Since embarking on the just-concluded month-long series of columns about comfort food, the hodge and the podge have been rather piling up, so let's get to it, shall we?

For one thing, every week when I do a column, there is inevitably some sort of follow-up -- something I forgot to mention, or some new development I was unaware of, something like that. Here are a few of those.

*

I was completely unaware, for example, that when I suggested Fred Saberhagen's Dracula novels were a sort of prose equivalent to Hammer horror movies, that there were in fact licensed prose Hammer novels out there.

These were done by John Burke, who was also the author of many of his own original horror books, notably the Dr. Caspian series.

Burke was a real go-to guy for the British paperback house Pan Publishing back then. He did several dozen movie novelizations for them, under both his own name and a variety of pseudonyms, of movies in all kinds of genres ranging from A Hard Day's Night to Moon Zero Two. He also created and edited the anthology series Tales of Unease.

And now you know as much as I do.... somehow, despite a lifetime's interest in this sort of thing, I haven't got anything of Mr. Burke's here. Looking around the net I can find a couple of the Hammer collections available from dealers for about ten or twelve dollars. Not prohibitive, certainly, but a bit much to risk on idle curiosity... and honestly, after doing a bit of research on his stuff I'm much more interested in his Dr. Caspian books, anyway. I did end up ordering one of those and I daresay we'll be revisiting Dr. Caspian down the road, but in the meantime, I thought all this was worth a mention here.

John Burke also has a web page, which is where I cribbed most of this information after spending an entertaining half-hour or so nosing around there. Mr. Burke has had such a long and varied career I daresay something of his will pique your curiosity.

Incidentally, he's still working; his latest horror book, The Merciless Dead, came out just a year ago.

*

Also, while we're talking about Hammer, I forgot to mention that I have this nice little ten-episode documentary series about Hammer Films, The World of Hammer, that a friend presented me with a while back. Here's the problem -- it's only on VHS. I have no way to play it. So I'm giving it away.

I can't tell you much about it, because I've only seen one episode. Dracula and the Undead was included as a DVD extra on Dracula Prince of Darkness. It was a pleasant enough little retrospective. Clip show, basically. I think I'd have been annoyed if I paid for it, but as a DVD extra it was kind of cool.

There are ten episodes in the set: Dracula and the Undead, Frankenstein, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Vamp, Sci-Fi, Wicked Women, Lands Before Time, Thriller, and Mummies, Werewolves, and the Living Dead. Each one's a half-hour long; I assume they're all similar clip shows to the one I saw, and each is narrated by Oliver Reed. The cassettes are all brand-new -- several of these are still in their shrinkwrap.

I'd thought of taking it to the local Goodwill but I hate doing that. It was given to me because the previous owner knew I was a Hammer guy and saved it out for me when he was packing for a move. I'd feel guilty if it didn't go to SOME Hammer Films fan somewhere. And then it occurred to me that someone out there reading this might still own a VCR and be interested.

So here's what we'll do. Send an e-mail to ghatcher79 (at) gmail.com. saying, "Give me the Hammer!" and it's yours. Earliest timestamp takes it if there's more than one of you. If you're a U.S. resident I'll even cover the shipping. Anywhere else, well, you could Paypal me a couple of rubles or pounds or lira or whatever to cover the postage and I'd still get it to you. Fair enough?

I just like to see these things go to good homes.

*

I was also not aware, when I wrote the second comfort food installment, that Global Frequency, my favorite action comic of all time as well as my favorite unsold TV pilot of all time, apparently is under consideration as a TV series again.

All we have is the bare fact, sadly, and the name of the screenwriter currently working on it -- Scott Nimefro. ComicMix has the full writeup here. And John Rogers, who scripted the original TV pilot and is currently masterminding the excellent show Leverage, comments here.

I'd just like to add my pleas to the rest of the internet's -- just do it right, and if you could get Michelle Forbes again, too, that would be awesome.

*

I wrote this gigantic overview of DC's Bat-relaunch a few months ago, and it seemed like an update was in order. Since they keep adding stuff to it.

Still liking Batman and Robin, Detective, and Batman: Streets of Gotham, those are the clear front-runners. Hanging in there with Batman though I'm not digging Tony Daniel's take as much as Judd Winick's (...yeah, I know. Shocked me too.) Dropped Red Robin and Gotham City Sirens. Not bothering with Batman: Confidential or these other ancillary mini-series that keep popping up, though I daresay Unseen will probably find its way into this house as a trade collection at some point. Praying to God that none of this Blackest Night crap slops over on to these or any other DC books I'm actually enjoying.

And I think I've added Batgirl.

I wasn't going to pick it up, but I was downtown between buses, the comics shop was there, I wanted something to read, and they helpfully had issues one, two, and three right in a row. They had that "Batman: Reborn" banner same as the rest of the relaunch, and I thought well, I gave the rest of the line a fair shot, so I picked them up. Call it an OCD impulse.

That "Reborn" trade dress was a good call, because I wouldn't have bothered otherwise and you know what? I just plain enjoyed the hell out of these books. If I can't have Birds of Prey, well, this will do fine. I really like the idea of Stephanie Brown taking on the identity of Batgirl, it flowed organically out of the story itself -- unlike the strained rationale that gave us Tim Drake as Red Robin or Catwoman deciding to hang with Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn over in Sirens.

Moreover, it gives Barbara Gordon a regular monthly home again, and that pleases me... especially since that also flowed organically out of the story. It makes sense for the characters to be doing these things. (I wish I could say that about more superhero comics. It ought to be a plot requirement, not a rarity. But whatever.) In fact there's a great vibe about the mentor/student thing the book is building here that felt delightfully familiar.

It took me a little while to figure it out, though I'm sure many of you got there way ahead of me. Sometimes I'm old and slow.

But when Barbara moved into the old Batcave under Wayne Manor, the light finally dawned. The book is essentially doing Batman Beyond, but with the girls instead of the boys. And it really works, it evokes both Batman Beyond and also the early Birds of Prey, both of which I liked a lot. Plus, despite the banner at the top of the first three covers, it's completely self-contained. You don't need to know anything else in any of the other Bat books to enjoy this one, and it's really enjoyable.

I've never heard of Bryan Miller that writes it, or Lee Garbett who's drawing it, but they're both doing great work here and building a nice little straight-ahead superhero action book with a premise that should last. Now let's hope that they keep doing it because it's just a lot of fun. Fun is something I approve of in my Bat books and I'm glad to see so much of it lately.

And I love that this is a book I can hand to any of my cartooning students with a clear conscience and know they'll enjoy it as much as I do, for reasons that have nothing to do with my own forty years of Bat-nerdity. This book is pure adventure and it is huge with my 7th grade girls.

It's not wildly innovative or anything. It's just good. And good is worth cheering on when we see it. Applause all around to everyone involved with this one, DC. (Once again I find myself asking, why isn't this the baseline instead of the exception?)

*

I think I'm going to wrap it up there for this week... I have lots to do today, and I don't want to be late getting home. Julie and I have an evening at the theater planned, and it looks to be all sorts of fun.

See you next week.

17 Comments

• At November 20, 2009, Steve Flack wrote:

  I'd be all about the new Batgirl, if they hadn't saddled her with such an awful costume.

• At November 20, 2009, Michael wrote:

  I guess you haven't seen the more recent Batman and Robin solicits, Greg...

• At November 20, 2009, Daryll B wrote:

  Greg, I never thought of it like that before but looking back at it now, the hints are all there. ...

• At November 20, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  We have a winner for the Hammer giveaway! Congratulations to Jeff Stadt. That didn't take long at all.

  And no, I ...

• At November 20, 2009, Rebis wrote:

  Dunno what the sales figures are for Batgirl — I think it's doing fine. Michael is referring, Greg, to the fact ...

• At November 20, 2009, Mike Blake wrote:

  Greg,

  If you'd like to see the Peter Cushing episode of THE WORLD OF HAMMER, someone has sliced it into YouTube-sized ...

• At November 20, 2009, Tom wrote:

  Sad to hear Tony Daniel's run on Batman might not be so good. But I'll buy the back issues anyway ...

• At November 20, 2009, Sijo wrote:

  Wasn't "Dr. Terror's House of Horrors" the movie where some men on a train are told by a stranger how ...

• At November 20, 2009, Jeff wrote:

  Greg, thanks for the VHS tapes!

  Sijo, I think you might be thinking of Vault of Horror, but there is no ...

• At November 20, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  Wasn't "Dr. Terror's House of Horrors" the movie where some men on a train are told by a stranger how ...

• At November 20, 2009, Bright-Raven wrote:

  Re: Bryan Miller --

  Smallville, Greg. He's one of the writers / story editors over last season / current season.

• At November 20, 2009, Perry Holley wrote:

  I would be remiss if I didn't give thanks to Greg for his recent 'comfort food' series - because of ...

• At November 21, 2009, Sijo wrote:

  Thanks for clearing that up, Greg. Though I'm still confused why the movie is called "House of Horrors" when it ...

• At November 21, 2009, Edo Bosnar wrote:

  On the subject of the just-concluded 'comfort food' columns, I'd like to second Perry's sentiments: thanks again, those were fun. ...

• At November 21, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  I have just recently picked up seven more Helm books, although it may take me a while to get to ...

• At November 21, 2009, Sam L. wrote:

  Glad I could help with titling, Greg!

  Since I figure being called out by name in a hodge-podge column is the ...

• At November 21, 2009, Matthew Johnson wrote:

  I can't quite imagine that novelization of "A Hard Day's " Wouldn't it be about ten pages long? Or did ...

Here's part one, part two, and part three. I really had intended, when I first outlined this, to keep it to one or at most two columns. What can I say? Comfort food's a staple around here lately. Between cold and flu season, and then hosting our godson Phenix for a couple of days, the old standbys have been in heavy rotation a lot.

Anyway, these are the last ones  -- my go-to list of SF, fantasy, and superhero comics and books and movies that I never get tired of.

Let me reiterate that these aren't my picks for the best in their genre, or even my all-time favorites, exactly. (Although many of them are favorites of mine.) One of the reasons I started writing about 'comfort food' entertainment was to try and explain the idea a little better. The defining characteristic of these works is they aren't particularly innovative in an artistic sense -- they're hitting genre beats in a classic way, there's nothing in them that's going to set the world on fire. But at the same time, they're doing it so well, so reliably, that even when you can see a plot development coming a mile off it's okay. Because you enjoy it so much that you just don't care, it's like greeting an old friend.

What I notice, as I write these columns, is that when I just want something relaxing I tend to go back to my 'firsts.' For example, my first encounters with science fiction were Irwin Allen's various television efforts  and the original Star Trek.

So my preferred comfort SF tends to be something heavy on the adventure, enough science fiction in it to be fun but not enough that it's taxing. For example, The Omega Man is comfort food. 2001: A Space Odyssey is not.

All of this is by way of explaining why my comfort picks tend to be... well, quality-challenged, one might say. Very few of these works are going to end up on anyone's "Best Of" lists, especially in science fiction or fantasy circles (superhero fans are more forgiving.) But I still love them. These are the stories I pull off the shelf when I just want to relax, or when I need something to cheer me up on a bad day.

There are lots of great science fiction movies out there, some real classics. But for pure enjoyment, I keep coming back to the aforementioned Omega Man.

Damn dirty zombies!

Objectively, I couldn't tell you why. It's not a good adaptation of I Am Legend. It's terribly dated-- ironically, mostly from its effort to appear fresh and hip. It's hammy and pretentious and the allegory comes off as painfully heavy-handed.

But... I love it in a way that I just don't The Last Man on Earth, which is by the way a much better movie, or even the original Matheson novel I Am Legend which I think is a brilliant book. The thing is, neither one of those are really what I'd call fun. They're intense stories that demand a lot from the audience. They're Art. Compared to those, The Omega Man is cheese. But it's really tasty cheese.

Maybe it's the era -- The Omega Man is a very seventies movie, and so are my other SF picks, come to think of it.

Between the cancellation of the original Star Trek in 1969 and 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Gene Roddenberry tried his hand at four other science fiction and fantasy TV series pilots. In the olden days, these would air as made-for-TV movies and I loved every one of them.

Technically, the first one he tried twice. Genesis II was the story of Dylan Hunt, a man from our time who was trapped in a cavern during a suspended animation experiment, revived a couple of centuries later into a world trying to recover from nuclear war. Alex Cord did well enough as Hunt, and he was ably supported by Ted Cassidy as Isiah, the white savage as well as the young Mariette Hartley as the hot mutant babe Lyra-A.

That one aired on CBS, and they ended up picking up the Planet of the Apes TV series instead. The following year we saw Planet Earth, a somewhat re-imagined sequel (It was roughly the same relationship the new Edward Norton Hulk movie had to the Eric Bana one, if that helps you.) This one was on ABC.

This Dylan Hunt was cooler than the first one and knew kung fu besides.

Honestly? I like this one better than Genesis II even though, again, objectively Genesis II is the better movie.

For one thing, Planet Earth is simply more fun. Roddenberry was determined to prove to ABC that he still had what it took to do an action show, he was able to do a TV series that wasn't just about Making A Statement about Humanity's Bold Future. So the movie opens with a big action sequence between Dylan and his team and the killer mutant Kreegs ("A species obsessed with militarism and war!") and goes on from there.

The cast is better too. The only holdovers from the first are Ted Cassidy, who was simply too cool to lose (The creator of Mr. Spock and Data knew a cult hero when he saw one) and of course Majel Roddenberry has a small role. But John Saxon is much better as Dylan Hunt than Alex Cord was, he brings more of that Jim Kirk swagger to it. And the late Janet Margolin is wonderful as the naive but determined Harper Smythe.

Diana Muldaur also does a nice job as the matriarch Marg, and on the whole everyone looks to be having much more fun than the cast of Genesis II. The gender-politics stuff is about as ham-handed as one would expect, but it does sort of work on a satirical level. (Here's a clip.)

But the real draw of the thing is the old-school adventure vibe, especially the big fight at the end with Ted Cassidy and his exuberant warrior's yell. It's one of my favorite film fights ever. Most people remember Ted Cassidy as Lurch from The Addams Family, but for me he'll always be Isiah.

I can't help thinking this show would have been great fun. Sigh.

This pilot didn't sell either. ABC took one more swing at it, with Saxon and without Roddenberry, in an awful movie called Strange New World. We'll just ignore that one.

I'm also very fond of the other two failed Gene Roddenberry TV series pilot movies from this time, Spectre and The Questor Tapes.

Spectre was an idea that predated The X-Files by a couple of decades.

It featured Robert Culp as the very Holmes-like occult investigator William Sebastian, and the late Gig Young as his even more Watson-like friend Dr. "Ham" Hamilton.

SPECTRE often has the feel of a Hammer film, honestly.

In their initial outing they are up against a demonic cult that worships the lizard-god Asmodeus, "Prince of Lechery." With all of the vaguely unsettling Roddenberry riffs about sexual liberation and free love that you'd expect to be included. (Watch all these movies in a row and you are left with the overall impression that Gene Roddenberry had some weird ideas about women.) Nevertheless, it's an entertaining little movie, there's something very Hammer-esque about it.

Hot girls and dinosaurs in capes! This one has it all!

The plot is a bit oddly-structured in places, but overall it holds up well, and Culp is always a treat. There's also a very young John Hurt as a prissy Satanist type. I don't know if a series would have worked, but it's a fun movie.

The Questor Tapes is widely regarded as the best of the Roddenberry pilots from this era, and it's easy to see why fans love it so. This story of an android and his search for his creator is very, very Trek-like. In fact it originally was going to star Leonard Nimoy as the android Questor, but Robert Foxworth got the job instead.

Most of the ideas Roddenberry is trying here he came back to with the character of Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation, but this is quite a bit looser and more entertaining than the early episodes of that show ever were. Most of this is due to Foxworth's mannered performance -- I think he did it better than Nimoy would have, honestly -- and additionally, Mike Farrell is simply charming as engineer Jerry Robinson.

These four films have all been convention bootleggers' evergreens for decades, but Planet Earth and Genesis II are finally getting a legitimate DVD release from Warner Brothers Archive.

About damn TIME.

Sadly, nothing yet for the other two, but there are paperback novelizations a determined web surfer could probably track down.

The one by Dorothy Fontana for Questor is actually pretty good, and stayed in print for years after the movie was forgotten by TV viewers. Of course there are the bootleggers, but I can't really recommend that option. I think the entirety of Questor is on YouTube in ten-minute chunks, as well.

The whole Dylan Hunt/Genesis II concept eventually got retooled into Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, but that's so far away from the original that it's hardly applicable here.

This was okay, I guess, but I'd rather have had PLANET EARTH as a series.

Although I did like bits of the first and second seasons of that show okay, I always felt a vague sense of injustice that it was the version that actually succeeded. I wanted the John Saxon one with Ted Cassidy as Isiah, damn it. (I occasionally wonder if Saxon or Alex Cord actually ever guested on the Kevin Sorbo show. That would have been a really nerdy piece of stunt casting. Dueling Dylans!)

*

When I want that same kind of undemanding comfort-food entertainment in a fantasy comic, well, there's really only one that does it for me.

Conan. I enjoy pretty much every version of Robert E. Howard's mighty barbarian that has appeared in comics, and the current Dark Horse take on the character is a class act all the way. But my first choice is usually something from Savage Sword.

I love that Dark Horse is putting the Savage Sword Conan stories out in paperback, but honestly, I like the actual magazines. They're exactly the right-size hunk of reading material when you just want to kill some time and relax -- especially the earlier issues that also included fun text pieces, real articles and reviews, along with the comics. That was something I'm sorry to say doesn't get included in the Dark Horse reprint trades, and it's why I'm not as enthusiastic about them as I want to be. I liked the rhythm you got in the old Savage Sword magazine of a long lead story with Conan, followed by an article about Conan's pulp appearances or the unlicensed Mexican Conan comic or Bran Mak Morn or something, and then a short second feature comic. It was a nice package.

I'm not terribly picky about who does it. I liked the Thomas/Buscema stuff best, but I also quite enjoyed Chuck Dixon's Savage Sword work, and even the Michael Fleisher version of Conan is okay by me once in a while, though it's my least favorite.

My filthy secret is that I'm just not a Conan purist. It comes back to that "first encounter" thing. See, I can appreciate that there are now nice Howard-only collections of the original Conan stories...

Yeah, yeah, this is the GOOD edition....

...but you know, after I bought those I ended up giving them away and spending an absurd amount of time prowling book dealers for the old Sphere paperbacks that are half Howard and half L. Sprague de Camp.

It just didn't feel right unless it was one of those old paperbacks with the Frazetta covers, complete with the nerdy chronological notes and the lame pastiches and all the rest of it. Because that's my Conan. I can't help it.

(Yes, of course I can tell the difference between the authentic Howard Conan and the other stuff, and yes, Howard's is easily the best. But I just like getting it in this package. Don't judge me dammit!)

Truthfully, while we're on the subject of lame knockoff versions of things, I've always thought that the best Conan movie anyone ever made was actually The Sword and the Sorcerer.

Lee Horsley as Talon isn't nearly beefy enough but by God he nailed everything else. He's simply so much better than Arnold Schwarzenegger was in the actual Conan movies that it's ridiculous.

And the script is a fun mishmash of Howard's Conan stories. You can see pieces of "The Scarlet Citadel," "A Witch Shall Be Born," "Black Colossus," and a couple of others. It's like a Greatest Hits collection. Pity that it was, you know, uh, plagiar -- well, let's say a devout homage, okay? --and not an actual Conan film.

Because everything else about this is just so... right. The plot, the atmosphere, everything, it feels so much more like a Conan story than either of the official Conan movies ever did.

Of course, there's that howler of a plot hole near the end with the crucifixion scene -- I really can't believe that Talon could tear himself down off that crosstie, leap thirty feet in the air, grab his thirty-pound triple-bladed sword, and lay waste to Cromwell's entire army while he still had gaping bloody holes in his hands. Not to mention the final duel and so on and so on, before waving at everyone and taking Kathleen Beller off to bed.

I mean, seriously, even Conan had to rest up after tearing himself off the cross in "A Witch Shall Be Born," where that scene is stolen from. It's just not something you bounce right back from.

But even with the idiocy of that one scene, even with its bizarre casting (Joe Regalbuto as a savage pirate mercenary? The guy from Murphy Brown? Seriously?) ...I can't help myself, I still love The Sword and the Sorcerer. I first saw it in the theater when I was in college -- my friends and I must have gone three or four times -- and I made it a point to grab it as soon as it showed up on home video.

The sequel's finally getting made, too, featuring former Dylan Hunt (and, okay, Hercules and Kull) Kevin Sorbo.

Even if this is bad it will still be AWESOME!

It's embarrassing how delighted I was to hear this. Lee Horsley actually came out of retirement for it, even; he makes a nice living writing Western novels, these days, but by God he put on the old loincloth again for this. I am so jazzed.

*

Well, I can see that this spun away from me again. I appreciate your forbearance, if you made it this far. Let's see if I can wrap things up.

The last comfort-food genre pieces I wanted to talk about are superheroes, but really, in some sense almost all mainstream superhero stories have that reassuring sense of the expected about them. The hero is going to fight the villain and the good guys are going to win. Hell, during the years the Comics Code Authority was enforcing stuff, that was actually written into the rules.

That's why the stories that break away from that template -- Watchmen, Animal Man, Astro City, etc. -- are usually hailed as genius and visionary. But the comfort-food stuff is where a lot of us find our inner fan at his most devoted.

For example, I've always been a Batman guy.... but in seventy years of published Bat stuff, that could mean a lot of things. So my favorite Batman stories tend to be the ones that fall into line with what I think Batman should be like.

Now, I can give you a lot of well-reasoned arguments about why I think Batman should be done this way and not that way, but really? At its core? I think it's the comfort-food, don't-screw-with-my-expectations factor. That certain satisfaction that comes with the nod of, "Yes. That's how that needed to go."

That's why I adored Batman Begins so much when I first saw it. Not just that it was a good movie -- although I think it was a terrific movie -- but it was my Batman, absolutely. The Bronze Age model.

Started with Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams' "Secret of the Waiting Graves," peaked with Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers, and finally ended with Doug Moench and Don Newton. That's my guy. And he's up there on the screen in Batman Begins, which is why that movie is so soothing for me. It really is like visiting an old friend for a couple of hours.

The challenge for most superhero writers of today is to evoke that happy feeling of recognition while at the same time not giving us something we've seen a zillion times before.

That's really goddamn hard. And gets harder every year.

...but I digress. I could do a whole column about the current challenges of writing illusion-of-change superheroics -- I may have even sort of done it once or twice already -- but that's not what this series of columns has been about. This was just where I wanted to mention a few of my personal favorite superhero stories that evoke that comfortable, quiet feeling of satisfied pleasure, that moment of Yes. Exactly.

For the classics, well, I already mentioned Batman. In particular, the movie Batman Begins and the collection Tales of the Demon.

I never get tired of this book.

And over at Marvel, there's the Lee-Romita Spider-Man. In particular, the early part of that collaboration, #40 to #50.

Again, this is one of those things where intellectually I know the Ditko stuff was better -- but the Romita stuff is mine.

The nice thing is that in 1992 Marvel put it all between two covers for me.

No matter how badly my day is going, reading this book will always make me smile.

Marvel Masterworks volume 22, pictured above, is the only Marvel hardcover I own that I paid full price for when it came out. I had to have it. I've lost count of the number of times I've pulled it off the shelf to look up something or other and just ended up reading it again.

Comfort-food superheroics of a more modern vintage? That's harder. Really the only book I can think of that gave me that "of course" vibe, that wasn't particularly groundbreaking but nevertheless was completely satisfying, would be JLA under Grant Morrison and Mark Waid.

That was really a tour de force of looking exciting and fresh while underneath it all, the Justice League was just going back to basics -- all the heroes in one story fighting menaces too big to handle alone. It was loud and fast and fun and had nice character bits and evoked the best of the old while still feeling new. It's no wonder DC ran it into the ground. But while it was cooking, JLA was my go-to superhero book. Always reliable.

*

And there you have it. Those are my picks for the days when only an old favorite will do. Feel free to list your own in the comments below, or anything else you feel like mentioning for that matter.

Me, I think it's time to dig out an old favorite and throw it in the DVD player. Maybe something from George Pal. This might be a night for Seven Faces of Dr. Lao. Or Doc Savage.

Or, hell, maybe both.

See you next week.

17 Comments

• At November 14, 2009, Perry Holley wrote:

  I agree completely that Sword and the Sorcerer is a better Conan film than either Conan film we actually got. ...

• At November 14, 2009, Bill Reed wrote:

  Sorbo *and* Lambert? Win.

  The deal with the Omega Man is that it is unapologetically awesome. Charlton Heston, dressed as Jon ...

• At November 14, 2009, Bill Reed wrote:

  My comfort food, anyway, is Burton's Batman '89 and Ghostbusters, I or II. Love 'em both. Watched these hundreds of ...

• At November 14, 2009, Brian D. wrote:

  The Romita, Sr., Spider-Man is easily the best Spider-Man. I might go a little further than you did into the ...

