Welcome to Perry Como's Nightmare

The Last Temptation, written by Neil Gaiman and Alice Cooper, illustrated by Michael Zulli (1994; this edition 2001): Neil Gaiman in a very minor key, collaborating with Alice Cooper on a comic-book tie-in to Cooper's 1994 concept album of the same name. It would probably help to own and listen to that album prior to, or contemporaneously with, this comic book. A 12-year-old boy gets tempted by a malign supernatural being called only the Showman (who looks like Alice Cooper in full make-up). Is the Showman a serial killer of children, the ghost of a serial killer of children, or the Devil himself? And what will happen on Hallowe'en?

Song lyrics are somewhat awkwardly wedged into various sequences in the comic. Both the Showman and David, the12-year-old protagonist, previously appeared in the 1970`s Cooper concept album Welcome to my Nightmare, which itself indirectly spawned a Marvel comic book starring Alice Cooper. Historically speaking, comic books and musical stars have never been a great fit, though the Superman comic book in which Lois Lane falls in love with Perry Como is hilarious.

The whole thing seems underwritten -- David, the protagonist, isn't so much unsympathetic as he is so sketchy a character as to be unidentifiable with on any but the most nebulous terms. Zulli's B&W art is lovely, but would look better reproduced at at least normal comic-book size, rather than the trade paperback size of the available Dark Horse reprint volume. Very lightly recommended for Cooper fans, Zulli fans, and Gaiman completists.

Kirby!

Kirby! King of Comics, written by Mark Evanier, introduced by Neil Gaiman (2008): This loving, lovingly illustrated biography of comic-book writer/artist Jack Kirby -- creator or co-creator of Captain America, the Fantastic Four, the Silver Surfer, Doctor Doom, Galactus, Magneto, the original X-Men, Darkseid, the Mighty Thor, the Incredible Hulk, the Boy Commandos, the entire sub-genre of romance comic books, the Red Skull, Nick Fury, the Challengers of the Unknown, Professor X, Cyclops, the Beast, the Thing, Ice-man. Mr. Fantastic, the Mole-man, Machine Man, the Avengers, the Newsboy Legion, the Guardian, OMAC, Etrigan the Demon, Mister Miracle, Big Barda, the Cosmic Cube, the Negative Zone, the Boom Tube, the Forever People, the Source, the Omega Force, the Astro Force, and literally thousands of other heroes, villains, concepts and supporting characters -- is a joy to read. And it's a teaser for a much longer Evanier biography promised sometime in the next few years.

A limited business sense and the cut-throat nature of the comic-book business in the 1930's and onwards meant that Kirby never got adequately compensated for all the work he did, and that attention-grabbers like longtime writing collaborator Stan Lee got far more credit for their work with Kirby's than they merited. Kirby was there nearly at the beginnings of the American comic-book industry, and he was still occasionally drawing work when he died at the age of 77 in 1994.

Kirby's characters continue to form the backbone of the Marvel Comics Universe; his visual language is there in pretty much every superhero artist who ever lived, as early on Kirby pioneered techniques such as 'breaking' the panel, tilting the 'camera', one- and two-page spreads, and always action delivered by operatically enhanced heroes and villains. No one threw or took a punch like a Kirby character.

Evanier, who knew Kirby for more than 20 years, supplies both a broad historical context and a rich supply of anecdotes both by and about Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg in New York in 1917 -- he changed his name to Jack Kirby because he thought the name sounded more powerful and successful, and not because it was a Jewish name). The book is copiously illustrated with both the expected (comic book covers, panels, and character designs) and the unexpected (a sketch Kirby presented to Paul and Linda McCartney at a 1975 Wings concert in L.A., Kirby's sketch of what should have gone on the Pioneer and Voyager space probe plaques).

Kirby and wife Roz become vital characters; Kirby's treatment by the comic-book companies, and especially Marvel, could form the basis for a tragedy if it weren't for the fact that Kirby essentially refuted tragedy with his outlook, embodied by many of his heroic characters. Those writers, artists, editors, publishers and animation-studio executives who'd come to love him, sometimes only through his work, were able to supply something of a happy financial late Golden Age beginning in the late 1970's and continuing until Kirby's death.

