The Vampire Sun

Comics:

Seven Soldiers of Victory Volumes 1-4, written by Grant Morrison, illustrated by Doug Mahnke, Simone Bianchi, Fraser Irving, J.H. Williams III and many others (2006): The original Seven Soldiers of Victory were a super-hero team of the 1940's whose members were pretty much all non-powered superheroes of the masked vigilante school of crime-fighting. Indeed, DC's gun-slinging Western superhero of the time, The Vigilante, was a charter member.

Morrison's modern reconfiguration of the team turns the Soldiers into a fairly powerful lot who manage to be the only super-team in history whose members almost never meet one another. Yes, they're the post-modern Justice League. Two framing issues surround 7 different miniseries, each focused on one hero. Put together, this somewhat odd configuration follows the Soldiers as they defeat an ancient enemy of humanity, the Sheeda, who periodically destroy all civilization on Earth. Why? Because they're hungry. And dinks.

Prophecy says that the Sheeda can only be defeated by a superhero team comprising seven members, so the Sheeda side-project involves tracking down seven-person teams and eliminating them. The bizarre nature of the new Seven Soldiers pretty much makes this Sheeda strategy unworkable, and while things look crazy for awhile, the Seven Soldiers remain cool in the face of a super-powered army of what initially appear to be evil, blue-skinned elves (Sheeda = Sidhe, get it?) but which actually aren't. Elves, that is. They are blue-skinned and they are pretty evil. Even the original Vigilante has to come out of retirement to help in the fight. Twice!

Among other things, this maxi-series was a run-up to Morrison's Final Crisis of a couple years later -- his reconfiguration of The New Gods will play into that series, as will mysterious government agency SHADE and SHADE operative Frankenstein. Well, the creature Frankenstein created, who also now goes by the name Frankenstein and is a mighty, sword-wielding force for Good. Frankenstein is joined by The Bulleteer, Zatanna, Klarion the Witch-boy, The Manhattan Guardian, Mister Miracle and The Shining Knight in the Seven Soldiers. I think it's a great series with great art, but your results may vary depending on how many obscure DC heroes and villains you know (Mind-Grabber Man? Really?). Highly recommended.


Books:


The Essential Conan: The Hour of the Dragon by Robert E. Howard (1935), edited and with commentary by Karl Edward Wagner (1977): This is the only Conan novel written by Conan's doomed creator, Texan Robert E. Howard, before his suicide in 1936 at the age of 30. And for a first novel, it's surprisingly well-constructed and tight. Howard would write several more Conan adventures after this one, but in Conan's chronology, this is the last adventure (though not The Last Adventure -- Conan is in his mid-40's and hale and hearty when we leave him).

Here, we find Conan as the King of Aquilonia, Aquilonia being one of Howard's imaginary pre-Ice Age European countries during the time called The Hyborian Age. Conan is a surprisingly fair and just king, but that doesn't stop intrigue against him, as several native and foreign enemies bring an uber-powerful wizard back from the dead in order to further their political aims. Conan's army falls in battle to the magically aided enemies, Conan is captured, and soon the wizard's plans put the entire world in danger of being plunged into a second age of darkness. Only a mysterious magical item linked to the wizard can be used to defeat him.

In a lot of ways, this novel resembles the later Lord of the Rings, only with Conan and a lot shorter. Howard excels in the creation of oddly imagined supernatural threats, bloody battle scenes and, of course, the character of Conan himself -- alternately morose and jovial, fatalistic but unbowed. Howard's Conan was always more like a hardboiled detective than a traditional fantasy hero. Editor Karl Edward Wagner did the admirable job of restoring available Conan texts to their original published form with some emendations derived from Howard's own final drafts, and with period illustrations throughout. Highly recommended.