• At November 15, 2009, Mary Warner wrote:

  If I remember correctly, there was a sequel promised at the end of 'Sword And The Sorceror'. I gave ...

• At November 15, 2009, Edo Bosnar wrote:

  I think super-hero comics are pretty much the comfort zone of everybody reading this blog; SF & fantasy were always ...

• At November 15, 2009, The Mutt wrote:

  Time Tunnel was all kinds of awesome. Doug and Tony lost in time. I will never forget the moment when ...

• At November 15, 2009, Sijo wrote:

  Oh man, I actually *remember* watching some of those movies in TV or VHS. Does that make me feel old?

  A ...

• At November 15, 2009, Tom Fitzpatrick wrote:

  I'm surprised you haven't mentioned "Soylent Green" with Charlton Heston. A depression-like era science fiction type movie, that leaves ...

• At November 15, 2009, Alan Coil wrote:

  I've always felt that The Questor Tapes was an inspiration for Machine Man. (Walter Koenig was also in it.)

  Time Tunnel ...

• At November 15, 2009, Andrew Collins wrote:

  Count me as someone else excited for the Sword & The Sorcerer sequel.

  I had seen that movie as a kid ...

• At November 15, 2009, The Mutt wrote:

  Speaking of Soylent Green and attempts to be hip that leave a movie feeling very dated: There is a scene ...

• At November 15, 2009, FunkyGreenJerusalem wrote:

  My comfort food films, that I've watched an insane amount of times are Wes Anderson's films, and I Heart Huckabees.

  They've ...

• At November 16, 2009, Lt. Clutch wrote:

  Timothy Dalton remains my favorite Bond to this day due to his performance in those two movies.

  I first watched SPECTRE ...

• At November 16, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  I'm surprised you haven't mentioned "Soylent Green" with Charlton Heston. A depression-like era science fiction type movie, that leaves you ...

• At November 16, 2009, LouReedRichards wrote:

  Well for me the first 2 Star Wars movies will do it every time (I know, how very original). I ...

• At November 16, 2009, FunkyGreenJerusalem wrote:

  Although Daniel Craig is pretty damn good, he looks a bit thuggish for Bond to me.

  Apart from 'From Russia With ...

Including, I believe, designing this poster.

Starring Katrina, Amanda, Emily, and others formerly of my Cartooning classes.

We are certainly going to be there. The last one we attended was a great deal of fun.

2 Comments

• At November 13, 2009, Apodaca wrote:

  That's a great poster design!

• At November 13, 2009, JdRavnos wrote:

  While I'm a little sad they didn't include the rest of the kids, I'm glad to see there is finally ...

A few months ago, Carla asked us to be Phenix's godparents, which traditionally means we will take some responsibility for his education. So really, it was perfect that we had Phenix here over Halloween. Who else would explain to him about the wonder of Hammer Films?

So after the requisite trick-or-treating we prepared to induct our young godson into the joys of classic Hammer horror movies... at least, the ones that weren't too extreme for a five-year-old boy.

Phenix was dubious at first. "Is it really scary?" he asked me about The Horror of Dracula.

"Some," I admitted. "But really these movies are more just adventures. They're sort of scary but mostly they're just exciting. Like ...like when you listen to rock music really loud, or something like that. Or when you go on a ride on a roller coaster. It takes you up really high really fast, but then it lets you off safe at the end. You always know Van Helsing is going to get Dracula, so the good guys win, it's not SCARY scary."

"Even I like the Hammer ones, Phenix," Julie assured him.

Thus reassured, Phenix settled in with me to watch the first of the Hammer Draculas, and he enjoyed it as much as I knew he would. Of course, it helped that I was there to explain it to him.

But the great pleasure of the old Hammers is that there's not a lot of explaining necessary. Whether it's Dracula or Frankenstein or even the Mummy or the Gorgon, these movies all had the same basic through-line. You've got your Dumbass Meddling With Things He Shouldn't. Resulting in the unleashing of Supernatural Evil. Who's menacing several Hot Girls.

Eventually the evil gets to the Hot Girl We Actually Care About, whereupon our Noble Hero (occasionally with the aid of the Smart Older Guy) comes to the rescue and dispatches said evil.

Always in ninety minutes or less. They really are amusement-park ride films.

Which is why, despite their being marketed originally as "Terrifying! Shock Follows Shock!" and so on in their initial release, the classic Hammer horror movies fit perfectly into what I think of as comfort-food entertainment. See, it's not just that they're favorites of mine.  No, the comfort-food part comes from the pleasure of the expected. When you know going in that there are certain things that are going to happen.

Now, if it's done badly you hear sneering about things like cliché and formula. But if it's done well... you get movies that may not be capital-A Art, but are nevertheless a great deal of fun, and the genre expectations are part of that fun. Hammer applied their formula to any number of classic (and some less-than-classic) efforts, as well as creating a virtual repertory company of actors -- Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Oliver Reed, Thorley Walters -- and as a result the studio became a brand-name in itself.

I really can't think of any other movie studio that created a house style like that. You can't say "a Sony film" or "a Warner's film" or "an MGM film" and create an instant impression of what kind of movie it's going to be -- but you absolutely can say "like a Hammer film" and people who know movies immediately understand what you mean.

I'm a Batman guy and so my favorite Hammers tend to be the vampire ones, though we have many others here as well. Mostly, when I'm looking to unwind with a Hammer, I usually pick the ones that bend the formula without breaking it.

Probably my favorite is Dracula A.D. 1972.

Apart from its delightfully cornball plot about how 70s teenagers looking for "kicks" accidentally resurrect the Lord of the Undead, it's easily my favorite performance by Peter Cushing as Van Helsing. He's always smarter than everyone else in the movie, but in this one he's also cooler than everyone else, even the hip mod London kids who are so contemptuous of The Establishment. Trailer here for those that are curious.

Another favorite of mine that tweaked the Dracula formula a bit is this odd mashup, Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires.

The idea of Peter Cushing's Van Helsing teaming up with a group of young martial-arts masters to take down Dracula's vampire legions is just completely irresistible to me. Hammer horror with value-added kung fu! What's not to love about that? The trailer, here, should give you a little bit of an idea of how much fun this movie is.

The third one on my personal short-list of the Hammers I never get tired of is Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter.

This is another genre mashup, this time with an old-school swashbuckler of the Errol Flynn style inserted into the Hammer horror template. It was written and directed by Brian Clemens, who gave us the classic Avengers with Steed and Mrs. Peel, so you already know it's going to be smart, sexy fun. And with a young Caroline Munro as the requisite Hot Girl you really can't miss. The trailer is here.

All of these are available on DVD for pretty cheap, and there are also several Hammer combo sets out there as well.

All recommended. None of them are ever going to be hailed as Great Cinema, but you know, I come back to them a lot more often than I do other, classier horror movies.

And if you've got an imaginative young person around that you can enjoy them with, so much the better. Certainly this was the best Halloween we had here in a while, and I know Phenix and Julie and I had a much better time here at home, with Lee and Cushing and the House of Hammer, than Carla did at her overpriced bash downtown. (Seeing Phenix cheering, "He tricked Dracula into the sunshine and burnt him all up! That is SO AWESOME!" was even more fun than the movie itself -- and the movie's a hell of a lot of fun.)

*

You can find that same Hammer horror vibe in comics, though I don't think you see it much in current comics. When I want to relax with the comic-book equivalent of a Hammer film I have to go to the archives.

No, not Tomb of Dracula or Swamp Thing or anything like that. Those are justly acknowledged as classics and I love them, but they don't really count as 'comfort-food' entertainment. They're a little too complex, too demanding of full attention.

You know, sometimes you don't want a gourmet meal. Sometimes a bag of chips or a bowl of popcorn will do. And in those cases, for horror comics it's gotta be the old magazine black-and-whites from Warren or Marvel.

That's about as close as you can get to that particular Hammer vibe in comic books. Monsters Unleashed, Creepy, Eerie, Dracula Lives!... any of them will do.

I tend to prefer the Marvel over the Warren, but that's just my taste, I don't think there's any particular qualitative difference. My favorites are Marvel's Vampire Tales, featuring Morbius, and Tales of the Zombie.

Tales of the Zombie has been collected in its entirety in a nice one-volume Essential, but you have to go to eBay or other online dealers for Vampire Tales.

I keep hoping Marvel's got an Essential Morbius coming sooner or later -- it's about the only horror series left for them to reprint from that era. How about it, guys? If Brother Voodoo and The Living Mummy both rate, I think Morbius is overdue.

There's even -- sort of -- a Hammer horror series of paperbacks out there.

Fred Saberhagen's "New Dracula" series isn't nearly as famous as his Berserker stories or his Book of Swords fantasies, but they are hands down my favorite thing he ever did. The gimmick is that he casts Dracula as the hero.

The first one, The Dracula Tape, is the original Bram Stoker story told from Vlad's point of view. The amazing thing about it is that he doesn't change any of the events of Stoker's basic plot, but nevertheless manages to make Dracula look like the good guy. By contrast, Van Helsing comes off like a superstitious, bigoted old man.

Saberhagen followed that with The Holmes-Dracula File, An Old Friend of the Family, Thorn, Dominion, A Question of Time, A Matter of Taste, Seance For A Vampire, A Sharpness on the Neck and A Coldness In The Blood.... eleven in all. (Saberhagen also wrote the novelization of Bram Stoker's Dracula, the 1992 film, but I don't count that one.)

All these books are tremendous fun, and Saberhagen managed to ring a number of clever twists on the vampire legend without sacrificing any of the essential ruthlessness of Dracula's character. What's more, you also can enjoy the added geekery of seeing Dracula meet Sherlock Holmes, Rasputin, Sigmund Freud, and other historical personages -- something that always lights up my inner Wold Newton fanboy. There's plenty of action and hot girls, as well, which is why I will forever associate this series of novels with the Hammer version of Dracula. (In my head I always picture Christopher Lee playing the part as I'm reading them.)

I'm afraid they're all out of print, but they're pretty easy to find online used. They're just compulsively entertaining novels, and though I prefer the earlier ones, particularly An Old Friend of The Family and Thorn, they're all worth checking out.

*

Once again I find I've rambled on rather longer than I meant to, so I'll see you all back here next week as we wrap this series of columns up with some comfort-food choices in fantasy, SF, and superheroes.

18 Comments

• At November 6, 2009, Penny wrote:

  I'm not much of a horror fan - I'm the squeamish sort, but I do like the Hammer horror films. ...

• At November 6, 2009, Bill Reed wrote:

  The Hammer films are, like, the one gigantic hole in my horror watching. Must rectify this.

• At November 7, 2009, Alan Coil wrote:

  I'm glad you were selective in which Hammer films to show young Phenix. I don't think he'll be ready for ...

• At November 7, 2009, tekende wrote:

  I LOVE The Dracula Tape. Read it a long time ago and really enjoyed it. I like how just by ...

• At November 7, 2009, Edo Bosnar wrote:

  I agree with Penny: the real horror here is the damage done to household budgets by Greg's columns - just ...

• At November 7, 2009, Sijo wrote:

  I had a special surprise this Halloween: A friend of mine Emailed me an audio file from an old Radio ...

• At November 7, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  By the way, I've never read anything by Saberhagen, so I have to ask, is he responsible for turning Dracula, ...

• At November 7, 2009, Edo Bosnar wrote:

  Hmmm, yeah, Anne Rice. Years ago, I could only get through about the first half-hour of "Interview with a Vampire." ...

• At November 7, 2009, Richard Hope-Hawkins wrote:

  Thank you for mentioning my late godfather Thorley Walters - Hammer and of course working for the Boulting Brothers he ...

• At November 7, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  For me and most other fans who know the films, Mr. Walters is just as iconic a Hammer figure as ...

• At November 7, 2009, Dan Bailey wrote:

  I'm not a bg fan of vampires per se, as opposed to horror in general -- I'm somewhat infamous in ...

• At November 7, 2009, Dan Bailey wrote:

  (My lack of enthusiasm for vampires notwithstanding, I feel compelled to note that my first LOC in a comic appeared ...

• At November 7, 2009, Mary Warner wrote:

  I've only seen a few Hammer films. I did see Horror of Dracula, and it was all right. ...

• At November 7, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  I also saw ... some movie with Peter Cushing fighting silicon creatures that escaped from a lab on some island.

  That's ...

• At November 7, 2009, Joe Lewis wrote:

  I think it would be really nice if you did a column on "Rat Pfink a Boo Boo."

• At November 8, 2009, Simmie wrote:

  Greg,

  Great column! I always learn something new from your column =) For those interested in Hammer there is a ...

• At November 8, 2009, FunkyGreenJerusalem wrote:

  Remember, wait till your god-son's a teen before putting on The Vampire Lovers.

  It's not right for a child, but for ...

• At November 14, 2009, Saturday’s Comfort Zone Wrapup | Comics Should Be Good! @ Comic Book Resources wrote:

  [...] part one, part two, and part three. I really had intended, when I first outlined this, to keep it ...

I floated the idea at work this week to several of my colleagues and they all had their favorites. As one would expect, for movies it broke right down gender lines -- the ladies all named movies like The Wizard of Oz or Sleeping Beauty or Casablanca, whereas we men like to relax with fare such as Road House or Die Hard or Magnum Force.

For books, it was a little more interesting. There my informal unscientific poll results were a lot less easily defined in terms of genre. I got answers like Stephen King, John Grisham, "the classics," Dorothy Parker (that last was from a guy, too -- a straight guy, before any of you wags out there say anything) Dick Francis, A.A. Milne, "Perry Mason" (NOT Erle Stanley Gardner; in fact, the lady couldn't remember who wrote the books) and stuff like that. The genre selections were not easily pigeon-holed, though I got more mysteries than anything else. But really, familiarity seemed to count for a lot more than genre. "Brand identity," as the marketing people refer to it.

Which, come to think of it, means something to me, too. My short-list of comfort-food movies, books, and comics all tend to be violent, it's true -- for some reason, fictional mayhem is tremendously relaxing to me -- but more often then not, they are also series things. Last week I talked about the list of Westerns... this week I'll give you the list of the modern action series that I always come back to, in print or on film.

For prose there are a few that I always can enjoy. Sherlock Holmes, James Bond... the originals, a pastiche, I'm not picky. In fact my favorite Holmes stories tend not to be Doyle's originals, but rather entertaining fakes like The Seven Per Cent Solution or Laurie King's books.

However, there are two straight action series of novels even more beloved to me than than Holmes or 007, that I've just never gotten tired of over the last thirty years.

The first is Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm.

Now, you say "Matt Helm" and most people think of those swingin' Dean Martin films from the 1960s.

No, no, no. When I say Matt Helm, I mean this guy.

Matt Helm, code name "Eric," government assassin for an unnamed U.S. agency. It has only one mission -- eliminate people who are inimical to U.S. interests. Helm is the agency's best and most ruthless operative. The novels are all narrated in the first person by Helm himself, and he is very matter-of-fact about what he does.

From The Silencers:

<

There was a groan off to one side. I knew where Number One had landed. He'd rammed the bed with his head as he pitched forward . . . but I thought I'd better do something more permanent about him while Number Two was still taking things easy and sizing me up. I jumped up on the double bed. The big one couldn't figure out what I wanted up there. He came forward slowly, alert for a trick. Finally, he lunged for me. I vaulted to one side, dropping over the foot of the bed and landing on his partner, driving the boots in hard. It wasn't a very nice thing to do, but I wasn't feeling very nice.

Another classic Helm moment, from The Betrayers:

He was kneeling there by the jeep, covering his wounds with his big brown hands, looking up at me accusingly while the blood oozed between his fingers. He licked his lips. "You...tricked me, haole!"

It was no time to apologize. I said harshly, "I'm a pro, kanaka. I don't fight for pleasure, just for keeps."

Then the message got through to his brain at last, and his face changed, and he pitched forward in the dirt of the cane field. I waited a little while, as you do, and checked his pulse cautiously, and couldn't find it.

One more, from The Terrorizers:

I knew they were out there. I knew they were coming in. They were on the outside stairs when I grabbed the knives out of the rack: the two big chef's knives I'd spotted the first time I'd walked through. There was one eight-inch Sabatier and one ten-incher, a real sword. Both had wicked, heavy, sharp triangular blades that were wasted on vegetables. They were at the door; they kicked it in. They came through it movie-style, two of them, waving submachine guns, for God's sake!

I recognized the nearest; I'd seen him before. I threw the big knife point first, letting it slip off my fingers; there wasn't room to put a spin on it at that close range. It flew like a spearhead without the shaft and went hilt-deep into the chest. As the man sagged aside, I threw the eight-incher. It got the throat of the guy beyond, a little higher than I'd intended, but why should I admit that? It looked very good, very impressive, very calculated.

That was the idea now, to make it look good. When the odds are overwhelming and retreat is cut off, when there's no place left to go or you just don't care to go there, that's the time you let the word get around once more that none of us comes cheap. They can have us any time, but they've got to pay the price. The tariff is more than a lot of people can afford. It makes things a little safer for those left behind.

It ain't Dean Martin, that's for sure.

Now, as I've said before, a great many macho action paperbacks have a strong undercurrent of conservative, right-wing attitude to them, especially the ones that came to prominence in the 60s and 70s as a sort of pop-culture pushback to the youth movement. But not these. The interesting thing to me about Helm is that he's almost completely apolitical. He doesn't think about the ideology of his opponents any more than the Orkin man worries about the politics of the roaches he's gassing. For Matt Helm, probably the most pragmatic action hero ever created, it's very simple -- his job is pest control.

This, as far as I'm concerned, is what makes the books so much fun. You get a whole new perspective on things when you look at the world through Matt Helm's eyes.

Here's one of my favorite bits of Helm's philosophy, from 1972's The Intriguers.

In this particular scene, Helm is talking to a small-town sheriff he's trying to protect. The sheriff, you see, had fired Kent State-style into a crowd of student protesters and killed several. One of those students had been the daughter of an assassin -- a government assassin, that is, one of Helm's own colleagues. The agent has decided he's going to get revenge on the hick that killed his daughter and it's Helm's job to stop him.

"If the bastard is yours, you ought to keep him in a cage!"

"Shit," I said. "Don't tell us what we ought or oughtn't, or we'll just tell you that you oughtn't to go around shooting people's kids, Sheriff. Sometimes it makes them real mad."

After a pause, he said, "The Janssen girl was an accident."

"Sure," I said. "An accident. You and your boys fired a couple of dozen rounds at a mob less than fifty yards away, if the newspaper reports are correct. Out of that whole barrage you got one solid bull's-eye on a legitimate target -- the Dubuque kid with a brick in his hand -- you got a few scratch hits, and you sent so many wild bullets flying around that you killed two innocent bystanders seventy-five and a hundred yards behind the line of scrimmage. Now really, Sheriff, what the hell kind of marksmanship is that? That's not an accident, that's plain incompetence."

He said sharply, "I suppose it would have been better if we'd got two dozen dead college kids to go with those two dozen bullets!"

I sighed. "Sure it would have been better. If you'd had a dead body to show for every bullet fired, it would have proved, at least, that you and your people knew what you were doing."

Now, I remember the Kent State shootings and that was a terrible, tragic thing.  Even so, that scene never fails to crack me up. I can't help it. I love Helm's bored annoyance with the incompetent cop that couldn't shoot straight even at a goddamn kid with a brick, let alone a REAL opponent.

And it's typical of Matt Helm. The simplicity of Helm's world view, his exasperation with stupid amateurs and his appreciation of competent professionals, be they friend or foe, is what makes the novels so relaxing. And it is refreshing to have a guy writing shoot-em-up books who -- unlike, say, Ian Fleming --  actually understands something about guns.

There are 27 Helm books in all, starting with Death of a Citizen in 1960 and ending with The Damagers in 1993. They are all paperback originals and any one of them is a guaranteed good time. I tend to like the middle ones best, from 1965 on up through 1982 or so -- but if action's your thing, I think you'd enjoy any of them.

My other go-to guy for action novels is John D. MacDonald. Specifically, his Travis McGee books.

MacDonald is often referred to as an author of mysteries and Travis McGee is usually categorized as a detective series, but that's not really what the books are.

Travis McGee lives aboard a houseboat called The Busted Flush that he won in a poker game, in a bohemian dockside community in Fort Lauderdale. He drives a Rolls Royce that has been converted into a pickup truck, and to an outside observer he looks like a Florida beach bum. In reality, McGee says he is taking his retirement in installments as he can afford it, while he's still young enough to enjoy it. Once in a while, he'll take on a job... of a very specialized kind. McGee describes himself as a "salvage consultant," not a professional private detective ("Those people have rules and licenses and such," he scoffs.) If he is successful, he keeps half of what he recovers and lives off that, basking in lazy leisure until his funds get low again.

McGee takes jobs on spec or, more often, to do favors for his friends. Sometimes he gets help from his friend Meyer, a wise old retired economist who also lives aboard a boat in the marina. But these ventures quickly turn into conflicts with ruthlessly corrupt businessmen and sadistic killers.

There are few villains in fiction scarier than the bastards Travis McGee takes on. MacDonald was writing about sociopaths and serial killers long before Hannibal Lecter was fashionable.

Here's Paul Dissat, the slender young sadist from A Tan and Sandy Silence:

He bent suddenly and took a quick swing with the bar, very wristy, and hit Meyer on the back of the right leg, just above the knee. It made an impact sound halfway between smack and thud. Meyer bucked his heavy frame and roared.

"See?" Paul said. "Heavier stock would crush bone and tissue, and lighter stuff would merely sting."

I said, "I'll trade Meyer for all you want to know about the letter."

He looked at me owlishly. "All of Meyer? Alive and free? That's naive, you know. Meyer is dead, and you are dead. There's no choice now. I could trade you, say, the last fifteen minutes of Meyer's life for information about the letter. He would approve a deal like that when the time comes. But what would be the point? I learned a little about myself from killing Mary and a little more from Lisa and a little more from Harry. Now I can check what I learned and learn a little more. Why should I deprive myself?"

"Why indeed?" Meyer said in a husky voice.

"I like you both," Paul said. "I really do. That's part of it, of course. Remember, Travis, how Lisa became... just a thing, an object? It moved and made sounds, but Lisa was gone. I made the same mistake with Harry, but not until the very end. The problem is to keep the person's actual identity and awareness functioning right to the end..."

Now, I can hear some of you wondering, Jeez, Hatcher, what's comforting about this stuff? There's nothing relaxing about that. That's nightmare material.

Well, first of all, the good guys win.  (That should be obvious about any sort of comfort-food adventure fiction, but it bears repeating.) But more, in a Travis McGee novel, there's something compellingly old-school about it, to the point of being almost Biblical, really. Travis McGee is a guy who smites evil. He fights monsters that must be destroyed. It is a certainty in a McGee book that the more evil the villain, the more horrible will be his eventual end. (Paul Dissat's is exceedingly nasty.) Travis McGee doesn't have adventures or fight crimes.  He embarks on crusades.

Which is not to say that MacDonald hasn't got a wry sense of humor about the whole thing. As Travis himself puts it:

If you can't change everything, why try to change any part of it, McGee?

Because, you dumb-ass, when you stop scrubbing away at that tiny area you can reach, when you give up the illusion you are doing any good at all, you start feeling like this. Give up your fatuous, self-serving morality, and you feel grainy, stud-like, secure, and that doggy little smirk becomes ineradicable. You are never going to like yourself a whole lot, T. McGee, so what little liking you have must be conserved.  Get out there on the range and see if they can pot you between the eyes. If they miss, maybe you'll get your nerve back, you tin-horn Gawain.

In recent years, there has been a great deal written about John D. MacDonald's environmental concerns, and how his contempt for what developers were doing to south Florida came out in his books. But that misses the big picture. MacDonald was writing about Evil, about the menaces that prey on the innocent. Crooked and careless developers were just one species of that evil, and in the McGee books at least, evildoers always get what's coming to them, sooner or later. It's what makes them so soothing. There are twenty-one McGee books in all, each with a color in the title (The Green Ripper, The Long Lavender Look, Bright Orange for The Shroud) and they are all easily available. Again, I like the middle ones best but really they're all good. Try to get the older editions with the cool Robert McGinnis covers.

Sadly, Travis McGee hasn't done any better in the movies than Matt Helm has. There was Darker than Amber in 1970, starring Rod Taylor as McGee, that wasn't very good at all.

It was directed by Robert Clouse, who went on to do Enter The Dragon and Black Belt Jones. As you might expect from Clouse, who's mainly famous for kung fu movies that are strung-together fight scenes, about the only thing anyone remembers about this movie is a fight that, legend has it, got completely out of control.

Neither Rod Taylor nor William Smith (who played the villain, Terry) used stuntmen, figuring they were in good enough shape to do it themselves. Apparently they didn't rehearse trhe climactic fight scene well enough; according to Smith himself, recounting the incident on his website, Taylor broke three of Smith's ribs and in return an angry Smith smashed a real bottle over Taylor's real head trying to get him to stop. It was a bloody enough battle that it was actually censored for American audiences, and for years aficionados have been trying to track down an uncut print.

