Spider venom comes in many forms. It can often take a long while to discover the full effects of the bite. Naturalists have pondered this for years: there are spiders whose bite can cause the place bitten to rot and die, sometimes more than a year after it was bitten. As to why spiders do this, the answer is simple. It’s because spiders think this is funny, and they don’t want you ever to forget them. (Neil Gaiman, from Anansi Boys)
COMICS
Atlas Comics Library volume 2: Venus by various creators. $49.99, 290 pgs, Fantagraphics.
I’m not sure if these comics are in the public domain or if Marvel worked out a deal with Fantagraphics to publish them (probably the latter, but I don’t care quite enough to find out on my own), but it’s neat that they’re here! In the introduction, Dr. Michael J. Vassallo writes about the Marvel Masterworks containing the first part of the 1950s Venus series (which I don’t own) and that they had plans for the second half before the line of Atlas Masterworks went away in 2013. But now they’re out, and this is a very weird collection, mainly because Bill Everett worked on Venus at the end of the run (issues #13-19). Issues #10-12 are fine – Werner Roth provides most of the art, and it’s quite nice, while Joe Maneely, Russ Heath, and Gene Colan do the non-Venus stories in each issue – but once Everett comes on board, things get weird. Roth and the others were doing standard Venus stories – she works at a beauty magazine, she and the editor are in love, there’s a jealous secretary, and Venus often appeals to the Roman pantheon for help (as she is, you know, the goddess of love). The stories are actually an interesting blend of action/adventure and quasi-romance, as Venus tries to solve the problems non-violently, even if that sometimes doesn’t make much sense. In issue #13, Everett comes on board, and the stories immediately take on a slightly odder and more horrific tone. Everett does this gradually, so by the final issue, the book is almost straight-up horror, but even his first story (which he probably didn’t write) is a bit weirder than what we’ve seen, as it’s a bit more psychologically creepy than what came before, as a man hypnotizes women and uses them in his carnival for … reasons. Venus saves the day with her “love” powers, and the Roman pantheon is still involved, so it’s still a standard “Venus” story, but it’s also a bit weirder than we’ve seen. By issue #14, Everett is writing the stories, and they get progressively weirder and more beautiful (it seems he wasn’t inking the stories in issue #13, but by the end, he’s penciling and inking, and the difference is notable). Everett slowly phases out the jealous secretary (she shows up a few times, but she’s no longer jealous) and Jupiter and the rest of the gods are put to bed, while Venus’s romance with her editor is generally ignored (he continues to make cameo appearances, but their romance is put on the back burner a bit). Everett gets weirder and weirder, with stories about cavemen robbing graves; a photographer who turns Venus into a photograph; another carnival dude, this time using what look to be dolls but which actually bleed; gargoyles haunting a mysterious 13th floor (in the same building where the Timely offices are located, a fun touch by Everett); a creepy mortician luring women to their deaths in his crematorium (with a bizarre supernatural twist); a “regular” haunted house; a haunted tower on an English manor; a cartoonist whose creations come to life and menace him; aquatic giants who try to destroy the world because humanity is wrecking the oceans; a haunted Tunnel of Love; a plane crash in a haunted mountain range; a woman who builds housing developments that get wrecked by tidal waves; a medium who can raise the dead; a murderer on a cruise ship; and a box that gives you what you desire … for a price! Everett’s art becomes moodier and moodier but also beautifully lush and brushed, and Venus herself becomes more of a paranormal investigator. Many of the stories, because of their brevity, don’t make a whole lot of sense, plot-wise, but Everett does a wonderful job evoking an emotional response to the stories even if, when you think about them, they’re somewhat unintelligible. This is a very cool collection, with a nice introduction, the advertisements included (that’s always fun), and a lot of very cool comics. Fantagraphics always has high production values, and this is another example of it!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
One totally Airwolf panel:
Bloodrik volume 1 by Andrew Krahnke (writer/artist). $14.99, 108 pgs, Image.
Krahnke’s story of how Bloodrik came to be (which he tells in bits and pieces in this collection) is almost as good as the actual book, as it’s taken 15 years for him to get this far, and I dig “process” stories about comics (about anything, really, but we’re talking about comics here!). The comic is good, too, although I wonder how parodic Krahnke wanted it to be, because it feels very much like a parody of Conan. Now, like any good parody, you can read it straight and it doesn’t lose too much, but it’s juuuuuuuust goofy enough that I wonder if Krahnke is having some fun sending the genre up (in contrast to, say, Juan Torres’s Rogues, which is very definitely a parody and also works as an adventure). I mean, in this collection, our hero wanders across a wintry wasteland, desperate for food, sees a mountain with a light at the top, so he climbs it, finds a ruined town, and enters a cave where the light source is revealed to be a fire in a sorcerer’s lair, which is never going to end well for the sorcerer. And that’s it, basically – Bloodrik looks for food, Bloodrik finds food, Bloodrik kills anything that stands in the way of his food. All good! The back-up stories are even more parodic, as Bloodrik shows a steel-minded determination that borders on madness, as he hunts a grouse that won’t come out from behind a tree and eats a fruit that he clearly sees is infested with maggots (and therefore causes hallucinations because it’s rotted so much) and chases a crow that pisses him off. There are narrators – in the main story, it’s an old man forging a sword – because Bloodrik himself is a man of very few words, and the stories are full of adventure and violence and bears and dragons and other weird creatures, but they’re not terribly deep at all. Which is fine! But Krahnke leans so hard into Bloodrik’s maniacal focus that I just wonder if he’s having some fun with us. Whatever – it’s a fun comic. And Krahnke’s art is amazing, as he does a superb job in the first story of isolating our hero in the winter, as the forest gives way to plains and then the mountains. We get a very good sense of how alone Bloodrik is, which is nice. When violence is needed, Krahnke gives us beautiful full-page spreads of Bloodrik and whatever foe he’s fighting, with a lot of blood and guts, so that the impact is extremely powerful, especially as he’s so minimalistic in so many other places. Krahnke uses rough lines to create a rough world, but his cartoony style is nice and fluid, so Bloodrik – who is almost completely a man of action – moves nicely through this world.
Krahnke writes that part of his inspiration for the character comes from Scandinavian metal, which is obvious (and he pokes fun at his unreadable logo, which is another reason why this feels like a parody). This is a just a metal comic, so just jump in and enjoy it – don’t overthink it!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
One totally Airwolf panel:
Hack/Slash: Back to School by Zoe Thorogood (writer/artist/colorist) and Sarah Mitrache (colorist). $12.99, 94 pgs, Image.
It makes sense that Thorogood would be good on a horror-ish book, as she has an angular style and her figures always look a tiny bit … weird, plus she uses perspective and depth of field in quite interesting ways, all of which would work in an off-putting horror book, and so it is that this comic looks not only great but upsetting, as Thorogood gives us creepy creatures and monsters, which you kind of need in a good horror story. We already know she’s a good writer, and she’s young enough (26) so that she’s able to write college-age girls well, so the book feels authentic for what it is, which is a story set when Cassie was just starting out as a monster hunter. Thorogood has to work around the fact that we’ve never heard about this story before, and she does in a bit of a hackneyed fashion, but the circumstance that sets up the ending is a good one, so there’s that. The entire book is the tiniest bit disjointed because Thorogood tries to tell single-issue stories, but she also has to bring in an overarching plot, and it’s not always seamless, although it’s still a very entertaining book. Cassie is invited to join a school of girls like her, who want to/can hunt killers, so an older woman who is also a hunter trains them. They encounter several horrific things, but there’s also something even more evil lurking in the wings, which leads to the tragic climax of the book. Thorogood does a good job with a lot of different characters in a short amount of time, and she does particularly good work with Cassie (and Vlad), so we can how she becomes Seeley’s grown-up character. I certainly want Thorogood to do her own stuff, because she’s so good at it, but what the heck – some things have to pay the bills, and she’s very well suited for Hack/Slash. Next up for Thorogood: Batman!!!! (Ok, not really, but come on – you would read it!)
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
One totally Airwolf panel:
Hollywood Special by Jeremy Lambert (writer), Claire Roe (artist), Jordie Bellaire (colorist), Becca Carey (letterer), and Alonzo Simon (collection editor). $17.99, 138 pgs, IDW.
I’m still not sure what the deal is with Scott Snyder’s “Dark Spaces” thing at IDW except … they’re horror stories? But they’re not, because the first one wasn’t. That they take place in … dark places? Maybe? I dunno, but Snyder gets good talent on them, so who cares, right? In this story, we have Lambert telling us a story that takes place in 1942 in beautiful Minersville, Pennsylvania, which is where my wife lived when she was but a lass. I had to show her some of the street scenes in this book (there aren’t too many, but there are a few), and she said it looks pretty accurate, so that’s cool (I don’t know if Lambert or Roe has ever been anywhere near Minersville – Roe is Scottish, so who knows how often she’s even been to this country!). It’s unclear why Lambert picked Minersville for his story except for the fact that it has a coal mine, but maybe that’s the only reason! Anyway, this is a pretty decent horror story hiding a tense psychological drama, as movie star Vivian Drake, on a train heading cross-country trying to pump people up for the war effort, finds herself stranded in the town after a mine collapses and damages the railroad tracks. There is, of course, something lurking in the mine, and Vivian gets all caught up with that, as a young girl who reminds her of her daughter gets into danger in the mine. So, in many ways, it’s a fairly standard horror story. When you get that, however, it’s all about the details, and Lambert does a nice job with that. Vivian is a fading star, which brings up any number of connotations about the commodification of people and what Hollywood does to actors who are a bit older. The other actor on the train, Lou Gaines, is implied to be gay, and while Lambert doesn’t do too much with that, what’s there is interesting. Vivian does not seem like a terrible mother, but she’s not a great one, either, so she’s carrying guilt about the way she raised her daughter, but Lambert hints around that she didn’t have much of a choice about it. She’s also estranged from her own parents, so that makes her so-called failures as a mother sting a bit more. There’s also some tension between the blue-collar residents of Minersville (and believe me, there ain’t nothing in Minersville but blue-collar residents) and the glamorous actors, even though neither Vivian nor Lou are to the manor born themselves. Lambert doesn’t do anything too astonishing with all this interesting psychological stuff, which is why this isn’t a great horror story, but because he doesn’t just give us a monster (which, naturally, relates to what Vivian is going through in a way I shan’t reveal) and instead delves more into the characters, it is a pretty good horror story.