Epic Zombie Fail

"But let's say there is an outbreak, like if one zombie was able to bite 30 people in the crowd at an Insane Clown Posse concert before they figured out it wasn't part of the show. "

Rag-and-Bone Shop

The Shining, written and directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd and Scatman Crothers (1980): While watching The Shining over the course of three nights on my PVR, I realized that, for me at least, I'd found the perfect way to watch it. The Shining has always been a movie of dazzling parts held together by a plot that shudders and jolts to a complete stop at points. It may be that Kubrick wanted to make a much longer movie, or it may be that Kubrick never intended the plot to work all that well in the first place. This was not a film-maker that gave a crap about pleasing an audience in a traditional way, after all.

The basic plot is this: failed writer Jack Torrance, wife Wendy and five-year-old son Danny take the job as winter caretakers at a Colorado hotel located in the Rockies. The hotel closes from November 1 to April 30 for the winter, leaving the caretakers the only people for miles. Danny has a psychic talent called "The Shining" which gives him premonitions of the future, causes him to see things, and occasionally results in his body being taken over by the benevolent but creepy "Tony."*

Overlook head cook Halloran also has "The Shining." He cautions Danny about the hotel's ability to show people illusions, and tells Danny to signal him telepathically should anything go wrong over the course of the winter. The Overlook Hotel itself has been the site of a number of murders and atrocities over the years, not least of which was a previous caretaker murdering his wife and twin daughters before killing himself. Over the course of the first five weeks or so of caretaking, hilarity gradually ensues.

Certainly, enjoyment of the film requires one to forget about Stephen King's novel. In the novel, Jack Torrance (played by Jack Nicholson in the movie) is a good man undone by alcoholism and circumstances and, of course, by the hotel. In the movie, Torrance is a physically abusive nutcase barely hiding his unravelling psyche from his wife Wendy (Duvall) and son Danny (Lloyd) even as the movie begins. There's very little sense that Torrance actually loves his family, and his fairly rapid descent into a homicidal fury suggests a sub-text of family violence and monstrous fathers that doesn't exist in the novel. Wendy, a blonde beauty in the novel, becomes the awkward Duvall in the movie, and Torrance-POV shots at key moments in the movie are probably the least flattering shots of Shelley Duvall ever put on screen. Of course, that's the point: Torrance's real view of his wife, allowed to fester by the hotel, is that she's a hideous shrew.

Production design and camera work are key here, as they are in all of Kubrick's films once he had complete creative control. The interior of the snow-bound Overlook Hotel is subtly alien and off-putting both due to size and colour scheme; the rugs alone might drive almost anyone off the deep end. Certain things work really well as horror -- the looming hedge maze is an improvement over the novel's homicidal hedge animals -- while others seem to verge on parody. The red-and-white washroom is really pretty hilarious.

That line between hilarity and horror -- or horror and horror-parody -- is crossed and recrossed throughout the film. One of Kubrick's stated aims -- to make a horror movie in which the lights stay on as much as possible -- is pretty much achieved. Certain scenes and images (especially the blood-torrent-spewing elevator) play more like parody, and the revelation that 'Redrum' is 'murder' spelled backwards lands with a dull thump, as does the 'shocking' photographic revelation that ends the movie. I believe these thuds are intentional: Kubrick seems to be aiming to scare people and make fun of horror tropes at the same time, maybe never moreso than in the fate of Halloran in the movie, much altered from the novel.

Nonetheless, there are enough startling moments -- the revelation of what Jack's been typing for weeks, Jack's pursuit of Danny through the hedge maze -- to allow the horror to outweigh Kubrick's parodic play with the horror. Kubrick's film also serves as a companion piece to his own 2001: A Space Odyssey: rather than watching humanity evolve from killer ape to Star Child, we watch Torrance devolve back into a killer ape chasing his own son through the hedge maze, his urge to do violence ultimately destroying him while Wendy and Danny are saved by Halloran's altruism and Danny's cleverness. Recommended.

* Who, in the novel, is Danny trying to telepathically warn himself from the future, Danny's middle name being 'Anthony.'

