Reiterations in Red and Green

In my last post as the New DC Universe was just launching (Its been a busy couple of months) I suggested that the new Swamp Thing and Animal Man books were calling back to their Alan Moore and Grant Morrison glory days.

In fact after reading the first four issues of both it seems they are instead calling back to just after both of those writers left.

After Grant Morrison left Animal Man the book was given to writer Jaimie Delano who introduced the Red, gave Animal Man a more animalistic appearance and made Buddy and his daughter the avatar/elemental champions of the animal kingdom the way Swamp Thing is for the plant kingdom.  This is of course the currently running storyline in the new Animal Man series as well.

After Alan Moore left Swamp Thing Rick Veitch continued with much the same thematic approach as Moore until his Swamp Thing meets Jesus storyline was censored by DC (after originally approving the script.) and Doug Wheeler took over.  In a storyline that combined with fan backlash over how Veitch had been treated dropped sales to record lows Wheeler created an archetypal foe for the Green that Swamp Thing served, the Grey - the separate fungal world.  The resonance with the Rot of current Swamp Thing and Animal Man stories is obvious.

I have serious doubts about both of these books now.  Making an anthropomorphised villain out of the concept of decay seems to fly in the face of the themes of Moore's run that explicitly recognized death and decay as a natural part of both nature and the Green.  When the book suggested a conflict between parts of the natural world, the seemingly never ending 'vegetable wars' story was a conceptual, and sales disaster that the book foundered on.

Over in Animal Man, Jaimie Delano left behind the meta fictional conceits of Morrison's later run on the book and used the animal avatar concept to address radical political animal rights and environmental concerns.  Echoing an almost despairingly apocalyptic viewpoint from his Hellblazer run Delano's was a challenging read, feverish angry extremes with stretches of bleakness that were almost unreadable.  His run was fascinating but ultimately exhausting and disheartening.

The current Animal Man storyline and that of the new Swamp Thing haven't even mentioned environmental or political concerns except in almost purely comic book monster terms.

I wanted to like these books, I really did, but they seem like pale shadows of the characters glory days calling back to old narrative dead ends.  

Nymphos!

From Shock Corridor, 1963

Guilty Pleasures TV Edition

Sometimes you just want your culture in greasy, bad for you, cheese filled quick gratification form. Here's some carnival food stand slices of TV entertainment the dweller has queasily enjoyed lately.

Todd and the Book of Pure Evil 

As if 1980's Degrassi High and Buffy the Vampire Slayer had a baby and then let the kid smoke pot and listen to Heavy Metal all day.

Starring headbanging underachiever Todd, his one armed best friend Curtis, The indie chick Jenny that Todd crushes on and the science loving Hannah who crushes on Todd.  They battle 'the Book of Pure Evil' a living, flapping malevolent tome that grants wishes to the lost and demented kids in their odd high school, inevitably in gruesomely ironic ways.

But strangely, the real star of the show is Guidence Counseler and closet  Satanist Atticus Murphy JR.  Whether he's sarcastically cringing before the sinister cult looking for the book or screaming impotently at his phone alone in his office he steals every scene he's in.

The first 13 episode season has aired on Canada's Space Channel.  Keep an eye out for a DVD release soon hopefully.  Fun cheese.

Doctor Who The Movie Special Edition

In the dark days between when the last episode of the original series aired in 1989 and it's triumphant rebirth in 2005 the one new piece of TV fans got was a Fox movie of the week that transplanted the Doctor to America (as played by Vancouver of course.)  starring Paul McGann as the Doctor with Eric Roberts camping it up outrageously as the Master.

It was a bizarre and flawed entry in the series but with its own odd charms.  It's canon for one thing, featuring a long intro sequence with seventh Doctor Sylvester McCoy before he dies and is resurrected in the most blatant Christ metaphor scene you'll see outside of a Narnia book.

McGann is a perfectly acceptable Doctor and with all the criticism this entry got from fans the consensus was he did a good job and deserved more time as the character.  He has done a series of audio dramas continuing his eighth Doctor's adventures.

This 2 disc set features the movie, and several good behind the scenes features and interviews.  An oddly fascinating look at the dark times for fans of the Doctor and the abortive movie and series projects that kept the fire burning.

The First Horror Movie

It's short, not quite thirteen minutes.  It's stagy and melodramatic.  The effects are crude, though surprisingly effective and the film stock is very degraded.

But put yourself in the mind of somebody in 1910.  Maybe you've seen a couple of the new short silent film reels, maybe you've never seen moving pictures at all.

