Tombstone Blues

A Walk Among the Tombstones: adapted by Scott Frank from the novel by Lawrence Block; directed by Scott Frank; starring Liam Neeson (Matt Scudder), David Harbour (Ray), Adam David Thompson (Albert), Dan Stevens (Kenny Kristo), and Brian 'Astro' Bradley (T.J.) (2014): It looks like one thing the American box office doesn't want is a movie starring Liam Neeson that doesn't suck. Oh, well. Adapted by screenwriter-turned-director Scott Frank from one of Lawrence Block's hardboiled, modern detective novels featuring world-weary ex-NY-cop Matt Scudder, A Walk Among the Tombstones is refreshingly old-school noir in its sensibilities.

And such grim sensibilities, with little of that bang-bang, pop-pop revenge crap Neeson's been doing so much of lately. As Scudder, Neeson takes punishment but only reluctantly dishes it out. Frank lets Scudder loom in certain shots, taking full advantage of Neeson's over-sized presence. And the actor occasionally known as 'Astro' throws in a solid performance as T.J., the smart-ass street kid who decides he wants to be a private detective because Neeson makes the whole enterprise look sorta cool.

The case involves unlicensed P.I. Scudder being hired by the brother of a fellow A.A. member to hunt down the kidnappers-turned-rapists-and-murderers-and-dismemberers of his wife. But this isn't one of those movies about loveable innocents being screwed over by a harsh and uncaring world until Shane rides into town. The brother is a dealer in hard drugs ("A trafficker, if you understand the difference," he tells Scudder). And it turns out that the kidnappers have been targetting the families of other mid-level drug dealers because the dealers won't notify the police.

Remembrances of Scudder's own sins form a structural element in the film, used to good effect especially in the climax, which is brutal and messy and jarringly realistic. Like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe (both of whom T.J. namechecks), Scudder walks down the mean streets mostly alone, but not quite. The characters he meets will be colourful, to say the least (when one asks Scudder how he figured out that he had something to do with the murderers, Scudder tells him, "You're a weirdo."). And the depiction of the violence is unsettling, never moreso than in the opening credits. 

Frank situates much of the action among decaying streets and cemeteries and houses and rooftops in Brooklyn, with a few forays into the high-toned habitats of highly successful drug dealers. Set in 1999, the film uses the Manhattan skyline and the planes flying over it as a pre-9/11 commentary on cultural doom in some scenes: "People are afraid of all the wrong things," one of the killers notes, amused by the Y2K fears that dominate the newspaper headlines. It's a smart, faithful adaptation of the novel, and a fine addition to cinema's hardboiled detective films. Highly recommended.

River of Doubt

Deliverance: adapted by James Dickey and John Boorman from the novel by Dickey; directed by John Boorman; starring Jon Voight (Ed), Burt Reynolds (Lewis), Ned Beatty (Bobby), and Ronny Cox (Drew) (1972): James Dickey and John Boorman's nightmarish canoe trip continues to resonate more than 40 years later as one of the greatest horror movies ever made. It evokes horror in the white-water expanses of the river the four unfortunate Atlanta men canoe upon, and in the claustrophobic nooks and crannies of the forests and cliffs that surround that river. Through these spaces move men who are comfortable within them, and men who are assuredly not.

The acting of the four primaries is superb, with a charismatic turn by Burt Reynolds as the only outdoorsman among the four, and with nervous, overwhelmed performances by new-to-the-screen Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox. As the conflicted protagonist ("Now you get to be the hero," one injured character mumbles), Jon Voight is smart and emotionally overwhelmed. It's as raw and varied a performance as his great work in Midnight Cowboy.

I suppose there are obvious subtexts to be mentioned, most notably the idea that this screwed-up, violent misadventure in the Great Outdoors can stand in for America's contemporaneous follies in Viet Nam. The movie rewards such interpretations because it is wholly itself in its horrors -- at no point are we asked to believe that this is a story about anything other than four city slickers on a vacation gone bad.

The horrors include grievous bodily injury and rape and murder, all framed within the context of an increasingly hostile natural world that hints at the supernatural. The human antagonists could just as well be orcs or some of Lovecraft's inbred human monsters. But they have ties to the world outside, and because of that, the authorities can't be trusted, at least not anywhere near the river. These monsters have suspicious, angry relatives.

The return to civilization is signalled by a rusting vehicle. A taxi gets delayed by a church being transported away from the soon-to-be-inundated banks of the river, which is being turned into a lake. For the surviving characters, there will be nightmares and guilt and at least some doubt as to what actually killed one of their number -- and, perhaps, a dead and bloated hand rising from the water. Highly recommended.

