In Flight from Lost Time

A Small Killing: written by Alan Moore; illustrated by Oscar Zarate (1991): Oscar Zarate's art, lovely and grotesque and colourful, really adds layers to the this odd story of a successful designer of advertising campaigns and the demons that haunt him. Alan Moore works on a much smaller scale than he does in better-known works such as Watchmen or From Hell. This move away from the epic may explain why this sometimes seems to be Moore's least-discussed major work. No explosions, no heroes, no villains, and no real fantasy elements. Well, maybe.

An ex-patriate Englander in New York starts to see a mysterious little boy on the eve of his trip to Moscow to design an ad campaign for an American soda-pop's first foray into glasnost-era Russia. memories of past failures and betrayals begin to haunt him, always counterpointed with his own justifications and evasions -- we're shown the past and given the protagonist's often wildly off-base commentary upon it. And then, prior to travelling to Moscow, he returns to England to visit his parents.

The telling of the story is much more compliated than the above synopsis makes it, with flash-backs and flash-sideways, numinous 'normal' objects become mythic in memory, fragments of dialogue to sift through, panel composition and colouring to mull over. Zarate does some marvelous things as he moves back and forth from subjective to objective, from crowds to solitude, from the grotesque to the everyday. A fine piece of work that deserves more recognition. Maybe Moore should have stuck a superhero in it. Highly recommended.

Closing Time

Hitman Volume 7: Closing Time: written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by John McCrea, Garry Leach, Doug Mahnke, and others (2000-2001, 2007; collected 2012): 11 years after the series ended, DC finally gets around to finishing its collections of Garth Ennis and John McCrea's Hitman. And it's a wild ride to the end, complete with side-journeys to the hilarious Hitman/Lobo one-shot and the melancholy 'coda' to the series, JLA/Hitman, published in 2007 but taking place before the end of the regular series.

Tommy Monaghan's life as a super-powered hitman-for-hire who only kills bad people moves inexorably towards what seems like an inevitable climax. Along the way, the body count will be just south of ludicrous. Had the series not concluded with issue 60, I'm not sure how it really could have continued -- by that last issue, we're down to about three surviving regular characters.

Before the 8-issue closing arc, we get the Doug Mahnke-illustrated Lobo 'team-up', in which the inexplicably popular alien bounty hunter gets literally and figuratively de-pantsed when he bugs Tommy and the boys at their favourite bar. It's taking the piss out of a popular character in pretty typical Ennis fashion, reminiscent of his takedown of Wolverine and Spider-man during his later run on Punisher.

Ennis, of course, really hates superheroes. Except for Superman. And what he really seems to hate are grim, gritty, 'realistic' superheroes. The short arc involving Six-Pack and Section 8, the bizarre quasi-superheroes who frequent Gotham City's more rundown areas, ends with a tribute to the idea of a superhero that also informs Ennis's take on Superman both earlier in the series and in the Hitman/JLA epilogue. Someone should hire Ennis to actually write Superman. It would be a hell of a ride.

In any case, the seven volumes of Hitman mark a fascinating bit of ultraviolent comic-book story-telling that runs the gamut from slapstick to tragedy to odd, quiet moments of uplift. John McCrea's art is gritty and violent and cartoony when it needs to be, with the inks of Garry Leach adding a real gloss to the later issues. Highly recommended in its entirety.

Ancient History

Year's Best Horror VII: 1978: edited by Gerald W. Page and containing the following stories: "The Pitch" by Dennis Etchison, "The Night of the Tiger" by Stephen King, "Amma" by Charles R. Saunders, "Chastel" by Manly Wade Wellman, "Sleeping Tiger" by Tanith Lee, "Intimately, With Rain" by Janet Fox, "The Secret" by Jack Vance, "Hear Me Now, My Sweet Abbey Rose" by Charles L. Grant, "Divers Hands" by Darrell Schweitzer, "Heading Home" by Ramsey Campbell, "In the Arcade" by Lisa Tuttle, "Nemesis Place" by David Drake, "Collaborating" by Michael Bishop, "Marriage" by Robert Aickman. (1979):

Solid but unspectacular Year's Best Horror from DAW, Gerald Page's last volume as an editor. Robert Aickman is weird and unnerving as ever, as are Dennis Etchison and Ramsey Campbell (though Campbell's story is intentionally funny in a Tales from the Crypt way, with a punning title to boot).

Historical fantasy occupies a surprising amount of this volume, with "Amma", "Sleeping Tiger", "Divers Hands" and "Nemesis Place" all occurring in exotic locations of history and legend. Lisa Tuttle goes to the future instead in a story that's quite unnerving, though improbable once one thinks about it too much. Manly Wade Wellman offers another adventure of his ghost-buster Judge Pursuviant; the Schweitzer and Drake stories are also tales of recurring ghost-facers.

The Stephen King story is a curiosity insofar as King hasn't reprinted it in any of his collections. It's not a particularly memorable King offering, which may explain its omission from his collected short stories to this date. Recommended.

