he finally convinces her to unmask, he is disappointed to find she is not May.


Shortly thereafter, he realizes that May has been the reclusive tenant of the apartment across the alley from his, and manages to reach her just in time to save her from an attack by Fox, in an incredibly entertaining and ridiculous fight sequence.

But not before Fox manages to inflict a terrible curse on her. He inhales a special toxin named Terrible Angel, which causes his skin to go pale and his eye to turn blue.

The drug makes him temporarily super-strong and blazing hot. He can also turn immaterial, passing his body through that of another and transferring the effects of the drug to them. Apparently, if one is not adapted to it as Silver Fox is, the effects are more deleterious. May loses all her strength, and is told that in 24 hours, she will become a mind-controlled puppet of Fox. He will then have her kill Chin.

Chin takes May to a hospital, but they can do nothing. Desperate, he takes her to Pet Lady, but even though he accedes to her demand to crawl through broken glass, she refuses to help. Defeated, Chin takes May back to his apartment, where he tells her that he has turned on all the gas, which will ignite and kill them both when the 24 hours is over. They will never be parted again.

Which is of course the moment that Silver Fox chooses to make his final attack.

"Saviour of the Soul" is a strange beast, combining action, drama, romance, and broad comedy into one insane roller-coaster ride. The action is exciting, but also cartoonishly broad, with crazy weapons like a bullet that steals all the oxygen out of a room and a yo-yo that turns into a sword with a springy blade so flexible that it can wrap entirely around an opponent's head and sword before stabbing him in the eye.

Unfortunately, this is all accomplished on a horribly low-budget. So while the film occasionally features some breathtaking compositions (which highlight the romantic fantasy nature of the story)...




...it also features some Batman tilt-a-cam shots, laughably fake CGI effects and other cheap shortcuts (as well as horrible translations in the subtitles). For instance, at one point, while under the effects of Terrible Angel, Fox gets caught in a mirror. For some shots, they used a decent split-screen effect...


But for quick action shots, they took the expedient method of just gluing a picture of Silver Fox to the mirror (it's much more obvious in motion than in this crappy scan):

So in the end, by American standards, "Saviour of the Soul" fails on almost every level. Its comedy is too broad, its drama too melo-, its epic moments compromised by cheap effects and an overstuffed plot. The movie is ultimately too cheap and uneven to convince anyone who doesn't already love Hong Kong Cinema that there is cool stuff waiting to be mined out there.

However, for people who are already familiar enough to overlook its shortcomings and love its considerable strengths, "Saviour of the Soul" is an absolutely unique,over-the-top experience. It's my kind of crazy.

Out of the Vault - The One-Arm Swordsman

So I mentioned last week that before Jademan made its big U.S. debut in 1988, there had been another attempt at bringing Chinese Kung Fu comics into the U.S. market. That was Victory Comics with The One-Arm Swordsman in 1987.

One thing stands out right off. Like the Jademan Special with which Jademan launched their line of comics, The One-Arm Swordsman uses gold ink to give it the look of superior quality. Not only do they use it in the title on the front cover, but it is also used on the back cover to hype their upcoming second book, The Invincible Four of Kung Fu & Ninja. Sure the title may be crap, but look at that gold printing; that's the mark of quality, right there. Also like the Jademan books, a poster is included, as well as a mailing address where you can write for even more cool swag.

The story is pretty standard kung fu movie fare. Master Lui the Tiger calls himself "#1 in Kung Fu," and works hard to maintain that reputation. He has a wicked three-sectional staff technique: the middle section of his staff can split in two to form two nunchaku. We learn that his henchmen have robbed a convoy of a large shipment of silver, and have framed Chan Lam (a wandering hero nicknamed "The Invincible Broadswords") for the crime.

The traders in charge of the convoy confront Chan Lam, who denies the crime and fights off the traders' men. At that moment, Lui the Tiger steps in to see that justice is done (Lui's men have staged all of this so that Lui can kill Chan and eliminate a kung fu rival while still appearing righteous). Lui battles Chan, and the two seem evenly matched until Chan pins one section of Lui's three sectional staff to the ground with his foot.