It helps to have Roe drawing things, because Roe is a terrific artist who doesn’t seem to get enough work. She creates a terrifying monster, which is pretty key, but she’s also able to show the darkness in Vivian herself as she struggles to get through life and then stand up to the monster. There’s some weird stuff in the mine, which Roe draws wonderfully (and which is, not surprisingly, superbly colored by Bellaire), and Roe is quite good with the “action” – so to speak – late in the book, when Vivian finally confronts what’s down in the mine. She does a very good job making Vivian just slightly faded, while Lou is just slightly non-masculine, hinting at Vivian’s age and his (possible) sexuality. She uses spot blacks really well, which is crucial in a dark book like this, because while we’re in a mine, we still need to see what’s going on, and Roe inks the book really well to show all while obscuring some. Her sense of design is excellent, too, from the monster itself to the scene in which eggs and bacon play a horrifying role in the proceedings. Roe is a really good artist, so I’m glad she’s drawing something that I wanted to read.
Snyder’s quasi-imprint has had some cool stories in it so far. We’ll see what else he’s “curating” down the road!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
One totally Airwolf panel:
The Hunger and the Dusk volume 1 by G. Willow Wilson (writer), Chris Wildgoose (artist), MSassyK (colorist), Diana Sousa (color assistant), Simon Bowland (letterer), and Alonzo Simon (collection editor). $21.99, 134 pgs, IDW.
I wasn’t sure if I’d like this, even though I like Wilson and Wildgoose, because I’m not the hugest fan of fantasy fiction. It’s fine, but I’m not super-jazzed by it, although I’m certainly not adverse to a good piece of fantasy sword-and-sorcery-esque fiction. So I wasn’t sure about this, but I really liked it, so that’s nice. We’re in a world where humans live in the southern part of the continent while orcs live in the north (intelligent and highly organized orcs, so not like the Lord of the Rings ones), and while they’ve been adversaries for years, early on something bad happens that forces them into a truce, with one of the orc leaders giving his cousin (whom he planned to marry) to a human band of soldiers (not an army; in this book men simply organize into fighting forces and then hire themselves out, like mercenaries but, it seems, a bit more formally organized than simple mercenaries) whom she can help fight the new enemy. Meanwhile, the orc leader enters into an arranged marriage with another orc to strengthen their tenuous alliance, and he and his wife (who turns out to be more formidable than he thought she would be) have to resist other orc leaders who want to break the human-orc alliance because they just don’t like humans. Wilson is pretty good at this kind of political maneuvering, so the book is lively and entertaining even as the orcs are debating the finer points of their alliance, and she’s always been good at creating interesting characters, so her four main ones – Callum, the leader of the human soldiers; Tara, the orc sent to live with the humans; Troth, the orc leader; and Faran, his wife – are strong and well rounded from the very first time we meet them, and it makes what they go through more powerful. The book doesn’t exactly go where we think it’s going – we can certainly anticipate that the invaders whom the orcs and humans ally to fight are smarter than they seem, but Wilson gives them far more facets than we think when we first meet them. She makes sure that Callum and Tara bond over various things in their pasts, but they remain independent entities and their paths don’t always go where we think they will. One reason I don’t love fantasy fiction as much as the next nerd is because I’m not a big fan of magic in my fiction, and Wilson does a nice job keeping it to a minimum, which I appreciate. I don’t know how long she’s planning to do this series or how long she’ll be able to do the series, but she sets up a very good foundation for whatever she wants to do. Meanwhile, Wildgoose is a very good artist, and he does a nice job creating a lot of different characters with their own personalities. We see the bitterness on Callum’s face because of his past, while the weight of the world sits heavily on Troth’s shoulders. Wildgoose has a nice, fluid line, so his battle scenes “move” beautifully, and his violence is visceral and upsetting, as it should be. He does a really good job with the city where the orcs meet, as it’s a beautiful but decadent mass of stones interwoven with cracks and foliage, showing a decline in orc culture far more clearly (and subtly) than if Wilson had made it. He does this pretty well throughout the book, showing that this world is not quite as strong as it used to be. MSassyK’s nice sepia colors reinforce that, as it feels like a twilit world even in the broadest of daylight.
Anyway, this is a pretty darned good comic. I’m looking forward to reading more!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
One totally Airwolf panel:
The Midnite Show by Cullen Bunn (writer), Brian Hurtt (artist), Bill Crabtree (colorist), Jim Campbell (letterer), and Daniel Chabon (editor). $19.99, 92 pgs, Dark Horse.
Bunn and Hurtt have worked together a lot, and they must enjoy it, because their comics are always a blast. Bunn doesn’t do anything terribly original with this story – a lost, “cursed” horror film is finally shown, and the monsters in it come to life and start terrorizing the city of Cedar Bluffs, and only a small group of survivors can stop it – but he writes it with more … joie de vivre, I guess, than some of his other stuff (and, to be clear, I like Bunn as a writer, but he does have good stuff and not-as-good stuff), and I wonder if that has to do with Hurtt, who draws the shit out of this. (Incidentally, I wanted to see if “Cedar Bluffs” is actually a place that might be a small city, as it obviously is in this book, so I Googled it, as you do, and this is what came up as I typed:
I love how “Cedar Bluff” is a “human” settlement in Iowa – and Mississippi! – because, I mean, what else would it be? If it was inhabited by Morlocks or Skrulls or if it were a town entirely populated by orangutans, I guess that would come up, too, but, I mean, of course it’s going to be a “human” settlement, Google!)
Anyway, Bunn gives us a group of plucky types, led by a horror film buff who knows quite a bit about what’s going on (once everyone accepts that the monsters are real) and a former “scream queen” who takes no shit, as well as some others to round out the group. We know most of them are going to die, and Bunn paces the story nicely so that we get gruesome deaths – not just in the group, but of random townspeople – every few pages, with no one able to catch their breaths. They’re assisted by Abraham van Helsing, who has also come to life (the main monster is, naturally, Dracula), and they have to figure out how to stop the monsters, because they can’t just be killed. There’s nothing terribly original about the story, as I noted, but Bunn does a very nice job with the characters, giving them nice personalities so that even if they don’t last very long, they leave an impression. Hurtt gets to draw Dracula, the monster from Frankenstein, a Mummy, a Wolf Man, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and he gets to draw some truly horrifying deaths, as well, which looks like fun. Crabtree resists the temptation to make the book dark, so we can see all of Hurtt’s glorious lines, and the book just looks superb.
This is one of those books from Dark Horse that annoy me, as the company, even before they moved to the “back of the book” in Previews, didn’t indicate how long their mini-series were. This is only four issues long (but Bunn and Hurtt do a nice job packing it with content), and each issue was $3.99, meaning buying them in single issues would have cost me 16 bucks. Dark Horse prices their four- AND five-issue trades at 20 dollars, and that annoys me because I would have bought the single issues had I know it was going to be only four issues long (their web site isn’t helpful, either, in case you were going to mention it). I’m not going to boycott their trades just because of this policy, but it does annoy me and it actually does make me think a bit more about getting the trades. I mean, I wasn’t going to skip a Bunn/Hurtt monster story, but for something else I’m a bit more unsure about, that would be a consideration. Come on, Dark Horse!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
One totally Airwolf panel:
The Mighty Barbarians by Michael Moreci (writer), Giuseppe Cafaro (artist), Barbara Nosenzo (colorist), and Jim Campbell (letterer). $19.99, 145 pgs, Ablaze Comics.
I’m sorry, but whenever I read a title with the word “mighty” in it, I’m taken right back to this:
That theme song is straight fire.
Anyway, this is a wacky adventure that I am sure Greg Hatcher would have loved, because it’s just a bunch of pulp kind of heroes teaming up to thwart a Great Evil, and Moreci doesn’t really do too much with it, just has a blast doing it. There’s a Great Evil Thing out there, and Morgan le Fay collects a bunch of groovy “barbarians” to fight said Evil Thing across a bunch of different dimensions, and away we go! Morgan gathers Birka (a Viking warrior), Nanook, Anansi, and Kull, and later they’re joined by another warrior, Thongor (one of the characters makes a joke about the group having one too many “beefy barbarians”), and they zip across dimensions and fight bad guys. There’s not really too much to say about this – Moreci gives each character an interesting personality, a bit of backstory that comes into play at times, and they play off each other well, with Kull and Birka forming a nice friendship and Morgan doing a nice job as the leader seeking some kind of redemption (the quest is a bit personal for her). Moreci rarely takes his foot off the gas, which means Cafaro gets to draw a lot of action, and he does a good job with it. He gets to draw Nanook turning into a polar bear, Anasi turning into a spider, goblins being goblins, dinosaurs, giant snakes, a Hot Evil Sorceress, and a pretty terrifying Great Evil Thing. In one or two places, his storytelling goes a bit wonky, but I assume that’s because he’s called upon to draw so damned much and occasionally he got a bit lost. It’s only one or two panels, so it’s no big deal, and the rest of the book is fun to look at, because Cafaro does a good job cramming a lot of stuff into the space. Moreci leaves things open for a sequel, so we’ll see if that’s coming down the pike. Overall, this is just a fun adventure comic, and there’s nothing wrong with that!
(I do like that creator credits for Kull (REH) and Thongor (Lin Carter) are listed, but listing “Geoffrey of Monmouth” as the creator of Morgan le Fay seems like a joke. Geoffrey, in case you don’t know, lived in the early 12th century and is credited with popularizing the Arthur stories, which had been in circulation orally for some time, but which Geoffrey actually wrote down. I mean, he may have invented Morgan le Fay, but more likely she was a figure from Celtic myths, and even if he did, I mean, copyright law was not a thing in the 1100s, so who cares if he “created” her? Geoffrey certainly doesn’t care, as he, you know, died almost 900 years ago.)
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
One totally Airwolf panel:
The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos volume 1 by Tate Brombal (writer), Isaac Goodhart (artist), Miquel Muerto (colorist), and Aditya Bidikar (letterer). $24.99, 202 pgs, Dark Horse.
James Tynion gets top billing on the credits page because this is “based on an idea” of his, which sounds like a pretty sweet gig. How much do you get paid for throwing ideas out there, because I can do that! Especially if they’re ones as relatively unoriginal as … What if monsters were really the good guys?!?!?!?
I imagine it was more convoluted than that, but essentially, this comic is about what happens when a few teens find out that the monsters of popular culture aren’t actually that bad, while the people who hunt monsters are really, really evil. It’s not rocket science, people!