　

Year's Best Horror III: 1972: edited by Richard Davis: containing the following stories: "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal" by Robert Aickman, "The Long-Term Residents" by Kit Pedler, "The Mirror from Antiquity" by Susanna Bates, "Like Two White Spiders" by Eddy C. Bertin (aka Als Twee Grote Witte Spinnen), "The Old Horns" by Ramsey Campbell, "Haggopian" by Brian Lumley, "The Recompensing of Albano Pizar" by Basil Copper, "Were-Creature" by Kenneth Pembrooke, "Events at Poroth Farm" by T.E.D. Klein (1973).

Feast or famine in Davis's third and last Year's Best Horror volume. On the plus side, one has Robert Aickman's astonishing vampire story "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal", a fitting companion piece to Sheridan LeFanu's seminal "Carmilla" and one of Aickman's sharpest and most keenly observed psychological studies. One also has an enigmatic story from Ramsey Campbell's transitional phase, a somewhat obvious gross-out from Brian Lumley, and a funny but slight and distinctly unscary story about the cut-throat politics of the publishing industry from Basil Copper.

One also gets the first version of T.E.D. Klein's marvelous "Events at Poroth Farm," a novella that would grow to become Klein's epic and towering The Ceremonies by the mid-1980's. The novella has its own hideous and unnerving charms, along with some fairly unusual intertextual play with the stories and novels that helped shape horror fiction in English up to the point at which Klein wrote his novella. It's like a snarky graduate seminar class and a horror story! Recommended.

God's President

Gabriel Over the White House: written by Carey Wilson and Bertram Bloch, based on the novel Rinehard by T.F. Tweed; directed by Gregory La Cava; starring Walter Huston (President Jud Hammond), Karen Morley (Pendola 'Pendie' Molloy), Franchot Tone (Hartley 'Beek' Beekman), C. Henry Gordon (Nick Diamond) and David Landau (John Bronson) (1933): 

Made by William Randolph Heart's production company in 1932, this movie was held back by its Hollywood distributor until March 1933 because the studio head, Louis B. Mayer, was a staunch Republican who didn't want this movie released during Herbert Hoover's presidency. It's certainly one of the oddest movies of the 1930's, a paean to fascism and socialism in the service of the Greater Good.

Walter Huston plays Jud Hammond, a corrupt President who does whatever big money and the leaders of his (unnamed) political party tell him to do. But then he gets in a car accident and, instead of dying, emerges from his coma as Super-President!

After firing everyone in his Cabinet except his personal secretary "Beek" Beekman and his former lover Pendula (!) Molloy, Hammond leaps into action to save America from despair, starvation, civil unrest, and organized crime. He declares martial law, making himself the de facto emperor of America, and then puts all the unemployed men to work in his new peacetime army of the unemployed. Soon, the President has opened up all manner of cans of whoop-ass on the forces of evil in this world.

Does the newly energized President have enemies? Sure. But he's also got help. Angelic help. Though we never see the archangel Gabriel, the movie makes it pretty clear that the President has divine help in his campaign to save America and, indeed, the world. Apparently, God is a socialist with fascist tendencies. Who knew?

Huston. always a fine actor (father of John Huston, grandfather of Anjelica) makes a convincing President here under the circumstances -- indeed his acting is finer and subtler than the film itself. Huston makes Hammond slightly off-kilter while he's possessed by Gabriel (or getting advice from him, or whatever's going on) -- he really does seem to be receiving direction from outside his body, direction only he can hear. The rest of the cast is liveable, with a young Franchot Tone solid as idealistic secretary Beekman. All this in less than 90 minutes!!! Recommended.

The Great McGinty

The Great McGinty: written and directed by Preston Sturges; starring Brian Donlevy (Dan McGinty), Muriel Angelus (Catherine McGinty), Akim Tamiroff (The Boss) and William Demarest (Skeeters) (1940): Zippy political comedy from the great writer-director Preston Sturges. Indeed, this was his first directorial effort, and it won the Oscar for best screenplay.

Set in a city that seems an awful lot like Chicago but is never named, The Great McGinty shows the rise and fall of, well, Dan McGinty. We first see him as a grifter and a drifter. But once he attracts the eye of backroom political power The Boss, McGinty's rise to the governorship of his state is assured.

Political corruption is taken as a given in this movie, which may surprise people who are unaware that political corruption wasn't created in the year 2000. Sturges was something of a cynic, though he held out hope that a person's good nature could be put to decent use, just so long as that person didn't end up owing the wrong people money.

Brian Donlevy is solid as the tough, hard-luck McGinty, and Muriel Angelus is mostly fine as his secretary/wife-of-convenience, though her odd mid-Atlantic accent can occasionally distract one from what she's saying. Akim Tamiroff blusters, sweats, and yells entertainingly as The Boss, the Eastern European mobster with a heart of lead. This isn't Sturges' best film performing double duty, but it is fun and entertaining and blessedly short and fast-moving, clocking in at under 90 minutes. Recommended.