Lui splits the middle section of his staff and pops out a hidden blade, with which he cuts off Chan's right arm. Chan flees and barely escapes with his life.

Years later, Chan is working as a simple laborer in a restaurant. He has learned to perform all his tasks with only one arm, which has developed outstanding strength and speed. When love interest Mei Ling is nearly raped by some local bandits, Chan tries to stop them, but refuses to fight, still shamed by his defeat of years past. That's when Wan Wei, "The Super Broadswords," arrives in town and saves the girl. He cuts off the bandits' ears and they flee.

Wan Wei is an old friend of Chan Lam and tries to convince him to take up kung fu again, and Mei Ling gives Chan Lam her father's sword so that he can protect himself. Meanwhile, the earless bandits report to their master (none other than Lui the Tiger) that Wan Wei is in town. Lui decides to frame Wan Wei so that he can kill him.

Chan Lam tries to warn Wan Wei that it is a trap, but his poor word choices don't get the message across.


Yes, his techniques are very mischievous, if by "mischievous," you mean he's going to cut your fucking arms off.

So Wan Wei confronts Lui the Tiger, and once again, after a frame-up and a well-matched duel, Lui splits his staff and stabs Wan Wei, proclaiming, "There is no need to consider whether the technique used is upright or not when dealing with an evil man."

When Chan Lam learns that Wan Wei has been killed by Lui, he decides enough is enough. Taking up the broadsword he received from Mei Ling, he goes batshit and kills everyone in Lui's household before confronting the old man himself. Lui's techniques are as devious and tricky as before, but he does not count on the incredible speed which Chan Lam has developed in his single remaining arm and so is defeated, which results in a spectacular death tantrum.


Once Lui is dead, Chan Lam can go back to a happy life with Mei Ling. But we are warned that trouble awaits in issue two. Unfortunately for Victory Comics, there was no issue two.

And it's fairly easy to see why. The story has the feel of a mid-70's Shaw Brothers film, but comics in 1987 had moved far beyond that level of storytelling. Both Watchmen and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns had debuted the previous year, and their influence had hit the U.S. comics marketplace like a bomb. It's not surprising that a stiffly drawn, poorly-translated comic with skimpy color would not perform well.

Which is too bad, actually, because The One-Arm Swordsman is not horrible. The artwork is stiff and not as polished as the Jademan studio's offerings, but the action sequences play out almost like diagrams in a kung fu manual. The action is clear and believable. And the storyline is mostly simple and direct without the xenophobia or convoluted soap operatics of The Blood Sword or Oriental Heroes.

But yes, the translations are laughably awful. That's part of their charm, though. Only a man with a heart of stone can remain unmoved when Wan Wei, facing Lui's false accusations, responds with:


No, I wouldn't have bought any more issues had they printed them. But I actually enjoyed rereading this one more than I expected to.

Took Long Enough

Two years ago, I took part in a short story contest on Codex Writers Group. I received a character sketch as a story seed and set to work. I got maybe a third of the way through the story and gave up. I had the shape of it in my head, but it wasn't coalescing on the page.

I've tried several times in the intervening years to finish the story but it always refused to gel. Today, I finally finished the first draft, making it the first thing I've written in well over a year (blogs don't count). I didn't hit it out of the park. It was more like a sad bunt dribbling down the third base line, but at least I'm sort of back on the horse.


Speaking of horse, I realized that Hell's Kitchen is back on, so I watched the first three episodes on Hulu tonight. One of the chef-hopefuls was a guy named Tony (eliminated at the start of the third episode, sadly). But the thing with Tony is, in the opening credits (which have a circus sideshow theme), he is presented as a kind of donkey-centaur, with the signs behind him reading "Half-Man! Half-Donkey!"

