The Rural Ghostbuster

Planet Stories: Who Fears the Devil?: The Complete Silver John Stories by Manly Wade Wellman, introductions by Mike Resnick and Karl Edward Wagner (2010 this edition): God bless the relatively new Planet Stories imprint, which is trying to bring out-of-print fantasy and science-fiction classics back in affordable, over-sized and reasonably priced paperbacks. It's a worthy project, and I hope profitable enough for them to continue. At the very least, you should go buy this book, the two entries by C.L. Moore and Robert E. Howard's Almuric from their back catalogue. Oh, and the Kuttner and A. Merritt volumes too.

Manly Wade Wellman, born early in the first decade of the 20th century and dying in 1986, wrote to the end. He was a pulp writer in many genres, but it was the regional horror-fantasies of the short stories of this volume and the five Silver John novels that represent the pinnacle of his reputation, works of startlingly original regional American fantasy rooted in the legends and songs of the rural American Southeast.

Nothing like them had appeared before the Silver John stories found a home in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the early 1950's (though two of the stories here, "Frogfather" and "Sin's Doorway", date from the 1940's and may, Wellman maintained conditionally, be formative stories of John the Balladeer before he took up his silver-stringed guitar). The last story chronologically was written only a few months before Wellman's death.

Silver John (or John the Balladeer), never given a last name, wanders throughout the wilds of the Southeast, centered roughly in North Carolina. He carries a silver-stringed guitar and an encyclopedic knowledge of both myth and traditional regional songs. And he battles the forces of evil with those tools, his faith, and his essential goodness and decency. Silver is a bane to most things supernatural, though John will also occasionally use white magic (derived from such real spell books as The Long-lost Friend -- you can order it online!) and natural counterforces (woods such as hazel and cedar) in his wanderings.

John is endlessly curious about the origins of songs and of stories he's heard, and that drives some of his wandering, though he also does so to bring aid to friends and strangers alike who've been confronted by such things as witches, warlocks, the mysterious and malign Shonokins, the lurking gardinels (living, carnivorous houses), the weird creatures that may or may not be malign, and a variety of other back-country legends both 'real' and invented by Wellman (the line blurs sometimes, not least of which because Wellman collected stories from the people of the areas he wrote about, stories that in some cases were extremely regional in focus -- the gardinel and the stories of the Ancients Ones who mined the hills before even the Indians came may have a basis in truth. Or maybe not.)

Throughout it all, Wellman pulls off one of the most difficult feats in all fiction -- he makes good both interesting and attractive. John's neither a prude nor a teetotaler, and he's humble about his abilities in the face of supernatural evil. The scene in which he summons the ghost of George Washington to defeat a malign 300-year-old warlock is both emblematic of the series as a whole and deeply strange. But this stuff happens all the time. And maybe it does. Highly recommended.

Jarvis Poker the British Joker

Knight and Squire: 'For Six', written by Paul Cornell, illustrated by Jimmy Broxton (2010-2011): DC Comics' Knight and Squire first appeared in an adventure with Batman and Robin in the early 1950's as the "English Batman and Robin," again a couple of more times over the next ten years, and then not at all until writer Grant Morrison excavated them from DC's mine of unused characters first for a cameo in JLA in the late 1990's and then more fully in other, later projects.

They're now "legacy" heroes -- the Knight (Cyril) was once the Squire, while the Squire (Beryl), a young woman, is a family friend. They played fairly pivotal roles in several Batman storylines of the last four years; here, though, they get their first extended solo adventure in, well, ever.

And it's a pretty jolly adventure at that, rife with jokes about, and references to, British pop culture on all fronts. Cornell and Broxton create about 130 new supervillains and superheroes to populate DC's British landscape, and put a fairly benign British spin on the whole superheroing enterprise, with villains and heroes meeting once a week in a magical pub where violence is impossible.

Most of the heroes and villains are peculiar to Great Britain but there are "cover versions" of American heroes and villains as well. Most notably, there is Jarvis Poker the British Joker, a non-homicidal villain whose imminent death from cancer drives the plot of the final two issues of the miniseries.