Despite that, this is a pretty cool comic. Brombal does a good job creating this slightly off-kilter world and its inhabitants. Christopher, our nominal hero, is a typical nerdy kid who has an ability to, basically, see how everything in the world works and fits together, which freaks everyone out because he can’t really control it. He’s a bit like Sheldon Cooper on steroids. He has a crush on a football player, and one day he sees said football player sneaking into the woods looking scared, so he follows him and witnesses the football player turning into a werewolf and getting ripped apart by a legion of white-robed, white-hatted, masked killers, who turn out to be a Top Secret Organization dedicated to hunting monsters. Oh dear. Christopher ends up with a teen vampire and the football player’s girlfriend, who can summon ghost-like cats that fight for her, and they are taken in by Adam Frankenstein – yes, the original monster, still roaming the world – who tells them the secret history of the world and helps them fight back against the Top Secret Organization. Meanwhile, an idealistic detective is trying to find out what’s going on, but the bureaucracy of New Briar City (which is where the book is set), represented by an older, fairly sexist beat cop, keeps trying to stop her because, naturally, the government in the city is in bed with the Top Secret Organization. What’s an idealistic detective to do?
Brombal keeps things moving at a nice clip, and we get a lot of nice characterization on the fly, which is always nice to see. He falls into clichés about teens fairly easily, but he works his way out of them decently, too, so while the three main characters – Christopher, Jordi, and Viveka – sometimes act too much like stereotypes, they become more realistically portrayed as the book moves on, so that’s good. The most interesting relationship is between Jesse Tombs, the detective, and Rocco, the beat cop who tries to limit her investigation. Tombs is a nepo baby – she’s the daughter of the now-dead commissioner – and she’s trying to prove herself, and Rocco comes off early on as a typical asshole cop, but there’s more to it than that, and as the book moves on, their relationship becomes more interesting. Brombal does a good job showing the many different sides of the conflict between monsters and monster hunters, even though there’s never any doubt that the monster hunters are evil. Even when he takes us inside their organization, he does a decent job making the evil characters a bit more well-rounded than we might expect. The plot certainly isn’t complicated, but it’s not dumb, either. Brombal has a lot of space to work (the book, as you can see, is pretty long for six issues), and he uses it well.
Goodhart does a very nice job, too. His characters are very distinctive, and his layouts are quite well done, which is good given the amount of visual information he has to provide in this book. Once or twice his storytelling is a bit confusing, but it’s not a big deal. He creates a new world, too, as New Briar City is a strange place, and Goodhart fills in a lot of details, from the odd buildings to the clothing, which is just slightly off from “our” world – the nurses and cops wear recognizable uniforms, but they’re just different enough to be odd. Making the evil soldiers wear white is a good choice – it’s how they see themselves, naturally, as pure and incorruptible, but also because a lot of the book takes place at night or in dark places, and while Muerto never makes the book too murky, the bad guys certainly stand out nicely when they’re coming for our heroes. Goodhart is good at the action in the book, which is always nice, but his strength is in the character design and the way he taps into the teens’ uncertainty about their lives and their futures. We get a good sense of the anxiety of being a teen from Goodhart, which works well with the way Brombal writes them.
This is a good start of the series – I don’t know how long it’s going to run (issue #13 was just solicited, but this collection was a bit late, so I don’t know how far behind they are), but it’s a pretty nifty story (from such a great idea!!!!) that could easily go for a bit. I’ll have to keep reading!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
One totally Airwolf panel:
Paklis: 1949 by Dustin Weaver (writer/artist). $18.99, 98 pgs, Image.
I’ve been a big fan of Dustin Weaver’s since S.H.I.E.L.D. (I think that was where I first saw his art), but he doesn’t work terribly fast and I imagine he does work outside of comics, so he just doesn’t produce a lot. He began doing Paklis, an anthology series for Image, back in 2017, and I don’t think too many issues have actually come out (he does everything on the book, including lettering, so I imagine each one takes a while). I figured I would get collections eventually, but I don’t even know if the first four issues have been collected yet, so when I saw this (which collects issue #5-7), I ordered it right quick, even though it was a hardcover and cost a bit much for the length. Who knows when a softcover is coming out?!?!?
Anyway, 1949 is a terrific comic. It looks a-MAY-zing, as you might expect, as Weaver toggles back and forth between the 1940s and 200 years in the future, and both are wonderfully rendered. He uses rougher lines, more ragged black chunks, and Zip-A-Tone effects in the 1940s to give it a really nice noir look, while in the future, he uses more precise lines, more nuanced shading, and no effects (although his blacks are still a bit ragged and he doesn’t make things too “clean”), so there’s a nice delineation between them (plus, the 1940s stuff is in black and white and the future stuff is in vibrant colors). His attention to detail is staggering, as he takes no panels off, so we get immersed in both worlds, and the contrast between the grungy, tactile 1940s and the sleeker, more sterile future is stark … although Weaver is a good enough artist that he makes sure the “future” isn’t as sleek and sterile as we might think – he adds just enough degradation to make it more real and, importantly, more corrupt. He packs every panel with amazing detail, so both time periods come alive beautifully. His characters are interesting and fully formed, and the way he shifts between 1940s Detective Blank and the “Blank” of the future is impressive – it’s the same character, but he makes nice subtle changes so that we can tell they’re not exactly the same. There’s a brief section where Weaver gets a bit cartoony, which is pretty keen, and his villain is horrifying and creepy, which he achieves by sticking to the old “less-is-more” adage, shrouding him in shadows and allowing us tiny glimpses of what he really looks like. It is truly a marvelous book to look at.
Weaver’s story is terrific, too. I mean, as usual, it’s not the most original thing, but he tells it very well. Blank is a super-duper detective who’s investigating a string of gruesome murders. Or … is she a futuristic woman who’s being sent back in time into the body of a person from 1949 in order to solve these murders, which are connected to her own time somehow? We’re conditioned to think that the future is the “real” thing and that Blank is just a construct, but Weaver does a nifty thing and adds enough ambiguity so that we’re not quite sure if Blank is the “real” character and the future is “fictional.” The two times are obviously tied together, and Weaver does a good job with that, weaving (sorry, it was too easy) the threads of each timeline together and slowly bringing them into concert with each other. Honestly, the worst part of the story is the ending, because while it’s fine that Weaver leaves questions about what’s really going on, the speed with which he works makes me wonder if he’ll ever get back around to Blank and what’s really going on with her. I hope he does, but they aren’t high. Still, he creates a fascinating character in Blank, someone who’s smarter than everyone in 1949 (because she’s from the future?) and increasingly paranoid in the future (with good reason), and the way Weaver makes her slowly face up to the weirdness of her life is well done. As I noted, I do wish we got a slightly better resolution, but in general, the story works really well.
I figured I would like this because I like Weaver’s art, but the writing is better than I thought it would be. I hope Weaver can continue this weird series, and I hope we get more collections of it!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆
One totally Airwolf panel:
Phantom Road volume 2 by Jeff Lemire (writer), Gabriel Walta (artist), Jordie Bellaire (colorist), Steve Wands (letterer), and Greg Lockard (editor). $14.99, 109 pgs, Image.
This comic is one of those series that, once you accept the initial premise, it feels like there’s nothing more to say. If you liked the first trade, you’ll probably like this one. Lemire knows what he’s doing, and he continues to unspool events slowly, as in this volume the package our heroes – Birdie and Dom – are carrying does something strange that changes the dynamic of the book, while our intrepid FBI agent – Weaver – continues to investigate. Lemire obviously has long-range plans, as we learn a bit more about these truck stops where Dom and Birdie can pass between worlds, but he’s just beginning to tease us with the mysteries, so, once again, if you bought the premise of the series, you’re just along for the ride. That doesn’t mean this is boring or world-building or anything – Lemire is too good to let things get stale, so there’s action, revelations about our protagonists that they’d rather keep secret, and the weirdness of the other world and what’s going on, so it’s intriguing – it’s just that Lemire has a plot laid out, and he knows how to get from Point A to Point B in an entertaining manner. Walta is a very good artist, and his kind of bare-bones, solid, meat-and-potatoes style helps ground the weirdness nicely. I will keep reading, because I like what I’m reading, but there’s not much to say about each individual issue that won’t seem like a plot summary, and I don’t want to do that too much.
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
One totally Airwolf panel:
The Ribbon Queen by Garth Ennis (writer), Jacen Burrows (penciler), Guillermo Ortega (inker), Dan Brown (colorist), and Rob Steen (letterer). $19.99, 176 pgs, AWA Studios.
Ennis gives us this creepy horror story about a New York cop, Amy Sun, who discovers there’s something quite evil stalking cops, and she has to figure out what to do about it. It’s a pretty strong book, as Ennis doesn’t want to make it just a weird horror book – he also wants to tackle social issues, which he’s done his entire career, with some success and some ham-fistedness. In this book, Amy is investigating a murder of the survivor of a serial killer from a few years before, and she thinks the cop who rescued her did it. He became obsessed with her, and she rebuffed him, and he was caught on video being super-macho with her, and it doesn’t look good for him. He shows up in her apartment to vaguely threaten her, and she decides to do the same, but right when she gets to his house, he’s being taken apart by an unseen force (in front of his wife and kids, of course). His skin is being stripped into ribbons and peeled off, which cannot be pleasant. Amy has to figure out what’s up!
Ennis does a nice job making this about more than simple revenge. The “Ribbon Queen,” who’s responsible for the carnage, is a supernatural being from way, way back in the past (as we see in a flashback to olden days, when she was invoked by a woman running from the destruction of her village), and Ennis cleverly makes her less a defender of women than a cruel creature that just likes killing things, and if revenge is involved, so much the better. Amy herself, an Asian woman in the New York Police Department, has to walk a fine line between being a cop and being someone who cops like beating up, and having her go against white, Irish men is the least subtle part of the book, but such is life (her brief interactions with her family are much better). Of course, most of the cops are irredeemably corrupt, which is the standard trope, but Ennis still manages to make the villains of the story fairly interesting, because their evil is so … not exactly banal, but so fitting within the context of the story, and of course he has time to show that they live “regular” lives when they’re not being, you know, pure evil, which is always a good thing when you’re trying to write something (the villains in far too many stories don’t have home lives to speak of, which is a bit annoying). Granted, they’re jut asshole cops, but at least Ennis shows that they’re all too human, which makes their evil that much more depressingly realistic. When you have a supernatural force stripping your skin to ribbons, you need to keep other things realistic, and Ennis does well with that. I’m curious about how much an editor was involved in this – no editor is listed for the specific series, but Ennis always seems to work better when his more obnoxious tendencies are reined in by an editor, unless he’s just getting older and not interested in grossing us all out anymore (I mean, yes, a lot of people get flayed in this book, but nobody has explosive diarrhea or gets their dick cut off or any other juvenile things that Ennis seems to enjoy). Either way, this is a pretty cool horror book without a “shock” ending but still an unsettling one. Which is nice.
