The More You Know

Sluggo denies your reality and substitutes his own.

If you love her, buy her a gun

Hulk sneers at your 'safe word'

Take it. Take it all.

Comics Review - Look at the colours edition

SPIDER-MAN: FEVER #1 (of 3)
Written by BRENDAN MCCARTHY
Pencils & Cover by BRENDAN MCCARTHY

This is the book to get if you want to see Spiderman tripping balls on magically contaminated bug-spray in Doctor Strange's bathtub.

McCarthy channels Ditko at his pop-art insanity - rather than his equally prodigious Objectivist, Ayn Rand worshiping insanity - peak. Featuring the non-linear, drug-trip dimensions of Ditko but with some P. Craig Russell gloss and a nod to Frank Brunner on the faces and torsos. It's an artistic tribute to the entire history of Doctor Strange.

Plus it goes well with mushrooms. Holy crap is this ever blatantly a druggy Spiderman and Doctor Strange Comic.

Lots of Burroughsian demonic spiders speaking in cut up poetry while Spiderman has tub seizures and Doctor Strange monologues about Aleister Crowley Albion Crawley.

Trippiness level: Hangin' with the Machine Elves.


Doctor Who
Classics Series 3
Issue #2
Steve Parkhouse & John Ridgeway

Colorizing and reprinting 25 year old black and white stories from the Doctor Who magazine, from the fraught sixth Doctor era no less, traveling with a talking penguin as his companion.

I know it doesn't sound promising but this is a grand mal 70's disco science fiction concept album of a comic book flip out. There's a plot in there about rogue Time Lords and a highly symbolic lighthouse tower that may be a Tardis.

It's part three of a story about mysterious black ships on metaphoric oceans, Cthulian monstrosities from the deep and running about energetically in the classic Doctor Who style. It really doesn't matter though, just roll with it and let the story come up without worrying about anything so prosaic as whats or whys.

Trippiness Level: Altered States, breaking into the monkey cage at the zoo.



Philip K. Dick's Electric Ant
Written by David Mack
Art by Pascal Alixe
Cover by Paul Pope

Philip K. Dick used to throat cheap speed like cheerios and write for twenty hours straight churning out dozens of novels in the course of a few paranoid twitchy years.

The signature Dick style of a glassy speed freak existential paranoia about the nature of consciousness and reality has become standard fare in movies, cyberpunk SF, and video-games post Matrix, it's all the fruit of the Philip K. Dick tree.

Electric Ant successfully captures the jittery amphetamine dread of Dick, but it's not bugs under the skin its nuts and bolts. Garrison Poole wakes up in a hospital to discover his blissful life as a corporate prince is an illusion. He's actually an android programmed not to realize he's an android. Hilarity and existential crisis ensue.

Trippiness Level: The tinfoil protects me from the rays.

E-Sheep Reborn

Here's your opportunity to directly support some kick ass comics by an enormously talented artist.

Patrick Farley was one of the early innovators of the web-comic scene, producing under the E-Sheep brand intricate fascinating, hilarious and disturbing web-comics. Some were traditional pen and ink scanned and posted, later he produced spectacularly beautiful computer illustrated chiaroscuro like branching stories that took advantage of the virtual space of the web. And then there was the retelling of the Book of Revelation of St John the Divine in the style of Pokemon.

He did it part time for awhile, made a couple abortive attempts to make it pay enough to do full time and is trying again with an innovative audience support scheme utilizing Kickstarter.com and the 'thousand true fans' business model.

Think about supporting this. If you need any convincing I recommend a nice artgasm wallow in his archives page.

Comics Reviews - March 3

MW
Osamu Tezuka
Vertical

It's difficult to get across to western readers the importance of Manga 'god' Osamu Tezuka. Cross Walt Disney, Jack Kirby and Will Eisner and you begin to understand the extent of his innovation and influence on Japanese comics and animation. Westerners know him best for Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion and its...cough... 'homage' by Disney The Lion King.

But by 1976 his position was being challenged by a new generation of Manga artists working in a more mature and dramatic style called Gekiga (dramatic pictures) Tezuka was rapidly becoming yesterday's man with his cute Disney cartoonish style (The big eyes and little mouth Manga is known for was actually Tezuka imitating Disney) and light approach to story-telling. All of that changed when Tezuka decided to challenge the new bloods at their own game and produced a perverse and swirling melodrama full of themes and scenes that are shocking even today.

There is fairly explicit homosexuality, pedophilia, rape, even hints of bestiality all illustrated in Tezuka's incongruously Disney cute style.

MW tells the story of Michio, an amoral sociopath, a beautiful young man rising high in the ranks of a bank office while at night he engages in a series of savage kidnapping murders and Father Garai, the despairing compromised priest who tries to save Michio's soul while being unable to control his lust for his body. As the story unfolds we learn of their history together and of MW, a deadly nerve gas that killed an entire island full of people and may be responsible for Michio's psychopathy.