There's a pun about being half-assed in there somewhere, but I'm too lazy to reach for it.

Corinne Bohrer's never too lazy.

D&D Nostalgia

A friend of mine posted on his blog recently about his introduction to role-playing games. He mentioned specifically that when he was first starting out, one of the books he used was "Blue Set D&D rules."

I'm guessing he meant this, which was the booklet for Basic D&D. I bought this one in the summer of 1980, as part of a boxed set which also included some really crappy dice. They were not made from high-impact plastic, so they shed little plastic flakes all over the place. This was made worse because, when I joined my first gaming group (the Wargames Club at the University of Southern California), I didn't know from dice bags and carried my dice in an empty Blue Diamond almond jar. The dice rolling around against the hard glass made them flake much faster than normal, plus they stank. Within a couple of months, I got rid of jar and dice.

That was an exciting time to game, because role-playing was new, so lots of people were experimenting crazily. True, there were a lot of games that hewed pretty closely to Dungeons and Dragons' basic design philosophy, like Starships and Spacemen from Fantasy Games Unlimited, which felt almost as if they'd taken the Basic D&D Rules and plugged in the word "alien" whenever "monster" showed up in the original. Stats and combat were basically the same. Similarly, the original Villains and Vigilantes (also from FGU) felt very similar to D&D.

But there were other games coming out that were entirely different. Runequest from Chaosium took a very different approach to the issue of levels and skills. Traveller from Game Designers' Workshop was an attempt at a hard science fiction game that held the distinction of being the only game (as far as I know) that would kill off your character before you'd even finished creating him (I bought the books, tried rolling up a character, and by my third death, decided not to play it ever again). In Champions from Hero Games, you purchased your character from points rather than rolling statistics randomly; this made character creation a pain in the ass, but it could also be fun if you liked numbers, tweaking stats for hours to get a character that was powerful enough to survive and matched the conception in your head as closely as possible.

There have been three major gaming periods in my life. At USC, I gamed for about four years with a rowdy group, one of whom I still keep in touch with (and I wish I could track down some of the others). Some time after I came back to Oklahoma, I started gaming at a comic book shop in Oklahoma City, where I ran a brief but memorable Champions game, and also introduced the folks there to the joys and terrors of Steve Jackson's Illuminati.

I tried joining a D&D group when I moved to Tulsa, but it sucked; they handed me a pre-gen NPC, since they were in the middle of an adventure. The group was 4 thieves and a mage, and in the adventure, we were detectives searching for a stolen shipment of textiles. Seriously, it was dull as hell.

So I didn't game (other than occasional sit-ins here and there) for 20 years, until joining a group of friends here in Tulsa last year. Now gaming is fun again, although not as crazy exciting as it was almost 30 years ago, when the world was new, and bird and beast and flower were one with man, and death was but a dream. Also when there were a million new games with more every day, and we were itching to try them all, from Runequest (fantasy) to Bushido (feudal Japanese fantasy) to Boot Hill (Wild West) to Paranoia (sci-fi comedy) to The Morrow Project (post-apocalyptic doom).

Movie Monday - A Man Called Hero

So I figured I'd start doing the same thing with movies that I've been doing with Out of the Vault, which is looking back at old movies, doing sort of half-review, half-nostalgia. My initial plan was to concentrate mainly on superhero movies adapted from comic books, so of course, my lead-off for the official feature is a kung fu movie, 1999's "A Man Called Hero," directed by Andrew Lau and starring Ekin Cheng.

But it is based on a comic book; in fact, the same comic I talked about in Saturday's Out of the Vault: The Blood Sword, known in China as Chinese Hero (sorry about the poor quality of the framegrabs--I don't have this movie on DVD, only VHS, so I grabbed frames off of Youtube, with the expected crappy quality).