But the rest of the movie is just not good. The bottom line is that Rod Taylor tries hard, but he's nothing like the Travis McGee I know. For one thing, he doesn't come off smart enough. Travis thinks a lot, and there's just nothing going on behind Taylor's eyes. At least, it doesn't look like it.

A few years later they tried again with the considerably better Travis McGee, a TV-movie that was a pilot for a series.

The series didn't sell but the movie is a serviceable enough adaptation of MacDonald's The Empty Copper Sea, and I have a much easier time accepting Sam Elliott in the role.

Unfortunately, budget concerns dictated that the setting be changed from Florida to California, and McGee without Florida isn't really McGee, either. But everything else was done well enough that I can forgive them.

Unfortunately, neither film is available on home video, though bootleggers do a brisk business in both. Once in a great, great while you might catch one of them rerun on syndicated television.

Really, though, when I want an action movie, neither Helm nor McGee's cinematic adventures are satisfying. There's always an undercurrent of fanboy annoyance to the experience that I can't quite seem to rein in.

No, for an action movie I'll usually settle in with Die Hard or The Warriors or maybe Road House. (I even have a soft spot for Road House 2: Last Call.)

But honestly? The DVD I am most likely to throw in when I want an old favorite at the end of a long day is, believe it or not, a homemade gift from a friend -- the unsold pilot for Global Frequency.

I know it's not a perfect adaptation. But it's a really good one, it's based on my favorite action comic of all time so I'm already inclined to be in love with it. Michelle Forbes was born to play Miranda Zero, and you know, most everyone else in the thing is pretty good too.

Likewise, for me, as far as action in comics is concerned, Global Frequency is it. I can go back to it over and over and love it every time. You can have Planetary ...as undeniably brilliant as it might be, it's more demanding. When I just want to relax with a comic that has balls-out action, Global Frequency is the most entertaining one I know, and it has the added benefit of a reader being able to jump in anywhere at any point. The premise is so completely understandable that the tagline's all you need -- mysterious Miranda Zero has 1001 specialists on the Global Frequency, any of whom can be drafted at any time to combat menaces too dangerous or bizarre for normal agencies to handle. There, you're caught up. Now hang on because Warren Ellis is going to floor it.

Seriously, that's all anyone has to know. You can pick up either one of the two collections or just a single issue and after having read it, be completely satisfied and delighted.

For straight action without superheroics, there's really nothing to touch it, not even classic stuff like Frontline Combat or Two-Fisted Tales.

I occasionally get wistful about there not being more than twelve issues of Global Frequency, or about the TV pilot not selling, but you know, sometimes it's best just to have a small number of episodes of something that you can count on to always be great.

*

....and once again this has gone on rather longer than I intended. Feel free to chime in with your own action picks below, and I'll be back next week with my comfort-food picks in SF, fantasy, and horror. (And yeah, there is such a thing as comfort-food horror. Really.) See you then.

22 Comments

• At October 30, 2009, Joe Lewis wrote:

  Dorothy Parker! (Let's see if I can remember...)

  "Razors pain you...rivers are damp...

  acids stain you...and drugs cause cramp...

  guns aren't lawful...nooses ...

• At October 30, 2009, Ed Buskirk wrote:

  I don't find your choice of comfort-food fiction strange in the least. My favorite comfort films are "Taxi Driver" and ...

• At October 30, 2009, Alan Coil wrote:

  That Global Frequency dvd was excellent. I'm guessing the only reason it didn't get made into a series was the ...

• At October 30, 2009, stealthwise wrote:

  It's funny, but until you mentioned it, I never thought of Global Frequency as an action series, but more of ...

• At October 30, 2009, Matt Bird wrote:

  Comfort-food novels: Ed McBain

  Comfort-food movies: James Bond

  Comfort-food comics: Anything written and drawn by Jim Starlin or Mike Grell

• At October 30, 2009, Tom Fitzpatrick wrote:

  My all-time comfort movie is SE7EN. One hard-hitting gut-wrenching piece of cinimetic film noir. I honestly did ...

• At October 30, 2009, Perry Holley wrote:

  Although I haven't read it yet, I recently picked up a copy of Death of a Citizen for a steal ...

• At October 30, 2009, Cei-U! wrote:

  My comfort food action fiction are the novels of Joseph Wambaugh (The New Centurians, The Blue Knight, The Choirboys, etc). ...

• At October 30, 2009, agent_torpor wrote:

  Ew, Miranda Zero? More Aleph instead!

• At October 30, 2009, Bright-Raven wrote:

  "My short-list of comfort-food movies, books, and comics all tend to be violent, it's true -- for some reason, fictional ...

• At October 30, 2009, The Mutt wrote:

  My comfort food is Spenser. Both the books by Robert B. Parker and the TV show with Robert Urich.

  I would ...

• At October 30, 2009, Penny wrote:

  I just bought a dozen Matt Helms and while I enjoy the movies, I like the books much better. ...

• At October 30, 2009, Alan Coil wrote:

  "I would say that they teach you what it is to be a man, but men don't talk about such ...

• At October 30, 2009, dhole wrote:

  I just had a recent urge for comfort-food movies and found myself watching John Carpenter's The Thing and Robocop. They ...

• At October 30, 2009, Michael Mayket wrote:

  Your Travis McGee talk just made me think, "Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder series rules. I should reread those".

• At October 31, 2009, Lt. Clutch wrote:

  Excellent blog! I'm going to check out those Matt Helm and Travis McGee novels now. Those excerpts and cover art ...

• At October 31, 2009, Edo Bosnar wrote:

  Interesting that some people would call "Casablanca" a comfort-food film, or something like "Citizen Kane" or "Taxi Driver" for that ...

• At October 31, 2009, Mary Warner wrote:

  I'm wondering how those Matt Helm stories you described could possibly get warped into the movie versions. I wonder ...

• At November 1, 2009, Anonymous wrote:

  One can find the Iron Giant on DVD for less than ten bucks at many supermarkets, these days.

  Great film, that.

• At November 1, 2009, garbonzo wrote:

  Global Frequency is, hands down, nothing but fun! I loved the pilot (flawed though it was) and shove ...

• At November 1, 2009, Edo Bosnar wrote:

  Mary, I think "The Princess Bride" would be the definition of a 'comfort food' movie. Heck, the whole storytelling device ...

• At November 14, 2009, Saturday’s Comfort Zone Wrapup | Comics Should Be Good! @ Comic Book Resources wrote:

  [...] part one, part two, and part three. I really had intended, when I first outlined this, to keep it ...

Julie and I are huge nerds and we love Jeopardy! so it's been really fun for us watching Mrs. Len Wein continue to hammer her opposition... especially since a three-day total of around $36,000 will probably go a long way towards restoring their home after the disastrous fire not too long ago. Check your local listings and tune in tonight, and let's hope her winning streak continues!

In other news, we're taking some students along to the upcoming Seattle Comic-Card show and we will be seeing Mr. Wein there, which should be a lot of fun. I'm rooting around in the archives to see if I have anything on this list. I need to thin the herd anyway and this is certainly a good cause. I encourage you folks out there to do the same.

7 Comments

• At October 29, 2009, David Hackett wrote:

  She's been great. The first and third game particularly when she pulled out such strong and dramatic finishes, the ...

• At October 29, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  Yeah, last night was a squeaker, we were so delighted when she pulled out the win that we actually yelled ...

• At October 29, 2009, Joe Lewis wrote:

  I had a friend, Larry Taylor, who was on Jeopardy a few years back. I was sitting at my ...

• At October 29, 2009, Brad Curran wrote:

  I had no idea this was happening. Cool.

• At October 29, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  Woohoo! She won again -- she's at something like $67,000 total now.

• At October 29, 2009, Brian Cronin wrote:

  Yeah, it was a great win.

  Although I can't believe that that dude didn't know the answer to Final Jeopardy. Really, ...

• At October 30, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  Well, she lost tonight, but still, four days is respectable, and nearly $68,000 is certainly a nice package to be ...

For my wife, this means home-improvement shows on TLC or HGTV. I don't know what it is about perky design people showing a young couple how to remodel their den that Julie finds so soothing.

But more often than not, if she's not feeling well, I'll come home to find her snoozing happily, cocooned under a quilt on the couch while some terrifyingly enthusiastic young man on the TV is nailing up shelving. I don't know why this always works for her -- people that are that cheerful and energetic about their household chores scare me -- but for Julie, it's better than chicken soup.

On the other hand, she finds my choices of relaxing entertainment completely baffling, as well. "How can you relax when you're watching all that mayhem?"

I don't know. But I bet I'm not the only guy out there that relaxes with this kind of thing. Maybe it's hard-wired into guys' DNA or something, but I find settling in with Die Hard or Road House to be tremendously soothing and restful. (I'm not the only one -- on the DVD commentary for Road House, Kevin Smith observed that it's a really comfortable movie, one you can cozy up to like a warm blanket, no matter where you come in on it.)

I suppose it's why they call it escapist fiction. After all, it's not as though we're the ones that have to take all those punches, and the heroes win, so it's all good, right?

Anyway, since we've had the flu here the last couple of weeks, comfort food has been the order of the day, and after battling my way through the work week just trying to stay upright at school, I don't have the energy to read or watch anything new. So it's all been old favorites, stuff I never get tired of no matter how many times I see it.

Just for the hell of it, I thought I'd talk a bit this week about my go-to guys... the movies, books, and comics that always work for me no matter what. Generally, these fall into four areas of action-adventure.

The first of these will come as no surprise to regular readers -- Westerns. I think I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that recently we've been watching a lot of Randolph Scott's fifties Western B-movies. Mostly because we picked up these two DVD compilations for a song and we really enjoyed the hell out of them.

I came to the Western genre late in life, though, so these 1950s classics are new discoveries for me. Usually my go-to Western films that I never get tired of are of a more recent vintage. Most often, it's one of the made-for-television Louis L'Amour adaptations done a few years back.

Yeah, I know. Why these? Why not John Wayne or Clint Eastwood? Why not a classic like The Magnificent Seven or Shane or even Silverado? What makes these made-for-TV pulp adaptations special?

I couldn't point to anything specific, but honestly, I think it's the comfort-food thing. These were, believe it or not, the first real Western movies I was exposed to, and you never forget your first.

Understand, I'm not holding them up as being the most innovative and brilliant cowboy films ever done or anything like that. But they are really well-crafted, and there's something reassuringly comfortable about them, a nice old-school adventure vibe. There were several, usually starring Tom Selleck, Sam Elliott, or both, and we own them all: Conagher, The Sacketts, The Shadow Riders, Crossfire Trail, The Iron Marshal. Truthfully, it's the lack of innovation that I appreciate -- they're just plain old westerns, pleasantly familiar without descending too far into cliche. Any one of them is a guaranteed good time for a couple of hours.

But my favorite of them all is The Quick and the Dead.

Later Sam Raimi made a Western with that same name starring Sharon Stone and Gene Hackman, but this isn't it. This one was never in theaters, it was made for HBO in 1987.

It stars Tom Conti and Kate Capshaw as a couple of Easterners who are venturing out west to make a new life for themselves with their young son, and Sam Elliott as a wise old mountain man who takes them under his wing just in time to save them from a psychotic outlaw (veteran western actor Matt Clark, cast here in his one role as a badass and not a bartender) and his gang.

Watching Elliott teach Tom Conti how to be a tough cowboy is a lot of fun, especially when Conti gets to teach Elliott a thing or two as well.

The Louis L'Amour movies eventually led me to his books, and the nice thing about that is that he wrote about a zillion of them... or, I suppose, one could say he wrote the same four or five over and over again. But then, that's what comfort food books are all about -- the pleasure of the expected, when you go in knowing certain marks are going to be hit sooner or later. I don't have a particular favorite (although, oddly, I like the movie version of The Quick and the Dead better than the book.) I have a few of them here in hardcover, but if you just want a fun Western to kill a couple of hours with, you can almost always find a bunch in paperback anywhere you go, often in a used bookstore's fifty-cent box.

I've also acquired a few collections, anthology books full of Western fiction from a variety of the stars in the field. Probably the best of these is A Century of Great Western Stories edited and introduced by John Jakes, who's no slouch at historical adventure himself.

But my favorite Western novel that I can always go back to was, for many years, the only Western I'd ever read.

Lonely Star by Donald S. Rowland. This book once saved my summer, back in 1971. I'd been dragged off to visit family in Montana with my grandmother for what seemed an interminable three weeks. My cousins were vaguely annoyed at being stuck with a city kid and I was really annoyed that Mom hadn't let me pack any books or comics. And we were way the hell out in the middle of nowhere on my Uncle Jack's farm, there was no chance of getting any new ones.

But Uncle Jack, like me, was a reader, and he liked Westerns. He had a couple lying around he'd gotten from the local library's monthly bookmobile visit and Lonely Star was the one that had me from page one. It was the kind of pure-adrenaline adventure I can never resist:

The game horse labored up the steep rise, its heart nearly done. It staggered on the crest, then foundered, falling upon its side with outstretched neck and glazed, bulging eyes. The foaming jaws were agape and its bloodied tongue lolled between its champing teeth. Tracey Blaydon, tall and beefy, middle-aged, with a fleshy black-stubbled face and hard blue eyes, kicked his feet free of the stirrups and fell clear of the saddle as the horse rolled. The echoing crash of a shot, then several shots, made him look down his back trail, and the sight of the dozen riders spurring rapidly towards the bottom of the slope made his thin lips pull tight against his teeth.

That's the first paragraph and it just ramps up from there. Turns out the posse wants Blaydon for a string of robberies he didn't commit-- and the crimes were committed by the same guy Blaydon himself has been after for over a year. At which point, territory governor Andrew Bordene strikes a deal with Blaydon. Bordene's been trying to find a man to go undercover who can get the goods on the Sam Gotch gang, the same gang that Blaydon's quarry was on his way to join...

It's just a rollicking good time. The book was published in 1964, and is one of Rowland's many pulp western and science-fiction efforts. I've never run across any of the others but I made it a point to find this book when I returned home from Montana, and was delighted to find it in our hometown library as well. But that was the only other place I ever saw it, until I finally ordered my own from a dealer in Britain over the internet about six years ago.

I couldn't tell you why I love it so much. It's just a fast-moving pulpy western. But that one summer it was a refuge for me and maybe I still associate that feeling with it. I go back to it once a year or so and it's always a pleasant afternoon. Lately I'm getting interested in guys like Rowland and his contemporaries, E.B. Mann and Archie Joscelyn and so on, who pounded out these potboiler hardcovers at a rate of what seemed like one a month during the 1960s. But Lonely Star is still my favroite.

In comics Westerns are only just coming back into vogue, but even when they were mostly gone there was always one I could count on. Jonah Hex.

There's something really indestructible about this character. Old series or new, I can always count on the character to be engaging, the art to be a cut above the industry standard, and the story to be a reliably entertaining good time.

Unlike other long-running characters in comics, though, I honestly couldn't tell you the name of a Hex story I ever thought was out-and-out bad. Some are better than others, sure, but even the less-than-stellar entries are always done at a baseline level of competence I can count on.

I suppose I should qualify that by saying that it has to be the WESTERN version of Jonah Hex. But I don't count that post-apocalyptic SF monstrosity DC put out a couple of decades ago, and I think all us Hex fans are agreed that must have just been a bad dream or something.

The new collection, Lead Poisoning, just came out this week, and it was just as solidly entertaining as all its predecessors. In fact, settling in with that a few days ago was the bright spot in an otherwise crappy flu-ridden week.

*

This has run so long that I think I'm going to break it up into a couple of installments. I'll be back here next week with part two -- featuring my short-list of always-dependable, comfort-food class of modern-day action comics, movies, and novels that I never get tired of. See you then.

20 Comments

• At October 24, 2009, danjack wrote:

  i really like Sam Raimi's 'Quick & the Dead'. Its one of my 'comfort movies'. Hey! That might be a ...

• At October 24, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  Ha! Well, you're in luck, because I thought "comfort-food" entertainment WAS a pretty good idea for a column, actually. Or ...

• At October 24, 2009, Perry Holley wrote:

  I just wish DC would put out more Showcase volumes of Jonah Hex.

• At October 24, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  I just wish DC would put out more Showcase volumes of Jonah Hex.

  Don't we all. Bat Lash was nice and ...

• At October 24, 2009, Da Fug wrote:

  And then there's the odd one of us who has only read the Vertigo stuff and can't believe that a ...

• At October 24, 2009, Tom Fitzpatrick wrote:

  I seem to remember Tom Selleck doing a couple of Quigley movies, western, I think.

  Am I wrong?

• At October 24, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  I seem to remember Tom Selleck doing a couple of Quigley movies, western, I think. Am I wrong?

  Just the one. ...

• At October 24, 2009, Ian wrote:

  I agree; westerns are perfect comfort food movies, whether you've seen them before or not, as you're always familiar with ...

• At October 24, 2009, stealthwise wrote:

  I was buying Hex month to month for the first year or so, but dropped it as I didn't find ...

• At October 25, 2009, Ted wrote:

  My personal "comfort" movies are ... Lost in Translation

  Really? Excellent movie, no doubt, but comforting? Seems too melancholy to comforting ...

• At October 25, 2009, s1rude wrote:

  Another vote for Raimi's The Quick and the Dead as pure awesome that goes down smooth whenever needed. The ...

• At October 25, 2009, jazzbo wrote:

  I actually just read the entire run of Hex (the Jonah Hex in the future series) last winter, and found ...

• At October 25, 2009, FunkyGreenJerusalem wrote:

  It's funny, my idea of a good Western are Sergio Leone's films and Clint Eastwood's westerns - the post-modern Westerns, ...

• At October 25, 2009, sgt rawk wrote:

  Love Jonah Hex. Gray & Palmiotti's modern take on it suits me right down to the ground, but Hell and ...

• At October 26, 2009, Edo Bosnar wrote:

  You didn't actually mention it, although you included an image of the poster, and I fully agree with the choice: ...

• At October 26, 2009, Blackjak wrote:

  Always loved Jonah Hex. The Tim Truman/Joe Lansdale Vertigo run is actually at the top of my list though. ...

• At October 26, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  I also went from Floppies to trades, then back again with the current Palmiotti/Gray series - for exactly the same ...

• At October 26, 2009, Dan Bailey wrote:

  Man, I referred to "comfort-food comics" (particularly in reference, in my case, to Silver Age Legion of Super-Heroes) at least ...

• At October 26, 2009, Bill Reed wrote:

  Quigley Down Under always convinced me it was like the third in a series-- when it's the only one. So ...

• At November 14, 2009, Saturday’s Comfort Zone Wrapup | Comics Should Be Good! @ Comic Book Resources wrote:

  [...] part one, part two, and part three. I really had intended, when I first outlined this, to keep it ...

The question put to the floor was, what makes something a "cult" hit, as opposed to being just a clear success or failure?

We were primarily talking about movies, but I thought it was an interesting exercise to apply the idea to comics, as well.

Of course, if you apply the term as it's commonly used to describe movies or television, well, all comic books are "cult" comics. Especially superhero comics -- it's a narrow genre, there aren't that many people who read them, and the ones who do read them tend to be really devoted and knowledgeable. As far as the layman is concerned, technically DC and Marvel's entire output is to a cult audience.

So we have to refine the definition a little bit. Here's what I came up with as characteristics of what I'd consider to be a "cult" comic book series.

In its initial appearance, the series was a short-run commercial failure. Whatever time limit you choose is arbitrary, but for our purposes let's say that to be considered a 'cult' series, whatever its original incarnation might have been, it didn't sell in big numbers and ran two years or less.

Let me walk you through a test case. Take Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson's Manhunter.

It started as a revival of a Golden-Age B-lister, an obscure little feature from Joe Simon and Jack Kirby that ran in Adventure Comics during the 1940s.

The '40s Adventure Comics version would be called a moderate success, I guess, though the Simon and Kirby Manhunter was never a major player. The feature ran as a backup from #58 to #92 or so, as nearly as I can figure, usually running 8 or 9 pages per issue. But the Goodwin/Simonson revival turned into something else entirely.

Though, as I said, it was not a huge success initially. The revived-and-reimagined Manhunter started as a backup feature in Detective #437, and ended in #443. Six backup 8-page stories and one lead feature (shared with Batman) that clocked in at 20 pages.

By any standard measure it was a commercial failure. Didn't really bump the Detective sales numbers up, didn't get great word of mouth on the book... pretty much was a blip in the history of the title.

But it was admired by people in the business. I think that has to be the second criterion -- a "cult" series should be, despite its commercial failure, a word-of-mouth hit among fellow professionals. Manhunter reputedly blew away every freelancer that saw it in the DC offices at the time. Its writer, Archie Goodwin, was routinely named as "the best writer in comics" by his peers and three of the strip's seven installments won Shazam Awards, as well as a couple more being bestowed on Archie Goodwin for overall Best Writer as well as naming Walt Simonson as Best New Talent in 1973 and 1974. Those were peer awards, voted on by working comics writers and artists -- the membership of the Academy of Comic Book Arts. They're not fan awards.

What else? Well, a "cult" series should be continually discovered by generations of new readers. It doesn't die off.

Manhunter got canceled after seven installments. But it was such a legend that it was collected in trade paperback just four years later, in 1979, which was really unprecedented back then.

It was collected again in the 80's.

And again in 1999, this time with some added material.

And I believe that 1999 edition is still available. The book's still not a hit, not doing big numbers or anything -- but it's there, enough of a perennial that it's worth it to DC to keep it in print.

What else? Well, it should be influential. I think Manhunter certainly qualifies there. Pop quiz -- how many other superhero comics have done espionage, ninjas or clones since 1974?

Yeah, exactly. I don't for a minute imply that the works that came after were stealing from Manhunter, but I'm talking influences here.

And finally... in comics, a "cult" success means people keep trying to recapture the magic. And usually failing.

No one has been able to duplicate whatever it was that made the Goodwin-Simonson Manhunter work. But that doesn't stop them from trying.

But it takes more than just bringing the character back.

Or riffing on his name and costume.

Even a version done as a straight-up homage with the blessing and permission of Walt Simonson fell flat.

What's interesting is that Manhunter's most successful incarnation to date is a revival that goes nowhere near the Goodwin and Simonson character.

Kate Spencer's Manhunter has nothing to do with Paul Kirk's -- not even as a 'legacy' character, unlike DC's other tries. I think that as a result of that decision to make a clean break, it is the most successful version of "Manhunter" that DC Comics has ever done -- because it goes off and does its own thing. If you include Birds of Prey then I think Kate Spencer almost has more pages recounting her adventures than all the other iterations combined. (Kate's book ran 38 issues. Her closest runner-up, Mark Shaw, only got 24... Chase Lawler got 14. And Paul Kirk never even got to headline -- he was in seven issues of Detective and his clones were in a couple of different team books, Secret Society of Super-Villains and Power Company.) At this point I think Kate Spencer's page count even eclipses the original Golden Age Manhunter's, the Simon and Kirby version.

And yet that's the one that's usually referred to as having a "rabid cult following," or being a "successful failure," or all the other things one usually ascribes to things that are "cult" hits. Go figure.

*

I picked Manhunter because it's a favorite of mine and I already knew most of the stats, but you can play this game with any number of other short-lived-but-beloved comics series.

For example, just pulling one out of a hat, I think DC's Prez might well be a candidate for "cult" status.

Objectively, the book was a dismal failure, canceled after four issues. And the issues that were published were not really very good.

But for some reason, almost forty years later, the title has a certain cachet among comics historians. People still know the book and talk about it. It gets blogged about quite a bit.

And professionals keep going back to that well. Neil Gaiman did it in Sandman...

...and here it is again in a revival special from Vertigo, this time from Ed Brubaker and Eric Shanower.

There's something there in the original that people are still latching on to. I don't know that the series meets ALL the criteria I laid out above (Is Prez influential? Doubtful.) But I think it hits most of those marks.

One more example. This one I think is inarguable. Wally Wood's witzend.

This started as a self-published anthology project from Wally Wood and several of his studio friends, and served as the launching pad for all kinds of stuff. It's occasionally cited as the first of the underground comics, though I think it has much more in common with "ground-level" stuff like Star*Reach. In particular, Wood's Wizard King is remembered as being a groundbreaking piece of fantasy comics work.

Again, it doesn't meet ALL the criteria -- but it hits a lot of them. In particular, witzend was an influence on a lot of people. Ralph Bakshi's Wizards is very nearly an uncredited adaptation of Wood's Wizard King.

(Some say it's outright theft of Wood's work but I wouldn't go quite that far.)

The main point I wanted to make is that there's a difference between "cult status" and "fondly-remembered flop." For example, I think Chase was a cult series.

But Prowler, as much as I adored it, was just a failure.

I could go on. But I think you all get the idea... so let's hear your picks. What are your nominations for the series that were...

...initially commercial flops...
...but beloved by professionals...
...continually re-discovered by new readers...
...can be shown as a clear influence on other work...
...and occasionally revived, but without success?