10

Comics:


Tom Strong's Terrific Tales Volume 1 by Alan Moore, Steve Moore, Paul Rivoche, Alan Weiss, Art Adams and others (2002-2003):This anthology title puts Tom Strong, his family and friends, and far-future crime-fighter Jonni Future through a variety of adventures. Highlights include the tales of Tom Strong as an orphan growing up on tropical island Attabar Teru with the helpful Otu tribe, pretty much Moore's homage to the youthful Tarzan flashback book Jungle Tales of Tarzan (or if you want to go back to Tarzan's inspiration, Mowgli in The Jungle Book). Jonni Future, a 20th-century woman, uses the Time Bridge to battle evil 4 billion years in the future with the help of her leopard-like Paraman companion, a spaceship shaped like a Coelacanth, and a pair of the largest breasts in comic-book history.


Tom Strong's Terrific Tales Volume 2 Alan Moore, Steve Moore, Alan Weiss, Art Adams and others (2003-2005): The anthology title draws to a close with this collection of issues 7-12. Probably only Alan Moore could get artists like Peter Kuper, Jaime Hernandez, Peter Bagge and Sergio Aragones all working on what amounts to a superhero title, which is why Alan Moore is God. Maybe not the God, but definitely a God. Jaunty and fizzy, but with a surprising hit of poignance at the end as Tom leaves Attabar Teru (and, unbeknownst to him, future wife Dhalua) for Millennium City in the early 1920's in the final tale. But he'll be back. Highly recommended.


Legion of Superheroes: Enemy Rising by Jim Shooter and Francis Manapul and others (2007): Jim Shooter is one of the two most celebrated writers DC's 30th/31st-century super-hero teen team the Legion of Superheroes ever had (the other is longtime LSH scripter Paul Levitz), having helped make the Legion a cult favourite back in the 1960's, when Shooter became the youngest writer of a mainstream comic-book in, probably, ever (he was 13 (!)). Those 60's Shooter-scripted stories are still a delight today. Here, DC tries to catch lightning in a bottle again, bringing Shooter back to the book for the first time since a brief stint in the mid-1970's.

The result is actually pretty enjoyable, especially with the revelation in a whole other, later miniseries (Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds by Geoff Johns and George Perez) that this Legion is not the 'classic' Legion that once had Superboy as a member. No, this Legion, somewhat bizarrely, is the Legion of what is nominally 'our' world in the DC Universe, Earth-Prime. This at least explains all the Silver Age DC Comics Phantom Girl keeps reading.

Shooter develops an epic main plot (mysterious aliens attacking worlds throughout the galaxy) and copious melodramatic subplots with flair, though the results are a bit busy at times. Manapul's art is a bit too manga-influenced for me, but it goes down relatively smoothly, if occasionally a bit cutesy. Recommended.


Legion of Superheroes: Enemy Manifest by Jim Shooter and Francis Manapul and others (2008): Jim Shooter and the most-recent-until-three-months-ago Legion title go out together as the year-long "Enemy" storyline wraps up (and a bunch of subplots, like Princess Projectra's secret perfidy, do not). The ending seems a bit rushed, probably due to that whole cancellation problem, but overall it's a pretty nice ride. Recommended.


Doctor Who Classics Volume 3 by Dave Gibbons, Grant Morrison, Steve Moore, Steve Parkhouse, Bryan Hitch, John Ridgway and others (1981-89): A nice selection of original stories of the 4th, 6th and 7th Doctors from the B&W British Doctor Who magazines of the 1980's by some of the leading lights of British comic books. Nothing too fancy, though one possible origin story for the Cybermen is offered almost as a throwaway. Recommended.


Tom Strong Book 4 by Alan Moore, Geoff Johns, Chris Sprouse, Peter Hogan, Jerry Ordway and others (2003-2004): The alternate universe 'Tom Stone' three-parter is the centerpiece of this collection, as Moore's Doc Savage/Tarzan/Superman mash-up is shown a glimpse of a universe where he never was -- and where things initially seem to be much better than in the universe he lives in. The other stories in the volume are a bit more light-hearted. In the alternate universe in which Alan Moore never had his falling out with DC Comics, one imagines this is what Moore might have ultimately tried to do with Superman. Highly recommended.