The movie opens in 1914, in the village where young Hero Hwa lives. He is excited, because he is due to try out to become the disciple of martial arts master Pride. Before he leaves, his mother gives him her prized possession, the family heirloom Red Sword. Hero goes off to perform a sword form for Master Pride and his chief disciple, Shadow. The master tells Hero that he will accept him as his student, and that when he returns from an errand in Japan, he will teach Hero the ultimate sword technique known as China Secret.

Hero runs home, bursting with pride, but discovers that his parents have been killed while he was gone. His father was a reporter who opposed the opium trade, and the foreigners dealing in opium have killed him in retaliation. Hero uses the Red Sword to take revenge on his parents' murderers, then hides out in the home of his girlfriend, Jade. In a scene that is lifted straight from the comic, their shoes keep each other company on the floor while they (apparently) knock boots.


The next morning, Hero takes passage on a ship taking coolies to America, while Jade and Hero's friend Sheng cry on the dock.

Sixteen years later, in 1930, Sheng arrives in New York with a sixteen-year-old boy named Sword. Sword is Hero's son, conceived on the night of the shoes (I'm not sure why they land in New York rather than say, San Francisco other than setting up the climax--in this movie, all Chinese coming to America come straight to New York). Sheng and Sword go to China House, a hotel for Chinese immigrants, and ask if anyone knows Hero.

Over the course of the rest of the movie, we see in flashback from several witnesses how Hero battled slavers while working as conscripted labor in a mine, how he was rescued by Shadow (Master Pride's senior disciple), how Jade found Hero in New York before the birth of their child, how Shadow and Hero fought ninjas seeking their master Pride, how Jade died giving birth to twins (a boy and a girl) and how the twins were separated shortly after birth. Sword went to China with Sheng, and the daughter was kidnapped by an enemy. We learn how a fortuneteller told Hero he was born under the Star of Death and everyone around him was doomed to die, after which Master Pride finally taught him the China Secret (just before he died as a result of wounds suffered in a duel with rival master Invincible from Japan). No one has heard from him in the years since.


Just as Sword is thinking he will never meet his father, Hero shows up. Sword is happy to finally meet his father, but Hero is distant, explaining that they can never be close because of his curse. Now that Hero has returned, the folks at China House decide to free the coolies enslaved at Steel Bull Canyon (the mine from which Hero escaped 16 years before, and which is run by the man who kidnapped Hero's infant daughter). The Chinese storm the camp and free the slaves, but the secret of Hero's daughter dies with the boss.

Soon afterward, Invincible shows up in New York, determined to duel Hero. Hero and Invincible battle on and around the Statue of Liberty, cutting it to pieces in the process, before Hero kills Invincible with the China Secret technique he has spent 16 years perfecting.


"A Man Called Hero" is an odd movie. Like many Chinese films, it tries to be a lot of things at once--generational saga, romance, action film--and it falls short in all of them. But it does have pretty high production values for a Hong Kong picture, although the CGI used for process shots and to depict incredible martial arts superpowers looks horribly primitive now. And there are some breathtaking shots, although choppy editing, especially in the Statue of Liberty climax, blunts the impact of those incredible images.



The movie tries too hard to cram years' worth of comics storylines into two hours of running time; the story alternately lurches and drags, and some major characters get short shrift. Big Bad Invincinble, for instance, only appears in one brief scene in the last third of the film before he comes back for the big climax. Likewise, the gang of ninja who cause so much trouble appear out of nowhere almost halfway into the film and disappear just as quickly once their little bit of the adventure is over, with one exception. That exception is the female ninja played by Shu Qi, who went on to play Lai in "The Transporter."


Wow. You can see why they came up with an excuse to give her an extra scene.

So anyway, to sum up: "A Man Called Hero" is about a man associated with the Star of Death, or "Death Star," if you will, who has incredible fighting abilities and uses a glowing red sword that can cut through anything. His wife died giving birth to twins, a boy and a girl, who grew up without any contact with their father or each other, until the boy was a teenager.

Sounds familiar...

Pink Is the Color of Pain

From AOL's homepage:



Corinne Bohrer is amused.