Prequels, Sequels, and Adaptations

War Against Crime! Volume 2: Issues 6-11: written by Al Feldstein, William Gaines, and others; illustrated by Johnny Craig, Graham Ingels, and others (1949-1950; collected 2001): Beginning in 1950, EC's New Directions comic-book line would represent a brief high point in American comic books. But it didn't spring full-blown from the forehead of publisher William Gaines. A couple of years of experimentation preceded it as Gaines acclimated to the comic-book business and the talents began to assemble at EC.

War Against Crime! ran for eleven issues. It fed off the post-WWII crime comics boom. But by the end of the run collected here, it was clearly showing the way to the artistic and writerly excellence of the approaching New Directions line. And it didn't really die after 11 issues -- it was retitled The Vault of Horror with issue 12 and became one of EC's great horror comics. The stories and art in this volume aren't up to the standards of the approaching EC books, but they're still well-crafted, occasionally gonzo tales of suspense and horror. Recommended.


The Incal: Orphan of the City Shaft: written by Alexandro Jodorowsky; illustrated by Zoran Janjetov (1988-1991; collected 2001): Part of the prequel series to Alexandro Jodorowsky and Moebius's Incal series of the 1970's, The Incal: Orphan of the City Shaft features sharp, detailed, and often grotesquely imaginative artwork from Zoran Janjetov. Jodorowsky's story is bananas, as one would expect. It's all Euro-Comics-SciFi in the tradition of Heavy Metal/Metal Hurlant, a dystopian adventure story explaining the origins of Incal anti-hero John DiFool.

Weird, occasionally unpleasant, occasionally poetic, visually and narratively imaginative, it's also compulsively readable and extraordinarily dense compared to most American comic books. The whole thing pays homage to Metropolis and The Time Machine with its stratified society, a literalized hierarchy oriented around a vast shaft sinking deep into a planet. But there's a lot more sex, drugs, and fetishes than in either of those estimable forebears. This is the sort of European comic book that the TV series Lexx tried and mostly failed to emulate. Highly recommended.


Just a Pilgrim: Garden of Eden: written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by Carlos Ezquerra (2002): Ennis and Ezquerra's brutal post-apocalyptic Western continues here, as the gun-slinging religious fanatic known only as the Pilgrim encounters a team of scientists attempting to flee the devastated Earth to the stars. Terrible monsters and events abound, and Ennis and Ezquerra flinch neither in the grimy, bloody writing nor the grimy, bloody art. Recommended, but not for the squeamish.




Hypothetical Lizard: written by Alan Moore and Antony Johnston; illustrated by Lorenzo Orente and Sebastian Fiumara (1987 - 2004/2005): Alan Moore's World Fantasy Award-nominated novella from the 1980's gets the graphic treatment from Avatar Press. Antony Johnson preserves much of Moore's prose (the album includes the novella) while doing an able job of turning it into a sequential comics narrative.

The art by Orente and Fiumara is competent, though perhaps somewhat too prosaic (haha) for the fantastic goings-on. The novella appeared in a shared-universe anthology with its roots in the weird, magical cities of writers that include Fritz Leiber, Clark Ashton Smith, Jack Vance, and M. John Harrison. Moore's tale focuses on one tragic relationship in the city of Llaiven, all of it playing out in the weird and sinister brothel known as The House Without Clocks. Recommended.

Thomas Ligotti's Comics and Stories

The Nightmare Factory Volume 1, adapting stories by and with essays by Thomas Ligotti, including the following stories: The Last Feast of Harlequin, written by Stuart Moore and illustrated by Colleen Doran; Dream of a Mannikin, written by Stuart Moore and illustrated by Ben Templesmith; Dr. Locrian's Asylum, written by Joe Harris and illustrated by Ted McKeever; and Teatro Grottesco, written by Joe Harris and illustrated by Michael Gaydos (2007).

The rapidly defunct Fox Atomic comic-book line has to be credited with a whole lot of WTF chutzpah. Adapting four stories by cult horror writer Thomas Ligotti into a graphic album looks almost as odd as some of Ligotti's stories. Who thought this was a good idea? Kudos for risk-taking.

The adaptations are certainly solid. Much of Ligotti's prose has been preserved, and the art on all four stories is more than competent. However, the strangeness of Ligotti's work rests to a great extent on what a reader makes of the strange events and deadpan delivery of most of his protagonists and narrators. Illustrating the stories literalizes them, freezing a reader's ideas into an artist's singular interpretation of events.

The most straightforward story adapted, the Lovecraftian "The Last Feast of Harlequin," showcases a mostly understated art job by Colleen Doran. But once literalized by Doran's art, the creatures of the story lose a lot of their menace. The more surreal stories that follow also lose something in the translation. These are illustrated stories that never needed to be illustrated. A fascinating failure. Lightly recommended.