As the American superhero-based comics industry sputters into oblivion, one notes how much it could use someone like Jack Kirby now -- and how little the beancounters and coat-tail-riders deserved him when they had him. Hail to the King, baby! Highly recommended.

The Mightiest Man in the Universe

The Shazam! Archives Volume 3, written by Bill Parker, C.C. Beck and Rod Reed, illustrated by C.C. Beck, Pete Costanza, George Tuska and Mac Raboy (1941-42; collected 2002): Another dandy volume of Golden-Age Captain Marvel (Shazam!) stories, though a bit light on the epitomal 1940's version of Captain Marvel as drawn by C.C. Beck. Blame the good Captain's popularity for that -- Fawcett Publications was rushing out Captain Marvel material in response to fervent public demand, and that required artists and writers other than the then-standard Bill Parker/C.C. Beck team.

George Tuska supplies a surprisingly light line in the stories he illustrates here, and the writers keep the fantastic adventures -- always more fantastic than those of Superman during the 1940's -- rolling along. There's some surprisingly metafictional stories here, along with attempts to mesh the mostly inconsistent worlds of the comic book and the recent Republic Captain Marvel serial, which offered an origin for Captain Marvel much different than that of the comic book.

We also get what is probably the first in-story 'franchising' of a superhero, as Captain Marvel 'drafts' the three similarly powered Lieutenant Marvels. This stuff is all so much more fun than most modern superhero comics, it isn't even funny. Michael Uslan supplies a pointlessly continuity-obsessed introduction. Yes, it's true, Michael -- there's a certain lack of consistency in the presentation of a variety of things in the Captain Marvel stories. That's because no one gave a shit about that stuff in 1941, though one day an obsession with continuity would begin to crush the life out of superhero comics. Highly recommended.

Tarantula!

Tarantula!, written by Robert Fresco, Martin Berkeley, and Jack Arnold, directed by Jack Arnold, starring John Agar (Dr. Hastings), Mara Corday ('Steve' Clayton, and Leo G. Carroll (Professor Deemer) (1955): Giant ant movie Them! was such a hit, it kicked off a slew of giant insect movies. The law of diminishing returns soon held sway, though Tarantula! is one of the best of these movies, primarily because of the skill of longtime science-fiction and comedy director Jack Arnold. Arnold knew how to sell a threatening landscape, and indeed it's the desert -- and not the giant tarantula -- that looms most menacingly in this film over the puny humans.

Professor Deemer and his scientific cohorts are working on some crazy-ass, radioactive food supply to make things grow really big without them having to eat anything other than the radioactive food supply. As the film opens, giant rats, guinea pigs and a tarantula the size of a Great Dane attest to the success of the experiments. Then all hell breaks loose, and it's up to the always affable John Agar as a small-town doctor to figure out what's killing cattle, horses and people. Oh, right. It's a tarantula the size of a ten-story apartment building. Or maybe large -- there are some scale issues with the tarantula.

The tarantula looks surprisingly good. There are only a couple of model shots of the spider, with most of its appearances combining real spider action with shots of the desert, houses, what-have-you. The spider really is a jerk -- it seems to go out of its way to knock down telephone lines, power lines, and the occasional transformer tower, for reasons only a giant tarantula could know. The ending is abrupt, and features a young Clint Eastwood as a jet pilot. Good times! Recommended.

Them!

Them! , written by George Worthing Yates, Russell Hughes and Ted Sherdman, directed by Gordon Douglas, starring James Whitmore (Peterson), Edmund Gwenn (Dr. Medford), Joan Weldon ("Pat" Medford), and James Arness (Graham) (1954): Giant insects are fun to think about and essentially impossible thanks to very basic laws of physics and biology. Insects don't have lungs -- they breathe through their skin. But basic math tells us that as surface area increases as a square, volume increases as a cube.

A 12-foot-long ant (like the ones in this movie) would need lungs, which supply a gigantic amount of oxygen-processing surface area, or it would suffocate. It would also need a major structural and/or chemical redesign to allow its body, which evolved to be a teeny, tiny size, to support its cubed-increasing mass. Of course, hyper-dense endoskeletons or exoskeletons can explain a lot in science-fiction movies -- King Kong's necessary bone density and skin thickness might very well make him nearly impervious to bullets. A giant ant that actually could walk around without essentially crushing itself would be a pretty tough hombre.