Out of the Vault - The Blood Sword #1

In 1987, manga began to make a big splash in the U.S. market with the publication of Lone Wolf and Cub from First Comics and several titles from Viz Studios and Eclipse Comics. The following year, 1988, Hong Kong publisher Tony Wong decided the time was right for his Chinese comics to break into the U.S. market.

Wong kicked off the line with a comic called Jademan Kung Fu Special #1, which bore a cover illustration with a gaudy but distinctive golden border. Inside, the book told the legend of the colorful and flamboyant Tony Wong, who had come to dominate Hong Kong's comic market (you can read an entertaining account of Tony Wong's career here-I love how several of the covers show his main characters not only losing the fight, but actually being disemboweled, like, every other issue). The book also contained previews of the four titles Jademan would be offering in the U.S.--Oriental Heroes, Drunken Fist, The Force of Buddha's Palm, and The Blood Sword.

Of the four, only The Blood Sword was not credited to Tony Wong. Instead, it was written and illustrated by Ma Wing Shing. Turns out, The Blood Sword is cited by Hong Kong comics historians as having single-handedly transformed the industry. Ma Wing Shing's artwork introduced greater realism in drawing style to Chinese comics and spawned a host of imitators. Even Wong's most popular title, the disembowelathon Oriental Heroes, changed its more cartoony style to follow Ma's lead.

The Blood Sword #1 was published in the U.S. with a cover date of August 1988, with a gorgeous cover illustration featuring very sophisticated colors. Ma Wing Shing was credited with the story and illustrations and the scripts were credited to Mike Baron.

I was looking forward to the line with great anticipation. I liked martial arts movies, I liked the freshness that that the Japanese releases had brought to the U.S. comics scene, and I was a big fan of Baron, who had written Nexus and Badger, as well as DC's update of The Flash and Marvel's The Punisher. There had been a previous attempt to export Chinese Kung Fu comics to the U.S., but it had been poorly translated and sank without a trace after one issue. But if Baron was on board, I was sure this time, everything would come together beautifully.

So it was with great anticipation that I bought all four titles in Jademan's initial line, expecting to be dazzled.

I wasn't.

The Blood Sword opens with this caption:

Life in the village was hard enough after the war. They didn't need gangs of pimps catering to the foreign devils.

That shows you right off where the story is headed.

The Blood Sword stars Hero, an idealistic young man from tiny Clear Stream Village, son of a blacksmith. His mother is also a talented swordswoman and has taught Hero her kung fu techniques. Clear Stream Village is being terrorized by evil white slavers kidnapping and raping the women, in collaboration with corrupt local Chinese officials.

When Secretary Wan refuses to pay for some knives made by Hero's father, young Hero beats him up, earning his enmity. The secretary then tells his boss, Master Man, that Hero's parents own a magical sword that can "slice through iron like butter." Man naturally decides he must own such a sword and confronts Hero's parents, demanding to be given the sword or else they'll burn the blacksmith's house down.

So Hero's father pulls a box out of a hidden niche in his house and pulls out the sword made by one of his ancestors. But when Hero looks at the blade, it's rusty and dull. They hand the sword over to Master Man anyway (much to Secretary Wan's surprise, since he'd apparently been making the whole thing up), but Man throws it back at them and demands the real sword. Hero's mother then appears with her own sword and challenges Man's bodyguards, and the foreign devils accompanying him, to take her sword if they can. Hero's father tells him to run.

Hero runs away, taking the rusty sword with him. Hero's mother fights valiantly, and seems on the verge of defeating Grasshopper, Secretary Wan's Chinese bodyguard who is a master of Praying Mantis style, but she is shot in the head by one of the foreigners. Hero's father is also killed.

Hero flees to his girlfriend's house, where he apparently spends the night getting busy. When he returns home, he finds the house burned to the ground and his parents dead. Master Man's men throw a net over Hero, and he uses the rusty sword to try to fend them off. At its first taste of blood, the rusty blade suddenly begins to glow red and can now literally slice through iron like butter. Turns out, it really is a magic sword. Hero kills Master Man, Secretary Wan, Grasshopper and the foreign devils.