The Nightmare Factory Volume 2, adapting stories by and with essays by Thomas Ligotti, including the following stories: Gas Station Carnivals, written by Joe Harris and illustrated by Vasilis Lolos; The Clown Puppet, written by Joe Harris and illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz; The Chymist, written by Stuart Moore and illustrated by Toby Cypress; and The Sect of the Idiot, written by Stuart Moore and illustrated by Nick Stakal (2008):

This second volume of Fox Atomic's comics adaptations of the work of horror writer Thomas Ligotti is weaker than the first, with only "The Clown Puppet"'s eerie visuals by Bill Sienkiewicz really adding anything to one's appreciation of the original stories. The exaggerated, cartoony approach favoured by artists Vasilis Lolos on "Gas Station Carnivals" and Toby Cypress on "The Chymist" seems to me to be a colossal mis-step.

In the former, the surreal paranoia of the piece would be better served by a more realistic style, perhaps even a hyper-realistic style. The cartooniness defuses the horror of Ligotti's conception, which here and in other stories requires a combination of hyper-realism and the surreal to be effective. The story should be a sinister, over-rendered Magritte piece with the distortions in reality coming from artistic juxtaposition, not distortion.

The latter is an astonishingly unpleasant romp featuring a mad scientist, a prostitute, and terrible experiments. It's like a debased homage to the EC Comics horror shorts of the 1950's, except that the female character has done nothing wrong other than being female and a prostitute, and the male character will be triumphant and unpunished at the end. I haven't read the original, but this adaptation is predictable, unpleasant without being horrific, and grindingly long. I have no idea how it got selected. It's the worst story by Thomas Ligotti I've sort-of read. In total, not recommended.

Screwed

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (1898): One of the great horrors of a lot of first-year university English courses is The Turn of the Screw. It's really not something that should be inflicted on anyone below third-year English. And besides the complicated sentence structures of Henry James, there's a cruel tease in handing students a ghost story that's too attentuated to be viscerally scary.

So it goes. The striking things about the story have nothing to do with horror, and everything to do with a realistically imagined reaction to horror. It's one of the first psychological examinations of the workings of terror on the human mind. For actual scares, James' admirer Edith Wharton was much more forthright and reliable. Her ghosts stories would be fine first-year texts. James, not so much.

The distancing effects of the text play into its very title, which is, as explained in the story, a metaphoric description of the effects of a particular type of narrative, the ghost story itself. In the narrative, the revelation of the events of the story of the governess comes as a result of a bout of fireside ghost-story telling. The typical ghost story elicits certain reactions: to imperil children in such a story represents a further "turn of the screw" to increase the emotional and horrific "pressure" on the audience.

The two schools of thought on The Turn of the Screw roughly divide up into 'There are ghosts' and 'there are no ghosts.' The latter requires narrative duplicity on the level of The Usual Suspects: pretty much everything in the main part of the story that describes the struggle between a young governess and two malign ghosts for the souls of her two young charges must either be confabulation on the part of the governess or, at a further remove, confabulation on the part of the frame character who has ostensibly set down her narrative.

The former requires suspension of disbelief, something the average reader will accept but that many academics are incapable of accepting. There are no ghosts in the real world; hence, the ghosts in James' story must be fiction. If there are ghosts, though, what then? We know they did something to the young girl and young boy when they were still alive. What?

James isn't necessarily going to answer such questions. There's a reticence born of his own sensibilities and the sensibilities of the time. That reticence occurs within the story-world as well: the governess is at all points constrained by what is or is not proper to talk about, by what is or is not mentionable in polite company. Within that story-world in which there are malign ghosts, propriety allows those ghosts much more free rein than they might have in other circumstances.

But the genius of the story lies in the aforementioned psychological examination of the effects of terror on a human mind. The governess' mind must circle, returning again and again to its own reactions to things others cannot see, forced to deal again and again with feelings of horror the source of which only she seems to see. How much do the children see? How many of the children's actions constitute clever play-acting? What do the ghosts want now?

Around and around we go. The chills here are almost entirely of a philosophical or existential nature: how does the mind in isolation react to that which should not be? How can action be taken against incorporeal beings that never really act against one, but instead appear and disappear, trailing clouds of malevolence? How complicit is the governess in what happens? And why does she write exactly like Henry James? Highly recommended.

Talking Heads in Space

 Jim Starlin's Warlock: written by Jim Starlin with Bill Mantlo; illustrated by Jim Starlin, Al Milgrom, Steve Leialoha, Josef Rubenstein, and others (1974-1983; reprinted 1992): Writer-artist Jim Starlin's relatively brief run on Warlock represents one of a handful of the weirdest mainstream superhero comics of the 1970's, in an era when virtually all superhero comics were mainstream -- they were all sold on the newsstands, and all held to sales standards of more than 150,000 copies sold a month, at least.