In any case, this is a great movie, and several scenes pretty clearly indicate that it was on James Cameron's mind when he conceived Aliens. American atomic testing of the 1940's has created a giant, mutated strain of ants living hitherto undiscovered in the desert until they run out of food and start going after people. And sugar. Because first you get the sugar, then you get the power, and then you get the women. Or something like that. There's a nice, stark moment of cinematography when we come across the entrance to the anthill and see the human and animal skeletal debris littering the ground around it.

Scientists, local police, the FBI and the military soon must band together to find and destroy the anthill (and what an anthill!) before new queens hatch and go forth to be fruitful, multiply, and wipe humanity off the face of the Earth. A young Leonard Nimoy even shows up briefly to operate a teletype. All hands on deck!

Sharp, suspenseful writing and surprisingly good special and visual effects help lend an aura of verisimilitude to the events. The giant mechanical ants are kept off screen for the most part, appearing in glimpses except in major scenes, and the addition of a truly annoying 'ant noise' helps distract one from thinking too much about whether or not the ants look all that convincing.

The cast is terrific as well -- this was a big-budget science-fiction movie when there were almost no ig-budget science-fiction movies, and James Whitmore, James Arness (soon to be Marshal Matt Dillon on TV's Gunsmoke), Edmund Gwenn (Kris Kringle in the original Miracle on 34th Street) and Fess Parker (soon to be Davy Crockett on TV) help sell these improbable events. I'd suggest a remake with modern CGI, but I fear that the sensibilities of most modern filmmakers would put impersonally rendered, reductively literalized CGI ants front and centre, stripping any such remake of tension and suspense. Highly recommended.

Superman's Dead

Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?: Deluxe Edition, written by Alan Moore, illustrated by Curt Swan, Dave Gibbons, Rick Veitch, Kurt Schaffenberger, George Perez, Murphy Anderson and Brian Bolland (1984-86; collected 2009): Once upon a time, in the farflung past of 1985, DC Comics decided to streamline their comic book universe by putting all their heroes on one Earth, rather than the half-dozen they then occupied. In the aftermath of this, a number of heroes got new, substantially revised origins. One of those superheroes was Superman. The Superman of Earth-One, who'd been kicking around since the late 1950's, would be no more.

Alan Moore (Watchmen, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, From Hell) was just then beginning to reach the height of his popularity in 1986 when he begged then-Superman-titles editor Julius Schwartz for a chance to write the last adventure of the Silver and Bronze Age Superman. Longtime Superman penciller Curt Swan would draw the two-issue story, with inks from super-hot artist George Perez, longtime Swan collaborator Murphy Anderson, and longtime Superman family penciller Kurt Schaffenberger.

In 48 pages, Moore and his artistic collaborators got to tell the last Superman story...sort of. Thereafter, the Superman titles would cease publication for a few months and then return with new writers John Byrne and Marv Wolfman telling stories of a 'new', less powerful, younger Man of Steel.

DC seriously pissed off Alan Moore in 1987, resulting in him never working for the parent company again. And so DC has packaged and repackaged Moore's 1980's output for decades, milking a long-deceased cash cow quite handily. This time around, DC packaged together the last Superman two-parter with the two other Bronze Age Superman stories Moore wrote -- the Superman Annual double-length story "For the Man Who Has Everything" and the Superman/Swamp Thing team-up "The Jungle Line" -- into an oversized hardcover package. It's a lovely package, reproducing the art at close to the size it was actually drawn.

All three stories are terrific adventures of the Man of Steel, causing one to wonder what would have happened had Moore accepted DC's offer to write a rebooted Superman full-time. Moore refused on the grounds that he couldn't imagine his outre sensibilities being able to sustain a viable Superman book without major weirdness creeping rapidly in. Maybe he was right, though it's nice to dream.

The core story here -- "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" -- takes us to the then-future of the late 1990's. A reporter for the Daily Planet has come to interview retired and married reporter Lois Lane on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Superman's last battle with all of his enemies. Superman disappeared thereafter, and has been presumed dead ever since. What follows is one of those nice counterpointed stories Moore did so well -- Lois's narration gives us her reaction to the events, while the art and dialogue occasionally shows us things Lois didn't know about, or at least couldn't have known about at the time.