Talk amongst yourselves. Enjoy. And I'll see you next week.

38 Comments

• At October 16, 2009, brian wrote:

  I loved Night Force, though I'm not sure it meets all your criteria.

  I think one of the reasons Prez remains ...

• At October 16, 2009, Manglr wrote:

  I'd go with Moore/Davis/Delano's Captain Britain run.

  The Jasper's Warp storyline in particular had the benefit of two up and coming ...

• At October 16, 2009, jazzbo wrote:

  I think another criteria that could be added is if the comic was an early project by a now well-known ...

• At October 16, 2009, Teebore wrote:

  Would Moon Knight fit the mold? His initial failure wasn't that colossal, but he seems to get his series canceled ...

• At October 16, 2009, Tom Fitzpatrick wrote:

  How about the DOOM PATROL?

  Isn't Grant Morrison's version of DP considered the best version? Pollack's version never achieved the ...

• At October 16, 2009, Mary Warner wrote:

  I like Brian's suggestion of Night Force. I really liked that one, although I only read the first four ...

• At October 16, 2009, Dan Bailey wrote:

  Neat topic. I've asked myself many times over the years about why probably my two favorite writers, Philip K. Dick ...

• At October 16, 2009, Teebore wrote:

  Omega the Unknown is probably a great example. It never caught on, but was critically acclaimed, and revisited recently (including ...

• At October 16, 2009, Carl wrote:

  I'd think that Morrison's DP might qualify as having been too successful to qualify.

• At October 16, 2009, Carl wrote:

  Also, Doom Patrol revivals haven't necessarily been about recapturing Morrison's DP. Some have been more about recapturing the original.

• At October 16, 2009, Adam wrote:

  I'd nominate the Spectre, but I'm not sure he fits the "initially commercial flops" element. I honestly don't know ...

• At October 16, 2009, Jacob T. Levy wrote:

  Chase was the example in my mind as I was reading the column... and then there she was!

  I agree, Morrison's ...

• At October 16, 2009, Wesley Smith wrote:

  I think something that's missing from the formula is "a small but loyal and VOCAL group of fans." I wouldn't ...

• At October 16, 2009, Bright-Raven wrote:

  Ouch.

  I wish I could play your game, Greg, but thinking about this stuff just makes me blindingly angry. All I ...

• At October 16, 2009, Scott Harris wrote:

  I was going to respond with a long, thoughtful reply, but then I saw that Manhunter #0 cover and instead ...

• At October 16, 2009, garbonzo wrote:

  OMAC?

  Grendel?

• At October 16, 2009, Scott Harris wrote:

  Thinking about it more, I might nominate the original Deathlok series from Astonishing Tales. Also, Don McGregor and Paul Gulacy's ...

• At October 16, 2009, capt usa(Jim) wrote:

  I initially thought of star-lord as a possibility. I figure that most of the big two examples would be ...

• At October 16, 2009, Jeff R. wrote:

  Actually, Prez was revived by John Ostrander (in Firestorm) several years before Gaiman touched him. Only it was done far ...

• At October 16, 2009, danjack wrote:

  Bruce Campbell has said that the difference between a cult movie and a successful movie is that one is seen ...

• At October 16, 2009, Mike Loughlin wrote:

  Although beloved by discerning readers and professionals at the time, Howard the Duck's reputation was killed by the movie. A ...

• At October 16, 2009, benday-dot wrote:

  Flex Mentallo... critically acclaimed, but due to legal issues, not nearly as widely read... this little series is one with ...

• At October 16, 2009, Sijo wrote:

  First, nice to you that you (and your wife, hopefully?) have by now recovered from whatever bug kept you from ...

• At October 16, 2009, Bill Reed wrote:

  Man, Prez is great. The Gaiman and Brubaker revivals? Godawful. Really bad. But those originals are brilliant, same for anything ...

• At October 17, 2009, Basara wrote:

  Scott Harris:

  I'd include Atari Force as well, with one caveat.

  IT started off as bonus comics for 5 video game cartridges, ...

• At October 17, 2009, KAM wrote:

  My first thought was "Bat Lash", although I'm not sure if it meets all your criteria.

  I'd like to say "Star ...

• At October 17, 2009, Cei-U! wrote:

  Regarding the Golden Age Manhunter series: the Simon and Kirby version doesn't begin until Adventure #73. The earlier stories by ...

• At October 17, 2009, Dan Bailey wrote:

  bill --

  >>anything Joe SImon did in the 70s, like Green Team, or Brother Power.

  *ahem* Brother Power was from the ...

• At October 17, 2009, Perry Holley wrote:

  Another Atari Force fan here.

  It doesn't meet all of the requirements (it hasn't been revived in any fashion that I ...

• At October 17, 2009, Edo Bosnar wrote:

  I agree with a few of the commenters above, in that I think Omega the Unknown (especially), Rom and Omac ...

• At October 17, 2009, Bill Reed wrote:

  Underwhelmed by Flex Mentallo!?!?

  You better believe that's a paddlin'.

• At October 17, 2009, benday-dot wrote:

  Edo, yes, you are probably right in your assessment of Flex Mentallo. Any cult status it has is pretty much ...

• At October 17, 2009, Dan Bailey wrote:

  Looks like we already know which camp Bill falls in ...

• At October 18, 2009, FunkyGreenJerusalem wrote:

  Does Starman count as a cult hit?

  It was below cancellation numbers for most of it's run, and only kept alive ...

• At October 18, 2009, Dalarsco wrote:

  I had no idea until this moment that that wondersully trippy Sandman issue was based on a previous comic.

• At October 19, 2009, Chappy wrote:

  Although its rather recent, I'd nominate Peter Milligan and Mike Allred's run on X-Force/X-Statix for consideration. I remember it being ...

• At October 19, 2009, philfromgermany wrote:

  I doubt the last Manhunter title will achieve a cult status. But maybe it's just me because, much as liked ...

• At October 20, 2009, Ricardo wrote:

  I would say that Vext and Heckler are pretty close to cult status. And Ambush Bug, which is never a ...

Okay, I'll level with you.

It's been a really rough week. Very tough school week (fun and challenging, yes, but tough) with massively overcrowded classes, as well an ugly book-production job that involved horrific amounts of overtime... and the column I've been wrestling with for the last couple of days just blew up.

On top of everything else, as is traditional during the fall for many of us who labor in the public school system, I have managed to catch some sort of hideous virus, and I'm afraid my bride has managed to catch it as well. I love my students, but they are little plague ships, the lot of them. Somehow I always forget this and neglect to get a flu shot in September. Every October as I am coughing and blowing my nose, I mutter, "Shoulda made time for the flu shot," and then over the intervening months, I forget this resolution. Every goddamn year. For going on sixteen years. You'd think I'd learn.

Not to go on and on like Eeyore, but...

...sometimes, all you have left is, "Blegh."

The point is, I know when I'm licked. I am admitting defeat.

If it's good enough for Batman, it's good enough for me. I'll take another swing at the real column next week, but in the meantime Julie and I are going to settle in with some chicken soup and a DVD that arrived recently, featuring the Middleman's favorite movie star.

I can tell you that Colt .45 is a fine old traditional Western and Randolph Scott is terrific in it. But you don't have to take my word for it... someone's put the whole thing up on YouTube in eight parts, here. Check it out. That way I won't feel guilty about skipping this week and going back to bed.

See you next week.

14 Comments

• At October 9, 2009, Kevin Hellions wrote:

  Get well soon Greg. Your Friday columns are always a highlight of my week, but my enjoyment is not ...

• At October 9, 2009, Sijo wrote:

  Sorry, what? My brain is still blown by BATMAN DECIDING TO CELEBRATE A FAILURE! O_O

  But seriously: Hope you and your ...

• At October 9, 2009, Tom Fitzpatrick wrote:

  You're not the only one whose Friday is in Ruins.

  Up here in Winnipeg, we've gotten about 5 cm of snow ...

• At October 9, 2009, Alan Coil wrote:

  2000 IU of vitamin D3 per day is supposed to help boost your system so you don't catch viruses. I ...

• At October 9, 2009, chad wrote:

  get well greg for its better to rest up then trying to write a column when your mind is clouded ...

• At October 9, 2009, Brian wrote:

  As a teacher, I totally sympathize with your flu dilemma. Hope you feel better soon, and I look forward to ...

• At October 10, 2009, Edo Bosnar wrote:

  Get well soon, and take advantage of the opportunity to indulge in audio, video and literary 'comfort food.' I can ...

• At October 10, 2009, stealthwise wrote:

  Feel better soon, man. I ditched out on class this week (I teach night courses at the college) in ...

• At October 11, 2009, Perry Holley wrote:

  Sheriff Bart: Just give me 24 hours to come up with a brilliant idea to save our town. Just 24 ...

• At October 11, 2009, Mortenzen wrote:

  It's already been said many times but get well soon!

• At October 12, 2009, FunkyGreenJerusalem wrote:

  I can't remember if you've mentioned seeing it or not, but I recently got the Green Lantern: First Flight animated ...

• At October 12, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  I can't remember if you've mentioned seeing it or not, but I recently got the Green Lantern: First Flight animated ...

• At October 12, 2009, FunkyGreenJerusalem wrote:

  Haven't written it up or anything, but we DID see it and it instantly leapfrogged to Favorite DC Animated Adaptation ...

• At October 12, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  Psyching yourself up for the new Holmes film, or immunizing yourself with 'real' Holmes ready for when it comes out?

  Oh, ...

*

Business News: By now most every comics blogger on the planet has weighed in on the ramifications of Disney buying Marvel, or the DC restructuring, or the Kirby heirs lawsuit. I don't have anything new to say about that stuff except that I agree with all those people who are saying "too early, we'll have to wait and see."

I do have a couple of comments that are more general, though.

The first is in answer to a question I've seen come up several times, which is: why do we even care about the business side of things at all? Aren't we supposed to be talking about the characters and the stories here? The place is called Comics Should Be Good, not Contracts Should Be Good.

That's a fair question. Here's a partial answer.

The first reason you as a reader should care about the business side of things is because for any area of popular culture, the business side affects how the creative work is executed. Whether it's something as basic as a title being canceled because of low sales, or something more subtle, like price changes affecting page count, or a newly-purchased character joining an ongoing team book, or even creators venting about business practices in the work itself, the financial considerations will affect the story that sees print. Period.

Comics are a commercial art form. The need to insure that commercial art makes money for the publisher always affects the process of how it is created. Always. Ignoring that basic fact is something that you really can't do if you're going to write intelligently about comics. Or television, or movies, or any mass entertainment medium.

However, there's also the question of why we all worry about it so much.

I can't speak for any of my brethren toiling away in the online comics press outlets, but I know why it's a topic I keep circling back to, one way and another.

For me, the reason I am often compelled to look at the way Marvel and DC do business is because I worry about the audience.

It keeps getting smaller. And over and over I see the biggest comics companies making decisions that seem designed to shrink the audience even further. Instead of a business plan that might actually bring more people into the pool, increasing overall readership, the whole strategy seems to be predicated on getting every single hardcore comics fan in North America to read every comic published instead of just some of them.

So this desperation to please the hardcore comics fan is what's driving the industry. I don't think there's even any argument about that any more. It's just a question of whether that's good or bad.

As a general rule, I think it's bad, certainly as far as Marvel and DC are concerned. It keeps their comic books locked in this weird no-man's-land between being a mass medium and a hobbyist's collectible. It's why we keep printing comics in a format that makes no sense either from a business standpoint or a consumer's. Because, really, the only reason to keep comics as a periodical 32-page stapled booklet, that's ridiculously overpriced compared to any other form of popular entertainment out there, is because fans insist on getting them that way.

That's just one example. There are lots of others where appeasing fan preferences trumped using simple business sense.

And yet... despite Marvel and DC's constant wooing, that fan base never gets any bigger. Instead, it shrinks, year after year. We have to adjust our comics budget in tough times, or we decide we're tired of lugging longboxes around, or we just plain get bored and move on. That happens about a thousand times more often than a new person sampling a standard monthly comic book from DC or Marvel and deciding to keep up with it.

Hell, you don't have to take my word for it. Ask yourselves. How many titles have you dropped in the last ten years? Against that, how many have you added? I love comics, I've been buying the things on a weekly basis since 1975 or thereabouts with only one brief hiatus from 1983 to 1985... and I don't get nearly as many as I used to.

Marvel and DC have bet everything on us. Hardcore fans, the Wednesday faithful. Their whole business strategy is pinned on catering to our whims. And I'm pretty sure that's a dumb idea and it isn't working, and it bothers me. I want Marvel and DC to succeed. I enjoy superhero comics. I'd like them to do well.

Apart from all that, I'm firmly convinced that comics stories produced for a mass audience are overall of a higher quality than those produced for a specialty audience. The level of craft in play tends to be better. So when comics give up on trying for a mass audience, the level of craft goes down. When DC and Marvel decide they should abandon any hope of a mass audience and concentrate on pleasing us, the net effect is that we get worse comics.

Fans excuse more. Sorry, but we do. We buy books that are bad because we don't want to break up a run. We buy books that are bad because we're hoping it'll get good again later. We buy books that are bad because they tie in to a crossover. Etc. DC and Marvel are betting big on that, too.

So when there's a big business shakeup or a turnover in editorial personnel, I'm always watching it and wondering, Will this be it? Is this where someone realizes that making Marvel and DC Comics a key club for aficionados was a bad idea and fixes it? Or what if they just decide to give up on publishing comics period? How long before some accountant kills the whole thing? Hell, Disney couldn't be bothered to keep publishing their own newsstand magazine and it probably outsold most of the books Marvel considers to be hits.

So I watch, and I wonder, and I worry. The last time the landscape looked this grim was back in 1978 or thereabouts, and then a hail-Mary throw from half-court gave us the direct market. That wasn't a solution for the sinking ship so much as it was a stopgap, a life raft-- one that's developed a slow leak ever since the early 1990s. Today, once again, things are looking grim and no one seems to have any real idea what to do about it.

A lot of us are wondering what the new idea will be that bails us out of the mess we're in now... or even if there is one. Occasionally, I wonder in print, here, and float a few ideas of my own.

That's why I keep coming back to the business side of things. Others might have different reasons, but those are mine.

*

Nerd Pandering: Admittedly, speaking as one of the forty-something comics fans that Marvel and DC seem to want to cater to so completely, it's a great time to BE a guy like me. I am continually astonished at how much of the current slate of paperback and hardcover collections are aimed directly at readers my age.

On the other hand, if publishers really want us old fogeys to take an interest in their new stuff based on our affection for the old, they ought to try and get it right.

Exhibit A: Marvel's Shang-Chi one-shot.

Now, that cover had me at hello, it was such an awesome re-creation of the old Deadly Hands of Kung Fu cover ambiance.

If you've only seen the preview art you're not really getting the full effect, because the Shang-Chi cover typography sold me more than the picture itself. It evoked such a wave of nostalgic love for the old Deadly Hands that it was off the rack and in my hands before I even consciously thought I have to get this.

However, it's when you open the book and start reading it that it kind of goes off the rails. At least as far as the old-school appeal is concerned.

To begin with, the lead story by Jonathan Hickman isn't really a Shang-Chi story. It's a funny Deadpool story with some other guy in it that is apparently supposed to be Shang-Chi, but bears absolutely no resemblance to the character in any incarnation I've ever heard of. This wisecracking, bike-riding hipster with a taste for diner food isn't really the Shang-Chi I bought the book to read about.

Even granting that I haven't been keeping up with every last development in the Marvel Universe over the last few years (for all I know, this might be Shang-Chi's Bold New Direction or something) it was a little jarring.

Still, I was a Bob Haney fan, I can say to myself Just go with it, if it means staying on the fun train... but, I dunno, this story just wasn't all that much fun for me. I admit that a lot of my discontent came from opening it up expecting to see a more traditional martial-arts suspense story and instead getting a sort of surrealist slapstick buddy comedy with all the action scenes moved off-panel. Nevertheless, it did feel a little bit like I was the victim of a bait-and-switch, and the jagged, impressionistic art job from Kody Chamberlin -- though it absolutely suited the material and was very well done -- added to the feeling that I wasn't really the guy this story was aimed at, despite the cover. This is for fans of Deadpool, not Shang-Chi. If you're into Deadpool, you'll love it; but if you bought this for the Master of Kung Fu, well, it's probably not going to be your thing.

The next story, a more traditional entry by Mike Benson, I liked quite a bit better. Except that it wasn't a story so much as a vignette. A guy with a grudge follows Shang-Chi and calls him out, they fight, Shang-Chi wins -- oops, SPOILER, sorry -- and Shang tells him good luck next time. The end.

It's a nice enough little piece and I loved the art by Tomm Coker; it was experimental and different-looking, but not enough that I had any trouble figuring out what was going on. I really liked the cinematic approach, it was clearly an attempt to merge the traditional Gulacy look with a more photorealistic style. Shang-Chi, as played by Jet Li in a John Woo film.

However, the story was marred by an editorial decision that just doesn't make sense to me. An eleven-page visceral action set-piece that's basically all mood and movement -- but in a misguided effort to be authentic or something, all the dialogue is typeset in Chinese and then the English translation is footnoted.

Sorry, but from an editorial and storytelling perspective, that's just dumb. The effect is to constantly stop your eye as you look from the panel to the footnoted translation and back again. Whatever the reasoning was behind doing it this way (Enhancing the 'authentic' Hong Kong mood? An obsession with accuracy? Showing off a new capability in Photoshop? Who knows?) the effect is distancing and distracting. So, again, a story that I was all set to like a lot fell a little flat.

The final entry was a piece by Charlie Huston that kind of had the opposite problem. Rather than trying to be New and Different, it is an absolute and unashamed pastiche riffing on the early days of Shang-Chi. In fact it's a direct sequel to the second Master of Kung Fu comic ever published.

That one ended with Midnight dead at the end. Now, suddenly, he's back, and with super powers, even.

Plus, he's got amnesia. Huston doesn't really bother with explaining any of this other than a throwaway caption referencing "Kree science" being responsible. Now, again, in fairness it's entirely possible that I missed something somewhere in some other book, but, you know, I bought THIS one and that's where I'd like to see some of these things spelled out a little better. (And bear in mind that I'm probably one of the four or five people that bought this that actually remembered the original Midnight story. A newer reader would have been even more lost than I was.)

It seemed like, again, kind of an odd storytelling choice, to reference something that far back and go for a character resurrection tale predicated on the assumption that the reader is steeped in Marvel continuity and can easily follow along. Especially since the story itself is pretty light fare. It's basically another 9-page fight-scene vignette, Shang-Chi trying to subdue the guy and jog his memory before any innocent bystanders are hurt. The art from Enrique Romero is serviceable but not particularly inspired.

We end with a text piece from Robin Furth that gives the background on Shang-Chi as well as one could expect when you're forbidden by licensing issues from mentioning Fu Manchu, Sir Denis Nayland-Smith, or anything created by Sax Rohmer. At least it's got some nice Paul Gulacy illustrations, another bone thrown to us old-school geezers.

So, on the whole, I have to give Marvel credit for trying... but despite wanting to like this book a whole lot, most of it left me wondering why they bothered. It's presented as something to woo the guys my age, but the Deadpool story that headlines it comes off like it's deliberately designed to annoy people like me. And all the other pieces can be filed under "heart in the right place, but fumbled execution." If Marvel wanted to do an updated Shang-Chi comic that preserved what was cool about the character for us old folks and at the same time introduced him to new readers in a way that leaves them wanting more, well... this wasn't that book. Sorry.

Truly, I am, because this is a great idea for a package and I'd love to see Marvel try more stuff in this format. 48 pages, three stories and a text piece, for $3.99, is a good deal. It's the first time in forever that I took more than five minutes to read a comic, and I've been saying for years that an easy way to cut costs without looking cheap is to print in black and white.

The trouble was, what I thought I was buying never really showed up. For a book ostensibly starring Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu, it didn't feel like he was in it all that much. Shang-Chi was traditionally a strip about a peaceful guy that was thrown into an amoral world of betrayal, espionage and violence; he was constantly having to prove his ethics to people that had none. That was what made the character interesting. But only one of the three stories in this comic even flirted with that idea, for about a panel and a half.

My feeling is that it should be easy to do a new take on the original Shang-Chi idea -- fighting for one's morals in a world of ugliness and betrayal -- and shine up the character for a new readership, and that's what I bought the book expecting to see. That's the trap when you trade on people's nostalgia. You risk just annoying them if your new version doesn't satisfy the expectations you evoke with all your callbacks to the old stuff.

I do applaud Marvel's making the effort, and would happily support more books in a format like this. I just wish I'd liked the actual stories in this book better than I did.

*

Nerd Pandering, part 2 (TV edition): It's fall premiere time for the networks, and against my better judgement I decided to check in on a couple of shows I'd previously given up on.

Quite a few people had suggested to me that Dollhouse had, after its stumbling beginning, turned into a really cool show and I should give it another chance.

I tried. I really did. Julie and I watched the season premiere through the second commercial and were just not impressed. Later I pulled the episode up on Hulu and watched it from start to finish, just in case we had passed judgement too soon.

Despite an amazing level of craft on display from everyone involved... it still leaves me cold. I think my problem with Dollhouse is twofold. First, it's a villain-protagonist kind of show: the Dollhouse is an organization staffed with people who are doing bad things for selfish ends. The one person who's not, Eliza Dushku's Echo, is empty of personality. The fun of a TV series is spending time with characters week after week. Here all the characters are vaguely unpleasant, except for the lead character who's a mannequin that gets imprinted with a new persona every week. There's nothing to latch on to.

If the through-line of the series is Echo getting her personhood or individuality or whatever back -- and that seemed to be where the season premiere was leading us -- then that brings us to the second problem, what our friend John Seavey calls a 'false status quo' and TV executives call 'Gilligan syndrome.' Specifically, if Echo solves her basic problem, that is to say retrieves her original personality and escapes the Dollhouse, well, the series is over. So subconsciously we all know that she never can really escape the Dollhouse, and that tends to suck all the suspense out of everything. The question the viewer ends up asking is, "So how exactly will they hit the reset button this time?"

Or forget all that and just go with what my wife said: "I like Joss Whedon but this is still icky." I'm afraid I have to agree.

We also checked in with Heroes.

Earlier I was speaking of how business considerations can affect the creative side of storytelling, and Heroes is practically a textbook case of that. The original concept of the show was a rotating cast of different characters from year to year, all of whom would cope with their newly-discovered superpowers in a different way. Each season would be a separate arc with a different group of heroes. Some might recur but the idea was that each year would be new.

Well, NBC hated that idea. People want to see these same guys, they've formed a bond with those characters, they said. And actors have agents who negotiate multi-year deals, etc., etc. The upshot is that instead of the interesting semi-anthology idea the show started with, we have the same group of people going through the same motions, four years later. Claire still wants to be normal, Peter still is ambivalent, Matt still wants to work it out with his wife, Noah is still a good guy who does terrible things and Sylar is still EEE-vil. After four years it's really tired. And Hiro is apparently dying... yeah, right, the most popular character in the series is going to die. Pull the other one. Yawn.

Zero for two so far. I thought about checking in with Smallville -- which apparently takes place in Metropolis now -- but, you know, every time I try to watch that show I end up getting massively irritated at both a fanboy level and an artistic one. Judging from this still I found of Clark's new look I think skipping it was the right call.

Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm pre-judging, but I just don't think Dark, Edgy Matrix-style Superman is Julie's and my thing.

And we missed Flash Forward completely. Forgot it was on. So, we're bad nerds, I guess. (Our friend Kurt thought it was good, though.)

Mostly we're happy just to wait for Leverage and Burn Notice to come back in January and watch DVDs in the meantime. Although we have enough Browncoat in us to enjoy Nathan Fillion in Castle, that was one we were glad to see come back.

I'm almost as big a mystery geek as I am a superhero geek, so it's nice to see a traditional whodunit-style mystery show doing a Thin Man riff in the sea of forensic profiler, serial-killer-hunting cop shows out there. Plus we enjoy all the cameos and in-jokes. It's fluff but it's smart, fun fluff. And it's on Monday nights right after I get home from teaching my evening studio class, so it's the perfect thing to unwind with. Recommended, if you want something fun and not particularly demanding.

*

Lightning Round! Or, just some brief thoughts about cool stuff that's arrived in the last couple of weeks, or that I heard about, that you might want to look for.

The Middleman original graphic novel, The Doomsday Armageddon Apocalypse, arrived from Viper yesterday and both Julie and I devoured it within an hour of it getting here.

Since we were and are huge fans of the show-- we own the DVD set and relentlessly press it on everyone we know-- we adored it. The things that Greg Burgas thought were weaknesses (like inadvertently 'hearing' the actors saying the lines as we read) came off as strengths to us. Put it this way -- if you didn't see the show, there's recaps and annotations and such, you'd probably still enjoy it. But if you did see the show you will want this book and it will be your favorite thing you buy this year. The thing is, it's sold out everywhere so if you want it you have to order direct from Viper. Do it quick before they sell out too.

Enemies and Allies by Kevin Anderson was just okay.