By sales standards, Starlin's Warlock was a dud -- his entire run spanned about two years, with intermittent later appearances in other titles finishing the initial Warlock saga. But what a weird, ambitious, purple-prosed epic this was. DC and Marvel were a lot more inclined to allow for weird projects in their mainstream universes back then. It's impossible to imagine a story and a hero this odd crossing over with Spider-man, the Thing, and the Avengers today.

Adam Warlock's curious origins began in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four in the 1960's, as a genetically engineered superman who ultimately destroys his power-hungry creators and takes to the stars. Back then, he was known only as Him. Guest shots in Thor led to his own book, written by Roy Thomas, in which Warlock became a Christic figure, trying to save Counter-Earth (oh, look it up) from the Satanic machinations of the malevolent Man-Beast. That book was soon cancelled, with the Man-Beast saga wrapping up in the Hulk's book.

Then along came Starlin, fresh off an odd and abortive run on Marvel's Captain Marvel title, to resurrect Warlock in the pages of Strange Tales. The resurrection would lead to another resurrection, of Warlock's own book. That lasted another 6 issues. It would take seven years for what seemed to be the final stages of Warlock's story to be told in other superhero comics, culminating in a battle alongside the Avengers against the mad space-god Thanos and his plot to extinguish all the stars in the universe. As Thanos is now the lurking villain in The Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy movies, I'd guess Warlock won't be far behind. His iconic cocoon has already showed up in Guardians of the Galaxy and one of the Thor movies.

Starlin's Warlock is a cosmically subterranean work, obsessed with death and the self-doubt of a somewhat pompous, cosmic man-child who wants to save the universe but isn't entirely sure how. Warlock is also compromised by the Soul Gem embedded in his forehead, a stone of strange power which can suck the souls out of people. Fun times!

Various cosmic shenanigans occur, along with more hand-wringing and soul-searching than you can shake the saddest Spider-man in the world at. There are points at which Starlin seems to be going for My Dinner with Warlock, as talking heads and lengthy conversations dominate the proceedings. Warlock's consciousness seems to be constantly under attack, as is his sense of self. The comic-relief companion Pip the Troll lightens things up for awhile, but this is Jim Starlin's world: Death is the only constant. Well, and resurrection. Possibly followed quickly by more death, more resurrection, and possibly some lengthy conversations about death and resurrection.

Starlin's writing can be painfully clunky and overblown at times, but he's still the best person to write his own stuff. The art, with all its tics, nonetheless strives for, and sometimes achieves, a weird grandeur not often found in superhero comics of any era. Introduced herein is Gamora, Zoe Saldana's green-skinned warrior in Guardians of the Galaxy. Can Warlock and Pip be far behind? And how boring will Marvel Studios make them? I'm guessing we're not getting a Warlock movie in which the characters talk, to themselves and others, for 2 1/2 hours. More's the pity. Recommended.

End of Night

Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus Volume 4: written by Jack Kirby; illustrated by Jack Kirby, Mike Royer, Greg Theakston, and others (1974-1986; collected 2010): The last omnibus of Jack Kirby's Fourth World work, or at least of Fourth World work that he both wrote and drew, spans about a decade. Kirby was having major problems with his eyesight by the mid-1980's, and it shows a bit in some of the art, but the conclusion to the saga of Apokolips, New Genesis, and their far-reaching war is a fascinating and essential part of Kirby's body of work.

Of course, it's not really the end: DC Comics would use Kirby's creations again and again after this 'conclusion,' a couple of times with Kirby on-board writing and/or pencilling in the two Super Powers miniseries. The saga was never meant to be wrapped up in less than a hundred pages. So the final graphic novel of Kirby's Fourth World, The Hunger Dogs, is really more of an intermission than anything else, albeit an intermission without any more of the play after it.

The volume collects the last few issues of Mister Miracle from the early 1970's, Kirby's last Fourth World title to remain standing back then. That title concludes with a truly bizarre sequence involving the wedding of Mister Miracle and Big Barda, a wedding the evil god Darkseid decides to crash at the last minute. Groovy!

The concluding material from the 1980's goes places super-hero comics generally don't go -- into the futility of endless war and the possibility that conflict can sometimes simply be walked away from. It was never meant to be an ending, but the last scene between Darkseid and his warrior son/nemesis Orion is both poignant and celebratory. Orion has changed. Darkseid has not. There will be no last battle of prophecy. This time, anyway.

Perhaps thinking of President Nixon's squirmy final days, Kirby invests the previously nigh-omnipotent Darkseid with hitherto unseen characteristics of failure, impotence, and obsolescence. The dark god stands revealed as just another tyrant watching his empire crumble, shaking his fist impotently at the sky.

It's powerful stuff, capped by a terrific final one-page spread that could have stood as the final image of the Fourth World and the New Gods. Kirby was still teaching writers and artists where to go near the end of his colossal and unparalleled career. In all, highly recommended.