You're ushered into a dark room and watch in horror as a grotesque monster is born out of a steaming cauldron.  A backwards immolation as the figure forms out of burned meat.  And then a shaggy monstrous creature, not even remotely human stalks its appalled creator.

It must have seemed apocalyptic.

Edison Frankenstein - 1910:





Some history.

Ingrid Pitt RIP

Ingrid Pit died at age 73 in her South London home.  The actress, a concentration camp survivor and horror movie scream queen of the 60's was best know for such shockingly sexy Hammer Horror epics as Countess Dracula, The Vampire Lovers, the subversive horror classic The Wicker Man and a couple serials of the classic Doctor Who series, most notably as the Queen of Atlantis in 'The Time Monster'.

Unlike some scream queens who've voiced discomfort with their horror movie infamy, Pitt quite enjoyed her sexy, predatory image and liked playing the baddies.

Pick up and put on The Vampire Lovers some time and raise a glass of the red stuff to one of the premiere scream queens.

Top 100 Horror Movies

Top 100 Horror Movies
IDW/Fantastic Press
Written by Gary Gerani
Introduction by Roger Corman

I approached this one with caution and skepticism.  Invariably these kind of 'best of' books are so subjective as to be one step up from vanity projects, overly weighted to recent movies and suffering from unforgivable exclusions.

But Gerani has created a list that had me nodding my head at almost every page.  Almost every pick and its ranking made sense.  These aren't necessarily the 100 best horror films, but Gerani makes a good argument for them being the most important ones.

OK, no true genre fan could pick up a book like this without at least a couple fierce nit-picks.   The author justifies the absence of John Carpenter's The Thing because it will be in his planned follow up Top 100 Science Fiction Movies.  I would quibble that while yes, Romero's original Night of the Living Dead certainly belongs on the list, the original Dawn of the Dead does too.  It's the platonic ideal and all time classic of the zombie genre and any list of great horror movies has to include it.

Plus if you're going with a Tim Burton film, I would pick the Hammer Horror worshiping Sleepy Hollow, a more artistically successful and quintessential horror film than the entertainingly gory but overly stylized musical Sweeney Todd.

The production is excellent and while the art selected will be familiar to any fan of Famous Monsters of Film Land or indeed any genre productions its an atmospheric graphic collection nonetheless.

Sleeping Through the End

The Walking Dead hasn't even officially aired yet and already some commentators are sniffing that the opening seems awfully similar to the opening of 28 Days Later.

This is, of course, true.

In 28 Days Later bike courier Jim, in hospital with a head injury from a car meets bike courier accident wakes up out of a coma to find the hospital and seemingly all of London are completely abandoned. Death and destruction are everywhere, and ultimately it turns out that ravening hordes of horribly transformed normal people are slavering for his blood.


In The Walking Dead (Both comic book and TV series) Rick, a police officer in hospital after being critically injured in a shoot out wakes up out of a coma to find the hospital and seemingly all of his home town are completely abandoned. Death and destruction are everywhere, and ultimately it turns out that ravening hordes of horribly transformed normal people are slavering for his blood.

So yeah, kind of similar.

But what the nitpickers don't realize is that 'sleeping through the apocalypse' is actually a recurring trope that has appeared many times.  In fact 28 Days Later was specifically referencing the classic John Wyndham novel turned multiple movie and TV adaptions The Day of the Triffids. 

The hero Bill Mason, is in hospital getting treatment for an eye injury that has temporarily blinded him.  So his eyes are covered with bandages when almost everyone else raptly watches a bizarre meteor shower that lights up the skies all over the world.  The next morning everyone who did is permanently blind while Mason can see as soon as he takes off his bandages.  His awakening in hospital surrounded by the terrified newly blind and stalked by horrific monsters is strongly reflected in the first quarter of 28 Days Later.

Ultimately the sleeping through the apocalypse trope is useful to writers because it allows them to plunge directly into the post apocalyptic action without having to explicate the apocalypse itself.  Plus the audience is introduced to the new reality at the same time as the hero is, encouraging identification with his baffled terror.

Other examples range from the Twilight Zone classic episode 'Time Enough at Last', the short lived Gene Roddenberry series Genesis II, the zombie move Night of the Comet and too many other examples to count.

Worry about the similarities between 28 Days Later and The Walking Dead if you want - or you could just enjoy a great thrilling zombie series on the small screen every week.

I know which option I'm picking.

UPDATE: Heh.  AMC aren't too worried about the comparison.  They ran 28 Days Later right after the repeat performance of the premiere episode on Friday Nov 5.