Burrows does excellent work on the art, as usual. He’s just a good, solid artist who doesn’t do anything fancy, and his precise linework always makes his horror stand out, because he makes sure we see every strip of skin peeling off the victims’ bodies. Over the years, colorists have been able to add a bit of nuance to his work, and that’s what we get here, as Brown adds nice shades to the work so that it doesn’t seem quite as boldly black-and-white as I’m sure Burrows’s raw pencils look. Burrows is never going to be a superstar because it seems like he’s still perfectly happy doing books like this instead of working for the Big Two (I met him 15 or so years ago briefly and he told me he loves doing stuff like this, and I think his brief run on Moon Knight is the only time he’s ever ventured into the superhero realm), but when you see his name, you can be sure the book is going to look nice.
As you know, I’ve always liked Ennis but I’m always wary he’s going to hit us with a Jennifer Blood or The Boys, so I’m happy that this is an example of his good stuff. Color me relieved!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
One totally Airwolf panel:
Shazam! volume 1: Meet the Captain by Mark Waid (writer), Dan Mora (artist), Alejandro Sánchez (colorist), Troy Peteri (letterer), and Paul Kaminski (collection editor). $16.99, 120 pgs, DC.
Waid and Mora give us another fun superhero book, showing once again that it’s certainly not impossible to do so, so why others don’t remains a mystery. Waid does have some fun working around DC’s idiotic rebrand of the character, because he literally has no “real” superhero name anymore – he can’t tell anyone his name is “Shazam,” because then he’d turn back into Billy Batson; he can’t call himself Captain Marvel because, apparently, lawyers from the Other Company will appear; and so he and everyone else calls him “The Captain,” which is incredibly stupid (Waid does hang a bit of a lampshade with it, but he still can’t save it) and makes me wonder when the special Nextwave Lawyers will appear. Still, it’s a fun comic, as Waid gives us a story that is perfectly superheroic but still feels fairly real and even relevant, if you look at it a bit askance – the gods that gave Billy his power begin messing with him, one at a time, making him do weird, out-of-character things that wrecks his Q rating, all because they’re grumpy that nobody pays much attention to them anymore. A commentary on modern secularism in a ostensibly kid-friendly superhero book? Sure, why not? Waid gets to throw in dinosaurs and apes, so Mora has a lot of fun with those things, and he also deals a bit with puberty even (in a strictly metaphorical way), as the “Marvel Family” is no more (well, except for Mary Marvel for some reason, probably all of which has to do with DC wanting girls to read comics) and the kids don’t love it and act differently. The dinosaurs are fun, because Waid does something clever things with Shazam’s relationship to them, and it’s always nice to see Garguax (who’s kind of an oddball villain) and Queen Bee. Mora, naturally, is marvelous (whoops, sorry about that, but I’m not changing it now!), as he gets to draw all manner of wild stuff, and the book is packed with action, which Mora is very good at drawing. Oddly enough, Waid ends it on a pretty (seemingly) important cliffhanger, so I’m not sure if there are actually plans to do a second arc, but we shall see. Despite that ending, it’s a very old-school kind of superhero romp, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
One totally Airwolf panel:
Uncle Scrooge and the Infinity Dime by Jason Aaron (writer), Paolo Mottura (artist), Francesco D’Ippolito (penciler), Alessandro Pastrovicchio (artist), Vitale Mangiatordi (artist), Giada Perissinotto (artist), Lucio De Giuseppe (inker), Arianna Consonni (colorist), Joe Caramagna (letterer), and Mark Paniccia (editor). $7.99, 30 pgs (plus a 20-page reprint), Marvel.
Ok, so a couple of things: I got the Frank Miller variant there, because of course I did! It’s not as terrible as some of his recent covers, but it’s certainly not peak Miller. Oh well.
Second: Carl Barks. I’m convinced that whenever Brian Cronin does his “Best Runs Ever” polls (one should be coming up at the end of this year!), he creates a bunch of fake e-mail accounts just so he can vote multiple times for Carl Barks’s duck stories, because it always shows up on the list. I should point out that I’ve barely read any of Barks, so I don’t really have a dog in the race (I just like to poke at Brian every once in a while), but in this issue, we get a full-on reprint of a Barks story … and that’s it? That’s what everyone is so jazzed about? I mean, it’s fine – the story is ridiculously simplistic, which is fine, but it’s not terribly funny, either, and while Barks is clearly a decent artist, he literally does nothing with the art that dozens of his contemporaries didn’t do. I imagine he could have done other things if Disney wanted him to, but they wanted meat-and-potatoes art, and that’s what he gave them. There’s nothing in this story that makes me think that Barks is the genius everyone seems to think he is. Even Aaron, in his page-long introduction, gushes about Barks and Don Rosa, and I’d really like to see one of the stories he’s gushing about, because it can’t be this one.
Finally: the actual story. I wasn’t sure if I’d get this, but the weirdness of Aaron writing a Scrooge McDuck story was too good to resist. However … man, it’s boring. It’s an evil Scrooge turning into Thanos and the other Scrooges banding together to stop him. Really? That’s the best you could come up with, Jason Aaron? I mean, I guess in 50 years everyone will call it a classic because it seems like every Uncle Scrooge story is a classic no matter how bland it is, but that doesn’t help us in the here and now! In this dimension, Donald and his nephews don’t visit Scrooge at Christmas (which is what the reprint is all about), so he becomes a bitter old duck who decides to steal all the treasures from every dimension, which doesn’t sit well with all the other greedy Scrooges of the other dimensions. They want to hoard their own damned treasures! So they join forces and stop Evil Scrooge. Yawn.
Ok, so this is finally: Is Disney owned by Italians now? Look at that artistic line-up: Italian after Italian! The art on the book is far better than the story deserves, as each artist (they each do a chapter) gives us nice, bold, cartoony artwork that fits the aesthetic very nicely. However, this is a split Marvel/Disney book, and the editors and executives listed for Disney are all Italians! That’s weird, right? As usual, this is not a criticism, as I don’t care at all who’s running Disney, but is this common knowledge these days, that Disney is being run by Italians from … let’s say a secret lair built into the side of Mount Vesuvius? I just found it interesting.
Anyway, Uncle Scrooge and the Infinity Dime: Don’t waste your precious, precious money. It’s not terrible, just dull. That might be even worse than terrible!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
One totally Airwolf panel:
Unnatural Order volume 1: The Prisoner by Christopher Yost (writer), Val Rodrigues (artist), Dearbhla Kelly (colorist), and Andworld (letterer). $19.99, 150 pgs, Vault Comics.
I kind of don’t want to give away the big twist in this comic, which comes at the end of the first issue/into the second issue, but it’s difficult to write about it without giving away the big twist. I’ll try, though! This book begins with the Roman invasion of the British Isles, where the legionnaires find a druid who’s doing some nasty things. They try to stop him, but he slaughters them with magic. Then the book shifts to “years later,” and we get several stock-ish characters from fiction – the Roman soldier, the big ol’ Viking, an Irish thief character, the mysterious exotic sorceress from “the East,” and the warrior woman – who are trying to stop this same druid from ruling the world, because it’s not a great world in which they live. They hear of a prisoner whom the druid fears, so they set out on a rescue mission. The end of the first issue introduces us to this prisoner, and that’s where we get a cool reveal. I don’t want to spoil it!
This is a cool action-adventure that feels like it could have ended in one volume, although it doesn’t. I have no problem with Yost and/or Vault wanting to continue, but it does feel a bit like they got a good response to the early issues and decided to extend it. Maybe. Either way, our group does rescue the prisoner, but they learn a bit more about the druid from him and what the druid is actually doing, and it’s pretty keen. There’s the usual stuff in an adventure like this – nobody completely trusts everyone else, someone might not be completely on board with the mission – but because of the twist at the end of issue #1, Yost can put some neat spins on the hoary clichés, and it works well. I really don’t want to say more, so I won’t – it’s just a neat adventure story with enough originality that it works well. Meanwhile, Rodrigues does a lot of good work on the art, as he’s tasked to draw dragons and weird creatures and wraiths, and he uses a nice, scratchy line to make this medieval world feel rough and real. His monsters are particularly well done, but the rest is quite good, too. He gives us a good sense of the world, so that it feels like a lived-in place despite a great deal of it being kind of a blasted wasteland, as the druid has wrecked a good deal of it. He does a nice job with the characters, too – they’re stock characters in many ways, but there’s a reason, and Rodrigues does a nice job working within the restrictions placed upon him by the plot. It’s a good-looking comic.
I’m curious to see where Yost goes with this comic. Obviously, it could turn out well or not at all, but this volume, at least, is pretty keen.
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
One totally Airwolf panel:
BOOKS
The Story of an African Farm and Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland by Olive Schreiner. 233 pgs and 60 pgs, 1883 and 1897, Dover Publications (for African Farm, 1998) and Okitoks Press (for Peter Halket, 2017).
Schreiner (1855-1920) was a South African writer whose first book, The Story of an African Farm, is considered a seminal work of South African fiction. Only these two fictional works were published during her lifetime (another novel was published posthumously), but she wrote nonfiction and became involved in South African politics later in life. Trooper Peter Halket, in fact, is a brazenly polemical novella, in which the title character, a British soldier in South Africa in the aftermath of the Jameson Raid, spends the night on watch on top of a kopje and meets, well, Jesus (he’s never identified by name, but, I mean, we know who it is!). Peter Halket, who went up the kopje as a simplistic and fairly racist soldier (I mean, he doesn’t seem any more racist than most people at that time, but of course, people at that time were pretty racist as a default), comes down a changed man, and Schreiner shows the inevitable consequences of trying to live like Christ in a modern society in general and in the British army in particular. It’s a quick read, but definitely not as good as The Story of an African Farm, which is considerably more impressive a work. The book is set during the 1860s (the only date we get in it is 1862, and it’s clear it goes on for several years after that) and tells the story of Lyndall, Em, and Waldo, three children who grow up together on the farm. Em is the most traditional, as she wants nothing more than to get married and run the farm after her stepmother, Tant’ Sannie, dies (or, as the case turns out to be, gets married). Lyndall, her cousin, is the rebel, wanting nothing more than to leave and get an education, which she does. Waldo is the son of the kindly German caretaker, and he begins the book as a devout Christian whose faith is severely tested during the course of the book. The first section focuses a great deal on Waldo, as a man shows up at the farm and his father helps him out, but we soon figure out that the man, Bonaparte Blenkins, is a con man. He ingratiates himself into the farm (Lyndall, notably, never trusts him), but he’s Icarus, and eventually he falls … not after wreaking some havoc, though. In the second section, set some years later, a new caretaker arrives on the farm and Em falls in love with him, but he falls in love with Lyndall, who has returned after getting her education. Lyndall remains a free spirit, however, and that complicates things with Em and Waldo, who also sort-of loves Lyndall, as well as Gregory Rose, the new man, who’s fairly misogynistic (to us, perhaps not to people of the day) and thinks Lyndall is far too independent, but damn it, he’s too fascinated by her! You can probably guess that there’s a good deal of tragedy involved, but it’s not a completely depressing book.