Cornell and Broxton make a nice team, and the book ably walks a line between the purely satirical and the (relatively) straight-faced. Another miniseries with this superhero universe-within-a-universe would be nice. Is there a British Lex Luthor too? Recommended.

Paul

Paul, written by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, directed by Greg Mottola, starring Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Jason Bateman, Bill Hader, Jane Lynch and Sigourney Weaver (2011): Pegg, Frost and director Gregory Wright (absent here) have previously given us British metapop confections Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. With Superbad director Greg Mottola subbing for Wright here, the action moves to America, and while things take awhile to really get going, the result is another humourous meditation on American pop culture -- in this case, centered on alien contact and invasion movies.

Pegg and Frost play an aspiring artist and science-fiction writer respectively, delighted to have taken a vacation from England to go to the mega-geeky San Diego Comicon and then onwards for a vacation touring famous science-fiction and UFO landmarks across the Southwest in a rented motorhome. Their characters are more genial and less sharp-edged than we've seen them assay before, fitting for a movie that's ultimately more genial and less sharp-edged than we've seen them do before. The whole enterprise is really quite warm-hearted -- there are villains, but almost no one gets killed. Almost.

Stopping to check out a car wreck in the desert, the two meet up with Paul, an alien who looks like a traditional Gray and talks like, well, Seth Rogen when he's being genial and funny, as opposed to Seth Rogen when he's mailing it in or Seth Rogen in a part Seth Rogen isn't really equipped to play. After much confusion and several faintings, the two agree to drive Paul to his retrieval area.

Paul's been stuck on Earth since he crashed his spaceship near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. The U.S. military abducted him then, and he's since been helping both them and Hollywood out with various alien ideas (he consulted on both E.T. and The X-Files) under the mistaken impression that he's a guest of the U.S. government. However, his technological and cultural knowhow exhausted after 60+ years, Paul is now expendable -- the powers that be want to dissect him to find out how his healing and invisibility powers work. Luckily, a sympathetic government agent managed warn him of his coming vivisection; Paul escaped; the government now pursues.

The somewhat unlikely trio proceed to have adventures as they attempt to get Paul off-planet ahead of government pursuit. Along the way, they pick up a fourth party member played by Kristen Wiig -- a socially backward fundamentalist Christian creationist they have to kidnap from a trailer park lest she reveal their location and plans to the government. Luckily, Paul's telepathic powers show her that the universe is actually more than 6000 years old and that "eyes didn't just happen!", and she becomes a foul-mouthed agnostic with a driving need to lose her virginity to Pegg's character.

The whole thing's a lot of fun, especially if you've seen the TV episodes and movies Paul refers to both explicitly and in passing. There are also some nice background bits of business, some surprisingly funny stoner comedy, and maybe a few too many jokes about Paul's junk. Recommended.

Earth to Sucker Punch: You Suck!

Sucker Punch, written by Zack Snyder and some other guy, starring a bunch of people (2011): The most surprising thing about Sucker Punch ("from the visionary director of 300 and Watchmen!") is that Jon Hamm is in it, briefly. Did he lose a poker game to writer/director/"visionary" Zack Snyder? Did he get paid a lot? Are they former roommates? Maybe we'll never know.

But we do know that Sucker Punch is one of the most deliriously awful movies ever made in the history of the universe. It's bad enough that it's almost never boring; thinking about it afterwards will, however, cause your eyes to bleed. If Snyder actually writes any of the new Superman movie he's attached to direct, we may get something in the Elektra range of bad superhero pictures.

Do you really want to know the plot? OK. A 20-year-old girl with a porcelain doll's blank, round face, an eight-year-old's pigtails and a hooker's clothing sense gets really mad at her Wicked Stepfather when her mother dies (or is perhaps murdered), and while trying to protect her younger sister from the stepfather, maybe she shoots and kills her stepsister, or maybe she just gets blamed for doing it.