Public Policy, Games Theory and the Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse

Oh sure our leaders and administrators are worrying about trivialities like global warming, simmering warfare, global food shortages and economic uncertainty...but who's planning for the ravening hordes of the hungry dead?

The prestigious journal Foreign Policy fills the dangerous zombie gap in large scale public policy planning and puts some serious wonk time into exploring different strategies for dealing with the hungry dead. they explore differing approaches based on ideology, resources and military strategy.

There are many sources of fear in world politics -- terrorist attacks, natural disasters, climate change, financial panic, nuclear proliferation, ethnic conflict, and so forth. Surveying the cultural zeitgeist, however, it is striking how an unnatural problem has become one of the fastest-growing concerns in international relations. I speak, of course, of zombies.
For our purposes, a zombie is defined as a reanimated being occupying a human corpse,
with a strong desire to eat human flesh -- the kind of ghoul that first appeared in George Romero's 1968 classic, Night of the LivingDead, and which has been rapidly proliferating in popular culture in recent
years (far upstaging its more passive cousins, the reanimated corpses of traditional West African and Haitian voodoo rituals). Because they can spread across borders and threaten states and civilizations, these zombies should command the attention of scholars and policymakers.

Followers of cold blooded Realpolitik would call for closing the borders and leaving the rest of the world to be over-run by the shambling hordes. Selfish but effective if you don't mind watching the rest of the world get eaten alive. Liberals would band together and cooperate against the zombie threat, a little hippie-dippy perhaps, but ultimately probably the best long term strategy for cooperating against the undead on a global level - see the book World War Z, an Oral History of the Zombie War for the best description of the UN VS the Zombies model. Finally neo-conservatives would probably go out in the world proactively bombing, shooting and presumably torturing the walking dead in the fight against the undead evil-doers. Effective in the short term but the 'You're either with us or you're with the Axis of the Evil Dead' approach would turn off potential allies.

In the end, what I am suggesting is that with careful planning and a consistent approach, the zombie threat can be managed. The purpose of this essay is not to make a policy recommendation or suggest that one approach is superior to another. It is up to the reader to exercise his or her own judgment in determining what to do with this information. Indeed, interested and intelligent students of world politics should use their own brains -- before the zombies do.

Monster Size Monsters

That's right baby, Frankie is 7 feet tall. 7 feet...and 11 inches.

Quote of the Day

If the absence of sensation means a living death, then perhaps zombies are merely creatures thrown up by evolution to live in the urban environment.

-Roger Ebert, from his review of Little Murders, 1971

Oh, that is just WRONG!

"All I know is, we're in love."

Walking Dead TV

Produced by AMC the network responsible for Breaking Bad, Frank Darabont the Director of The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile and with the full involvment of the books creator Robert Kirkman who will be writing some episodes. The reasons for enthusiasm about this impending TV show just get more and more compelling.

The premise of The Walking Dead, for the uninitiated, is that the zombie movie never ends. The survivors just keep running, struggling to survive in an ongoing battle to live through the zombie apocalypse. It's made for the kind of edgy episodic television that cable TV has been producing so regularly in the last few years.

They Live... to kick ass!

I'm watching They Live, the John Carpenter political horror movie starring Rowdy Roddy Piper. The movie with the longest, most awesome fight scene in the history of cinema.





There are a lot of 'political' horror movies. Films that find the terror in class conflict and cultural conflict. A lot of zombie movies are thinly disguised metaphors, for commercialism and mindless consumption, authority, mass movements, hidden sins... the list is endless. Some are more overt than others.

Films based on classic dystopian novels like 1984 and Clockwork Orange and those inspired by them like Brazil and Equilibrium that explore the twin and opposite fears of chaos and tyranny can easily be classified as political horror, while existential nightmares like The Matrix co-opt the paranoia of political dread to narratives more vaguely metaphysical.

The perversely playful low budget horror Society offers the same kind of alien overlords metaphor for the power elite of society that They Live embraces, with an added frisson of the sexual panic of effects heavy Cronenberg style body horror. The Torchwood miniseries The Children of Earth comes full circle to the understanding that the real threat are our own human leaders.

Low Budget Gems

When it comes to fantasy, SF and horror, low budget more often than not makes you think of the failures. Spectacular failures, unintentionally hilarious failures, monumentally inept failures.

But the other side of the coin is that sometimes big budgets just means movies that are both bloated and bad and sometimes neophytes with microscopic budgets produce gripping, suspenseful minor classics that because of equally low budget promotion and distribution don't get the audiences they deserve.

Today's installments: Parasomnia and Freaky Faron.