The story is elaborate, almost byzantine, and some of the story elements work and some of them don't but the book still remains compulsively readable for it's almost 600 pages.

Warlord #12
DC

With this issue Mike Grell completes a story begun almost 25 years ago in the first run of the series, bringing decades old story elements full circle. There are fierce battles, secret identities revealed, arch villains getting their comeuppance and an elegiac farewell.

The art is beautiful and in the slightly strained story Grell is clearly trying to bring a new maturity to a series that historically was always rather formulaic. In the original series Travis Morgan was an air force pilot who found a lost civilization in the center of the earth - or possibly another dimension.

Every issue Morgan would jump to conclusions, try to save an innocent from a monster - and usually discovers that it's the innocent who's the monster and vice versa.

He was always a flawed hero and in the most recent iteration of the series Grell is trying to reconcile the responsibilities of leadership that the title Warlord implies with the rip-roaring adventure readers expect from a sword and sorcery comic. The jury is still out if the series can sustain such pressures.

Earthquake

The Sign of the Bat

This entire article contains spoilers about the storylines in various versions of Batman in comic, film television and video game published in the last few years.

Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius stories were deliberate experiments in deconstructive meta-fiction. One was a scene for scene, line for line reconstruction of an Elric fantasy story re-written as a near future story of byzantine family plotting and murder, others took place in slightly or extremely different worlds, the multiple universe variations of a guy named Jerry. They were reasonably entertaining for metaphysical/existential literary experiments and extended jokes.

Batman seems to have evolved into the same kind of hyper-adaptable mytho-form by accident that Moorecock was creating on purpose with the Cornelius and Eternal Champion cycles. Batman is a meme now, with multiple changes of detail or history permissible in any version but certain highly charged symbolic historical imagery that has to be lurking under even the most innocuous interpretations. A young boy in an alley watches his parents get murdered before his eyes, the same boy swears an oath of vengeance against crime and the fearsome appearance of a bat or swarm of bats giving this traumatized obsessive his method of terrorizing his criminal targets.

It doesn't matter exactly how idealistic District Attorney Harvey Dent gets half his face scarred, goes insane and becomes a duality obsessed super-criminal, just that he does. Neil Gaiman's recent Batman story 'Whatever happened to the Caped Crusader?' explores this theme directly in an elegiac tale of the ghost of Batman attending his own funeral.

In the last couple years the Batman has reached creative peaks in all its interpretations. Batman Begins and of course The Dark Knight were monster hits, saved the movie franchise and rebooted the character in a hyper-realistic take. Fans were ecstatic.

In the comics, Grant Morrison has been writing an extended and stylish heightened reality version that tries to reconcile all of Batman's comic book history into one eventful life. Bathound, Batmite, alien monsters and otherworldly Batman analogues included. Morrison has written Batman before, in JLA Batman was a hyper-competent professional superhero of the first rank. The guy who could take out the insanely powerful menace with ruthless efficiency after the Justice League members with the power to crack planets were taken out easily. In his most recent run Morrison posits a Batman so obsessively super-competent and disciplined that he deliberately creates a back up personality that can take over if an enemy ever attacks him psychologically.

At the moment, the comic book version of Batman is believed dead and Dick Greyson the first Robin later known as Nightwing has taken on the Batman's cowl while Batman's secret son with a super-villain has become the new Robin. Hints have already appeared about the real Batman's impending return.

The third animated interpretation of Batman in just the last few years made the smart decision to do something different from what anybody else was doing but still grounded in the Batman tradition, history and mythos. The Brave and the Bold is in the tradition of the Super Friends Batman, the Adam West Batman, an avuncular Batman who lives in a colorful world crowded with other heroes and villains who spouts note perfect pulpy "You'll never succeed in your diabolical scheme" dialogue with a straight faced growl by the goofy guy from the Drew Carey show.

Its the lightest interpretation in years but just as valid as the gritty realism of the movies and heightened darkness of the comics.

The version that most perfectly encapsulated every characteristic and reference possible into one spectacularly immersive experience is Batman: Arkham Asylum. Taking inspiration from a fifteen year old graphic novel by the same Grant Morrison but expanding on it massively, the game that got some of the most glowing reviews of the year puts you through the longest night of Batman's life. The Joker has taken over Arkham with hundreds of violent thugs and set loose dozens of Batman's most dangerous and insane foes. In every category imagery, detail, voice acting, music and gameplay the game is Batman.

Gameplay is the most impressive way this is so uniquely a Batman experience. It consists of investigation, combat and sneaky combat. You can experience the world in two visual modes, normal which is a dark and lushly beautiful experience of a dank and eerie game world built to increase tension and suspense or the shadowy Detective mode that gives you a heads up display of clues, DNA trails, fingerprints secret passageways and usefully, bad guys through walls and around corners. In a room full of unarmed thugs you can wade into them. The combat system is simple enough for mashing the x key while running at the bad guys to work quite well at first to give you confidence and help you develop a bit more combat subtlety.