It's yet another version of the first meeting of Superman and Batman. (Someone out there should tally up all the different versions of that meeting that have been done over the years. Pre-Crisis comics, Post-Crisis comics, on radio, at least a couple of times in animation... and now here it is in prose.) In an effort to shake it up a bit, Anderson set the book in the 1950s with a lot of Cold War overtones. It was an interesting idea as far as it went, but overall I thought his Last Days of Krypton was better.

Done The Impossible is a fun documentary look at the Browncoat phenomenon that sprung up around the television series Firefly and its big-screen sequel, Serenity. I gotta say, for an amateur, fan-produced direct-to-DVD project, it's a classy piece of work.

I don't know that there's a lot of new information here for those folks who are already fans, and for those who are not fans, it may come off as a little puzzling in places. Still, it's a nice overview of the fan movement and how it grew over the course of the years between Firefly originally airing and Serenity appearing in theaters.

But the amazing thing to me was how much participation the fans who made this were able to get from producer Joss Whedon and the stars of the show. Almost everyone involved sits for an interview, Adam Baldwin hosts and narrates it, and Jewel Staite even provides audio for the trivia quiz included as an extra.

I don't think Trek fans or X-Philes could have pulled that off, not for a strictly fan-produced documentary. It's a testament to the affection everyone had for the show, both professional and not. Anyway, if you're into the show you'll love this. If not, you probably should skip it.

I continue to pick away at acquiring the Lone Ranger novels from the 1930s and 40s. The latest additions to the library are The Lone Ranger Rides North and The Lone Ranger Traps The Smugglers.

Smugglers was the better book -- one of the few times the Ranger was given a really worthy adversary, as he tries to get the goods on the clever and ruthless Sam Slake and his gang. Rides North was the more interesting find, though, as it marked both the introduction of the Ranger's nephew Dan, and, through that introduction, the first real recounting of the Lone Ranger's origin in the novel series. Sadly, if you have any familiarity with the Lone Ranger at all, that will ruin the big surprise ending for you -- Oh my God Dan Reid Sr. was the Lone Ranger's BROTHER!! -- but it's a fun read anyway, and it must have blown the minds of the kids in the 1940s who didn't know the origin story.

In other Ranger news, Pulpville Press is printing facsimile editions of the short-lived Lone Ranger pulp magazine.

There were eight of those pulps in all and Pulpville has reprinted them in four volumes, each retailing at fifteen dollars.

That's more or less what every other small-press outfit charges for their pulp trade-paperback reprints, but considering the originals are among the most highly sought-after Ranger collectibles on the planet -- you generally see them at auction for upwards of $700 -- that's really cool to have them available in facsimile like this. Complete with the original illustrations. If you're wondering what to get the hardcore Lone Ranger or pulp magazine fan in your family, well, here you go. You can get them on Amazon but you might do better going straight to the Pulpville site, here. They have a lot of other cool stuff on the main page, as well.

*

And I guess those are all the bits and pieces I have this time around. Or Random Thoughts or Kibble or whatever you want to call them.

See you next week.

45 Comments

• At October 2, 2009, Carl wrote:

  I'll say your analysis of the state of the Marvel & DC is spot on. I think most of ...

• At October 2, 2009, Neal K wrote:

  I've actually really grown to like Dollhouse, though I haven't seen any of the new season yet (its waiting for ...

• At October 2, 2009, Greg Burgas wrote:

  Is the Midnight from Shang-Chi the same Midnight who later showed up in Moon Knight?

• At October 2, 2009, Matthew Johnson wrote:

  The point Dollhouse reached at the end of this year's premiere is exactly where it should have been AT THE ...

• At October 2, 2009, Brian wrote:

  Great column, some great thoughts about the business stuff. In regards to the Shang-Chi (Post-Crisis version), while I've not ...

• At October 2, 2009, Ajit wrote:

  Plus, he's got amnesia. Huston doesn't really bother with explaining any of this other than a throwaway caption referencing "Kree ...

• At October 2, 2009, Adam wrote:

  I do wonder why DC and Marvel don't follow the Archie model: just tell consistent stories and get your books ...

• At October 2, 2009, Mysterious Stranger wrote:

  Castle is without a doubt the best fun show on TV right now. If you can't see that Nathan ...

• At October 2, 2009, Chris Munn wrote:

  I believe the Midnight from Shang-Chi later became a Silver Surfer villain (of all things) in the 90s.

• At October 2, 2009, David Hackett wrote:

  Wait, "Dollhouse" started already? Crap, now I'll need to find spoilers for the episodes I missed.

• At October 2, 2009, ElAndrew wrote:

  Midnight got resurrected as by the Kree in Silver Surfer, of all things.

  If you're wondering why a Shang-Chi villain ...

• At October 2, 2009, papabaron wrote:

  If you gave up on Dollhouse after a few episodes last season and then watched the first episode this season, ...

• At October 2, 2009, Bill Reed wrote:

  David: It's called Hulu. Unless you're a dirty Canadian. Then it's called something slightly less legal.

  Greg: I think the reasons ...

• At October 2, 2009, Thomas wrote:

  Greg, I have to completely agree with your analysis on the corporate end of comics, which in the end has ...

• At October 2, 2009, John Cage wrote:

  I kind of liked the Shang-Chi comic, but that's probably because I bought it because of the Deadpool appearance and ...

• At October 2, 2009, Neal K wrote:

  Ajit - You can't really claim Wednesday Comics is "cancelled". Sure its over now, but it was conceived as a ...

• At October 2, 2009, Dean wrote:

  From a marketing perspective, I do not think the right business model for DC Entertainment is so inscrutable.

  If ...

• At October 2, 2009, Eric wrote:

  I don't think that the fact that the protagonists on Dollhouse aren't squeaky clean should turn people off. The Sopranos, ...

• At October 2, 2009, Nitz the Bloody wrote:

  The people running the Dollhouse are no more evil or unpleasant than many of the Serenity's crew, or the Scooby ...

• At October 2, 2009, Andy wrote:

  It's interesting that you mention Burn Notice because I've been running through it lately, and to me, it has the ...

• At October 2, 2009, Scott Harris wrote:

  As Brian mentioned above, the Chinese dialogue with English subtitles is another part of the current obsession with trying to ...

• At October 2, 2009, Rob F wrote:

  Here in Australia, buying comic books is slowly morphing into a hobbyist pursuit. Not only are we paying (at ...

• At October 2, 2009, Paul Newell wrote:

  Thing I'm beginning to wonder about is...."They" say the readership is shrinking and the market is disappearing, but we have ...

• At October 2, 2009, Mike Blake wrote:

  I wonder if the reason behind the Shang-Chi special was, at least in part, a trademark-holding ploy for the character ...

• At October 2, 2009, Rene wrote:

  Still didn't watch DOLLHOUSE. But I disagree with Greg. The protagonists in fiction I enjoy don't necessarily have to be ...

• At October 2, 2009, Alan Coil wrote:

  Hatcher's Hatchings. Or Hatchlings.

  Greg's Grumblings.

  Masterful Musings.

  Teacher's Pet Peeves.

  (need any more?) ;)

• At October 2, 2009, Dean wrote:

  Go here for an analysis of the comic book market:

  http://fiendishobservationalcomedian.blogspot.com/2008/04/decline-of-comic-book-business.html

  The upshot is that dollar sales for periodicals has been essentially ...

• At October 2, 2009, Alan Coil wrote:

  I look forward every week to watching Castle, although I find it's not a great show. I man-crush Fillion.

  Reading your ...

• At October 2, 2009, Omar Karindu, with the power of SUPER-hypocrisy! wrote:

  To answer Greg Burgas's question, the Midnight from Moon Knight -- a young man named Jeffrey Wilde -- is a ...

• At October 2, 2009, Sijo wrote:

  How about "Friday's Leftover Dinner" as a title? :D

  And Greg, please don't give us any more "Comics Are Doomed!" stories. ...

• At October 2, 2009, Rob Schmidt wrote:

  "Because, really, the only reason to keep comics as a periodical 32-page stapled booklet, that's ridiculously overpriced compared to any ...

• At October 2, 2009, Sam L. wrote:

  "Cross-Hatchings"

• At October 2, 2009, wwk5d wrote:

  I love the stiletto heel look Shang-Chai has going for him in that first story. And Midnight wearing a mask ...

• At October 2, 2009, wwk5d wrote:

  "As Brian mentioned above, the Chinese dialogue with English subtitles is another part of the current obsession with trying to ...

• At October 2, 2009, Taylor B wrote:

  I completely agree with what you said about comics audiences are getting smaller. Hell, my pull list is down to ...

• At October 2, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  Shucks, I should know by now that I could write a couple of paragraphs about Dollhouse and call it done, ...

• At October 3, 2009, Mike Loughlin wrote:

  Burn Notice is like Monk- you know hes not going to solve his wife's murder until the series finale, so ...

• At October 3, 2009, Dan Bailey wrote:

  Haven't been awake long enough to even try reading a thoughtful, carefully written column ... but in glancing through your ...

• At October 3, 2009, Perry Holley wrote:

  "Cross-Hatchings"

  Not that we get a vote, but I really like this one.

• At October 3, 2009, Greg Burgas wrote:

  Omar: I hoped you looked that up on Wikipedia, because that's just way too much to know off the top ...

• At October 3, 2009, Omar Karindu, with the power of SUPER-hypocrisy! wrote:

  Top of my head, Greg, and you're lucky I didn't throw in Will Eisner's Midnight to boot!

• At October 3, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  Top of my head, Greg, and you're lucky I didn't throw in Will Eisner's Midnight to boot!

  Damn. I can do ...

• At October 3, 2009, Daryll B wrote:

  I personally recommend tracking down Warehouse 13 and Eureka for fun quirky sci-fi that makes you think...

  Smallville attracts yet repels ...

• At October 3, 2009, Anonymous wrote:

  Here in Australia, buying comic books is slowly morphing into a hobbyist pursuit.

  That happened long ago!

  Borders, the only bookshop ...

• At October 4, 2009, wwk5d wrote:

  Here in the Middle East, a good chunk of the comics sold at newsstands are aimed at kids, like Archie ...

It's my least-favorite time of year.

For one thing, by the time September rolls around, I'm invariably pretty well fed up with my summer printshop job and really, really ready to get back to school. And for another, trying to deal with the truly staggering amount of bureaucracy and paperwork, not to mention all the middle-management administrative types who are asking me for it, always puts me in a state of low-level annoyance for the month or so it takes to get all these things done. I understand the necessity, don't get me wrong. I'm willing to keep my head down and soldier on because it comes with the job. But it nevertheless gets on my nerves, every September.

This year it's been especially onerous, because I had a couple of things just blow up in my face.

The first was the high school 'zine class, a sort of sequel intermediate program that would have followed up with my middle-school kids who wanted to keep going somehow. The idea was to do a high-school level magazine that would have incorporated not just comics, but also fiction, photography, illustration, opinion pieces... whatever. My idea was to provide a forum not just for my comics grads but also for the kids that were doing blogs or who were frustrated grads of the middle-school Young Authors program, as well. Same deal as the cartooning classes -- I teach form, they do content.

Everyone was very excited about this and I was looking forward to it. Admittedly, I was also a little nervous, but very pleased about the possibilities this opened up for a lot of my 8th-grade Cartooning graduates. I'd even talked to Left Bank Books downtown about giving the class 'zine some rack space.

I spent a lot of August putting this idea together, in and around the regular work I was doing, even spending a couple of days actually at the high school doing orientation... and then, the afternoon of the day that proposals were due I got a call from the program director that they were "re-prioritizing" (Yes, I know. None of these people speak normal English.) and the "funds were being allocated elsewhere." Translation-- we're not doing it, thanks but no thanks.

I hung up the phone, cursed long and vociferously, and did some hasty re-prioritizing on my end. I was able to do some juggling and rewrite a couple of other proposals so that the time and resources I'd set aside for the high school program got allocated to Aki Middle School, just under the wire, and those proposals sailed through, thank God. But those of you that may have had to deal with this sort of bureaucratic craziness in the past will appreciate how enormously irritating it is to have something jerked out from under you, forcing last-minute rewriting of massive financial documents (that normally take days to prepare) in a couple of hours, because someone up the chain does something stupid like delay passing on important information because "it's more appropriately delivered in person."

Argh. If you will allow me to indulge a small rant --

Trust me, bureaucrats, if it means more time to meet a deadline for the very same organization, in fact for the woman two doors down from you that you know is expecting a similar proposal and who would welcome the extra time your cancellation frees up, using e-mail is okay for delivering that news. Like, the second you know it, not at five PM on the day budgets are due. Grrrr.

...whew. Been holding that in for almost a week now.

Anyway, that's life in public school. At least it all got done and we start the new school year in a couple of days. New kids, new plans, new ideas for changing it up and making it better.

Which leads me to the other thing that blew up. This one was more personal, and even though the idea didn't work out, it had an interesting and unexpected dividend.

Here's how it happened. As I've mentioned before, I don't just teach in middle school. I'm also a staff instructor at the Alki Bath House Art studio.

In addition to classes, we also have a number of people that use the place as their studio space, and they often have their work hanging in the gallery. One of our studio artists is a nice lady named Barbara Benedetto. She is one of the best we have, she does beautiful landscapes in watercolor.

What not too many people know is that Barbara also has a background in animation. She was at Filmation Studios for many years, all through the 1970s and 1980s.

If you have any interest in Saturday morning cartoons from those years at all, you've seen her work. She did backgrounds and layout for the animated Star Trek, New Adventures of Batman, Tarzan Lord of the Jungle, Fat Albert... all kinds of stuff.

She retired somewhere around 1994 or so, I think... right around the time I was hired to teach at the studio.

We didn't get to know each other for a couple of years after that. Our paths didn't cross that often, and of course there was the Great Coffee Controversy that kept me a figure to be dreaded by a great many of the studio ladies.

But after I'd been there a while, Barbara diffidently introduced herself and said she'd be happy to pass on some of her old stuff she had lying around, if I thought I could use it for my students. I said sure, anything she felt like she could part with, and so the following week a bunch of storyboard sheets and blank layout board and such appeared in my cabinet. I left her a nice thank-you note and my students got the blank stock.

Even then, I had only the barest grasp of what she'd done when she was in the business-- Barbara is very self-effacing, and tends to brush off talk about her screen credits. All I knew was that she'd done "some animation work." It wasn't until very recently that I put it together.

Sarah, our evening monitor, was bugging me about submitting an updated artist's CV for the studio front desk display, and it was then that I got a look at Barbara's CV, in the display book that Sarah was trying to assemble. I saw all the shows listed on Barbara's resume and the penny dropped. Barbara was at Filmation. The last real old-school animators in the country, before it all started going overseas. Christ, she was one of the designers on He-Man and She-Ra. In fact, indirectly, Barbara's work was partially responsible for my even being at the studio... it was originally the Filmation cartoons that led me to comics that led me to all the rest and resulted in my own teaching career.

Small goddamn world, huh?

And all that Filmation stuff's coming out on DVD now, too.

I thought it might be fun to show one or two of these cartoons in class with Barbara as a guest.

We could have her do a Q and A, she could talk a little about the process and what it's like to work in animation... maybe even I could persuade her to do a sort of live commentary on the cartoon as it was playing. The more I thought about it, the cooler it sounded.

This percolated in the back of my head all summer, and as we approached September, I finally made the time to track down Barbara's phone number. I called her one afternoon and made my pitch.

Her horror was a palpable thing. "Get up in front of people and talk?"

"Well, just answer some questions, maybe," I said, rather desperately. I could see the whole thing slipping away. "They're just kids. And you'd be a rock star."

"Oh I could never do that. I can't get up in front of people." It was final.

"Well, it was just a notion," I said, and sighed. "I just thought it would be a fun thing to do."

Barbara clearly sensed my disappointment. Gently, she said, "I'm glad you called, though, because it reminded me that I had a bunch of old stuff from those days set aside for you and your students. How should I get it to you?"

"Oh, just drop it at the BathHouse whenever you happen to stop by," I said, a little absently. I was still being disappointed at seeing my live DVD commentary idea go up in smoke. "Don't make a special trip or anything. --That's really nice of you, Barbara," I added, realizing that I was sounding rather ungracious.

"It's just taking up space here. Someone might as well get some use out of it."

I agreed, thanked her again, and that was it.

A month passed. I'd forgotten about it. Then, a couple of weeks ago, Sarah stopped me at the studio one evening before my drawing class and said, "Barbara left this big bag of stuff for you."

"Oh, yeah, that's my consolation prize," I told her, and explained about the DVD showing that wasn't going to happen. "Where is it?"

"On your shelf in there." Sarah waved at the supply room.

I retrieved the bag and opened it up. It wasn't supplies this time. It looked like old file folders of some kind...

"Oh, my God," I choked out. "Sarah, come look at this. Did you know what all this stuff is?"

Sarah came over from her desk and drew in her breath as sharply as I had. "This... Barbara painted these? What are they?"

"Model sheets. Cels. Background paintings."

Sarah shook her head in disbelief. "Are these... these must be worth a lot of money."

"I don't know. I guess it would depend on the collector market. This stuff from She-Ra, yeah, probably." We were both speaking in hushed tones despite being alone in the place. Just from awe.

For a while we were silent, just looking through all of it. There was a lot.

Most of the pile appeared to be from She-Ra, but there was also a fair amount of stuff from Archie's TV Funnies, some Legend of BraveStarr... and a lot of it I didn't even have a guess.

Finally I muttered, disbelievingly, "I can't believe she let all this stuff go. This has to be a mistake."

"There's a note, too," Sarah pointed out.

It read: Greg -- I couldn't find the pile of work I'd set aside for you and your students, so I put together this package instead, hope you and the kids can get some use out of it. Best, Barbara.

I took a few photos to put up here for you all, but I assure you this is barely a fraction of what was in the bag.

The pile was an inch and a half thick. Cels, backgrounds, color guides, model sheets, even file copies of old theatre one-sheets for the films Barbara worked on.

So if we couldn't have Barbara do the guest spot, well, this was a hell of a consolation prize.

The more I think about it, the better I like it. I think it's better that these paintings will live on as demo pieces in a classroom, enjoyed by the next generation of cartoonists, than for them to be gathering dust in a box in Barbara's garage. Or even if they ended up framed on the wall of some eBay auction winner. She wanted them used in a classroom and I resolved that would be what I did.

I sent Barbara an effusive thank-you note, but she deserves a more public acknowledgment of her awesomeness. And here it is.

*

I still hate September prep and all its attendant craziness. But it has to be said -- occasionally, you get a nice surprise, too.

See you next week.

16 Comments

• At September 26, 2009, Alan Coil wrote:

  Greg, you have got to talk to Barbara about doing an interview about her time in animation. She may not ...

• At September 26, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  I'm not getting what CV stands for.

  Sorry, I forget not everyone speaks the lingo. It means "curriculum vitae," literally life's ...

• At September 26, 2009, Rin wrote:

  *Has complete geekout moment*

  *breathes*

  That is awesome. Computer animation is awesome, but I also miss that the hand painted is fading. ...

• At September 26, 2009, Perry Holley wrote:

  Wow, that was really generous of her.

  As an aside, the Flash Gordon collection is completely worth it. Even given the ...

• At September 26, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  Wow, that was really generous of her.

  This from the guy that routinely sends giant packages of comics and stuff for ...

• At September 26, 2009, Sijo wrote:

  This is why I always save reading Hatcher's column for last when I come to CBR... it's almost always something ...

• At September 26, 2009, Da Fug wrote:

  I think you're right about the She-Ra stuff (though I am somewhat embarrassed to admit it (Hey, we only had ...

• At September 26, 2009, chad wrote:

  that is an awesome gift for your students. that is animation history and that one cell i know is ...

• At September 26, 2009, Mary Warner wrote:

  That really is some amazing stuff. I can only imagine what was in the pile of stuff she'd planned ...

• At September 26, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  SCHOOL started a week and a half ago. But the OST AfterSchool Arts Program, my thing, kicks in next week.

• At September 27, 2009, stealthwise wrote:

  That's pretty cool stuff man. I teach night courses at the college here (Grammar and Business English night courses, ...

• At September 27, 2009, Bill Reed wrote:

  Awesome.

  As usual.

• At September 27, 2009, FunkyGreenJerusalem wrote:

  What's the 'Great Coffee Controversy'?

  What did you do to their Coffee???

  Tell me you went Leary on them!

• At September 27, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  The coffee story's in the column linked just above the Bathhouse photo.

• At September 27, 2009, FunkyGreenJerusalem wrote:

  Whoa, glad you linked to that one Greg - not sure how I missed when it was originally posted, but ...

• At September 30, 2009, lilikindsli wrote:

  ZpCtdO I want to say - thank you for this!

5 Comments

• At September 23, 2009, Omar Karindu, with the power of SUPER-hypocrisy! wrote:

  I dunno, I wasn't much of a fan of the linked piece. The research is sloppy -- Defenders #20 ...

• At September 24, 2009, Dan Felty wrote:

  I just was able to be steered to Omegan the Unknown this weekend. Good God, what an awesome comic! ...

• At September 24, 2009, Edo Bosnar wrote:

  Thanks for the link, that is a good rundown, I guess I enjoyed it more than Omar Karindu above - ...

• At September 24, 2009, Marc-Oliver Frisch wrote:

  Omar,

  "The research is sloppy -- Defenders #20 is one of those unfortunate crossover issues, tying into early issues of Gerber's ...

• At September 24, 2009, Nitz the Bloody wrote:

  " We saw much better dissections of Gerber back in the "Seven Soldiers of Steve" link series, IIRC. "

  But didn't ...

In August of 1975, I was thirteen years old. My father's alcoholism had reached the point where he was unable to hold a job, and my mother was trying to hold things together all on her own. She had taken a teaching job and we were scraping by, but money was very tight. It was no longer possible to wheedle a quarter or fifty cents out of her for a comic book on our occasional visits to the drugstore. Instead, she snapped, "Why don't you go earn some money of your own?"

I suspect she might very well have just been venting about having to be the sole breadwinner, because usually she was a pretty soft touch. Anyway, I didn't take it as a rebuke. Mom had been bitter and grouchy from about 1968 on, and in fact she pretty much stayed that way until her passing earlier this year. It had become her normal tone of voice. So I assumed her remark was an actual parental directive, and prepared to enter the work force.

At thirteen, my options were limited: I could mow lawns or babysit. I did both, and soon I had a regular customer base and was earning anywhere from $10 to $12 a week. Back then, that was a lot. Suddenly, I was a man of means.

At roughly the same time, the grocery store up the street changed hands. It went from being a Thriftway to being a Sentry Market. And now that it was a Sentry...

...they started to carry comics. (And much cooler paperbacks and magazines, as well; the new magazine distributor specialized in infinitely more lurid fare than the previous guy did.)

This was a huge, huge deal.

Reading had always been a big part of my life anyway, but to really put across why this was so momentous a development for me, let me try to give you a glimpse into those misty days of yesteryear. Here is what the pop culture landscape looked like to a thirteen-year-old boy back then.

In August of 1975, video games were in the embryonic stage, hardly more than phosphor-dot pinball on a TV monitor. There was no such thing as home video: Sony's introduction of VHS was still a year away. Movies played in theaters for a couple-three weeks and then disappeared, until -- if you were lucky -- they played again on television, which generally only had five channels or so to choose from, the three major networks and a couple of local stations. There was no HBO or Turner Classic Movies or Cartoon Network -- hell, there was hardly cable.

In terms of adventure, SF and fantasy? There was no Star Wars. The original Star Trek showed in the afternoon as scratchy syndicated reruns on the local station, and the animated Filmation series was available on Saturday morning. In theaters, the big hit was Jaws, which was setting box office records all over the world. On the geek front, though, it looked pretty grim. The most recent James Bond movie had been the disappointing The Man With The Golden Gun, over a year and a half previously. George Pal's Doc Savage had just tanked in theaters a couple of months before, but I and several friends were hoping we'd be able to talk our parents into letting us go see The Land That Time Forgot when it came out in a couple of weeks. We would have loved to see Death Race 2000 back in April, as well, but we'd known we'd never get permission for that one.

Parenting was quite a bit stricter in those days, too -- at least, it was for me and the other kids in my neighborhood. If we went to a movie alone (a tough sell in itself) it was damned well going to be rated G, and in 1975 that meant Disney. Period. Back then Disney was doing stuff like The Apple Dumpling Gang and Escape to Witch Mountain; their last animated feature had been Robin Hood in 1973.

Even at age thirteen I'd already outgrown that crap. But for me to see any movie that actually looked cool, like Jaws or The Land That Time Forgot or Legend of the Werewolf, I had to have an adult along -- which in practical terms meant that I never got to see anything cool in the theatre. We didn't really do family outings or movie nights when I was growing up.

Generally, we never got to see any truly badass movies until they played on Saturday night's late-show horror broadcast -- ours was called Sinister Cinema, and it had local radio host Victor Ives in a Dracula cape introducing vintage scare films, occasionally abetted by fellow radio personality Jimmy Hollister.