But now he is wanted by the law for murder. So he says goodbye to his girlfriend Kittu and takes passage on a ship full of laborers going to work in America. When the ship reaches its destination, Turtle Island off the coast of California, Hero's sword is stolen by a man named Schemer. Hero chases him overboard to try to get it back.

Hero and Schemer battle a school of sharks in the water while the crew of the ship, actually foreign slavers who lure the Chinese onto the boat with promises of good pay only to slap chains on them and put them to work in a mine, shoot at the escapees. One of the stray bullets kills a fish, which results in the ship being attacked by the Sea God, a green fish man who protects all the fish around Turtle Island.

Both Hero and Schemer survive the sharks, but Schemer gets away with the sword. Hero rides a turtle to the beach and passes out. When he comes to, he encounters an escaped slave being chased by the mine's enforcers, the Four Furies, which leads to the first really off-the-wall Mike Baron moment in the book, when Tall Fury grabs the escapee and says, "Lemme brush your head, Fred."

Hero is captured and taken to the mine, where he discovers that one of the bosses there is none other than Schemer.

Overall, the issue didn't grab me. Its "Chinese Hero Battles the Foreign Devils" storyline may have thrilled Chinese audiences, but it did nothing for me (and I was surprised that Wong would choose such an anti-American story to introduce his comics to an American audience).The story was certainly action-packed, breathlessly so, but it pushed forward too quickly to ever more ridiculous extremes. The magic sword I could accept, slavers on the ship I could tolerate, but when the ship is attacked by Sea God, followed quickly by Schemer choking out a shark, followed by Tall Fury the Rapper, I had reached my Silliness Tolerance Level and could go no further. Baron's scripting, aside from a few off-the-wall dialogue choices, didn't really grab me either.

There was also a problem with the production of the book. A text page at the end of the comic claimed that "I am sure you will agree that this comic features some of the most outstanding artwork and quality printing ever seen in America," but it was just not true. The original Chinese comic was published to read right to left, so they had to flip the artwork for American release (and they apparently actually cut the pages apart and pasted the frames down in proper order). But when they lettered new word balloons, they were careless in the placement, so lines were often printed in reverse order. Also, Grasshopper for some reason only spoke in thought balloons. I'm not sure if this was a mistake or supposed to mean that he never actually spoke. It's a mystery.

And while the artwork was pretty good, it came nowhere near the level of sophistication of the Japanese comics I'd been reading for the last year, though it showed clear signs of Japanese influence, especially the realistic sharks and Sea God, who looked as if he'd been swiped directly from the work of Ryoichi Ikegami, artist of Mai the Psychic Girl (published by Viz/Eclipse at the time).

The colors were strange as well, delicate airbrushed tones that nevertheless showed too much white through. No other comics in America had that sort-of half-colored look. On the other hand, in several places, they used color holds to do some really outstanding effects, like this portrait of Hero superimposed over a river scene. It was a breathtaking hint of awesome in a story that was otherwise mediocre.

I ended up not buying any more issues of The Blood Sword. I don't have everything out of the Vault yet, so I don't know if I bought more than one issue of the other Jademan titles, but I don't think I did. (ETA: However, just becaue I didn't like it, don't assume the book faded away quickly--it apparently ran for something like five years in the U.S.)

But the story doesn't end there. See you Monday with a new feature and the rest of the story.

Roughnecks: Starship Troopers

So despite Veoh's best efforts to drive me away from their site, I finally managed to watch all the episodes of Roughnecks: Starship Troopers (except for a couple of clip shows). Actually, although all the materials I can find on the show call it either Roughnecks: Starship Troopers or Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles, the title card on the actual show calls it Starship Troopers: The Series.