Alternatively in a room full of armed guards you can swing about in the rafters or scuttle behind ledges and in and out of grates and sneak up on the bad guys one by one and choke them into unconsciousness from behind. Then you can booby-trap their bodies with explosives and trigger them from a distance when their friends bend over to check on them. This is more fun than it probably should be.

As well as the primary mission of sweeping through the asylum in Jokers wake clearing rooms and slowly discovering the Joker's hidden ultimate scheme, scattered throughout the game are Riddler puzzles punctuated with mocking radio messages from the Riddler himself, as well as hidden Arkham history and scattered therapy interview tapes with the Asylum's inmates. The sense of urgency created by the game's story and always stellar voice acting from most of the voice cast from the 90's animated version, had me finish it and then wander through the empty halls of Arkham for a few more hours completing the job of finding all the hidden trophies, visual reference tricks and audio rewards. I could listen to Mark Hamill's note perfect mix of mirth and menace as the Joker for hours.

Even after completing the story all of the various combat and stealth predation set pieces from the game are available as challenge modes both individually and comparable through online scoreboards with other players all over the world.

You might be able to tell I'm looking forward to the sequel.

Of all the console games I've ever played this one has kept my interest the longest.

Pele

It is said that the volcano goddess Pele once challenged a brave chief named Kahawali to a toboggan race down mount Kilauea. Not knowing she was a goddess and entranced by her beauty he agreed.

Despite her power the chief won the race due to his superior skill and asked for a kiss as his prize. Enraged Pele pursued him, sliding down rolling rocks which quickly turned to lava as her fury set the whole mountain alight.

Reaching the sea the terrified chief escaped in a boat just ahead of the smoking rocks she threw at him.

When he turned and looked back at the beach Pele had resumed her fiery form...

end.

From a folk tale of Hawaii.

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.

Santarchy

This one came to me from my buddy professional astrologer Matt Currie. You can find his vaguely disreputable yet rakish column at Astrology.com He's in San Francisco these days, enjoying the outside world looking like the inside of his head for a change.




Related: Santa, No!

It's Catching Up

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.

It's in the Blood

Vampirism is almost as flexible a metaphor as Zombies can be. Vampires have represented teen alienation, addiction, class elitism and of course sex. Most recently legions of enthralled teenage girls have utterly internalized getting bit by a vampire as corresponding exactly with 'losing it' in a series of rather dim novels and now movies.

But the correlation at the heart of the myth and implicit in Dracula, the Ur text of the genre, is vampirism as disease.

In Stoker's Dracula, Vampirism is a blood born taint being fought by science. The supernatural element is of course present, but as others have observed its really a book about Syphilis. In Victorian England before antibiotics drove a stake into it, Syphilis was what AIDS was until recently; an incurable, barely treatable blood disease. Nice people didn't talk about it, it was spread by 'beastly' behavior and the sufferers would die slowly and grotesquely being marred with ugly stigmatizing sores and wasting away and going mad as the disease ate at their brains.

In that context, Bram Stoker's Dracula with its emphasis on blood borne evil and modern (for the time) medical methods like transfusions becomes a very different beast than it is to modern readers.

Nosferatu the first unauthorized adaptation of Stoker's tale made the disease metaphor explicit. The vampire is a horrific deformed creature with rat like teeth bringing plague and swarms of vermin with him as he invades the comfortable reality of modern Hamburg.

And now film-maker Guillermo Del Toro and co-author Chuck Hogan make the disease metaphor explicit again with the first in their new trilogy of novels The Strain.

The hero is a doctor for the Center for Disease Control brought in to investigate a mysterious plague that has wiped out an entire airplane full of passengers - or has it? The medical mystery element is played well, but the underlying monstrous evil of the vampire begins to unfurl as the story goes on. Disease becomes unearthly evil gradually but utterly.

In this age of SARS and H1N1 and the world wide unease that we are due for something makes The Strain as timely and unsettling as any horror novel you've ever read. The fact is that a deadly killer flu strain seems to hit the world every 4 decades or so - and the last one hit us in the 60's. If SARS or H1N1 aren't it that doesn't mean it isn't coming.

The airplane opening in The Strain is a reminder that in our modern globalized world, the next killer virus could be burning in the bloodstreams of the worlds capitals for days or weeks before we even realized what was happening to us. This is a modern unease that The Strain captures very well.

Del Toro, of course, is the film-maker responsible for Pans Labyrinth, The Devil's Backbone and the Hellboy movies among others. He's currently in New Zealand working on the Hobbit with Peter Jackson. If you've seen and enjoyed any of these films - and enjoying them pretty much goes hand in hand with seeing them - then you will love The Strain. I'm looking forward avidly to the next book in the series, and after reading it I think you will be too.