This girl is called Baby Doll. She gets sent to a mental asylum for wayward girls that appears to have been dropped into the movie from the video game Painkiller. The stepfather bribes an evil orderly to have Baby Doll (she is, so far as I can recall, only ever called 'Baby Doll' in the movie) lobomotized in five days. Her female friends are Rocket, Sweet Pea, Blondie and Amber. As stripper names go, the movie really only lacks an Ayesha, and maybe a stripper with her pubic hair shaved into a Nike swoosh.

Blank-faced, espressionless-but-glycerine-tear-producing Baby Doll imagines a second reality in which she and the other inmates are actually stripper/prostitutes imprisoned in a strip club/bordello. In this reality, Baby Doll is such an awesome dancer that she can Hyp-Mo-Tize men while she dances, allowing her friends to round up the four objects they need to escape.

But, see, when Baby Doll dances, she's fantasizing that she's undertaking crazy adventures in various syncretically derivative science-fantasy landscapes (say, World War One with steam-powered German zombie soldiers, or a WW2 bomber taking on a dragon in what looks like an outtake from Lord of the Rings). Her and her gal pals undertake all these third-level adventures while dressed in fanboy fetish-wear, mostly lingerie, guns, robots, ninja swords, high-heeled boots, that sort of thing. WE NEVER ACTUALLY SEE BABY DOLL DANCE.

Yeah, I know you've just tried to process the idea that Baby Doll's escape fantasy is to be a stripper/whore who's going to be raped and probably murdered in five days by "The Big Roller" rather than a mental patient and that to escape that escape fantasy, she's an underwear-wearing ninja in a series of adventures that completely destabilize the idea that the 'top' level of reality is sometime in the 1950's or early 1960's, especially as all the music for the action sequences comes from long after the seeming milieu of the top level. Unless Bjork's "Army of Me" came out thirty years earlier than I remember.

Moreover, the top level's too stylized to represent any sort of narrative touchstone, and becomes moreso when the entire escape plan from the asylum is staged within the second level of the fantasy, leaving the viewer completely in the dark as to whether or not anyone actually died in the escape attempt, and if so, how and why, and frankly, really, who gives a fuck? There aren't any actual characters in this anyway, and the women are such stylized fetish objects that the whole thing feels like a role-playing game for sex dolls and the fan-boys who love them.

But to get a PG-13 rating, the movie eschews actually nudity and sex. To top everything off, a musical sequence cut from the main narrative of the movie plays under the closing credits for no apparent reason. I shit you not. This thing is so awful it may become a cult classic. It may ALREADY be a cult classic. Recommended only as a truly awful movie, awfully made and awfully written.

Frankenstein's Broody Error

Dick Briefer's Frankenstein, written and illustrated by Dick Briefer, edited by Craig Yoe (1940-1953; collected 2010): Briefer's Frankenstein was the first on-going horror character in comic-book history, making his (its?) bow in 1940, in stories with a strong flavour of the misanthropic adventures of Marvel's (then Timely's) humanity-hating Submariner.

Briefer's first Frankenstein, his origin relocated to 1940, was somewhat like Shelley's original -- a highly articulate monster who worked to keep his creator alive while simultaneously wreaking havoc on everyone and everything else. In one gonzo bit of business, Frankenstein creates a crocodile-headed monster to fight his original creation. As this battle will take place on top of the Empire State Building, I'm thinking he should have gone with something other than a crocodile hybrid.

Over the next 13 years, Briefer's monster would be rebooted twice, once as the loveable star of a humour comic book, once as an inarticulate, murdeous, lonely brute. Yep, that's pretty much 90% of the history of Frankenstein riffs all in one comic-book series. Briefer, a chameleonic artist, altered both art and writing to suit each phase of his creature's comic-book adventures, though in all three cases, the creature's nose would be located freakishly high on its face. A terrific snapshot of a little-known series, impeccably produced by Craig Yoe and his people -- though I'd have traded the oversized pages for smaller pages and more stories. Highly recommended.