Tom Strong Book 5 by Alan Moore, Mark Schultz, Brian K. Vaughan, Ed Brubaker, Shawn McManus, Duncan Fegredo and others (2004-2005): "The Terrible True Life of Tom Strong" by Brubaker and Fegredo is the high point of this collection. It almost out Alan-Moores Alan Moore as Tom Strong realizes that the dismal reality he thinks he exists in is an illusion because nothing could be as awful as, well, something that looks a lot like our world. Which is one of those points Moore makes from time to time. Tom's real, real world, a high-tech, lost-jungle-city wonderland comprising pretty much every comic book and pulp story ever written, is the sunshiney yin to the broody yang of Moore and Kevin O'Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Highly recommended.


What If? Secret Wars by various (2008-2009): A bunch of up-and-coming writers and artists create new endings for a variety of Marvel Event Books, including The Death of Captain America and the 1980's Secret Wars miniseries. About as good as the What If? titles ever were, which is to say interesting, uneven, and prone to kneejerk bleakness.Sort of recommended, sort of not.


Supreme: Story of the Year by Alan Moore, Joe Bennett, Rick Veitch and Alex Ross (1995-96): Supreme, a Superman knock-off created by the much-reviled Rob Liefeld for his portion of Image Comics, gets the superduper metafictional treatment here from Alan Moore and a number of artists, including Rick Veitch in full homage/parody mode. Supreme discovers that his universe is prone to periodic revisions, revisions which mimic the changing styles of comic books from the 1930's to the 1990's. In the 'present' he tries to adjust to the Earth after having been away for decades; to do so, he reminisces about the 'past', rendered by Veitch and written by Moore to resemble various eras and genres throughout the history of comic books.

The lines between homage, parody, commentary and plagiarism are often razor-thin here, as a number of the flashback stories are modelled on specific stories from Superman's past (one which riffs on a late 1970's/early 1980's Jim Starlin Superman/Spectre team-up from DC Comics Presents is especially jarring in this regard -- it might as well BE the original story). One gets the feeling Moore was trying to write Superman out of his system. The result is enjoyable and occasionally frustrating, but now looks like a necessary transitional book between Moore's work for DC and his much later metafictional epics in Tom Strong and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Recommended.


DC vs. Marvel by Ron Marz, Peter David, Dan Jurgens, Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, Kevin Nowlan and others (1996): Continuity is the great ball-and-chain dragging down this 'epic' DC-Marvel crossover event from the mid-1990's. Fans voted on how various confrontations would turn out (Superman vs. Hulk, Batman vs. Captain America, and so on, and so forth), but the unwieldy machinery of the plot makes the various battles an afterthought. The book huffs and puffs to get the two universes together. Frankly, the 'crossover Earth' of earlier DC/Marvel events was a lot less unwieldy and had the added advantage of explaining why so few DC superheroes live in New York (because that's where the lion's share of Marvel superheroes live!).

The secondary miniseries spawned by this crossover -- The Amalgam Age of Comics, in which various heroes and villains were 'amalmagated' into new configurations (Captain America + Superman = Super-Soldier; Batman + Wolverine = Dark Claw) -- was a lot more interesting than the main event. Kurt Busiek and George Perez would later do this sort of epic mishmash a whole lot better in JLA/Avengers. For completists only, though the combination of Garcia Lopez on pencils and Nowlan on inks on Dr. Strangefate is surprisingly lovely: those two should team up a lot more often. Not recommended.

Porno for Pomos

Comic:


Lost Girls, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Melinda Gebbie (2006): Moore and partner Gebbie worked on Lost Girls for over a decade. The end result might be the oddest book of Moore's career. It's certainly the most pornographic, though 'meta-pornographic' might be a better word -- this is an extremely graphic book of pornography that's about pornography, why people consume pornography, and the inter-relationship of fantasy and reality. I use the word 'pornography' rather than 'erotica' because it seems as if that's what Moore is aiming for here -- even the poetic sections are pushed so far into the explicit and the purple of prose that the whole enterprise really seems to be about What Gets People Off.