Parasomnia is a dark fairy tale. A heightened reality where characters, behavior and setting bring the darker side of the brothers Grimm to the modern world.

It has a beautiful princess locked in a lifelong sleep, a dark sorcerer holding her prisoner and the hero who steals her away.

Or its about a desperately ill patient, the hypnotic serial killer chained up in the hospital room next to her telepathically torturing her in her dreams and the slacker clerk visiting his druggie brother in the hospital and stealing away the comatose patient in one of her rare moments of wakefulness.

It's a film of almost cartoonish, guignol excess and arch stylization. There are gory murders, an arch-villain who could have been auditioning to be the next horror icon, abductions, escapes and daring rescue attempts. A high point is B-movie warhorse Jeffery Coombs as world-weary Detective Garrett. The low point is a lame nod to the Saw movies with a creepy doll in an abandoned warehouse. It almost seems like, 'Hey we've got his neat prop left over from another movie, lets throw it in.' It's a minor plot point though, so I can live with it.

The director William Malone has a track record that includes House on Haunted Hill and Fear.Com. Cheesy, but glossy and visually inventive horror. In some ways this film seems to take his style to its logical extreme.


Freaky Faron from Writer/Director John Ross is a very different film. There are no grandly structured gothic set-pieces here. No inventive camera work or shoe-string visual effects. This is a talky, slow moving character study made up of conversations in offices, in classrooms and playgrounds under streetlamps.

When she was 11 years old, Faron Hallowell shot and nearly killed a local TV weatherman. It subsequently comes out that she had been operating as a highly successful vigilante for months, investigating, revealing and punishing criminals, by breaking into dozens of homes.

She tells the doctors that she was trained by an alien to protect Earth from alien prisoners marooned on Earth in human bodies and she has intense almost Sherlock Holmesian observational and deductive abilities. Five years later she is released from hospital and tries to re-build her life.

But some people won't let her forget and some clues lead to the mysteries of her own childhood.

It's hard not to wonder what Freaky Faron would be like with a bigger budget. Most of the story happens in exposition, in memories related by children and interviews with doctors. As it is, the film has to depend on the performance of Courtney Halverson an intense redhead playing an emotionally guarded girl trying to live a normal life with a history no one will let her forget and abilities that drive her to pursue mystery.

Remember the name, you'll be seeing more of her.

The Crisis Begins

Hardcore DC comics fans know that the great Crisis that destroyed millions of alternate universes began when Krona of the Guardians of Oa broke their most sacred law and used his super science to peer back in time to the very origin of the universe.

Doing so introduced either evil or entropy into the universe depending which version of the story you read and led to the deadly conflict between the Monitor and the Anti-Monitor.

A dozen pan-dimensional Crisis's later the DC universe is only finally returning to much the same shape it was in 1985.

But now disaster stalks the multi-verse again with the same sign:

"I'm not normally a praying man, but if you're up there,

please save me, Superman!” - Homer Simpson

I've got a Giant-Size Man-Thing

What? What did you think I was talking about?

Calgary Comic And Entertainment Expo - Day Two

A better camera and many more pictures this time. Met some friends (Hi Hugh, Hi Theo, Hi Sam, Hi Courtney) bought more stuff, got some signatures.

Here's some photo moments from the day:









This was as close as I got to Leonard Nimoy. $60 for a signature and I was a few bucks short by the time I got there.

















On the other hand Aaron Douglas was $30 and I always liked Chief Tyrol. I'm a big pro-union guy so I liked his Shop Steward sequences on Battlestar Galactica.























"And that sir, is how we deal with big blue alien fuzzies in Her Majesty's Galactic Empire, by cracky!"






















A fateful encounter.





















She's a creature of the night.























The Star Trek mini-skirt makes a comeback in a big way. Practical, yet gratuitously sexy. I want to live in this future. Particularly if it includes cheesy carnival fun-houses too.

















Red Sonja, a hot Steampunk babe and a teenage anime fan whose life is having an awesomeness peak.
























Everybody get's one.






















All your miniatures are belong to Cthulhu.






UPDATE: Thanks for dropping by BEAT readers, feel free to check the rest of the site out. Lots of comics and reviews, music and art.

Getting my nerd on

Next weekend April 24th and 25th the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo is on and the Dweller will be there and blogging it.

Why should you care about a convention in a Canadian city many of you have never heard of? Well let's look at the lineup of guests:

We've got Malcolm McDowell, Tony Todd, Billy Dee Williams, Brent Spiner, Bruce Timm, Tamoh Penikett, Chris Claremont, Matt Wagner, Eric Powell, Len Wein, Lloyd Kaufman and Mr Spock himself Leonard Nimoy. Plus many other notables from the worlds of comics, TV SF and movies. I imagine some people of the teenage female persuasion are only going because a few of the beefcake homonculi from the Twilight movies will be there.