Byrne Out

Fantastic Four Visionaries: John Byrne Volume 0, written by Marv Wolfman, Chris Claremont, Bill Mantlo and John Byrne; illustrated by John Byrne, Joe Sinnott, Pablo Marcos and Dave Hunt (1979-80; collected 2010): What do you do when you decide to collect stories preceding the stories in Volume 1 of a reprint series, but want to keep numbering in sequence without renumbering the other entries? Go with zero. Though if there are any other John Byrne Fantastic Four stories uncollected, further volumes will have to go with fractions, or maybe irrational numbers.

Before Byrne started his 50-issue run as the writer and (usually) artist of the Fantastic Four in the early 1980's, he drew and/or wrote the Fantastic Four in several other issues of their magazine and other Marvel comics. That's what's collected here. It's all pretty enjoyable, though I never thought longtime FF inker Joe Sinnott was a particularly good match for Byrne's pencils. Oh, well.

The two-parter at the end of this volume, written and illustrated by Byrne, marks the first time he did that double duty on the FF's own magazine. It certainly points ahead to Byrne's interests when he would take over the comic about a year later, or at least his science fictional interests. Those stories not written by Byrne do serve, when set beside Byrne's later efforts, to highlight the fact that Byrne was the second-best writer the Fantastic Four ever had, after Stan Lee. The other volumes in this series are far more essential, but nonetheless Recommended.

24:2

24 Season 2. Written by Robert Cochran, Joel Surnow, Howard Gordon, Virgil Williams, Gil Grant, Maurice Hurley, Michael Chernuchin, Andrea Newman; directed by Jon Cassar, Bryan Spicer, Stephen Hopkins, Frederick King Keller, James Whitmore Jr., Rodney Charters; starring Keifer Sutherland, Carlos Bernard, Elisha Cuthbert, Dennis Haysbert, Reiko Aylesworth, Jude Ciccolella, Glenn Morshower, Penny Johnson, Sarah Clarke, Paul Schulze, Michelle Forbes, Sarah Wynter, and Xander Berkeley (2002-2003): I'm a left-winger who mostly enjoyed the 24 series for what it was -- a pulp thriller hybridized with an office melodrama. Indeed, only The Office dwelt more on the frustrations of the workplace during 24's eight-season run. In the Counter-Terrorist Unit, your bad boss and annoying co-workers are often a greater threat than nuclear weapons and biological threats.

I can see why presidential candidates on the Right kept invoking Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) during the last presidential election. He's always right, he's surrounded by idiots and enemies, and he's more patriotic than Captain America (and, ironically, played by a Canadian). Of course, the series established over and over again that politicians are almost universally weasels; the only thing Jack Bauer would do with John McCain or Mitt Romney would be torture them for information, because they'd undoubtedly turn out to be part of an evil conspiracy to start World War III.

Season 2 parallels Jack's hypercompetence and hyperpatriotism with that of President David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert), one of the most presidential fictional presidents I can think of. Both men intuitively know what's right, have a few loyal supporters, and are opposed by well-meaning incompetents and malign foreign and domestic powers. The whole thing makes for a thrilling ride, and a fairly deft bit of parallel plotting.

Alas, Season 2 also gives us the worst sub-plot in 24 history, Jack's daughter Kim (Elisha Cutherbert) and her endless, increasingly ridiculous adventures throughout the day. None of the adventures have anything substantial to do with the main plot, and could conceivably have been allocated to a spin-off series called The Perils of Kim Bauer. They're funny for awhile, unintentionally funny, but eventually, if you're like me, you'll start fast-forwarding right around the time Kim gets caught in a leg-trap in the woods and gets menaced by a mountain lion, only to be rescued and briefly imprisoned by a well-meaning survivalist before somehow getting involved in a convenience store hold-up.

Kiefer Sutherland does a nice job embodying someone who looks like an Everyman, but who dishes out more punishment than James Bond and Batman put together, and takes more punishment than Ash in the Evil Dead movies. The supporting cast is mostly solid, with Xander Berkeley's annoying CTU boss George Mason, made heroic by fatal radiation poisoning early in the story, and the reptilian former First Lady (Penny Johnson) being standouts. Highly recommended.