Moore's over-riding conceit here is that three women whose adventures resemble 'real-world' versions of the fictional adventures of Wendy from Peter Pan, Alice from Alice in Wonderland, and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, meet as adults at a sexually exotic resort in Europe in the days leading up to World War One and proceed to have a variety of sexual adventures while also recounting their sexual histories, which themselves vaguely resemble the adventures of the fictional heroines, only without magic and with an awful lot of sex.

A couple of hundred pages of sex, primarily rendered in Gebbie's art-nouveau-influenced art, with periodic side-trips into imitations of various other illustrative styles. In the event you somehow miss the connections between 'real life' and fiction, most of the 30 or so chapters contain a full-page spread which makes the parallels between a sexual incident and an incident from the fictional adventures of one of the characters explicit in pretty much every meaning of that word.

Much of the hardcore material is somewhat undercut (or, to use a crappy lit-crit word, 'problematized') by several discussions of the relationship of pornography to the real world (fantasy, one character suggests, is in many cases never meant to be enacted in real life, and cannot thus be judged as if it were an idea about a 'real' incident. This commentary occurs during an orgy scene intercut with a particularly filthy bit of incest-pornography). In many ways, Moore has succeeded in doing for pornography what he did for superhero battles in Miracleman: he's pushed them logically to the point of fictional apocalypse while at the same time maintaining distance as a commentator throughout. Or, 'If this is what you like, what happens when we push it all the way to its logical conclusion?'

While it sometimes seems as if Moore has succeeded in creating the world's longest and most expensive Tijiuana Bible (and in a way he has), the super-saturation of sex scenes and the sheer wackiness of much of the conversation in the book makes it hard to take this seriously: it really seems more like a joke, despite the somewhat ham-handed epilogue that attempts to ground the book in the horrors of war. Or is that some sort of joke as well? Moore's such a cheeky bugger that it's impossible to figure him out sometimes. In any event, not for the squeamish or easily offended. Recommended.



Book:


The Cleft and Other Odd Tales by Gahan Wilson (1998): Gahan Wilson was the natural inheritor of Charles Addams' title as "world's most macabre popular cartoonist", and he wore that title well for decades. He was also a writer of short stories and an occasional movie reviewer; it's products of the former occupation that The Cleft collects. It's a dandy bunch of short stories, reminiscent of the sort of droll horror of writers like John Collier or Roald Dahl, with the added bonus of illustrations by Wilson for each story. The collection spans more than 30 years, but Wilson's narrative tone remains remarkably consistent throughout. You may not be scared by any of the offerings here, but as with Wilson's best cartoons, you will be disturbed even as you laugh or at least chuckle. Recommended.

Crapocalypse

2012, starring John Cusack, Amanda Peet, some cute kids, two fat kids and a cute dog, directed by Roland Emmerich (2009): 2012 takes place in a magical alternate universe where the harmless neutrinos emitted by the sun suddenly decide to turn en masse into particles that cause the Earth's core to get even hotter than it already is. Yes, it's another heart-warming romantic comedy from the team of producer Dean Devlin and director Roland Emmerich (The Day After Tomorrow, Godzilla, Independence Day).

Given that the Earth's core is composed primarily of nickel and iron, you'd think these particles would affect nickel and iron on the surface of the Earth, and perhaps even on other planets and asteroids in the Solar System, most notably Venus and Mars, which would be getting an even denser bombardment of nu-neutrinos. Apparently, the nu-neutrinos do not affect anything else, however, because the various governments of the world manage to keep impending global catastrophe hidden from the public until approximately five minutes before the Earth's plate tectonics and magnetic field go completely haywire, killing several billion people and relocating the South Pole to Wisconsin. But happily, throughout this process, nickel and iron not located in the Earth's core remain completely benign and non-reactive. Apparently, the sun just has it in for Earth's core.