I've Come To Talk With You Again

The Year's Best Horror XXII-1993 edited by Karl Edward Wagner (1994) containing "The Ripper's Tune" by Gregory Nicoll; "One Size Eats All" by T.E.D. Klein; "Resurrection" by Adam Meyer; "I Live to Wash Her" by Joey Froehlich; "A Little-Known Side of Elvis" by Dennis Etchison; "Perfect Days" by Chet Williamson; "See How They Run" by Ramsey Campbell (aka "For You to Judge"); "Shots Downed, Officer Fired" by Wayne Allen Sallee; "David" by Sean Doolittle; "Portrait of a Pulp Writer" by F. A. Pollard [as by F. A. McMahan]; "Fish Harbor" by Paul Pinn; "Ridi Bobo" by Robert Devereaux; "Adroitly Wrapped" by Mark McLaughlin; "Thicker Than Water" by Joel Lane; "Memento Mori" by Scott Thomas; "The Blitz Spirit" by Kim Newman; "Companions" by Del Stone, Jr.; "Masquerade" by Lillian Csernica; "Price of the Flames" by Deidra Cox (aka "The Price of the Flames"); "The Bone Garden" by Conrad Williams; "Ice Cream And Tombstones" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman; "Salt Snake" by Simon Clark; "Lady's Portrait, Executed In Archaic Colors" by Charles M. Saplak; "Lost Alleys" by Jeffrey Thomas; "Salustrade" by D. F. Lewis; "The Power of One" by Nancy Kilpatrick; "The Lions in the Desert" by David Langford; "Turning Thirty" by Lisa Tuttle; "Bloodletting" by Kim Antieau; "Flying Into Naples" by Nicholas Royle; "Under the Crust" by Terry Lamsley.

This was editor Karl Edward Wagner's last Year's Best horror-short-stories volume for DAW Books before his death at the age of 49 due to complications caused by chronic alcohol abuse. His was a tragic end long foretold, based on most accounts I've read, a slide that went on for more than a decade. Through that slide, he edited more than a dozen volumes of this annual collection (the only such annual collection for horror at the time), and while his writing petered out over that awful span, his editing remained sharp and idiosyncratic right up until the end.

Wagner's editorship tended to focus on short stories rather than novellas and novelettes, which meant that his volumes -- especially the later ones, with much-increased page counts -- sometimes have a ridiculously large table of contents. I think sometimes there must have been one novella out there that year that was better than three of the included short stories, but Wagner's committment to a certain level of volume introduced readers to a lot of writers who might otherwise have remained mostly unknown.

This isn't Wagner's best Year's Best volume. There are a few too many gimmicky punch-line stories for my taste, and a few too many generic stories with generic titles. But there's also excellence here from Dennis Etchison -- maybe the least well-known great horror writer of his generation due to his concentration on the short story.

And there's a concluding double-punch of fine novellas by little-known writers, "Flying into Naples" by Nicholas Royle and "Under the Crust" by Terry Lamsley, that highlights Wagner's career-long strength as a finder and provider of excellence from unexplored corners of the publishing world. When Wagner died, the DAW series was buried with him. Poor Wagner, but what a legacy he left, singing out of darkness. Recommended.

Ragged Glory

The Complete Crumb Volume 15 by Robert Crumb (1983-1985; 2001): By the early 1980's, cartoonist and writer Robert Crumb was considered a has-been by a lot of people in the comics business, a relic of the Underground Comix of the 1960's and early 1970's whose time had come and gone. Crumb was well aware of this judgment.

And boy, were those people wrong.

What would instead soon happen would be Crumb's gradual and astounding Renaissance, one that has continued to this day. He'd work out new and commanding art styles, writing subjects, and obsessions. He'd co-edit the uneven but always fascinating and boundary-pushing Weirdo with young Turk Peter Bagge. He'd even release an album with his band of old-time blues aficiandos. And be the subject of a successful documentary. There's never been a second act in an American artist or writer's life to match it.

This volume, comprising material mostly from the years 1983-85, captures the beginnings of Crumb's recrudescence. Along with posters and book illustrations and covers for Weirdo, Volume 15 of the Complete Crumb also reprints the adventures of Mode O'Day, Crumb's take on early 1980's social climbing. Other media satires and commentaries appear, including Crumb's jeremiad against all post-1930 popular music and an unhinged Reagan-era take on Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

We also get his foray into the history of psychoanalysis, in which Crumb begins to work out the style he would refine and use over the next decades in his historical pieces, fine-lined and rigorously realistic without being photo-realistic, a style that would help make his recent adaptation of the Book of Genesis so compelling.

There's never really been anyone quite like Crumb in American art, comics, or letters. I suppose Mark Twain is the obvious comparison, but by the time he was in his 60's, Twain's best work was behind him. Crumb sometimes seems to be only getting started. He's a global treasure, and if any cartoonist should be the first to win a Nobel Prize for Literature, it's him in all his sweaty, fetishistic, frustrating, curmudeonly, humane, satiric glory. Actually, now I know who he reminds me of -- Neil Young, who also keeps trying to expand and improve while his contemporaries coast on past glories or slowly fade away. Highly recommended.