The series is spun off of the Paul Verhoeven movie. Not an extension of the movie, but instead a reinterpretation, incorporating more elements of the novel than the film did, like powered armor suits and Skinnies. We follow Johnny Rico and Dizzy Flores along with their squad, Razak's Roughnecks, through virtually the entire Bug War (until the show stopped being produced after 36 full episodes and four clip shows, leaving four episodes unfinished), from its origins on Pluto through Tophet, the homeworld of the Skinnies, to Klendathu, the bug homeworld, and finally to the final defense of Earth (with other campaigns in between).

Right up front, I have to say that I liked the book. I was in the Army when I first read it, so I could relate to a lot of what Heinlein was saying about leadership and sacrifice and service. On the other hand, I hated the movie. Verhoeven had no interest in making a film that honored the book or portrayed realistic people; he wanted to make a satire that portrayed soldiers as brutal morons, and succeeded in making them look pretty stupid. For all their advanced technology, the Mobile Infantry of the movie were so tactically inept that they could have been mopped up by an equal sized squad of real-life soldiers from WWII--even the Italians.

And when in the final scene, Doogie Howser of the S.S. shows up to give his monologue about exterminating the entire bug race, I guess we're supposed to realize the fascism within ourselves or something, but all I felt was Verhoeven flipping me off. Because of course, when the bugs invade, what we should have done was sit in the street with our arms linked together while singing "We Shall Overcome"and making sure that someone with a camera was filming everything so we could put it on Youtube and embarrass the bugs to death or something. Fucking moron. Right back at ya, Verhoeven, with both barrels.

Luckily, the producers of the series realized they couldn't sell that concept for a weekly series (and yes, I realize Verhoeven gets an exec producer credit on the show, but like Fran Rubel Kuzui's similar credit on Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, I think that's more a contractual requirement than an indication he ever had anything to do with the show's production). So instead, we get something closer to the novel. The humans actually aren't the bad guys. We also get to see more realistic tactics in the series than the movie. The humans wear powersuits (not the supersuits of the novel, but still...). The Roughnecks also employ heavy weapons, demolitions, close air support, tactical maneuver. None of it is textbook, and there's a lot of Hollywood silliness, like characters constantly running across each others' field of fire, but it's way better than the movie in that respect.

The series has to tread an uneasy line, though, between being a kid-friendly show and being a war drama for older fans of the book and movie. So on the one hand, the series employs more sophisticated storytelling techniques than your normal kids' show. Each week's episodes feature a campaign on a different planet, showing the progress of the war in continuity. There is romance. Characters face hard moral choices, losses and betrayals. Bugs get blown to smithereens. Characters get wounded, and even die on occasion.

But on the other hand, casualties are still very light. The language is highly sanitized. The episodes sometimes play out as clunky morality tales where Rico or one of the others learns a Very Important Lesson.

The same sort of uneasy balance played out in the visuals of the show. The art design of the show built upon the excellent design work from the movie; the bugs and ship designs echo what was seen in the theater. But the show added to it with mechanized armor suits and support vehicles and space fighters. Some of the planetary environments are breathtaking. And since this was a CGI show, they were able to use the camera with a sophistication that is impossible (or almost) to achieve in a traditional 2-D animated show.

But on the other hand, the demands of a TV schedule meant that quality could be very variable. Four different production houses made episodes of the series. They used the same software rendering the same models, so the look of the show stayed the same. But their animators weren't all on the same level, and the tight schedule meant limited amounts of time to fix mistakes or tweak shots, so you see lots of flubs that drop you out of the moment--characters' hands not locking right on the objects they're supposedly grasping, or Dizzy's lips not meeting Barcalow's right when they kiss. It doesn't help that the almost photo-realistic characters are lurking right in the shadow of the Uncanny Valley.

And though the voice acting is generally pretty good, the opening theme music is oddly muted and the sound of the rifles is downright anemic. So the sound is a mixed bag as well.