Sometimes cool fantasy and SF would show up there; that was where I first discovered Hammer films. Riddled with annoying commercials from local used-car maven Ron Tonkin, but at least I got to see them.

Elsewhere on television it was almost as bleak. Kung Fu had ended, but The Six Million Dollar Man was going strong. There was as yet no Bionic Woman, nor any of the other half-dozen television superhero-type shows that launched from that trend; we had seen the Cathy Lee Crosby Wonder Woman, but not the Lynda Carter one. The Planet of the Apes movies had done so well rerunning in prime time on CBS that they'd tried it as a weekly television show, but that had gone south a few months previously. Kolchak: The Night Stalker had lasted a little longer, but by that August it was gone too. Saturday Night Live didn't exist yet.

The reason I'm giving you this litany is because to really get a sense of how life-changing it was for me to suddenly have access to a regular source of both comics and paperback novels, you need to realize how limited the entertainment landscape was back then. Especially for me... a thirteen-year-old kid that didn't live close to a movie theater or a big bookstore. Basically, my choices consisted of what I could get to on foot or bicycle. Even our local branch library was across town, a forty-minute trek on my little Schwinn Stingray, and that trip always held the possibility of me being grounded for a month if Mom found out I'd gone downtown on my bike. Despite that looming threat, there were times I was bored enough to chance it.

Comics? I had to finagle a ride to where they were sold -- Village Drug, usually, way out of range for me or my bicycle back then. Once I was there, it was a question of whether or not I could persuade Mom to part with a quarter. Until I had an income of my own... but even then, prospects were still pretty bleak. Money was only half the equation. The other half was access.

So, that day when I ventured into the new Sentry Market, a mere seven blocks from my house, and saw that comics rack.... well, you can imagine. I rounded the corner of the candy aisle and suddenly there it was, bathed in a halo of golden light. For a moment I could only stand and stare as the angel chorus swelled in volume.

At least it felt that way.

I developed a routine over the next couple of weeks... mow a lawn or something to acquire cash, then bicycle up to the Sentry for a bottle of Coke and a couple of comics. I was like a guy who went on a spending spree after winning the lottery... I went from one or two comics a month, three if I was lucky, to six or seven a week. It was glorious.

It occurred to me that it might be fun to look back at the books that were actually on that rack in August of 1975. The ones that started the rock rolling down the hill, the process of my immersion in the world of comics and superheroes that ended with me teaching cartooning classes in public school, as well as writing this weekly thing for you all.

Here's what I snatched up, those last days of August. I can't swear to this being the actual order in which I bought them, but it's pretty close to what I'm giving you here, I think.

Defenders #28 was the first one, I can tell you that much.

I'd only seen three issues of The Defenders before that. #21, introducing the Headmen, and to this day one of my favorite single issues ever... and #24 and #25, the concluding issues of the Sons of the Serpent arc. That was enough to make Steve Gerber's Defenders my favorite Marvel book ever (still is, in a lot of ways) and thus I was willing to buy a book that was "continued." This was part three of the story that re-introduced the Guardians of the Galaxy, who were all new to me, but Gerber did a good job of bringing me up to speed. I never got lost and enjoyed this enormously.

I also grabbed Amazing Spider-Man #149, the conclusion to the (original) Clone Saga.

This particular arc had been really goddamn frustrating for me to try and keep up with. Earlier that year, vacationing with the family on Mt. Hood, I'd managed to get hold of #141, #142, and #143. Getting three in a row like that was enough to persuade me to give the regular monthly Spider-Man title a try again, rather than just the Marvel Tales reprints. (I still wasn't crazy about Ross Andru's art, but the story was interesting enough that I got over it.) The Gwen Stacy clone subplot had started to unfold there, and then I'd missed a couple. I'd grabbed #146, where Gwen was sort of back, and then missed a couple more, though I knew the Jackal was the big villain. I'd missed a couple more, though I'd flipped through #148 just in passing one day at a Fred Meyer store... hadn't actually read it, but skimmed enough to see the big reveal at the end. So this appeared to be the conclusion and there was no WAY I was missing out on that.

Doctor Strange #10 caught me with the cover.

I loved Doctor Strange anyway, and I remembered Mordo from the old Lee-Ditko reprints in Marvel's Greatest Comics. That, coupled with the way Gerber's Defenders had raised Stephen's stock with me in the last few months, made this a pretty easy pick. As it turned out, the action poses on the cover had nothing to do with what was going on in the actual story, but I didn't care... Englehart's trippy take on the Sorcerer Supreme sold me, and this was the first time I'd really appreciated Gene Colan's work. Even Frank Chiaramonte's scratchy inking couldn't hurt it.

Daredevil had been a favorite of mine since I'd seen him guest-starring at Reed and Sue's wedding in Fantastic Four, years ago. I also had fond memories of the 1972 Daredevil Special that had reprinted the Lee-Romita story from #16 and #17, featuring Spider-Man. That was enough to persuade me to try the solo title.

This issue, #126, was my introduction to the work of Marv Wolfman. I liked it quite a bit, though for some reason I managed to miss the next couple of issues, it wasn't until the Man-Bull story a couple of months later that Daredevil was firmly on my personal list. (In fact, I never did track down #127 until our trip to Seaside last year.) It wasn't lack of trying. Somehow I kept missing Daredevil when the books showed up. I think part of it was due to me failing to figure out the distributor's routine; back then, "new comics day" was not nearly as regular an event for newsstand distributors as it is for us today. But when I eventually worked it out, Marv Wolfman's Daredevil quickly became one of my favorites. (Yes, even #133, the Uri Geller issue.)

I liked the Fantastic Four and I liked Roy Thomas' writing, so this was a pretty easy sell.

I'd been avoiding the FF; flipping through the book on the stands in recent months, I'd gotten the impression that everything I liked about the Lee-Kirby days was gone. But Fantastic Four #164, the first part of the two-part Crusader story, had a pleasantly old-school feel about it, starting with that Kirby-Sinnott cover. I'd never heard of this George Perez guy that was drawing the book, but he had kind of an interesting approach, and the Joe Sinnott inks kept everything looking the way my thirteen-year-old self thought it should.

Generally, my preferences had slowly swung towards the Marvel books that year... the DC offerings in 1975 just felt tepid, for the most part. The 100-page books that I had loved so much were all gone, and in their place were these horrible little anemic 17-page things. Usually with lame stories and really lame art. The state of the DC superheroes in 1975 didn't seem so much like a decline as it did a crash dive, especially considering the heights to which they'd risen at the start of the seventies, the Batman books in particular. Just the year before, Detective had been kicking ass with Archie Goodwin and Manhunter, and that was followed by Len Wein and Jim Aparo's "Bat-Murderer!" Right around the same time we'd had Wein and Neal Adams' "Moon of the Wolf!" over in Batman, Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams' "The Joker's Five-Way Revenge," a couple of stories teaming Batman with the Shadow... and then in 1975 it was like everybody forgot what cool Batman stories looked like. Suddenly it was dumb gimmick stories by David V. Reed and Ernie Chan. Even Denny O'Neil, one of my favorite Batman guys, seemed like he was phoning it in... and the Bat-books were generally the high end. The other DC books looked worse.

But I couldn't bear to completely walk away. The right cover could still catch my eye.

Justice League of America #124 hooked me with the cover. I was still a sucker for a good Earth-Two story, especially one featuring the adult Dick Grayson in his freaky hybrid Bat-Robin costume. The story was the conclusion to the goofy two-parter featuring Elliott Maggin and Cary Bates, the Crisis on Earth-Prime. I liked it okay (especially Maggin's line, "Hawkman's got a personality that would bore a grapefruit!") but not enough to start picking up JLA regularly again.

A book I did like enough to add to the personal pull list I was creating that month was, surprisingly, The Joker.

Joker #4 was a smart, fun story featuring the Joker facing off against Green Arrow and Black Canary. And having the villain as the ostensible protagonist was a weird enough idea to intrigue me. That ended up being a DC title I stayed with.

The other DC book that intrigued me that August was Hercules Unbound.

I bought this because it was a #1 issue, plain and simple. I wanted to get in on the start of something. And I recognized Gerry Conway's name from Spider-Man, so I figured why not? The post-holocaust-SF-meets-Greek-myth angle was enough to keep me around, especially since it featured spectacular art from Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Wally Wood. This series and The Joker were the only DC books I bothered with that year. Sadly, neither one of them lasted.

I had only the vaguest notions of what 'collectible' meant, but I still was enough of a collector to be interested in getting #1 of a series. That was what had prompted me to pick up The Invaders a couple of months before on our family's Mt. Hood sojourn, so I was overjoyed to discover the conclusion to that story right there in my local grocery.

I grabbed Invaders #2 the second I saw it, delighted to have both parts of a two-part story. That was a rare goddamn occasion for me in those days.

I picked up Super-Villain Team-Up #2 for essentially the same reason. I'd bought #1 on the Mount Hood trip and here was #2.

However, I was irked to find that this one was continued again. I ended up staying with it a little while longer, but a few months later when Englehart quit, so did I.

Another #1 issue that I picked up simply because it was a #1, I liked enough to keep up with from that point on.

Iron Fist won me over despite the fact that the year before, I'd seen one of the Marvel Premiere issues and been underwhelmed. But this had Iron Man, and it was a #1. As it turned out, it also had Chris Claremont and John Byrne in their prime, so I was hooked.

Captain Marvel was another one I'd sampled on a whim during one of our Mt. Hood trips. I'd mostly fallen in love with the art from Al Milgrom and Klaus Janson, as well as Steve Englehart's accessible-yet-cosmic take on the character.

Previously I'd gotten hold of #37 and #39, parts one and three of "The Trial of the Watcher." That was enough to get me on board. It's hard to explain unless you've actually seen the stories, but...there was something deliciously counter-cultural and subversive about Englehart's Captain Marvel and I fell in love with it from the moment I saw it. (Honestly, to this day I much prefer it to the more famous run by Jim Starlin.) So I was tickled to find #41. That was another one that went on the 'regular' list.

I should pause here and point out that as sporadic as my comics purchases had been in the months leading up to that momentous two-week period in August, it was nevertheless possible to sort of keep up with a lot of Marvel titles simply because so many of them were bi-monthly. Captain Marvel, Doctor Strange, Invaders, Iron Fist... they only came out every other month, and often stores -- especially little mom-n-pop outlets like the Brightwood General Store up where we went to vacation on Mt. Hood -- let back issues just stay on the stand and pile up. (That was why I loved the place so. I didn't give a damn about the great outdoors -- it was getting to go to the Brightwood market that lit me up.)

There were a couple of B-list, also-ran books that I picked up as well during those two weeks. Strictly impulse buys, just because I wanted a comic and I'd already cleaned out all the "good ones"... but I still remember them fondly.

Marvel Team-Up and Marvel Two-In-One tended to be books I never bothered with unless there was nothing else out I wanted or the guest star was particularly intriguing. In these particular cases, neither of these were continued stories, I had fifty cents to burn, and I remembered liking the Beast from his Amazing Adventures days. I didn't regret the purchase, they were entertaining enough books... though Marvel Two-In-One #12 had the dubious distinction of being the story with a plot point that Jim Shooter would use to define 'stupid' for a number of years afterward. (If you've read it, you'll know. If not... well, let's just say that Shooter wasn't mistaken. Even thirteen-year-old me, who loathed science class, knew there was no way a rocket would do that.)

I wasn't all that interested in Captain America or Iron Man, either, but I was still basking in the joy of being able to go to the store and buy a comic any damn time I felt like it. The novelty hadn't worn off yet. These two I picked up mostly because I saw they weren't "continued." Glancing at the last panel and checking for the dreaded "continued" was a habit I'd gotten into years ago. For a long time when I was growing up, that was often the deciding factor in whether or not I bought a book.

Despite featuring Captain America and Iron Man, both characters I liked a lot, and both being done-in-one, neither one was good enough to keep me coming back. The Iron Man issue was a fill-in and the Captain America was a somewhat perfunctory and lame wrap-up to the whole "Snap Wilson" subplot with the Falcon, a collaboration between Tony Isabella and Bill Mantlo after Steve Englehart had left the book. (I did add Captain America to my 'regular' book list a couple of months later when Jack Kirby came back.)

Then, in September, it all started again....

... and really, that was what changed my life. Being able to get the next issue of a book I'd picked up a couple of weeks before.

To a kid who'd always had to struggle just to get to where comics were sold... this was truly intoxicating. It made me a regular monthly reader of comics instead of a sporadic, occasional one. I found that it was possible to follow a book, that I could stop worrying if an issue ended with "To Be Continued." At long last, I could keep up. This was when I learned to relax a little more in my comics reading, to enjoy a big sprawling story that unfolded at its own pace. (Bearing in mind that in 1975, a "big sprawling story" was five or six issues.)

If I hadn't had that... I don't know. It's possible I'd have found a way to keep in touch with comics, but it wouldn't have been the immersive thing it was, I wouldn't have ended up the scholar of comics and pop culture that I eventually became. I'm not sure what I'd have become, to be honest, my home life being what it was -- comics and junk culture were an escape hatch that I desperately needed. That Sentry Market comics rack entered my life at the perfect moment. That much, I'm sure of.

There's a saying that "the Golden Age is twelve." But for me... it was thirteen. At least as far as comics were concerned.

*

The market is still there, though it stopped being a Sentry long ago; it's a much more upscale place now, anchoring a little strip mall of gift shops and the like. When I brought Julie home to meet my family a few years ago, we stopped in there so she could buy a toothbrush and they were hosting a wine-tasting. It's a long way from the place I remembered getting all my Marvel comics and Doc Savage paperbacks.

Those original comics are long gone too, sold off or lost in a move or... hell, I don't even know what happened to half of them.

But here's the great part. Almost all of them are currently available in paperback, and some, like the Guardians of the Galaxy Defenders arc, are even out in hardcover.

The Defenders, Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, Super-Villain Team-Up, Marvel Team-Up, Marvel Two-In-One and Iron Fist are all available as Essentials.

The Joker story is reprinted in the Green Arrow/Black Canary collection, For Better or For Worse. The Justice League story is in Crisis on Multiple Earths volume four.

The Crusader story is the first one found in Fantastic Four Visionaries: George Perez volume one. The Invaders story is reprinted in Invaders Classic volume one.

....and so on. The only ones that haven't been reprinted anywhere are Daredevil, Hercules Unbound, Iron Man, Captain Marvel, and Captain America. The Daredevil and Captain America stories are certain to be included in the next Essential volumes of those series, and it's likely that the Captain Marvel and Iron Man issues will eventually get the Essential treatment as well. The Hercules Unbound was actually scheduled for reprinting in Showcase Presents The Atomic Knights but for whatever reason, it never materialized.

To me that's just a dazzling wonder, that all those stories are so easily available. My personal Golden Age might have been thirteen... but when I look around my office library where I'm typing this, surrounded by dozens of reprint volumes of my favorite comics, and consider the amazing inroads we've made into bookstores over the last decade, I can't help but think, Damn if today isn't looking pretty good too.

See you next week.

34 Comments

• At September 18, 2009, Mr. M wrote:

  Excellent piece, Greg. Summer of '75 was just when I was getting into comics with my friends' discarded copies ...

• At September 18, 2009, Argo Plummer wrote:

  You are nine years older than I am, but even at age four, my mom was buying me comics at ...

• At September 18, 2009, Bryant Hudson wrote:

  Great article. I'm 37 and I can relate very well to your story. I have similar memories and ...

• At September 18, 2009, jazzbo wrote:

  Great article. A truly interesting read.

  There was a used bookstore at the mall that was within biking distance from ...

• At September 18, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  I didn't notice you mention Hulk much.

  I loved him in Defenders, but I didn't really get interested in the Hulk's ...

• At September 18, 2009, Gavin wrote:

  For me it was all about K&B Drugstore and then Walgreens as a second option. The grocery stores in ...

• At September 18, 2009, Michael Mayket wrote:

  This was a great article.

  Amazing Spider-Man #149 was the first comic I ever purchased as a back issue from Lone ...

• At September 18, 2009, Michael Mayket wrote:

  Oh, and as we're all sharing where we bought comics for me it was 7-11 and Snyder's Drug store. ...

• At September 18, 2009, Brian wrote:

  Wonderful piece. I was wondering, given your love of Englehart's work on CAPTAIN MARVEL and THE DEFENDERS, if you were ...

• At September 18, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  I was wondering, given your love of Englehart's work on CAPTAIN MARVEL and THE DEFENDERS, if you were also reading ...

• At September 18, 2009, KCViking wrote:

  Nice work Greg! Thanks for helping me remember the good old days.

  I'm hoping you can update your your X-Men ...

• At September 18, 2009, Danielle Leigh wrote:

  Great column! I can't believe how spoiled we are today, just drowning in media these days, compared to your ...

• At September 18, 2009, Bill Reed wrote:

  Man, that Robin Hood is my favorite Disney movie. Must have seen it a hundred times.

• At September 18, 2009, Eric wrote:

  I only have one thing to say to that, Bill, and that is: Oodelally.

• At September 18, 2009, jazzbo wrote:

  Michael, I grew up in Minneapolis too, and Shinder's was my first source for monthly comics. It wasn't until college ...

• At September 18, 2009, Mary Warner wrote:

  I'm a few years younger than you, but I remember those days. I bought a lot of Harvey back ...

• At September 19, 2009, ks wrote:

  Another great article, Greg. I grew up in a small town (1700 people) and the only game in town was ...

• At September 19, 2009, Rob Schmidt wrote:

  Ah, you young people. ;-)

  I recognize the cultural landscape, although it didn't seem quite as bleak to me. One ...

• At September 19, 2009, Rob Schmidt wrote:

  P.S. I have most of the comics you listed. I think that's about when I started subscribing to comics. ...

• At September 19, 2009, Cei-U! wrote:

  Your column has given me a tingle of deja vu, Greg. Change the year to 1968, the city to Tacoma, ...

• At September 19, 2009, Sijo wrote:

  Like most of the other posters above, I too was a kid in the 70's and I too was exposed ...

• At September 19, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  Were you living in a small town, Greg? I would've thought shopping centers were ubiquitous by 1975.

  Pretty small. Lake ...

• At September 19, 2009, Andrew Wahl wrote:

  Greg:

  This was a wonderful piece. I think anyone who grew up during the Bronze Age of comics is able to ...

• At September 19, 2009, Greg Burgas wrote:

  Hey! I didn't know you grew up in LO. If the "downtown" area was the only part that ...

• At September 19, 2009, Rob Schmidt wrote:

  Okay, thanks for the info.

  I was addressing the range of what was available from the mid-'60s to the mid-'70s. ...

• At September 19, 2009, Mike wrote:

  Incidentally, the reason I ended up writing this column was from playing with the Time Machine widget over at Mike's ...

• At September 19, 2009, Michael Mayket wrote:

  Jazzbo -

  I eventually moved to Drramhaven, which I somehow talked my mom into taking me to once a week (we ...

• At September 19, 2009, Joe Lewis wrote:

  I enjoyed the story about Lake Oswego very much, as it covers the period just before I met Greg. ...

• At September 20, 2009, Edo Bosnar wrote:

  I think you asked recently which columns we readers like best - I'd have to say the ones like these ...

• At September 20, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  Hey! I didn't know you grew up in LO. If the "downtown" area was the only part that was built ...

• At September 20, 2009, Joe Lewis wrote:

  That's not exactly correct. The ethnic minorities in Lake Oswego either fished off the railroad embankment near a restaurant ...

• At September 20, 2009, Greg Burgas wrote:

  I can't quite wrap my head around "all pasture" until you hit the freeway. Dang. That's a ton ...

• At September 20, 2009, Anonymous wrote:

  The irony is there was never any racial slur intended with the Sambo's chain. It was actually named for ...

• At September 23, 2009, Rob Allen wrote:

  There's still a restaurant called "Sambo's" in Lincoln City, OR, but it's not related to the chain, and it does ...

These summer-vacation road trips of ours only started because our relative poverty kept us from continuing to attend the San Diego convention, but it's actually turned into something of a tradition for our anniversary. Just get in the car and go, preferably on as obscure and untraveled a route as possible to a relatively inexpensive rural destination, stopping at any bookstores or thrift shops or garage sales that catch our eye along the way. The first time out we ambled through the southeast Cascades until we ended up in Hood River, and the second time it was down back roads along the Olympics until we hit Seaside.

This year we were off to the Great White North. We chose that direction for a couple of reasons -- one, we'd never been very far that way, and two, we'd been promising to visit my old friend Helen, just over the border in British Columbia, for years. Helen was one of my fellow writers at With magazine for fourteen years, and she's one of my dearest friends... but with one thing and another she'd hardly had a chance to meet my wife Julie, except for a brief flyby at our wedding reception five years ago. So I was very pleased to be able to remedy this at last.

Also, more selfishly, I'd noticed a particular bookstore as we were passing through Mount Vernon on a day trip a couple of months ago, but it had been closed then and I really wanted to get back and get a look at it. It had advertised 'rarities' or 'collectibles' or something like that in its display window, and it looked like it was home to a real antiquarian book dealer. I couldn't remember the name of the place, but I was certain I could find it again if we were in the general neighborhood. So we decided we'd spend our first night in rustic Mount Vernon, where I could scratch my collector's itch that had been bothering me for three months and track down that bookstore.

Now, I am not actually a true antiquarian book collector, we can't afford it. I just play at it, here and there on the fringes. Most of the things I enjoy collecting are not high-end rarities, though there are a couple of juvenile young-adult series books we like that are edging into that range. (We are very fond of the original Oz hardcovers, and also I like a lot of the older boy's adventure series books.... more on those in a bit.)

Once we'd checked into our hotel, we were off in search of the bookstore. It didn't take long to figure out where it was -- downtown Mount Vernon's only about six square blocks. The place is Easton's Books, on south First Street, and we thought it was really rather magnificent.

Easton's was indeed a true antiquarian and collectible bookshop-- I had to make myself stop drooling over the pristine Naval Institute Press first edition they had of Tom Clancy's The Hunt For Red October ($100 -- a perfectly fair price, but way out of our league) though they also had lots of used paperbacks and stuff as well.

Right near the entrance was a shelf of vintage hardcover Westerns, something I've been getting more and more interested in over recent months. I found one nice little one by E.B. Mann priced at about four dollars.

For those that don't know, E.B. Mann was almost as well-known as Zane Grey or Louis L'Amour in his heyday. His primary vocation was as a outdoorsman-magazine writer -- he was a columnist for Field and Stream and an editor for American Rifleman, among others -- but he was a fine Western novelist, as well, and about a dozen of his books were loosely adapted for film in the 1930s.

He's fallen out of vogue somewhat since then, but I like his books quite a bit. His most famous character was Marshal Jim Sinclair, "The Whistler," who starred in three of his novels.

I'd found the first of the three, Rustler's Round-Up. In really good shape, with the dust jacket intact and everything. Even for a wartime edition (from Triangle Books, a firm that specialized in cheap hardcover reprints during the 1940s) four dollars was a steal -- usually you see something like that for about ten dollars.

Moving on to the juvenile series books, I found a Rick Brant that was in good shape -- The Lost City, second in the series. Rick Brant was one of the inspirations for Jonny Quest, for those that don't know.

However, this one was priced at twelve dollars, very reasonable considering its condition, but more than I was willing to pay; it would have been strictly a historical-curiosity purchase for me, I wasn't that big a fan. Regretfully, I put it back, but then I saw something I was sure Julie would like.

Pollyanna is one of Julie's favorite movies, but I was pretty sure that she didn't know it was based on a novel by Harriet Lummis Smith. And even I hadn't known that it was a series of novels that had been franchised out by the publisher after Mrs. Smith moved on to other projects... despite her name being on all of them, only the first two in the series are actually hers.

Easton's had the second in the series and the one true sequel by Harriet Smith herself, Pollyanna of the Orange Blossoms, wherein Pollyanna grows up and gets married. (Oddly, all of the Pollyanna sequels are about her adult years-- probably why none of them had the staying power of the original.)

Anyway, it delighted Julie as much as I'd thought it would, and it was only $6.95, so it went into the pile.

But the real find was not only the cheapest, it even had a comics connection of sorts.

The Adventures of Lewis and Clark was one of the first books I'd ever owned when I was a kid -- I have vivid memories of insisting our family detour to Fort Clatsop on a trip to Astoria when I was eight, simply because I'd read about it in this book and had to see it for myself. I'd read my original copy to tatters long ago and hadn't seen it anywhere since then.

So it was a wonderful moment of joy and recognition when I found it there in Easton's, and more, realized that the illustrations -- one on almost every page -- were all by the great John Severin.

How cool is that? One of the most fondly-remembered books of my childhood turns out to have been illustrated by my very favorite Western comics artist.

I am heroically restraining myself from posting every single illustration in the book here, but I assure you, they are all amazing. I snatched it off the shelf so fast it left a smoke trail.

Best of all, there was a little ding on the cover so it was marked down to $1.50. I'd have paid ten times that, ding and all.