Sometime in the 1980's, Superman and the other heroes of the world had, if not eliminated crime, at least curbed superhuman crime enough that Superman was in semi-retirement. He returns from a space mission for NASA to discover Metropolis under siege by...Bizarro-Superman, a hitherto harmless, defective copy of Superman who lived on his own, weird, cube-shaped world. But now Bizarro has come back as a genocidal killer. And this is just the beginning, as former nuisances like the Prankster and the Toyman come back as homicidal maniacs. What happens when the big guns -- especially Brainiac and Lex Luthor -- return?

And so Superman fights his last, weird battle in the North, at his Fortress of Solitude, trying to keep his remaining friends and loved ones safe while under attack by all his remaining foes. The Legion of Supervillains from the 30th century appears to inform the other villains that this is Superman's final stand -- he will be destroyed by his greatest foe, though history doesn't record who or what that foe is. An impenetrable force field surrounds the fortress, preventing the league of heroes who've arrived to help Superman from being able to offer that help.

All in all, this is a great Superman story, expertly told. Moore manages to throw in almost every Superman villain, trophy, knickknack and ally over the course of 48 pages without making things seem overcrowded, and without resorting to several pages of Basil Exposition. On the waste snows, in the ruins of the Fortress, surrounded by the bodies of dead friends and dead foes, Superman will meet his end. Highly recommended.

Forever Stand the Stones

Ghost Walk by Brian Keene (2008): Our world continues to exist because stones with the right sigils and signs on them sit in the right places, keeping evil out. It's amazing how often this trope repeats itself in fantasy and horror fiction -- it's even a key component of the final season of Lost. To some extent, this all derives from Stonehenge and other standing stones, filtered through the sensibilities of writers that include H.P. Lovecraft. Dangerous holes in reality lurk everywhere, behind which terrible things wait to erupt into our reality. Everything you know is wrong! Don't touch that rock!

I really like Brian Keene. He's one of the very, very few practitioners of ultraviolent horror who doesn't make me either vomitous or bored (or vomitous with boredom). He's a terrific synthesizer of the mundane and the fantastic, and his cosmogony really is an interesting piece of work. Maybe Ghost Walk delivers too much exposition when it comes to explaining the supernatural order of things in this particular fictional universe, but that exposition is pretty fascinating. Lovecraft would have approved.

A grieving, small-town Pennsylvania widower decides to honour his wife's memory by doing something charitable. He hits upon the idea of creating a Ghost Walk, a horrifying (for fun) stroll through the woods, with the dark forest's own after-nightfall fearsomeness augmented by various manmade scares along the way. Proceeds will go to charity. What could possibly go worng?

Well, the woods the widower uses for the Ghost Walk border on LeHorn's Hollow, a creepy place burned out by a recent forest fire, a creepy place where murders and disappearances have taken place over hundreds of years, including a recent slew of murders attributed to a cult. Now, if any town really had a place with this bad a documented reputation, I'm pretty sure someone would cough up the bucks to fence it off. But the bad place, no matter how bad, is never fenced off in a horror novel. It is there to fuck you up! Maybe we'll even build a golf course on it!

Almost needless to say, soon a small, disparate group of people will have to come together to stop an ancient evil from breaking into our universe. I like what Keene does with his cast of characters, as he's shown here and elsewhere that he's not interested in giving us the same cast of heterosexual Caucasians so many genre writers do. Here, a lapsed Muslim reporter and a lapsed Amish magician (!) carry a heavy burden of responsibility for saving the world.

The supernatural menace is sublime in its ambitions and powers, and deftly sketched by Keene with the smaller, sad horrors it inflicts on people (and animals) in pursuit of its own world-destroying pleasures. To make universe-annihilating evil truly disturbing, it helps a lot to clearly define the small awfulnesses it enjoys -- such things are viscerally graspable in a way that 'it's going to eat the world' aren't.

I'd have liked a longer novel, but the relative brevity certainly keeps things rollicking along. The (real) spellbook The Long-Lost Friend puts in an appearance here, making readers of Manly Wade Wellman's John the Balladeer series smile. The moral is, if you come across a mysterious grouping of rocks somewhere, don't move them. Or, frankly, go anywhere near them. Recommended.