But overall, the good points of the show overwhelm the bad points. It was an entertaining series. It's too bad the production of the show was such a cluster that it ended up never having the final climactic episodes produced. The show leads you right up to the big climax and then ends on a note reminiscent of "The Empire Strikes Back." Aaargh.

If you want to see the series for yourself, you can buy the DVDs, or if you're up to the challenge of a little search-fu, you can try to track it down on veoh.com. I was down to the last three episodes when their episode home page suddenly emptied. The episodes are still in their databases and watchable, but you have to do some playing around with different search options to find them. I'm guessing Veoh is going to delete them pretty soon, but for now, here's a link that I hope will work.

But now that I'm done with Starship Troopers, it's back to Hulu for me.

Goodbye, Universe

I learned the sad news yesterday that Jim Baen's Universe will be shutting down next year with the April 2010 issue. I had really fallen away from JBU, as I've fallen away from so much in the past year or so (and even more so in the past six months), but I've always felt a kinship with them, since my first published short story appeared in their first issue in June 2006.

They generated such hope and excitement from the moment they announced that they would be producing an online magazine (which was at first going to be called Baen's Astounding Stories). Writers were excited at a new market, especially a market from an established, well-funded publishing house, and even more at a market that guaranteed some space to unpublished writers. Meanwhile, those fans bemoaning the dwindling of short stories as opposed to Big Fat Novels were also happy, as well as those folks who preferred Baen's more old-fashioned, two-fisted approach to sci-fi over the more cerebral fare preferred by other magazines' editors. And if anybody could come up with a viable electronic publishing model, it would be the guys at Baen, virtually the only publisher who had managed to make e-books into a profitable business.

Excitement mounted when they began to announce the writers who would be appearing in the magazine. Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson doing a new Dune story, David Drake doing a new Hammer's Slammers story, Alan Dean Foster, Cory Doctorow, Gene Wolfe, David Brin, Gregory Benford, Ben Bova, Elizabeth Bear, Mike Resnick, not to mention in-house Baen favorites like Eric Flint and John Ringo.

In addition to the normal subscriptions for the magazine, Baen's offered special club memberships with additional benefits, like getting yourself written into your favorite Baen series (not as a major character or anything, more like seeing your name as one of the people killed during a space battle in an Honor Harrington book or something--still, who else would ever have given you the chance?), and the response that first year was overwhelming.

But it so happens that I got a chance to hang out at Conestoga with associate editor Paula Goodlett and web maestro Rick Boatright and author David Drake about a month after the first issue went live, and even then, they had some worried conversations about whether they'd be able to sustain the magazine for more than two years. They'd sold lots of club memberships, which gave them a lot of cash up front, but not as many regular subscriptions as they needed to keep things going.

I heard the same rumblings the following year, when Eric Flint was at Conestoga. We all hoped it would turn around, but there was a sense from the beginning that it might never.

But at the same time, the magazine didn't fold after two years, so even if it didn't fulfill the hopes invested in it from the start, Baen's Universe did at least last longer than people feared it might. And really, like any new venture, they always knew it could fail, but they had the courage to do it anyway. And unlike some writers of this blog, they took that huge risk and managed it in a smart way that will allow them to have a soft landing that won't leave their writers or subscribers high and dry. I wish the entire staff there the best. They were good people who tried to do a very hard thing, and if they didn't succeed as well as they hoped, the science fiction world is better for the attempt.

Bye Bye BAW, For Now

There will be no Big Audio Wednesday today. See here for the reason.

The Rag

So I was at Best Buy today buying more phone minutes. Took a tour through the DVD aisles & noticed a film in the horror section called "The Rag." That merited a closer look. Turns out, it was actually "The Rage," but the white price sticker against the light background of the cover obscured the "e." Likewise, the horror film "Marty" was not a remake of the 1955 Ernest Borgnine film, but actually the 2008 French film "Martyrs."

Which makes more sense, but is also disappointing, because at least for guys, a movie called "The Rag" could be absolutely terrifying.

Yes, tasteless, I know. Corinne Bohrer is not pleased with me.