I looked it up when we got home. Apparently, this is the only juvenile book illustration job Severin ever did, which is a damn shame. You can find more information here, along with all the rest of the illustrations.

So that was Easton's. We chatted a bit with the lady who rang us up. I expressed amusement at her sign on the register, Not buying ANY Danielle Steele or John Grisham.

"It must be really depressing for Danielle Steele if she ever goes into a Goodwill," I told her. "You can always find at least twenty of her hardcovers there marked down to nothing." (This is true. You could easily put together an entire Steele library in hardcover from your local thrift stores in about forty-eight hours, for roughly fifteen dollars total. If you were nutty enough to want to.)

"Woman's too prolific for her own good," sniffed the clerk, and made a sour face. Clearly, not a fan.

*

The next day we continued north. As luck would have it, the laws have changed so that now you need a passport to get into Canada, so we weren't going to be able to cross the border as we'd originally planned. (In the state of Washington, you can also get what's called an 'enhanced' driver's license that works in lieu of a passport just for Canada, but we hadn't even had time to get those.) So we were confined to the U.S.

However, Helen's passport was in good order, and she was coming across the border to have lunch with us stateside, in the town of Lynden. So we had a rough itinerary of leaving Mount Vernon around ten-thirty or so and being in Lynden by around two o'clock.

Here's a map to give you an idea.

Now, the routine way of doing this would be to shoot up I-5 to the Lynden exit and turn east, putting us there in an hour or so. But that's no fun at all, and anyway we were in no hurry -- our only commitment was to meet Helen at two. Our rule is 'no interstates,' if we can find a back road. We had decided to take Highway 9, in keeping with our tradition, and also because we'd never been on it.

It quickly became our favorite north-south corridor ever. This map will give you a slightly better look at the route, but it doesn't begin to put across the sense of the country we were passing through.

Seriously, it was like something out of Doc Hollywood. Here, for example, is downtown Acme.

Next door there is a diner and across the street is a fire station and a church. That's it.

You'd think there'd be slim pickings for book lovers on a back road like that, and certainly there weren't many places for us to stop and scrounge around.

But we did find a few. Just before Nooksack there's a wide spot in the road called Deming, and just for the hell of it we stopped at their library. Mostly because their neon sign assured us they were open.

After all, when you have to compete with taverns and diners, not to mention the Nooksack Casino just a hundred yards or so away, your library damn well better have a neon sign.

The Deming library is actually a really nice place.

It's set back from the main road, nestled in a little cul-de-sac just below the ridge. They were in the middle of unpacking and re-shelving stuff following the remodeling and expansion of the building, but in spite of that the place was clean and tidy and really rather bustling for a Saturday morning, with people using the internet stations and mothers finding books for their children.

Just out of curiosity, I wandered over to Dewey Decimal 741 in the nonfiction section, where the comics live, and saw that they weren't in any rut up there in Deming -- there were several of the Fantagraphics Peanuts collections, The Return of Superman, a couple of Marvel's Ultimate hardcovers, a Joe Sacco book, Calvin & Hobbes, some Lynda Barry, and a Fox Trot collection.

We were completely charmed by the place and really impressed at how nice it was, despite still looking a trifle unfinished. I said as much to the girl working the desk. "Raised all the money locally," she said, beaming. "Private contributions, no tax money at all."

You have to love a town that loves to read that much, especially when it's barely a block long.

They were having a little book sale in the foyer, too. Julie picked up a collection of stories by Jeffrey Archer, and I fell for a Robert Parker Spenser hardcover.

Frankly, the latter are becoming as easy and cheap to pick up as Danielle Steele's, but I like a Spenser book once in a while, and we felt like we should buy something. The girl at the desk had very kindly let us use an internet station despite our lack of a Whatcom County library card, and she'd also taken the time to answer all my questions about the expansion.

Just so happens they're having their grand opening for the new facility tomorrow, September 12, and we're honestly kind of sorry to miss it. We wish them well.

*

The Deming library was pretty much it for books or comics until we hit Lynden itself. Despite our dawdling, we were still an hour and a half early for our rendezvous with Helen, so we decided to wander up and down Lynden's one main street.

Lynden is a preternaturally tidy and quiet place, very nice to be sure, but there are times when it's disturbingly reminiscent of Stepford, Connecticut. Or maybe The Village.

The place is almost too nice. Like, manicured. I told Julie that if we saw a pennyfarthing bicycle anywhere, we were getting the hell out of town.

There were no actual bookshops that we saw anywhere on the main drag, but we did find a couple of nice antique places with book sections and we dug out some treasures there.

I found a couple more vintage juveniles. Impulse buys, both of them, but they were cheap.

The Shadow of Robber's Roost caught my eye simply because it reminded me so forcibly of the young-adult adventure books I devoured in grade school. One look at that Young America Book Club seal on the spine and instantly I had a sensory flashback to the smell of chalk and the incredibly loud ticking of the clock in the old Lakewood Elementary library. Picking it up I almost felt like I could hear my old school librarian Mrs. Hunter chuckling from over my shoulder, "Another blood and thunder book, Greg?"

And it was a vintage hardcover Western for two bucks. So I bought it. It actually turned out to be a pretty good book, based on the real-life story of the outlaw William Coe and how he terrorized the homesteaders of the Black Mesa country until finally young Buddy Emery, the son of the trading post owner, sneaked away during the night while Coe was asleep in their barn to bring back the U.S. Cavalry. Robber's Roost is a fictionalized account of this adventure, told from the boy's viewpoint. If I'd discovered this book when I was nine or ten, I'd have thought it was made of awesome. As it is, I still enjoyed it more than I thought I was going to considering it was strictly a nostalgia buy. Worth looking for at your local library, especially if you have a young reader around your house who craves adventure.

Mystery Rides the Rails just looked fun and pulpy, and it was only a dollar-fifty. Half the price of a modern comic book and it was a nice little hardcover from 1937, inscribed "To Jack from Aunty Belle, 1937." So it was a first edition, and for a buck and a half I thought why not?

It was entertaining too, but more for the historical part. The 'mystery' is nonexistent; young engineer Joe Jutton and his pal Tubby have to figure out who's sabotaging kindly Mr. Orest's Silver Line Railroad, a conundrum with a solution so painfully obvious that even Aunty Belle's little nephew Jack probably had it sussed by chapter two.

But the fun of the book is that it provides a wonderful snapshot of life in a 1930s mountain mining town. There's all sorts of interesting bits about the dangers of keeping the rails clear so the silver ore can ship, the heroics of trying to keep snow and rock from destroying the locomotive in an avalanche, the sheer desperation of a town trying to keep their one economic lifeline open. That kept me interested, even after I was snorting at the ease of the mystery and the predictability of the plot. If I was in third grade I'd have enjoyed it well enough, though it wasn't as good as Robber's Roost. Nevertheless, I was happy to have both books considering the total cash outlay was only around four dollars with tax. Not bad at all for 'vintage' books from an antique store.

Next door was an antique mall with a variety of individual dealer stalls, and it was there that I hit serious paydirt.

This particular dealer had comics... and he was the kind of dealer you secretly pray for when you are out nosing around for bargains, the Guy Who Has No Clue What He's Got.

If you look at that spinner rack there in the photo, you will see an amazing variety of material, ranging from Bronze and Silver Age rarities to 1990s three-for-a-dollar crap. This fellow had lovingly bagged and boarded every one and priced them all at three or four dollars each. No matter what it was.

I should cut the guy some slack... after all, this was an antique mall in Lynden, Washington, hardly a hotbed of comics fandom. It's probably all the market will bear. Still, it struck me as a very arbitrary sort of pricing, though as you will see it worked out well for me.

I am trying to cut back on the single-issue comics purchases and stick to trade-paperback format as much as possible... but this was just too good to pass up. I resisted temptation for the most part but did fall for three that are unlikely to be collected anytime soon.

World's Finest was the one that I grabbed just by reflex. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I loved DC's 1970s experiments with combining new and reprint material in a super-sized format, and you never see those books this cheap... and this particular issue features a rare Shining Knight reprint by Frank Frazetta.

Yeah, that Frank Frazetta. For three bucks.

That was the real score. But I also found a copy of DC's Korak I didn't have, also for three bucks.

This one isn't all that hard to find, but online dealers generally have it for at least double that price and that's before you add in shipping. The lead story with Korak is a nice little done-in-one by Len Wein and Frank Thorne, and the backup is the second chapter of Wein's adaptation of Pirates of Venus, with art by Mike Kaluta.

The final one set me back a whopping four dollars.

I bought this simply because I love Fantastic Voyage with all my heart and soul. But it turns out that the art was by Dan Adkins and Wally Wood and it's gorgeous, if a bit pedestrian.

Gold Key had a knack for sucking all the excitement out of adventure comics, there was always something a little textbooky about them.

Even so, I was delighted to find this. Gold Key also published two comics based on the Fantastic Voyage cartoon in 1969, and Julie got me the second one of those for my birthday a couple of years ago (also from an antique mall, as it happens.)

So that leaves just one to go. Sooner or later it'll turn up.

I should add that the guy had lots of other cool stuff besides comics, as you can see from this photo. (I love how Mr. Spock is getting ready to phaser Howdy Doody to ash. Serves him right. Squint at Howdy Doody and he bears an alarming resemblance to the demonic Chucky.)

If you look down to the left of that photo you can see that he also had some pulps. Again, those were priced around three to five dollars. I seriously considered picking up the copy of Dime Western he had there, but it looked too brittle to read... and even though the collector hunt is great fun, I do buy these to read.

He did have a nice copy of Zane Grey's Western Magazine from 1951 for $2.95 and I took that one off his hands.

This issue was something of an anomaly in that it doesn't lead with a Zane Grey reprint. Instead, the headline story is The Silver Star by Harry Drago, and as far as I know it never appeared anywhere else. I finished it last night and it was pretty good... nothing innovative, it was basically the old "lone man brings law to a lawless town, redeems his dark past and finds love" story that you've seen in countless westerns (and Road House, too, come to think of it) but it was done well and I enjoyed it.

Then it was time to meet up with Helen, but we weren't quite done acquiring books that day.

Helen surprised us with the gift of a signed copy of her new book, Lead, Kindly Light. Now, it's unlikely enough that Helen and I got to be such good friends in the first place -- she is a gracious, stately Christian lady who writes inspirational books and articles, and I'm a foul-mouthed, ex-drunk pulp fan who writes... well, the stuff I write. So normally her books are not really in my wheelhouse at all, but this one I am very interested in checking out because I actually know several of the principals involved.

It's the story of how Helen's mother smuggled their family out of Stalin's Russia through Austria during World War II after her father was killed, finally getting Helen and her three siblings safely to a refugee settlement in Canada despite enormous obstacles. Helen and her sister Katie have both told me bits and pieces of this story over the years and I can assure you it's a harrowing tale, it would make a hell of a movie. It's nice she's finally written it down. (Helen told us her biggest obstacle to getting the book done was her mother herself, who kept insisting that she was embarrassed to be painted as such a heroine. Despite, well, being one.)

I daresay it's highly unlikely anyone in the CBR demographic cares about it, but when I was writing this Julie said, "You're going to mention Helen's new book too, aren't you?" And so I have.

*

And that was our road trip.... at least the bookscouting part, though we had other adventures. But this has gone on long enough. Second year in a row I scored both pulp-magazine and comics rarities in the most unlikely places... it just goes to show that if you keep an eye out, the nerdity will always show up. No matter where you go.

Because Our People are everywhere.

See you next week.

16 Comments

• At September 11, 2009, Dan Bailey wrote:

  This looks great, but I absolutely *have* to get some stuff posted this afternoon on my place of work's new ...

• At September 11, 2009, Da Fug wrote:

  That was a fun read, Greg. Nice post. I love trip reports.

• At September 11, 2009, Bill Reed wrote:

  Love these posts.

  And... go-go checks. In a spinner rack. The definition of heaven.

• At September 11, 2009, Dan Bailey wrote:

  Did you offier to buy the spinner rack? *Did* you buy the spinner rack?

  Oh, yeah -- probably you had no ...

• At September 11, 2009, Matthew E wrote:

  Pollyanna's Debt of Honor

  Please tell me that this is about Pollyanna avenging the death of her mentor at the hands ...

• At September 11, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  Please tell me that this is about Pollyanna avenging the death of her mentor at the hands of the yakuza.

  Oh, ...

• At September 11, 2009, Mike Blake wrote:

  Sounds like you've been making some fun trips, and doing one of my favorite things: taking the back roads.

  I'd ...

• At September 11, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  Did you know anything about Gilbert A. Lathrop? He wrote a ton of railroading non-fiction books and also fiction for ...

• At September 11, 2009, Greg Burgas wrote:

  I think it's somewhat disturbing (perhaps only to me) that I instantly recognized Johnny Mack Brown's name ... as the ...

• At September 11, 2009, Edo Bosnar wrote:

  Thanks for another great column, although like last year's, it makes this displaced Oregonian really homesick - and that picture ...

• At September 11, 2009, MarkAndrew wrote:

  Hooray for mentioning the Deming public library. I was camping out in that area five-six years back, and spent ...

• At September 11, 2009, Narayan Radhakrishnan wrote:

  Wow....Wow...and Wow...

  This is one real interesting article. As a like minded fanatic/ collector of rare novels (of course our tastes ...

• At September 12, 2009, Joan wrote:

  Glad you found Deming--it is a small but mighty gem among many library gems and you've done well by it. ...

• At September 12, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  Our pleasure, Joan. Best wishes to all, and good on you folks up there for putting together the "Whatcomics" thing. ...

• At September 12, 2009, Matthew Johnson wrote:

  I once found one of those dealers who didn't know what he had, with a bunch of random stuff on ...

• At September 13, 2009, Mortenzen wrote:

  I really enjoyed reading, thanks for sharing Greg.

You would think Superman would have been a natural for serials in the early 1940s -- he had a popular comic book series, a syndicated newspaper strip, and, most importantly, a hugely successful radio drama based on his adventures. But there were several obstacles that kept coming up.

The first, and most troublesome, was getting the rights cleared up. The Fleischer Studios, in making their Superman cartoons, had done so under an ironclad exclusivity contract that tied up the character of Superman for any motion-picture projects, including live-action.

So when Republic found this out, they scrapped their Superman serial plans and retooled the project as The Mysterious Doctor Satan.

By the time they were done with it, there was very little left that showed it had ever been a Superman script at all. Though the hero's girl friend was still named Lois, the hero himself was now young Bob Wayne, who had revived his outlaw father's masked identity of the Copperhead, only Bob would use it to fight injustice.

The other element that remained was the killer robot. The original idea was that Superman would be facing an army of them (much like he had in the Fleischer cartoon "The Mechanical Monsters," probably the genesis of the idea) but they ended up just building one.

Considering that the best they could do was basically a boiler with legs, it's probably just as well that the original script idea of creating an entire army of them didn't survive to the final draft. Still, even Doctor Satan has its admirers among serial aficionados.

That was in 1940. In 1941, the idea of a comic-book serial was floated again, but instead Republic chose to go with Captain Marvel. Fawcett was much easier to deal with than DC had been, and Republic's version of Captain Marvel went on to huge success despite DC's attempts to get a court order shutting it down. (It wasn't the last time Cap and Superman would face off in a courtroom, but that's another story.)

Pause here for a little background.

I've always been a Batman guy, personally. But nevertheless we have a lot of Superman DVDs in this house. The Fleischer cartoons, the Filmation cartoons, the WB animated series, Lois & Clark, the Christopher Reeve movies, Superman: Doomsday, Superman Returns... even the first season of the syndicated Superboy. (Though that last one, I got rid of not too long ago. Despite what some people say, I do have standards.)

But I've never cared for the George Reeves television series. Just never could get into it.

Actor was wrong, costume was wrong, stories were lame... the affection so many fans of my generation have for that show has always eluded me.

So when I decided we had enough serials on DVD floating around here that I was going to do a couple of columns on them, I thought, well, I better cowboy up and look at the two Superman ones, too, or everyone's going to be lining up to tell me I left them out. And Amazon had the pair of them on sale for six dollars, it wasn't like it would be a huge investment. I figured maybe our godson Phenix would enjoy them at least. But I was fully expecting to hate them; my assumption was that they would be even worse than the 1950s television show.

Instead, they ended up being our favorites of the lot.

It was a startling discovery for us, especially considering how much the deck was stacked against any Superman live-action effort being any good at all back then. All the difficulty producer Sam Katzman had in getting the project off the ground, finding a studio to back him, getting DC to sign off on a script, figuring out how to do a Superman story in live action given not only the special effects limitations of the time but the even more severe budgetary limitations of serial production (Katzman was legendary for his cheapskate ways, even among serial producers.)

But nevertheless, despite all those things, we loved them both. There were two, Superman and Atom Man vs. Superman.

Superman, from 1948, tells the origin story we have all come to know. It opens on Krypton with Jor-El getting sneered at by the science council, the baby Kal-El being placed in the rocket, flying to Earth and being found by the Kents... there's even a couple of scenes with teenage Clark discovering his powers. This is at an accelerated pace, it all takes place in the first chapter, but it's there.

Once young Clark reaches adulthood and decides to take on the Superman identity, though, the first of the two reasons we fell in love with these movies shows up.

Kirk Alyn.

Kirk Alyn is simply terrific as both Superman and Clark Kent. He makes a real effort to differentiate between the two, for one thing (something that has always irritated me about TV's George Reeves, who never bothered) and he looks like Superman.

The first chapter of Superman is about how Superman came to Earth and decided to be a superhero after the death of his foster parents. The second shows Clark meeting Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, and the rest of the gang, and getting a job at the Daily Planet. All the rest of the story, the remaining thirteen chapters, revolve around Superman's ongoing battles with the villainess known as the Spider Lady (played with sneering relish by Carol Forman.)

What makes all this work -- apart from Kirk Alyn's great portrayal -- is that the whole thing feels not so much like a window into the 1940s, but a window into the magical 1940s, the fantasy world of pulps and Golden Age comics. It's well-written, too. The twists and turns of the plot are actual twists and turns, they're not just padding. It's mostly about the Spider Lady's efforts to steal a new govermenent weapon and Superman's efforts to stop her -- made more difficult by the Spider Lady's discovery of Kryptonite and her realization that this is a weapon that can actually stop Superman.

Unlike even the villains in the comics themselves at the time, Superman is having to really work at it to stop her. The Spider Lady even manages to take him down a couple of times before he finally puts her away in Chapter Fifteen.

Sure, there are lots of things that are contrived -- it's a serial, after all -- but it all works. There are great little bits where Superman is still trying to figure out how to be Superman and introduce himself to the world.

The energy that Kirk Alyn, in particular, brings to everything is great but really the entire cast is diving into it too. There's a very palpable feeling that everyone is aware that this isn't just another hacked-out serial, but the first Superman movie EVER! You really get the sense that seeing this in theaters was the same kind of rush for the kids of 1948 that Superman: The Movie was for kids in the seventies.

The other thing that sold these movies for us, apart from Kirk Alyn and the great Golden Age vibe hanging over the whole thing, was the element that usually comes in for such snarling criticism from serial historians.

Screw them. I don't care what the scholars say -- I gotta tell you, we adored the animated flying sequences.

As I'm sure many of you have, I'd read the various historical accounts of what a cheap-assed, hack special-effects cheat using animation was for showing Superman flying, especially since Captain Marvel's flying effects shots looked so much better... but you know, we liked this a lot more than Captain Marvel.

Now, I'm sure this was a budget thing. Producer Sam Katzman decided on this because it was cheaper than trying to do it on wires. In fact, they did screen tests with Kirk Alyn in a wire harness, but the footage looked so bad that the idea was scrapped and they went with the animated flying instead.

But that's all I'd ever heard about it -- 'animated flying sequences.' No one ever really went into detail as to what that actually meant.

Well, first of all, the sequences aren't animated. Only the figure of Superman is. Kirk Alyn leaps into the air and then, seamlessly, morphs into an animated flying figure that soars off into the sky. It looks great. Best of all, unlike the dummy they used in Captain Marvel for the flying, this animated Superman figure can move. He can dodge bullets and missiles, catch boulders flung at him, bob and weave between buildings -- and it's all really fast, using a well-modeled and realistically-lit rotoscoped figure on a level with the Fleischer animated stuff. Honestly, it comes off as primitive CGI more than anything. It doesn't take you out of the story. In fact, it enhances the story, because this technique lets Superman actually do things in mid-air. You aren't limited by what Kirk Alyn can do dangling on wires in front of a projected cloud scene. There's none of that lugubrious fake-looking posing. The cartoon figure can actually react to things and change direction.

Of course, we only ever see the perspective of a tiny flying figure darting around against a vast photo landscape, but that works too. It helps that everything else looks equally raw and primitive, and that it's all in black-and-white. Maybe it was a drag for theatrical audiences of the day (though I doubt it, and the box office would appear to bear me out) but to us it looked great on a living-room TV. We loved it.

Superman, the serial, was in fact a huge success. The sequel, Atom Man Vs. Superman, came out two years later.

We liked this one a lot too, though it's not as good as the first one. In the same way that Superman captures that forties Golden Age vibe, Atom Man vs. Superman evokes the atmosphere of a 1950s Superman comic all through it. If Wayne Boring's art came to life, it would look like this movie.

Kirk Alyn is still great and he's got Noel Neill and everyone else backing him up as earnestly as in the 1948 version, but this time the story takes more from the comics themselves. We have Superman taking on the villainous Atom Man, who has mastered the science of both teleportation and interdimensional travel.

The Atom Man is actually Lex Luthor, who is running the entire criminal enterprise from his jail cell. (Luthor, who is after all a SUPER-GENIUS, knows that being in prison is the perfect alibi.) He fools everyone by teleporting out whenever he needs to and assuming the identity of Atom Man when he wants to do some evil stuff. Only Superman suspects Luthor's hand in the Atom Man crimes, though even he is stymied when he finds Luthor still safely in jail.

Luthor is played with malevolent menace by Lyle Talbot, who I swear looks just like Luthor used to in the comics of the time: bald, burly, and thuggish.

The only Luthor to equal him for menace is Michael Rosenbaum on Smallville, but Rosenbaum loses points for being a kid. Lyle Talbot's Luthor looks like he's stepped right off the page.

Luthor's Atom Man extortion scheme is really just window dressing; the real plan is to lure Superman into his inter-dimensional gate and exile him into an otherworldly limbo... a kind of... phantom zone, if you will. He actually succeeds in this and for a little while in chapter eight, "Into the Empty Doom!" it looks like Superman is doomed to float around helplessly as a ghost.

I don't know if this has any connection to the Phantom Zone as depicted in the comics -- that didn't show up until 1961, eleven years later, though it's not unreasonable to speculate that perhaps Robert Bernstein was thinking of the "Empty Doom" sequence when he wrote the first Phantom Zone story.

Anyway, it all sounds great if you like Silver Age Superman. So why didn't we enjoy this one as much?

Mostly because of the cheapskate effects and costume cheating. The seams show a lot more this time out. There's a recap of Superman's origin with a lot of recycled clips from the 1948 serial, as well as liberal amounts of stock earthquake newsreel footage thrown in to depict the natural disasters Luthor is allegedly causing with his atomic ray. As for Atom Man, I really think that a SUPER GENIUS like Lex Luthor could manage something a little cooler-looking for a disguise than a bucket with a nose glued to the front and sprinkled with glitter.

Also, the animated flying doesn't work quite as well with closeups of Kirk Alyn in front of a fan intercut between them.

Nevertheless, Atom Man vs. Superman is still worth your time if you like old-school Superman. And I'd rank it way above the George Reeves television series.

These are available as a nice DVD set now, as part of the wave of Superman merchandising that accompanied Superman Returns.

In addition to these being the serials we enjoyed the most, this was also the classiest DVD packaging. There's a nice little featurette with Noel Neill and a couple of serial historians, and excerpts from the documentary Look! Up In The Sky!

Because serials are largely a historical curiosity for most people, you can generally find them at huge discounts. This was the most expensive of the ones I've talked about here the last few weeks and we still got it for under ten dollars. Well worth it.

*

Kirk Alyn, incidentally, turned down the Superman television series that ended up casting George Reeves. He was trying to avoid typecasting. Sadly, he never really broke out of the serial, B-picture ghetto. His last big hurrah was another DC property.

Blackhawk was also produced by Sam Katzman and again pitted Kirk Alyn against that wonderfully sneering bitch Carol Forman, who played the Communist spy, Laska.

Reviews are mixed but tend toward the lukewarm. "Pretty good" seems to be the overriding theme, though I think a lot of those reviews were done without any awareness that Blackhawk was ever in comics. Most critics tend to dismiss this serial as a generic aviation adventure.

Me personally? I haven't seen this one, but the stills I've found make it look awesome.

As far as I can tell all the Blackhawks are represented, and the story sounds like a Cold War good time to me.

However, this came out in 1952. The serial era was petering out, supplanted by television, and budgets were being cut right and left. Knowing the legendary tight-fistedness of Sam Katzman, I have a hunch this was shot even more on the cheap than Atom Man.