African Farm is a remarkably modern novel, in that Schreiner writes in a somewhat terse, blunt manner and deals with modern ideas about what it means to be a woman in society and how that can constrain people. Tant’ Sannie is a product of her times, and the children rebel against her in their own ways, and while Em seems the most traditional, she’s also far stronger than she looks. Lyndall is a fascinating character, willing to experience great suffering as long as she’s living life on her own terms, and Waldo is constantly trying to make sense of a world that does not live by the values he believes in and which the world tells him to believe in. There’s even a very odd subplot about Gregory Rose that is wildly modern, and it’s remarkable how realistically Schreiner portrays it (I don’t want to give it away, because it really is a genuine surprise). There are parts of the book that are wildly allegorical, other parts that are extremely polemical, and it doesn’t really follow a narrative track all that much – important things happen “off page,” and Schreiner hints around at some other things that we think ought to be more prominent – but it’s still a powerful book, in indictment of the society in which she lived and a plea for tolerance in a world that didn’t believe in it. I read in the introduction that some people have criticized it for not being more concerned with the state of the black people of South Africa, but that feels unfair – in real life, Schreiner was a strong advocate for equality, and in this book, she might not take up the cause of equal rights for the natives, but it’s also not really the focus of the book. In Trooper Peter, for instance, Jesus talks for a long time about racial equality, and Peter gets into trouble for putting those words into action. So it’s a bit strange to argue that Schreiner should have done more in The Story of an African Farm when she was still quite young when she wrote it and she was writing about women and not racism. At least, that’s what I think.
Anyway, The Story of an African Farm is a fascinating book. I’m glad I found out about it!
Rating (The Story of an African Farm): ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Rating (Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland): ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab. 442 pgs, 2020, Tor.
My daughter’s PT, who drives around all day and listens to audio books all the time (so she goes through a lot of them, far more than I do, as I actually read physical books), mentioned that she liked this recent book quite a lot, so I picked it up. It is pretty good – it feels a bit heftier than, say, a “beach read,” but it’s still not the most challenging novel you’ll ever read, but it’s lively and it zips along nicely and Schwab does have some good things to say about love and life, so there you go. Addie is a young woman in 18th-century France who can’t imagine living her entire life in the small village where she was born, so when her parents make a marriage for her and pressure her into going through with it, she prays to a dark god that the village “witch” told her about and makes a deal with a devil, whom she eventually names Luc. She asks, basically, to live forever, and Luc grants the wish, but with a typical devilish twist: no one remembers her once she leaves their presence. She can make no mark on the world – she can’t write, she can’t draw, she can’t say her own name, and when she leaves someone’s sight (or if they, you know, fall asleep), they instantly forget her. Addie doesn’t know about this part of the deal until after she’s made it, so she has to figure out a way to live with it, and she does, for 300 years, until 2014, when she meets a young man in a bookstore who remembers her. Of course, they fall in love – she thinks it’s great that someone actually remembers her, and Henry … well, Henry has his own reasons for hanging out with Addie. Of course he has a secret – what kind of book would it be if he didn’t?
It’s a good, brisk read, and Schwab jumps back and forth between the present and the past, unspooling Addie’s life slowly as she learns how to live with her curse and what she can do about it (influence other people who write and draw, for one, which is a clever workaround) and how she deals with Luc, who visits her often, usually on the anniversary of their deal. Addie sold him her soul, of course, but only when she doesn’t want to live anymore, so Luc is constantly pointing out how shitty her life is, and Addie keeps finding reasons to go on. Meanwhile, in the present, she and Henry begin a nice romance, as Addie has to learn how to be with someone for more than a day and what that means. Schwab focuses on Henry a lot in the book, too, so we learn about why he’s the way he is and, eventually, why he remembers her, and it’s a bittersweet reason, of course (no, he’s not dead and can see her because he’s a ghost). It’s not exactly a happy book, but it’s not really sad, either, because both Addie and Henry learn what it means to be in love and whether it’s worth it (of course it is!). Addie continues to spar with Luc, too, who’s a true monster (she witnesses what he does to Beethoven, and it ain’t pleasant), and their relationship is also a very important one as she learns how to exist in this new world she created for herself. Schwab does nice work with the historical stuff – she doesn’t get too deep into it, but she does a good job contrasting it with the present – and she makes sure to spend some time with the ancillary characters, as well, as they’re important to the overall narrative. She doesn’t quite get into how ugly Addie’s life must have been at times – she hints around at some of things that happen to Addie, but doesn’t get too much into specifics, which is probably for the best. It’s a pretty good book, overall, and I look forward to discussing it with my daughter’s PT!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
TELEVISION
A Gentleman in Moscow (Showtime). Ewan McGregor is our “Gentleman,” playing an aristocrat who manages to survive the Russian Revolution thanks to a poem he supposedly wrote before the war that called for something like Marxism (it’s clear he didn’t write it, but we don’t find out about who did for some time), but he’s kept under “house arrest” in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow, from which he is banned from leaving. He spends the next 30 years there, and the show takes us from 1922 until Stalin’s death, when McGregor decides that something needs to be done about his situation. It’s a pretty good show, as McGregor tries to live like a gentleman even though the Communists try to break him down. He befriends a young girl whose father is always away, leaving her to run around the hotel, and he explains old-school manners to her and, after he discovers a secret room that he can access through his threadbare room (where the servants used to live, because the authorities want to break him down, as I noted), they have tea parties and he tells her stories of Russian folklore. He meets his “handler,” a thuggish bureaucrat played by Johnny Harris (who does a nice job revealing Osip’s depth throughout the show), he has sex with a famous actress played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead (to whom McGregor is married in real life), which gradually turns into something else over the years, and he debates Communism with his old friend, Mishka (played by Fehinti Balogun), who claims that McGregor was never really friends with him because the power imbalance between them was too great (McGregor is a count, Mishka is a … not exactly a commoner, but not nobility, which means he’s still not equal to McGregor). McGregor, of course, learns hard lessons during his stay, and he learns how to survive in this New Russia, and he experiences great tragedy but is also in not a bad situation, as the Communists keep the hotel open and looking fancy to impress foreign visitors. The show jumps years often, but it works pretty well (except for one time, when two kids who have grown up in the hotel go off to World War II and it’s very emotional and shit but then the show jumps to after the war and we never find out what happened to them). People become more enamored of Communism, less enamored of Communism, there are unctuous toadies who don’t like that McGregor might not be getting sufficiently punished, and there are people who love McGregor because he classes up the joint. It was filmed in Manchester, which was easy because McGregor can never leave the hotel, so they could film it literally anywhere! Of course, when Stalin dies, things change quite a bit in Russia, and while the early episodes are tense, the final ones are more so, as McGregor makes some hard choices about his future. I’m of the opinion that Winstead doesn’t quite get the recognition she deserves, so it’s nice to see her really dig into her role. Anyway, it’s a pretty keen show, if you’re in the mood for some Russian drama!
Mr Bates vs the Post Office (PBS). Toby Jones is Alan Bates, who takes on the British Post Office in this 4-episode series, which is based on a court case that seems to be still ongoing, at least to a certain extent (a settlement was reached, but compensation is still being awarded, I guess). The PO installed software which was supposed to make the lives of British postmasters easier, but it was riddled with bugs and when shortfalls began showing up in reports, the postmasters were legally contracted to make them up, and when they couldn’t, the PO would accuse them of theft, even though it turned out to be the faulty software and, according to the show, some of the programmers actually screwing around with the money behind the scenes, which they shouldn’t have been allowed to do. Bates was one of the early people accused of theft, but he never signed anything admitting guilt and he always demanded proof, so they just shut his post office down and Bates had to find new work. He realizes that it’s happening to a lot of other people, too, and he becomes the organizer of the wronged postmasters and the name on the court case that wound its way through the British justice system. It’s a pretty good show – Jones rarely gets a chance to be the lead, and he’s very typically British about it all (he has to tell people that he’s really angry, because he often doesn’t act like it, because he’s British, don’t you know), and the cast is quite good. Monica Dolan as a woman whose life is ruined by the PO is particularly good, as she manages to rebuild her life pretty well. There are some good “Hey, it’s that guy!” actors (British division), including Ian Hart and Shaun Dooley, with Alex Jennings showing up as a Tory MP who champions the case for Bates (and who we’re always expecting to betray him, because he’s, you know, a Tory). It’s as maddening as you expect it to be, but considering that the postmasters won (there’s an annoying scene that has to be in every court drama, I guess, in which the plaintiffs get news of the settlement and they get grumpy, but I can’t believe that people in the 21st century don’t know that powerful corporations will always settle and poor plaintiffs kind of have to take it because they’ll always run out of money), it’s still a feel-good story, to a degree. The case took about 20 years to resolve, so the show does a good job showing how these people have to, you know, keep on living even though the PO wrecked their lives. I know you’re always down for a good “David-vs-Goliath” story, and this is a decent one to check out.