Factor in an enthusiastic crowd (A much larger venue was selected after the huge swarms last year.), row after row of huckster tables selling shiny nerd-bait and workshops, panels and a costume contest and you're talking about my idea of a hell of a good time.

Comment if you are going and let me know what you are looking forward to the most.

Rory Hayes: Where Demented Wented

Rory Hayes had one of the most extreme visions among the transgressive artists of the comix underground. The leading lights of the scene in the 70's considered his disturbing and primitive stories to be minor masterpieces of paranoia and terror.

There's a child like dread in his stories, crudely delineated, starkly presented and usually featuring a button-eyed anthropomorphic teddy bear in tales of murder and mutilation. I was introduced to his work in the 80's, in an article about underground horror comix in Marvel's news-stand fantasy magazine Epic - a short lived attempt to compete with Heavy Metal - and have sought it out ever since.

They're like the scrawled nightmares of a traumatized child dosed with heavy psychedelics.

Hayes had serious problems. His nightmarish comix reflected an equally nightmarish inner world. He was an enthusiastic user of drugs and ultimately died of an overdose. Vancouver comix artist Colin Upton, who I briefly knew back in the 80's has flatly said that "Rory Hayes was nuts. I mean, really, truly insane."

Others have argued that positioning Hayes as an 'outsider artist' a primitive stylist pouring his mental illness onto the page is too simple, among them Dan Nadel, co-editor with Glenn Bray of a new Fantagraphics retrospective of Hayes work:

"Where Demented Wented: The Art and Comics of Rory Hayes"

"This idea that he was some kind of outsider artist is overstated. He was an artist pure and simple, and very ambitious. He suffered from personal problems and was self-taught, but then R. Crumb was self-taught and suffered from personal problems. It's not that different from Krazy Kat. But Herriman was canonized and Rory wasn't."

But regardless, the work of Hayes elicits strong reactions from anyone exposed to it ranging from disgust to fascination.For more of Hayes work including several complete strips check out MONSTER BRAINS.

The Sacrifice of the Holy Fool

Edward Woodward died on Monday at the age of 79. He had many movie roles, including two authentic classics in Breaker Morant and The Wicker Man, but will be remembered primarily as one of the most prolific British TV actors ever. Most Americans probably remember him best from the 80's TV hit The Equalizer, as a retired secret agent using his deadly skills and barely repressed righteous fury to defend the weak and downtrodden.

To genre fans though, he will always be remembered as Sergeant Neil Howie of the West Highlands Constabulary, stolid, priggish and utterly dedicated to his Christian duty.

The Wicker Man was made in 1973 (For the love of God avoid the disastrous remake starring Nicolas Cage and directed by Neil LaBute, a misogynist hack and the most over-rated film-maker ever.) it tells the tale of a dedicated police officer who comes to a remote Scottish Isle searching for a missing child and discovers mystery, sensuality and a jovial yet sinister population who all seem to be in on a joke that he is left out of.

The joke, of course, is on him.

Despite the delightfully malevolent presence of Christopher Lee as the mysterious Laird of Summerisle and the pulchritudinous unclothed charms of a young Britt Ekland, the movie depends above all on the performance of Edward Woodward.

He doesn't disappoint. The rigidly self-righteous Sgt. Howie shouldn't be as likable as he is with his dour and disapproving Christianity and his quivering tight lipped fury at the sin and debauchery he encounters at every turn on an island where Christianity has long since been supplanted by a much older faith.

Woodward doesn't play Sgt Howie, he becomes him, and after multiple viewings you can still find yourself hoping against hope that he'll get back in his police seaplane and leave the dark mysteries of Summerisle behind. But events unfold with as they must, bringing him inexorably to a windy seaside cliff and his unavoidable destiny.

The movie is a study in bizarre tonal shifts and discordant atmosphere. It's a mystery, a comedy, a horror movie and a character study. Sprightly traditional folk songs contrast with a steadily building menace. Audience expectations are toyed with expertly - particularly via a sudden shift to a traditional action movie chase sequence late in the game that suddenly becomes a cruel jest on both protagonist and audience.

I can't recommend The Wicker Man highly enough. Its a great way to remember an actor's actor who brought a commitment to every role he took inhabiting the skin of baffled angry men with just enough self knowledge to make them tragically flawed icons of victimized everyman.