Much is made of the fact that the only way to survive the end of the world is in one of the humungous super-liners being built in the Himalayas by the G-8. Yes, the fate of the world rests in the hands of the G-8. Canada even gets a couple shout-outs. Yay! As long as Ben Mulroney survives the end of the world, everything will be fine.

Our hero is John Cusack, a down-on-his-luck science-fiction writer working as a limo driver for a rich Russian guy who, having given $1 billion to the makers of the super-liners, has a ticket on-board for himself and his two fat kids but not, alas, for his hot blonde mistress. Various plot shenanigans result in John Cusack realizing that the world is going to end, not least of which is the world ACTUALLY STARTING TO END.

Yellowstone Park turns into a supervolcano with a hard-on for Woody Harrelson, a tidal wave engulfs the entire world all the way to the top of the Himalayas, most of the Earth's surface falls about 5000 feet into oceans of lava, an aircraft carrier lands on President Danny Glover, the Washington Monument kills the Lincoln Memorial, St. Peter's Basilica crushes several hundred praying Roman Catholics, and so on, and so forth.

Luckily, John Cusack is The Best Driver in the World and manages to outrun the destruction of California all the way to an airplane, where he passes the baton to his ex-wife's new boyfriend, who turns out to be the Best Pilot in the World despite having had only one flying lesson. Whee!

Many scenes of mass destruction ensue, but throughout all the solar-induced mayhem, Earth's satellite and cellphone network remains working. I told you this was an alternate universe. Eventually, most of the good people we've been following survive and the bad people die various terrible and/or suddenly heroic deaths. The hilarious escape scenes almost make the movie worth it -- the escapes from death by land and air have all the realistic heft of a Roadrunner cartoon.

Monsters

Books:


The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezzi (2008-9): 'The Monster of Florence' was the name given to an Italian serial killer who murdered at least 16 people in the countryside around Florence in the 1970's and 1980's. Spezzi is the veteran Italian journalist who covered the story from its beginning, while popular American suspense novelist Preston got interested in the case after he discovered the villa he'd rented in 2000 was beside one of the Monster's murder sites and subsequently met with Spezzi to discuss the case. Ultimately, though, this isn't so much a non-fiction book about a serial killer as it is an indictment of the Italian legal system, from the polizia and carabinieri all the way to the prosecutors and judges operating at the national level.

Much of the pleasure of the book lies in the twists and turns of the real-life events, and so I won't give too much away. Florence itself becomes a major character, as Preston documents his own learning experience both about the city -- the centre of the Renaissance -- and about the Italian mindset both regionally and nationally. From the distant viewpoint of North America, it's easy to view Italy as a homogeneous state, rather than a collection of hundreds of tiny states that weren't joined as a nation until after Canada's own Confederation, and which used a wide variety of dialects (500 or more) which still linger in the individual regions. Besides Florence, Sardinia and its history plays a major role in the history of the Monster of Florence.

This is a very sad story in many ways, but the doggedness of Spezzi -- and the decency of at least some police officers and bureaucrats -- give one a little hope. The epilogue, written especially for the trade paperback edition, casts grave doubt on the rightness of the recent conviction of American student Amanda Knox for the murder of her room-mate. The Monster of Florence reads like a primer on how NOT to do police work: prosecutorial conspiracy theories, misconduct and child-like tantrums abound while a real killer remains unarrested and uncharged to this day. Highly recommended.


The Survivor by James Herbert (1977): A short, tense early horror novel from the writer most likely to be referred to as "England's answer to Stephen King." A horrific airplane crash in Eton leaves behind one survivor, the co-pilot, who can't remember the events leading up to the crash. People start dying. A medium shows up to try to help the co-pilot solve the supernatural mystery of how he survived and what's happening now. Shenanigans ensue. In the 'negative' column, Herbert gives us one of the ten clumsiest passages in literary history in the sub-sub category of 'Subtly establishing a person's race or ethnicity.' It's seriously hilarious. Recommended.