Parish season 1 (AMC). Giancarlo Esposito, who’s always an interesting actor, stars in this crime drama as the owner of a taxi service with a murky past as a car thief/getaway driver who gets pulled back into that world (of course!) when his old buddy, Skeet Ulrich, asks him for help with one simple job. Of course it’s not simple! Esposito ends up bonding with the head of a crime family, Zackary Momoh, who immigrated to New Orleans from Zimbabwe (via South Africa, where his father, the real head of the organization, now lives), but Momoh’s hotheaded brother, Ivan Mbakop, is suspicious of our hero, especially after Momoh gets ambushed by bad dudes while being driven home by Esposito. Esposito, naturally, finds himself in a bad situation – he used to work for Anton, a white crime lord (played with casual menace by Bradley Whitford), and he promised Anton he was out of the life, so now that he’s back in, Anton is naturally vexed, especially as it seems the job he and Ulrich pulled hurt Whitford, as Momoh was in business with Whitford but is trying to branch out on his own. Oh dear. Esposito is, as usual, quite good in the role, and it’s interesting seeing the back-and-forth between a white gangster and a black gangster, neither of whom can claim the moral high ground, even though Momoh tries to occasionally. The showrunners seem to get more confident about the notion of racial inequality as the season moves on, as we get more into Momoh’s business of human trafficking in the final few episodes (the fact that he’s trafficking black Africans is not handled particularly subtly, but it’s not too bad). The biggest problem I have with the season is that it feels like they weren’t sure they were getting a second season (which they clearly seem to be getting), because the first four episodes seem to deal with Esposito’s problem of not being trusted by Momoh thanks to the ambush and figuring out a way to get Whitford off his case, but the final two episodes pivot into a broader look at New Orleans politics and how it relates to crime and what’s going to happen with the power structure of Momoh’s family moving forward. So the season feels a bit disjointed, and it’s frustrating. Esposito wants to make things right with his family (he’s married to a white woman and his son is dead, a plot point that is fairly important), but in the final two episodes, he kind of abandons them, and it feels like he’d only do that if the show was getting another season (it doesn’t feel right, in other words, based on what’s happening in the story, but feels more like an external complication that will be resolved in the second season). Stuff like that makes it not a great show, but only a decent one. We’ll see what happens when (and if, I suppose) it returns!
The Sympathizer (HBO). This is an odd mini-series that never quite comes together, although parts of it are quite impressive. Hoa Xuande plays a South Vietnamese member of the secret police in the waning days of the Vietnam War (which, of course, is called the American War in Vietnam), but he’s really a Communist spy. When the North is about to take the South, Hoa – who’s called only The Captain – believes his job is done and he can embrace his comrades, but his childhood friend, Man (Duy Nguyen) tells him that he’ll be better placed fleeing the country with his boss, The General (who actually does have a name, but usually he’s just called The General), so he can keep feeding them information about the counter-revolutionary program The General is sure to pursue in the U.S. So The Captain moves to Los Angeles and continues spying, but he’s walking a fine line, as he’s trying to help his other long-time friend, Bon (Fred Nguyen Khan), who lost his wife and child in the escape from Saigon and is bitterly anti-Communist (The Captain, Man, and Bon call themselves the Three Musketeers a lot, but it’s clear Bon, at least, doesn’t know as much about his friends as he should). The show is told mostly in flashback, as The Captain is writing his “confession” in a Communist “re-education” camp, so we know something went wrong when he returned to Vietnam, and it’s also fairly disjointed, which works in some places and not in others. It’s a frustrating show, because its weirdness works well so often and there’s a lot of humor juxtaposed with the high tension of The Captain’s situation (very early on, Man tells The Captain he’s going to have to leave Vietnam while Bon is beating up a group of soldiers in the background, and it’s one of the best scenes in the show). The Captain hooks up with Sandra Oh, which becomes a bit of an issue later on, and he has to find a mole for The General once The General becomes paranoid because not every refugee loves him as much as he thinks he deserves (a bit on-the-nose there regarding a current political figure, but what are you going to do?), so there’s a lot about him trying to figure out how to frame someone so no one suspects him. In the middle of the show, he becomes a “consultant” on a big war movie, which is basically Apocalypse Now, and that episode is a nice encapsulation of the show – it’s very clever and funny in places (David Duchovny as the main character in the movie is superb), but it’s also a bit too herky-jerky to be too effective. The frustration of the show can be summed up by what every person writing about the show leads with, and which I have kept to the end: Robert Downey Jr. He’s a producer, and I imagine was a big part of getting it on screen, and he also acts in it. And acts. And acts. And ACTS. As most people will point out, he plays FOUR roles (actually, five, which makes me wonder if some reviewers didn’t watch the entire thing) – the CIA agent in Saigon who helps The General and The Captain get out of the country; The Captain’s professor in college (he went to college in Los Angeles, which is why he speaks English so well and why he’s perfect both to work with the CIA and to work against them); a very pro-war Congressman; and the director of the “Apocalypse Now” movie (I’m not going to get into his final role, because it’s a bit of a spoiler). Downey is obnoxious in all the roles, although his work as Claude, the CIA agent, is quite good, as is his work as the director (he’s ok in the other two, but he hams it up a bit more) – he’s obnoxious because each role is an archetype of AMERICA and the American attitude toward Vietnam. His obnoxiousness is kind of the point, and it a weird show like this, it doesn’t make it bad, but it does threaten to overwhelm Hoa Xuande, who actually does a very good job with his role. Most people don’t love Downey and wonder why he’s playing four roles, but if you do stick through to the end, it becomes fairly obvious (which, again, is why I wonder if some reviewers didn’t watch the entire thing). It’s just … he’s a lot, and he shouldn’t overwhelm the show, but he does. I want to believe it’s purposeful and that it represents the idea of America stepping all over everything because that’s what it does, but the final episode seems to swerve away from what the show has been doing, so I wonder how purposeful Downey’s ACTING is. Anyway, it’s a nice-looking show, and it does attempt to deal with both America’s attitude toward the war and the Vietnamese experience both in Vietnam after the war and in the States, so that’s not a bad thing. It’s just a bit off, and it’s too bad.
Nolly (PBS). Helena Bonham Carter stars as Noele Gordon, whose entire life, it seems, was lived on television (she is credited with being the first woman to be seen on color television, as she was part of a test for color in 1938, when she was 19 years old). This three-part series focuses on the end of her career, when, in 1981, she was fired from her long-running soap opera, Crossroads, and she needs to figure out what to do next. She goes back on the stage, but that’s a bit fraught, as it’s been years since she was in front of a live audience. The show is mainly about ageism and sexism, as Nolly is a difficult character because she’s rightly thinks of herself as a star, and she’s sacked because she is a pain in the ass, although she points out, probably rightly, that a man wouldn’t have been treated the same way even if he acted the same way she did. Nolly died of cancer in 1985, and the show deals with that, too, as well as with what would have been a return to Crossroads were it not for the illness (the show implies she actually did return, but in real life, her cancer would not let her come back).
Bonham Carter is good, of course, as she plays Nolly as someone who knows she’s a star and takes advantage of that, but also as someone who recognizes the contributions of everyone around her. Even if she’s acting like a star, she knows the names of all the people at the studio, and she takes the time to mentor a new cast member (a black woman played by Bethany Antonia, whom it seems like will be fairly important but turns out to be, well, not really) and explain to the women in the cast of Gypsy (which is the show she does after her dismissal) the way the world works for women, especially older women. The rest of the cast is pretty good, especially Augustus Prew as her best friend, fellow cast member Tony Adams, but it’s clearly Bonham Carter’s show, which is not a bad thing at all. It’s a nice show that has some things on its mind and which Bonham Carter elevates, and while I don’t love it, it was entertaining. You could do a lot worse than spend some time with Nolly.
Alice & Jack (PBS). Yeah, we’ve been watching a lot of things on PBS recently, so sue us. It’s strange – PBS can go months without having anything that either one of us particularly wants to see, then they drop everything at once – currently I’m DVRing three separate shows on PBS on Sunday nights, so I’ll get to them soon enough. Weird.
Anyway, Andrea Riseborough and Domhnall Gleeson star as our titular lovers in this six-part series that annoyed the living hell out of us, even though it’s often very beautiful and both lead actors are terrific. It takes place over the course of 15 years (2007-2022) and examines their not-quite romance, as they’re apart far longer than they are together during these years. That’s part of the problem, honestly. I get that when you’re doing a romance, you try to do things a bit differently because they’ve been done to death, but sometimes you go too far!!!! Alice and Jack meet when they match on an app, and while Jack seems to be the more romantic, Alice works a lot of hours (she’s a financial investment advisor of some sort, which is important later) and she just wants to meet a nice guy so she can fuck him. Jack’s down with that, and while Alice enjoys the sex, she also kicks him out afterward. Ok, so far, so good. Jack then becomes obsessed with Alice, and he simply can’t move on from her. It’s stupid, sure, but then he decides to try dating, and he instantly gets another woman pregnant (the carelessness with which otherwise smart characters get pregnant in fiction annoys me). Instead of getting an abortion, he convinces the woman to marry him, and she foolishly says yes. I mean, yes, he hadn’t seen Alice in a while, but he’s still obsessed with her (for no real reason, honestly). She shows back up and asks him to go to her mother’s funeral, which his best friend says is a terrible idea (no one ever listens to the best friend!), and through a quirk of fate, his wife finds out about it and kicks him out. So, now he’s divorced, and he’s still “in love” with Alice. She almost gets married, but backs out because she realizes she’s in love with Jack, but she’s still not ready to be in a relationship with him. This goes on for years, and as I noted, some moments in the show are stupendous and Riseborough and Gleeson do an excellent job showing how these people feel for each other, but throughout it all, I just can’t buy it. Why is Jack so obsessed with her so quickly? Why is Riseborough such a jerk, and why does Jack keep taking it? We find out why she is, because she can’t just be a jerk throughout the entire show, and we have to see that his patience will be rewarded, but why is he so patient? At one point, he mentions that some relationships lose the thrill after several years, but that hasn’t happened with them yet, and my wife and I laughed because, despite the passage of over a decade, they had, at that point, probably spent less than a year in an actual relationship, so of course the thrill wasn’t gone! It’s a very frustrating show, as the creators obviously want to write kind of an “anti-romcom,” but they can’t help themselves toward the end, making it sappier and sappier as we go along despite not having a solid foundation on which to get sappy. I don’t know – it’s another example of writers confusing “lust” with “love,” and I get so annoyed with that. I’ve always liked Andrea Riseborough, and Gleeson is an interesting actor, but for me, at least, it was just too vexing to like. Oh well.
MaryLand (PBS). Yep, another Masterpiece show on PBS. Roll with it, people!
This show could have easily been a Mike Leigh movie, as it deals with family members who love each other but have also been keeping secrets and are also not terribly happy in their lives, and the inciting event that gets it all out into the open. In the first scene, a man finds a woman lying dead on the beach, and it turns out that woman was the mother of Becca and Rosaline, played very well by Suranne Jones and Eve Best, respectively. Their mother, Mary, died on the Isle of Man, which is strange to them as she was supposed to be in Wales with a friend of hers. When Becca and Rosaline arrive on the island (sadly, the show was filmed in Ireland, not Man), they discover that Mary was living a whole separate life, with friends and a lover (the man who found her). This throws a rather big spanner into their works, and they have to deal with it while also dealing with their own fraught relationship and their relationships with their families. Rosaline has had cancer, twice, and is in the middle of another scare, and she has shut herself off from intimacy with most people because of that, while Becca has a pretty good but occasionally inept husband and two teen daughters, the younger of whom is testing the limits of her world and worrying her parents. Their father doesn’t want to hear about anything that’s been going on with their mother, although it turns out he knows a bit more than he’s letting on. Becca and Rosaline meet the man, played by Hugh Quarshie, and he annoys them because he’s perfectly nice, and one of their mother’s friends, played somewhat inexplicably by Stockard Channing (she’s fine, but I couldn’t figure out what Stockard Channing was doing in the middle of this British drama). It’s not a surprising show at all – I mean, the sisters do learn some odd and upsetting things about their mother, but nothing too shocking – but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. Jones and Best are really good, so whenever they’re talking to each other (which is often, as they’re the only family on the island for the first two episodes), the scenes crackle with tension and energy, and it makes a good foundation for when Becca’s family and their dad finally arrive and more secrets come out. There’s nothing particularly innovative about MaryLand – it’s just a good, solid, well-acted family drama. And the locations are great, so that’s nice, too!
**********
Here’s the money I spent in June!
5 June: $177.01 (Sigh – the next volume of Terry and the Pirates came out)
12 June: $95.43
19 June: $254.23 (Sigh – the second Rom Omnibus came out, plus a bunch of other stuff!)
26 June: $231.67 (Sigh – another Terry and the Pirates collection came out! Sheesh!)
Money spent in June: $758.34
(Jun. ’23: $550.91)
(Jun. ’22: $839.57)
(Jun. ’21: $598.36)
Two Terry and the Pirates collection will do that to you, I guess.
YTD: $3181.96
(2023: $3100.83)
(2022: $5518.10)
(2021: $3769.89)
It’s odd how close I am to last year’s YTD. I have tried to cut back, but I guess I haven’t from last year, just from two years ago!
Here’s the breakdown of publisher and format!
Ablaze: 2 (1 manga volume, 1 trade paperback)
Avery Hill Publishing: 2 (2 graphic novels)
AWA Studios: 1 (1 trade paperback)
Clover Press: 2 (2 “classic” reprints)
Dark Horse: 2 (2 trade paperbacks)
DC: 3 (2 single issues, 1 trade paperback)
Dynamite: 1 (1 “classic” reprint)
Fantagraphics: 1 (1 “classic” reprint)
IDW: 2 (2 trade paperbacks)
Image: 8 (1 “classic” reprint, 2 graphic novels, 5 trade paperbacks)
Mad Cave Studios: 1 (1 graphic novel)
Marvel: 3 (1 “classic” reprint, 2 single issues)
NBM: 1 (1 graphic novel)
Penthouse Comics: 1 (1 single issue)
Silver Sprocket: 1 (1 graphic novel)
Vault Comics: 1 (1 trade paperback)
Viz: 1 (1 manga volume)
5 “classic” reprints (25)
7 graphic novels (32)
2 manga volumes (5)
5 single issues (34)
13 trade paperbacks (63)
Ablaze: 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 2 (1 graphic novel, 1 manga volume, 1 trade paperback)
About Comics: 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 (1 “classic” reprint)
Abrams: 0 + 1 + 0 + 1 + 1 + 0 (3 graphic novels)
Ahoy: 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 (1 trade paperback)
Antarctic: 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 (1 trade paperback)
Avery Hill Publishing: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 2 (2 graphic novels)
AWA: 0 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 0 + 1 (4 trade paperbacks)
Battle Quest Comics: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 (1 trade paperback)
Boom! Studios: 1 + 1 + 0 + 2 + 0 + 0 (1 “classic” reprint, 3 trade paperbacks)
Clover Press: 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 2 (2 “classic” reprints, 1 graphic novel)
ComicMix: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 (1 “classic” reprint)
Dark Horse: 3 + 3 + 1 + 3 + 1 + 2 (4 “classic” reprints, 6 single issues, 3 trade paperbacks)
DC: 1 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 2 + 3 (1 “classic” reprint, 9 single issues, 8 trade paperbacks)
Dynamite: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 1 (2 “classic” reprints)
Epicenter Comics: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 (1 “classic” reprint)
Fairsquare Comics: 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 (1 graphic novel, 1 trade paperback)
Fantagraphics: 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 1 + 1 (2 “classic” reprints, 1 graphic novel)
First: 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 (1 graphic novel)
First Second Books: 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 (1 graphic novel)
Floating World Comics: 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 (1 graphic novel)
Humanoids: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 (1 graphic novel)
IDW: 0 + 0 + 1 + 2 + 0 + 2 (5 trade paperbacks)
Image: 4 + 3 + 2 + 5 + 6 + 8 (2 “classic” reprints, 4 graphic novels, 5 single issues, 17 trade paperbacks)
Invader Comics: 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 (1 graphic novel, 1 single issue)
Mad Cave Studios: 2 + 1 + 0 + 1 + 3 + 1 (2 graphic novels, 2 single issues, 4 trade paperbacks)
Marvel: 3 + 3 + 2 + 4 + 1 + 3 (7 “classic” reprints, 4 single issues, 5 trade paperbacks)
MCD Books: 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 (1 graphic novel)
NBM: 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 1 (2 graphic novels)
Oni Press: 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 (2 trade paperbacks)
Papercutz: 0 + 0 + 0 + 2 + 0 + 0 (2 “classic” reprints)
Penthouse: 0 + 1 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 1 (3 single issues)
Random House: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 (1 graphic novel)
Scout: 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 (1 single issue)
Silver Sprocket: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 (1 graphic novel)
SLG: 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 (1 graphic novel)
T Pub: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 (1 graphic novel)
Ten Ton Press: 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 (1 graphic novel)
Titan Comics: 0 + 4 + 0 + 1 + 1 + 0 (1 graphic novel, 2 single issues, 3 trade paperbacks)
TKO Studios: 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 (1 trade paperback)
Top Shelf: 1 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 (2 graphic novels)
Valiant: 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 (1 single issue)
Vault: 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 1 (3 trade paperbacks)
Viz Media: 0 + 2 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 1 (4 manga volumes)
A Wave Blue World: 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 (1 graphic novel)
**********
I keep meaning to listen to the music some of you told me about back in March, and I’ve listened to some of it, but not enough to offer a decent opinion on it (some of you will claim I never have a decent opinion about anything!!!). But this month, I decided to start being more diligent about it, so I listened to some songs more and thought about them a bit, and those thoughts are below! I didn’t want to just focus on, say, Eric’s suggestion, so I did the first suggestion in each of the first three comments, and I’ll try to do more in July. I apologize for taking so long – as I get older, I have less time to write, but I also have less ability to do two things at the same time, so if I’m listening to this music, I really have to listen to it and I can’t be doing other things. I will get through all the suggestions, though – this I swear!
Leprous – “Distant Bells” (2019). This, Eric’s first suggestion, is a 7-minute song that doesn’t really become interesting until about 5 minutes in, which is too bad. It begins very (too) slowly, and I’m not a huge fan of singer Einar Solberg’s weak falsetto for the early part of the song, as it’s somewhat enervating. However, the music is nice – there’s a nice piano and cello (maybe?) in the music, and while I wish the build had been a bit faster, it does build, so that’s something. At about 4.45, we get a glissando, which indicates that the gang is kicking it up a notch, and we get a nifty guitar under the lyrics, and Solberg sounds a bit more urgent, so things look up! At 5.50, we finally get a drum break, and Solberg can cut loose a bit, and the final minute-and-a-half of the song is pretty keen. I don’t love the lyrics too much (they’re fine, but they feel a bit banal), but I don’t hate them, either, and the song is definitely redeemed by the final two-and-a-half minutes or so. I just wish they had gotten there a little bit faster! Check it out below!
Johnny and the Distractions – “Octane Twilight” (1981). Edo listed a bunch of Portland rockers, which was fun. I love the name of this band – it’s just fun – and this song is just very straight-forward rock, with a pretty cool guitar solo by Mark Spangler and a good, thumping beat backed by Kevin Jarvis on drums. I don’t love Johnny Koonce’s voice, as he seems to mutter a bit too much and his vocals are pushed back in the mix a bit, but the lyrics aren’t bad, and I like the final words: “Motherless sons always say yes,” hinting at a weird psychological dissonance that the rest of the song lacks. I like this song, but I’m not sure if I’m going to put in on my phone, simply because it doesn’t grab me and demand to be heard. Still, not a bad choice.
Grant Hart – “(It Was a) Most Disturbing Dream” (2013). Pete Woodhouse suggested this track from Hart’s final album (he died in 2017), and it sounds like something you’d get from a dude who used to be in Hüsker Dü – lots of feedback, vocals deep down in the mix and fuzzier than they need to be, and music that sounds like it was recorded in a garage (that latter is not necessarily a bad thing). The album this is from is loosely based on “Paradise Lost,” and I guess this song is about Adam and Eve, to some extent, but it’s not entirely clear and I can’t find the lyrics written out on-line (I can catch a good amount of them from the YouTube recording, but some crucial parts of obscure). It’s not a bad song – it sounds a bit like some kind of weird ELO throwback with trash can drums and scratchy guitars instead of ethereal keyboards. There is an annoying, repetitive organ as the foundation that comes straight out of the Ray Manzarek Book of Songs, but what are you going to do about that? I’m not the biggest Hüsker Dü fan, but this is a pretty good song. It’s just weird enough to wipe out some of the weird production values!
**********
I found this article about why popular culture sucks these days, and while some of it is pretty good, I love articles like this because it so very much comes off as an old man yelling at a cloud (something I approve of, of course!). I mean, sure, I think the ridiculous amount of information out there can get overwhelming, but sheesh, come on, people, lighten up a bit. I’ve seen more than a few articles recently about this – coincidence, or is the algorithm targeting me?!?!? – someone wrote an article bitching about how Taylor Swift doesn’t sing about anything meaningful, unlike Madonna back in the 1980s (when she sang such important lyrics as “Keep on pushing me baby, don’t you know you drive me crazy” and compared her latest sex act to that time when she was a virgin), and I watched a few videos recently about why music today sucks (the guy had a point about autotune and digitization of music) and why lyrics suck (I mean, sure, Beyoncé’s latest country song makes no damned sense if you listen to the lyrics, but comparing a pop single to a Beatles song that wasn’t released as a single – “Across the Universe” – is cheating a bit – why not compare it to an actual Beatles single, where we find gems like “Help me if you can, I’m feeling down, and I do appreciate you being ’round” – it’s poetry!!!!), but again, I’m not sure if grumpy oldsters are just more emboldened these days or if my Computer Overlords are pushing this stuff on me. Oh well. I find good pop culture all over the place, because I’m not a drone. I’m sure you find cool stuff, too!
I don’t really want to discuss the presidential election yet, but we did have a debate here last week, in frickin’ June, and the Democrats lost their minds because Biden performed terribly. I don’t know why it’s so hard for the Democrats to beat Trump, as so many people loathe him. If I’m Biden, I’m not even talking – I’m just coming with a tape recorder queued up with every vile thing Trump has said about women and immigrants and veterans and everyone else and just hitting play whenever someone asks me a question. Biden has done a fairly decent job as president, but like a lot of presidents, what he’s done isn’t especially sexy, so it’s tough to run on his record because people are bored easily and don’t want to hear it. But far more people abhor Trump than like Biden, so why not keep highlighting what a vile human being the Orange Baboon is? Or just read from the playbook the Republicans are using to turn this country into a dictatorship – the Project 2025 handbook is on-line (no, I’m not linking to it), so it’s not like they’re even trying to hide what they want. I mean, this should be a landslide, but Biden and the Democrats are too … what? polite? to hammer Trump where it counts. Just the abortion thing should be enough to turn this into a landslide, for crying out loud! I thought having a debate in frickin’ June was stupid, but maybe it won’t be, because Biden and the Democrats have several months to turn it around. If this debate had happened in October, it would be more of a disaster, I think. People have such short attention spans that by the time of the election, they might have forgotten about this, especially if Trump keeps saying stupid things (what do I mean, “if”? – of course I mean “when”). I still think, if Biden wins, he should resign the day after the inauguration and let Harris take over. The racist Republicans (or, as they’re more commonly called these days, “Republicans”) would have a fucking fit, and I would be here for it.
Blech. It’s July here in the Basin, and that means MONSOON!!!!!, which means we get the high heat AND higher humidity (not as high as in the East and South and Midwest, but still), so it’s the worst of both worlds! My wife is working hard, of course, and I’m counting the days until school starts back up (in 3 weeks!), both because my daughter likes school (sadly, it’s her last year of high school … although it will be her 8th year, so, I mean, I guess it’s about time to move on) and because I can get back to work substituting. My younger daughter is actually thinking about going to college or post-high-school education, which is nice – she’s been working at her current job for little less than a year, and it has shown her that maybe an education isn’t that bad a thing because it will help you get a better job. She’s been saving her money and chilling out, so her financial situation is fine and her mental health is a lot better than it was in high school. We shall see what she decides to do, but at least she’s thinking about it!
Other than that, things are pretty calm here in the desert. Nothing too weird, nothing too wild, nothing too dramatic or traumatic. How are things with you all? I hope you’re doing well!
Oh, man, dissing Johnny. You should have that whole album on your phone!!
Switching gears – and hoping I don’t start a heated politics debate here – watching the US presidential race from across the pond is frustrating. A potted plant should be able to beat Diaper Don (a.k.a. the Fartin’ Felon) in a landslide, and the Biden administration actually has a decent (domestic) record to run on. Yet the polling keeps telling us it’s a close race. I’m at a loss trying to explain any of this to people here when asked about it. Like I said, very frustrating.
Well, I do like the song, so I’ll have to check out some of the others on the album.
People like authoritarian governments is the easiest explanation. Having a strongman (or, in the case of Trump, someone who tries to act like one) tell them that it’s ok to hate certain segments of society is very attractive to some people. I just hope it’s not enough people!
I think his domestic record has been pretty great, especially considering only half his presidency was with legislative majorities (and very narrow ones).
And internationally, he did great with Ukraine. At least for American interests, we’ve shipped over our unused, outdated equipment. We haven’t lost a single American life. And Putin has been mostly stopped from achieving his goals. The disruption to one of the biggest producers of wheat, corn, and barley hasn’t caused any shortages or any problems.
And here I thought you had a good taste for music. Not just my music but also Edo’s. BOOO 😉
Comics:
I got the Secret Six omnibus. Sweet.
Concerts:
6/10 Judas Priest
I went with my youngest son, who is also a fan of these old farts. The latest album sounded really good and they were great form. After all these years Rob Halford (72 years old) still kicks ass, and Victim of Changes was the perfect example. I got the new tour-shirt as a fathers day present from my son. 🙂
6/15 Mystery
These canadians see the Boerderij as there second home, and try to visit it every year. This time they played a lot of the latest album which made my wife very glad. Because they like the venue so much they even had a limited edition shirt and I got one.
6/19 Rammstein
I got the tickets by accident about 3 weeks ago. It were seated tickets but I didn’t care. It was pricey (€ 130) but I had a very good view and could take nice photo’s and videos. We had luck with the weather. The day before it had rained heavely, but we had a nice sun, so it was a perfect day.
6/28 + 29 Midsummer Prog Festival
We had a blast. We discovered some new bands and the ones we were familiar with didn’t dissapoint. I won’t bore you with all the names. Steve Rothery, who you are familiar with due for your love of Marillion played a terrific set (2 songs of his latest solo album, and after that only Marillion stuff). I got some new cd’s from, mostly signed by the bands so all in all a nice weekend.
A clip from the festival. On 0.10 you see me on the right (black shirt with a brown hat). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qTn40o5JkI
Real life shit:
After my wife had a mammography she felt a bump under her armpit which felt painful. Her doctor didn’t trust it so she got a appointment at the hospital were they took 3 biopsies. Last Thursday we got the results. Luckely it’s not life threatening but they want to know what it is, so they took some blood (8 tubes) and next monday a ct-scan and the wednesday after that we get the result.
It took 223 days but we have a new gouverment. Hurray! Curious if they will finish the 4 year term.
I agree with Edo about the US elections. Very frustrating. Choosing between a pathological liar and a living statue. Trumpies will vote for him no matter what, and I (and most people in the world with commen sense) hope that all other people will use there brains while voting.
“Distant Bells” has grown on me, though!
Those are some cool concerts. I wouldn’t mind seeing Priest, and of course I’d be down to see Rothery!
I hope they figure out what’s going on with your wife. I’m glad to hear it’s not too, too bad.
Hey, a government! How nice! 🙂
Thanks for the kind words.
Most people who heard the song liked the part and bailed ship when the guitars kicked in…
If Rammstein would somewhere near you I would advice you to see the show. You won’t be dissapointed.
That’s funny, because I love a slow build to a big guitar part in songs! I liked it here, too, but it just took a little long to get there.
My ears would probably bleed if I went to a Rammstein concert. I’m so old!!!! 🙂
Thorogood’s Hack/Slash looked absolutely gorgeous– definitely influenced by Junji Ito in some of the more monstrous parts. I wish the series ran an issue or two or three longer, though. After setting up an episodic format, the ending is very abrupt, and then the last couple pages pull out a hoary trope to shove it into continuity. It could’ve used the space to either treat us to more adventures or more fully explore the consequences of the ending.
Shazam vol 1 is fun enough, if a little empty of calorie. Very breezy read with good, energetic Mora. He feels like the poster boy for the Dawn of DC aesthetic, which overall I’m really enjoying. Waid’s story is topical in that it’s about a bunch of old white men trying to control the youth and grasp for relevance, but are stymied by their outdated ideals, which you could apply to politics or religion or the comic book industry, etc. And I love the deep cut of using Garguax. I believe Mora disappears after this run and Waid only hangs on for three more issues before they both left to do the Absolute Power crossover.
I ended up passing on Midnite Show and Christopher Chaos, but maybe I shouldn’t have!
I’m all caught up on Wild’s End, which has been one of the best comics I’ve read lately. Also really dug Rob Williams and Pye Parr’s Petrol Head from Image, which is a very fun dystopian hot-rod robot racing action comic which has a brisk pace, bright colors, and solid balance of characters and action. Mark Russell and Laci’s Death Ratio’d was a lot of bleakly comic fun. I thought the first volume of Jeremy Adams and Xermanico’s Green Lantern was a rock solid superhero book with some good-looking art. And Jurassic League from Juan Gedeon, Daniel Warren Johnson, Mike Spicer, et al, started out extremely rad. It peters out a little, but on the whole is a fun diversion.
Currently reading the second volume of Zdarsky and Phillips’ Newburn, which has been an excellent crime comic with a great format– Fell-sized episodic stories that build up a world and plot arc over time before everything comes to a head– and I hope they stick the landing.
TV-wise, I also watched Nolly. It was a pleasant way to spend a few hours, though I don’t think it was a story that demanded being told. (I think Nolly did return for a couple episodes of the show as shown at the end, but did not return full time.) I watched one episode of Parish and four? episodes of A Gentleman of Moscow but did not have a desire to continue either one– and I’m a Winsteadhead!
As for The Sympathizer, I did not watch it, but I believe reviewers typically only get 3 or 4 eps, never the full run, from which to base a review which is published in advance of the first episode.
I got some free months of Paramount Plus, so I’m catching up on Evil– a very fun, darkly humorous, and occasionally freaky/scary show. My main issue with it is that almost every case of the week or ongoing plot ends ambiguously and/or suddenly, and the characters just move on with their lives by the next episode. If I was them I’d be freaking out a lot more. But maybe that’s just like real life, you know? Another terrible thing happens and we still have to go to work and live long enough for the next terrible thing to happen.
I also caught up on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which is very close to my ideal Trek. Retro-futurism (with a modern sheen), mostly episodic, ensemble cast, character-focused plots, wild tonal shifts, etc. My only issue is they rarely actually go to Strange New Worlds– most of it, probably for budgetary reasons, takes place on the ship. But still– very much worth watching, and almost as good as The Orville!
I might have to try Lower Decks, even though I worry I don’t know enough Trek lore to get the jokes. But speaking of Jack Quaid cartoons, My Adventures with Superman has been great this season. They’ve got a good handle on the characters, *and* Mallah and the Brain get to be wacky side characters.
I definitely would have liked another issue or two of Hack/Slash!
I loved the first season of Evil, when it was on CBS, but we didn’t want to get Paramount Plus, so we didn’t, and I’ve missed the subsequent seasons. I’m sure it will circle back to CBS in a few years – I’ll have to keep an eye out for it!
I ought to catch up with My Adventures with Superman, because it sounds neat.
I’ve watched the first season of My Adventures with Superman and thoroughly enjoyed it. And yeah, Mallah and the Brain are hilarious and adorable.
Joining in the enthusiasm for My Adventures with Superman. Proves there’s fun to be had with Superman yet.