Still, Kirk Alyn sure looks like he made a hell of a good Blackhawk.

It just came out on DVD this year, and eventually we may have to look into it.

If we do, I'll let you know. In the meantime, here's the trailer on YouTube. You can make up your own mind... though I have to say, I love how they gave Reed Crandall a credit.

*

I hope you all have enjoyed these little excursions into the odd backwater of American movie history that was the weekly serial, over the last few installments here. (I never can tell if people enjoy the more historical columns I write, they're not the sort of thing that provokes a lot of controversy or comment here; but they tend to be my personal favorites to work on. Thanks for indulging me.)

Certainly, it takes a particular mindset to sit down and watch an old-time movie serial, but I have to say, I enjoyed watching all of these more than I expected to-- and enjoyed them largely on their own terms, not in some postmodern ironic Mystery Science Theater way. The Superman serials, in particular, evoked the comics they were based on -- more than many of the other Superman films I've seen did for their respective eras.

All that being said... are these films worth your time?

I don't know.

For me, certainly. I love this sort of thing and always have. So as far as I'm concerned, finding all these old films suddenly out on DVD for pennies on the dollar was like a prospector stumbling onto a rich new vein of the good stuff. If you have that same sort of taste for good junk, I think you'd enjoy these. If not -- if you're the kind of comics reader that, for example, has no idea how or why anyone would enjoy the writing of Bob Haney -- then you'd be better off to avoid them.

As I said above, it largely depends on the mindset you bring to it. For me there's something lovable about serials. As crappy as the special effects looked, as contrived and silly as the stories got, as hammy and inept as the actors often were... even with all that there was a real joy, an exhilaration, about what they were doing. I think it's that same screw logic, floor it! vibe that other fans find in grindhouse films or pulp magazines or... Golden and Silver Age superhero comics.

Hopefully, that answers the question. If not, well, you'll just have to check a couple out and make up your own mind. The good news is, the investment's cheap.

See you next week.

17 Comments

• At September 4, 2009, Dean wrote:

  I was obsessed with old Buster Crabbe "Flash Gordon" serials as a kid. They used to air on ...

• At September 4, 2009, Matt Bird wrote:

  Great columns! The historical columns are my favorites. I've got a lot of viewing to do. "Batman ...

• At September 4, 2009, Zory wrote:

  http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/serial19.jpg This poster you posted, I have it. Only it's not a poster, it's a painted piece of wood ...

• At September 4, 2009, ks wrote:

  Greg, I enjoy your column the most on this site. I think I am little younger than you (35), so ...

• At September 5, 2009, wil wrote:

  For the record, I always enjoy your column but the historical ones are my favorites.

• At September 5, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  Shucks, guys, I wasn't fishing. It was just a throwaway remark. But thanks for sounding off. We don't see the ...

• At September 5, 2009, Chris Roberson wrote:

  Well, fishing or no I'll point out that I never miss your columns myself, Greg. A new one is always ...

• At September 5, 2009, Edo Bosnar wrote:

  Love your historical columns - like I said in an earlier comment, I always learn tons of new stuff, and ...

• At September 5, 2009, Perry Holley wrote:

  Out of curiosity, Greg, have you seen the Spider serial?

• At September 5, 2009, Bill Reed wrote:

  Amazon apparently doesn't have the Blackhawk DVD, but it is available on eBay. Now I am tempted.

• At September 5, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  Out of curiosity, Greg, have you seen the Spider serial?

  I have not. I wasn't even aware there WAS one. It ...

• At September 5, 2009, Mary Warner wrote:

  I never heard about the animated flying sequences before-- that sounds kind of cool!

  The trouble with these old serials in ...

• At September 5, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  But I'm sure I've heard mention of a Captain America serial before. Have you seen it?

  Not in many years. But ...

• At September 6, 2009, Edo Bosnar wrote:

  Since you mentioned the Superman cartoons by Fleischer Studios, it reminded me of a question I have had for some ...

• At September 6, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  Were those the only superhero cartoons made before the 1960s?

  Adapting costumed heroes from comic books, you mean? I think so. ...

• At September 6, 2009, Edo Bosnar wrote:

  Yes, I meant adaptation of comic book or comic strip or pulp (i.e. Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Tarzan, etc.) heroes ...

• At September 9, 2009, Teebore wrote:

  I never can tell if people enjoy the more historical columns I write, they're not the sort of thing that ...

Vincent Markowski from Port Henry, New York, led a life in the early 1900s that in itself was worthy of a movie. He knocked around all over the country, doing all sorts of physical labor -- coal miner, lumberjack, and even some bare-knuckle boxing in local bouts. Eventually he decided to try his luck in the newborn motion-picture industry, changed his name to Tom Tyler, and came to Hollywood in the 1920s.

As luck would have it, one of the studios was looking to replace one of their cowboy-picture contract players and the casting people were impressed with Tyler's athleticism and two-fisted resume. Soon he had made a name for himself as a Western star in the silent era.

He also was a competitive weightlifter at this time and won the 1928 National Amateur Athletic Union championship as well as making the U.S. Olympic team, allowing RKO to bill him as "The Strongest Man In America."

Tyler didn't fare so well with the switch to the 'talkies,' though. His raspy voice and tough-guy delivery would have made him a Western star in the 1970s -- he was the kind of actor that was born to do spaghetti Westerns with Lee Van Cleef -- but back then audiences liked their cowboys more in the style of Roy Rogers than Clint Eastwood.

He did find some work as a villain in Westerns, most notably from John Ford in 1939's Stagecoach, who cast Tyler as the despicable Luke Plummer.

But mostly Tyler was relegated to the B-picture stuff. Lots of Westerns -- which is ironic, as Tyler did not really enjoy doing them. The rumor was that he was clumsy, and somewhat nervous around horses.

Tyler also ended up doing a lot of serials -- seven, in all -- starting with Phantom of the West in 1930.

The two that interest us here are widely regarded as classics by both serial fans and comics fans alike. In fact, the first of them, 1941's The Adventures of Captain Marvel, is usually named as the finest serial ever made.

It is awfully damn good, just in terms of its story construction, clever special effects, and sheer sense of adventure.

It's a pretty fair adaptation of the strip-- even with a couple of changes made to fit the needs of the plot, it's still remarkably faithful to the spirit of the early Fawcett comics. In the film, Billy Batson is an assistant radio operator with the Malcolm archaeological expedition, which is traveling to the Valley of the Tombs. Their goal is to find the Golden Scorpion, a sculpture fitted with lenses that can focus the sun's rays into an incredibly destructive weapon and, it is said, turn base metals to gold. Sure enough, when the expedition finds the tomb, a beam from the Scorpion device collapses the entrance and opens a hidden passage that leads Billy to the ancient wizard Shazam.

The wizard grants Billy the ability to change into Captain Marvel in order to prevent the Golden Scorpion from falling into the wrong hands. It is his "duty to see that the curse of the Scorpion is not visited on innocent people."

That's all in the first ten minutes. And with that, we're off and running. After Cap rescues the archaeologists and gets them safely to Fort Mooltan, the expedition returns to the United States and disassembles the scorpion device, distributing its lenses among themselves for safekeeping. But soon they must contend with a new threat-- the masked Scorpion wants to reassemble the deadly device for his own nefarious uses.

Several expedition members are killed one by one as the Scorpion searches for the hidden lens each one has in his possession. Cap has a number of skirmishes with the Scorpion and his thugs, including one amazing sequence where the Scorpion uses the partially-constructed lens device to bring down a mountain on the World's Mightiest Mortal. The flying and the molten-rock effects still look great today.

The suspense continues to build, especially after young Billy realizes that the hooded Scorpion (whose face we never see) has to be a member of the Malcolm expedition in his secret identity, and so the hunt is on for the traitor in the ranks. The whole thing is just a great ride.

There are a couple of things that might be jarring for modern audiences. The main one is the zest with which Captain Marvel routinely kills the bad guys.

Tom Tyler's Cap thinks nothing of hurling gunmen off buildings or breaking their necks. Clearly, due process is for sissies.

But by and large the serial deserves its reputation and it made Tom Tyler a bankable star for Republic. The funny thing is, this is one of the greatest cinematic trompe l'oeils ever, because Tom Tyler himself is hardly in the movie. About half the scenes of Captain Marvel are actually shot with stunt doubles or, in the case of the flying sequences, a papier-mache sculpture strung on wires. The picture is largely carried by a young and energetic Frank Coghlan as Billy Batson, who has almost all of the dialogue. The character of Captain Marvel is barely a walk-on, he has about as much actual screen time as Lou Ferrigno used to get on the old Incredible Hulk TV show-- and Cap generally only shows up for the same reason, to get his alter ego out of trouble at the last possible minute. (Watching it here at home, seeing Billy confronted by gunmen or trapped in a crashing plane, Julie would sometimes blurt, "Just say your magic word, stupid!")

Nevertheless, it's a fun movie and it's been available on home video for years, both on VHS and DVD. It'll probably set you back six or eight dollars and it's well worth it.

However, it's not actually my favorite Tom Tyler serial, or even my favorite superhero serial. That came a little later.

The success of Captain Marvel, as I said, made Tyler one of the go-to guys at Republic for action pictures, and they started putting him in more starring roles. Westerns, mostly.

In particular, Tyler took over the role of Stony Brooke in Republic's Three Mesquiteers movies, playing the part in the final thirteen entries in the series. (Previously, Stony had been played by both Robert Livingston and John Wayne, who did thirty-six of the Mesquiteers films between them.)

However, by 1943 audiences were getting a little tired of the Mesquiteers, and Republic was looking for a different vehicle for Tyler.

They ended up choosing the Phantom. The Ghost Who Walks.

And that is my pick for the best serial Tom Tyler ever did. It's just terrific. Frankly, I prefer it to the 1996 movie with Billy Zane in most ways. There are a couple of minor changes -- Devil is a German shepherd instead of a wolf, the Phantom is "Geoffrey Prescott" instead of "Kit Walker," stuff like that -- but for the most part it really is Lee Falk's strip on film.

The story opens with a renegade tribal chieftain assassinating the Phantom on the orders of the evil Dr. Bremmer. The dying Phantom summons his son Geoffrey home to the Skull Cave to take over as the new Phantom and Geoffrey immediately starts out after his father's killers, only to discover that they are out to sabotage the very same archaeological expedition he himself was a part of before he had to assume the role of the Phantom-- the quest to find the lost city of Zoloz! The plot thickens when it turns out that not only is Bremmer out to derail the expedition and capture the lost treasures of Zoloz for himself, but he's also cut a deal with an unfriendly power that wants to use that same part of the jungle to establish a secret airbase. It's up to the new Phantom and his faithful dog Devil to stop them.

This is a great serial, period -- something I'd recommend not just to anyone who likes the Phantom but also those folks who like Indiana Jones movies, or, hell, anyone who just plain enjoys adventure. It's got all that stuff in spades and since the Phantom is a non-powered hero, there's not a lot of distracting low-budget effects. It's just all cheerful hell-for-leather mayhem, as you can see in this clip here. Tyler is great as the Phantom -- he looks amazing in the outfit, and the gritty square-jawed delivery that didn't feel quite right for the Big Red Cheese is pitch-perfect for the Ghost Who Walks. He's got more to do here, too. The rest of the cast is pretty good as well -- not, you know, A-list, but they do fine for this kind of production.

One of the nicer things about this particular serial is that since Bangalla is a made-up place and the filmmakers chose to go with equally fictional jungle tribes (they look sort of Mayan) as well, the movie has aged well and is relatively free of a lot of the racism that plagues other serials produced in the thirties and forties.

You can find it on DVD in a really nice package, and there's even extras -- a fun gallery of Phantom comics covers from Whitman, Gold Key, and Charlton, and a wonderfully knowledgeable commentary on the first chapter by Max Allan Collins. (I'm no slouch myself when it comes to this stuff, but Collins mentions quite a few things I didn't know.)

Sadly, The Phantom was pretty much Tom Tyler's last hurrah as a leading man. His health was failing -- he suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, and could not sustain the athleticism that was his chief asset in Hollywood. Tyler continued to work in movies and television, usually in supporting roles. But his parts got smaller and smaller, and as his health continued to deteriorate he finally retired to Michigan to live with family, where he passed away in 1953.

There is a biography of Tom Tyler, The Tom Tyler Story by Mike Chapman, that makes for interesting reading if you are so inclined. It's a very well-researched piece of work and is pretty much the last word on the subject. It's a specialty-press limited-edition kind of thing, but you can find it at Amazon. And of course Captain Marvel and The Phantom are available there on DVD as well, and both are recommended.

Considering how many superhero movies have gotten screwed up over the years, it's quite an accomplishment for one guy to have starred in two unrelated ones that are both widely acclaimed as being among the best of their kind. It is a great pity that Tom Tyler was never recognized during his lifetime for the roles that have made him so beloved among comics fans and serial enthusiasts for over sixty years. Tyler never was rich, or even all that famous considering how many movies and TV shows he was in -- over a hundred and eighty in all. Like a lot of the folks who did this kind of work in the forties and fifties, whether it was in comics or pulps or serial adventure movies, there was never any thought to the stuff lasting longer than the few weeks of its initial release. Tom Tyler was reputedly just a guy who was happy to have a job and worked hard at doing it as well as he could. I daresay he'd have been very moved, and perhaps a little surprised, to see that his movies still have so many fans today.

As legacies go, that's not a bad one. We should all be so lucky to do work that keeps its audience that long.

*

That's it for this week. Next week we conclude our look at the old serials with Chapter Three: Look! Up In The Sky!

See you then.

9 Comments

• At August 28, 2009, Perry Holley wrote:

  That reminds me, I never did get around to watching the first few chapters of the Captain Marvel serial. ...

• At August 28, 2009, Perry Holley wrote:

  Arrgh, I meant 'last few chapters'.

• At August 28, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  It can be a little debilitating to watch them all at once. We usually do three or four chapters in ...

• At August 28, 2009, Matt Bird wrote:

  Wow-- I'm a big Phantom fan so I have to see that! Thanks for the tip!

• At August 28, 2009, Ajit wrote:

  I have never seen the Phantom serial, and need to remedy that.

  And there was a (sort of) sequel to the ...

• At August 29, 2009, Edo Bosnar wrote:

  Oh, Christ. This series of columns is going to make my "to see" movie list just like my burgeoning pile ...

• At August 29, 2009, Mary Warner wrote:

  Is Captain Marvel's cape always that small? It's been decades since I've read any Shazam comics, and I didn't ...

• At August 30, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  Is Captain Marvel's cape always that small?

  Pretty much, yeah.

  I haven't had any desire to watch serials since then. How much ...

• At September 4, 2009, Comics Should Be Good! @ Comic Book Resources » Serialized Friday, Chapter Three: Look! Up In The Sky! wrote:

  [...] old cliffhanger serials over the last couple of weeks. The first installment is here. The second is here. And ...

CHAPTER ONE: JUNGLE DRUMS!

The first one we bought, the one that got a half-dozen others suggested to us, actually caught my interest years ago because of something I saw in a Joe Kubert comic.

When DC was doing its Tarzan book, often there would be some sort of extra or filler page thrown in -- I think this had something to do with the way the stories were being reprinted overseas, the license required one less story page for the European version or somesuch. Meaning that here in the states the DC Tarzan comics always had to have an extra page of content that could then be painlessly removed in the reprint without screwing up the story.

One of the ways Kubert would fill an extra page would be to run a still from one of the many old Tarzan movies and give us a little informative caption. And in one case, he ran a shot from The New Adventures of Tarzan, adding that star Bruce Bennett was one of the few actors to portray Tarzan consistently with the way Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote him, as a well-spoken British nobleman.

Well, I was all over that. If there's one thing all fans of Burroughs' Tarzan books agree on, it's disappointment at how the movies depict him.

I assure you, those of you still smoldering over the cinematic incarnation of Daredevil or the Fantastic Four have nothing on us fans of the Tarzan novels for bitterness. We're talking decades of heartbreak here.

Anyway, "Bruce Bennett as Tarzan" sounded vaguely familiar, and sure enough, on a budget Tarzan DVD collection Julie had given me a while back, there was Bennett starring in Tarzan and the Green Goddess.

So I screened it again... and remembered why I hadn't been able to get through it the first time. I liked Bennett's portrayal of Tarzan well enough, but the movie was an awful, disjointed mess. I thought at the time, with its breakneck pacing and twisting turning plot, that the effort looked like an old serial more than anything else.

Well, there was a reason. That's because it was cut together from bits of an old serial, The New Adventures of Tarzan.

It took me a while to figure it out because I was not aware that Bruce Bennett, the actor I knew from Sahara and Treasure of the Sierra Madre and other classics, had originally gone by his real name, Herman Brix.

The history of this serial has as many wild twists and turns as the story it tells. Let me see if I can sum it up for you.

At the time this was made, 1935, MGM had been very successful with its first two Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weissmuller. Burroughs, however, did not care for them and after the first two films, the contract was up with MGM. With the film rights returned to him Burroughs was anxious to see if it could be done better.

Enter Ashton Dearholt, a guy who'd had some minor success in Hollywood with Westerns and knew Burroughs though his daughter. Dearholt persuaded Burroughs to go into partnership with him to form their own film company and produce their own Tarzan films.

Burroughs outlined a story and arrangements were made to shoot in Guatemala, on the theory that it would be both cheaper than a studio shoot and lend an air of authenticity. So they were off and running.

The production was by all reports an extremely rocky experience. Problems with illnesses and customs issues caused enormous cash flow difficulties and Burroughs himself had to step in and bail out the serial, causing him to rethink his relationship with MGM and allow them to renew the option to make more Weissmuller movies. As a result, once the New Adventures of Tarzan serial was actually finished, a great many theaters refused to show it for fear of losing MGM business. The studio had made it very clear that their Tarzan was the official one and with a new Weissmuller movie already in production, most theater owners didn't see any reason to alienate MGM and lose the box office of a known hit for the sake of running a crappy low-budget serial. Frantic to try and recoup somehow, Dearholt cut together several different versions to hawk to theatres as a one-off feature, including Tarzan and the Green Goddess.

There's lots more behind-the-scenes stuff like that -- really, it could be its own column -- but I should skip to the bottom line that concerns us here. Is it worth checking out? Is the movie itself any good?

Well, let's define our terms a little bit. When you're watching these old serials, a different standard applies. It has to do with what Stephen King called 'the set of reality.' The idea is that you automatically make mental adjustments when you are watching a big-budget Hollywood special-effects extravaganza as opposed to, say, a high school play.

Serials were shot on the cheap and often cannibalized footage from other films in the studio's library for anything from crowd scenes to an erupting volcano. The actors were usually contract players from -- well, call it the shallow end of the talent pool. The scripts were in service to the action, not the other way around. There was very much a quota system in place for fights, damsels in distress, and so on and so on.

Now, for me, that's why I like them. To me that kind of storytelling in an imposed rigid structure is harder than just writing a story; which is why I always admire the people who can do that and make it work well. The best of the serials were still constructed according to the needs of the formula -- there was a set number of chapters, each chapter contained at least one action set piece, and a cliffhanger ended each one -- but they felt organic, the seams didn't show. And if you got lucky, the actors in it, although they probably weren't ever going to be Oscar winners, were bringing their A-game.

Okay. All that being said, is The New Adventures of Tarzan any good?

Actually, yeah, I thought so. The story works a lot better when you get to see all of it (the total running time for all twelve chapters is five hours, as opposed to a paltry 72 minutes for Green Goddess) and it's familiar stuff to anyone who's read the books. It's a tale very much in the tradition of the later Tarzan novels, not surprising since this was made in 1935 while Burroughs was still writing them -- that puts it just after Tarzan and the Leopard Men came out and before Tarzan's Quest was published. The story concerns Tarzan going off to Guatemala to find his missing friend Paul d'Arnot, and through a chain of coincidences getting embroiled with Major Martling and his search for a mysterious idol called the Green Goddess. There are competing expeditions looking for the idol as well, one led by a woman named Ula Vale and another by the villainous Raglan. There are plenty of fights and cool jungle action sequences, plots and counter-plots, and even a lost city with a hot priestess who's going to offer up Tarzan and friends as a ritual sacrifice. Vintage Burroughs.

The acting is not great -- Raglan is played by Dearholt himself, and Ula is played by his wife -- but Herman Brix/Bruce Bennett is pretty good, and the jungle footage and stunts are amazing. Herman Brix did everything himself and the sheer athleticism on display from him is astonishing. He was a college football star as well as a gold medalist in the 1928 Olympics (for the shot put) and only missed the 1932 games because of a broken shoulder. But by the time he made this Brix was in great shape and it shows. All his fighting and vine-swinging and lion-wrestling and so on looks incredible, especially when you remember they were shooting the whole thing in the wilds of Guatemala and there was no Hollywood special effects department backing him up. Here's a clip demonstrating what I'm talking about -- that's not a special effect where Tarzan is breaking the ropes, Brix really did it, and the lion stuff speaks for itself.

Plus it's in the public domain, so you can get the DVD for about two dollars.

Be sure you get the real one, though, the twelve-chapter serial. In addition to Tarzan and the Green Goddess, Dearholt also cut together another crappy 70-minute movie from the footage, called The New Adventures of Tarzan, after Brix had changed his name to Bruce Bennett and was having some Hollywood success. Don't be fooled. You want the serial.

*

And there you have it. Be here next week for our next thrilling chapter: The Trials of Tom Tyler!!

15 Comments

• At August 21, 2009, Dean wrote:

  Can we get a link to Amazon, or somewhere?

• At August 21, 2009, JackKing wrote:

  You can't search for it yourself?

• At August 21, 2009, Dean wrote:

  Of course, but he made a major point of getting the correct version.

• At August 21, 2009, Bright-Raven wrote:

  Speaking of Tarzan, Greg - you happen to own the old Filmation cartoon version that used to air in the ...

• At August 21, 2009, Mike Blake wrote:

  See the weird ear on that elephant Brix is riding? Looks like this is one if those Tarzan movies I've ...

• At August 22, 2009, Sijo wrote:

  Like most people, to me Tarzan is a childhood memory, something I used to watch in the b-movie matinees in ...

• At August 22, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  The DVD case that is pictured is the correct version. Amazon link here. But the easy way to check it ...

• At August 23, 2009, Edo Bosnar wrote:

  Fun column and informative column - I used to absolutely love the Tarzan novels until about the end of my ...

• At August 23, 2009, Dean wrote:

  Thanks Greg.

• At August 23, 2009, Perry Holley wrote:

  if your real name is something as cool as Herman Brix, why ever would you feel the need to change ...

• At August 23, 2009, Edo Bosnar wrote:

  The fact that Herman Brix does sound a bit "Aryan" occurred to me, but why would an American-born athlete who ...

• At August 28, 2009, Comics Should Be Good! @ Comic Book Resources » Serialized Friday, Chapter Two: The Trials of Tom Tyler! wrote:

  [...] doing a little series talking about the old black-and-white cliffhanger serials. Last week, I told you about an obscure ...

• At August 30, 2009, Mary Warner wrote:

  Mike Blake, that is DEFINITELY an Asian elephant!! You can tell by the raised back and the knobby forehead. ...

• At September 4, 2009, Comics Should Be Good! @ Comic Book Resources » Serialized Friday, Chapter Three: Look! Up In The Sky! wrote:

  [...] at several of the old cliffhanger serials over the last couple of weeks. The first installment is here. The ...

• At September 5, 2009, Rob Barrett wrote:

  If you like Brix, be sure to check out "Fighting Devil Dogs"--it's another great serial. Notable for its villain ...

*

You may or may not be aware of this, but The Middleman is now available on DVD.

We are very sad here in the Hatcher household that there won't be any more, but on the other hand we do at least have these twelve delightful episodes. Highly, highly recommended. One of the best comics-to-screen efforts ever.

Also, just as a bonus, in San Diego this year the cast gathered for a live reading of the unfilmed thirteenth episode's script. You can enjoy that now in seven parts on YouTube, right here.

*

Speaking of comics-to-screen, I finally got around to seeing Watchmen. We liked it fine; considering it's a story I regarded as basically unfilmable in its original form, the movie struck me as being about as serviceable a job as could be done.

I confess I don't get a lot of the vitriol I saw unleashed on this movie by the comics community. I thought there were plenty of things to like. Jackie Earle Haley, in particular, was terrific as Rorschach, and I thought most of the other actors did fine. I wasn't thrilled with the direction, particularly the stupid music-video trick of super slo-mo shots SUDDENLY SPEEDING UP FAST FAST FAST for the action scenes, but it didn't happen often enough to ruin the movie for me or anything. There were other bits in it that they might have improved here or there, I had a couple of casting quibbles, but on the whole even if those changes were made I still don't think I'd have given it more than a solid C-plus. It's just not a book that's ever going to make a movie that will feel quite right for fans of the original story... hence, 'unfilmable.'

It seems to me that should have been obvious to all of us going in. The people who made the Watchmen movie tried harder to respect the source material than a lot of other movie studios that have tried to adapt comics to film over the years, they kept quite a bit more from the book than I expected, and as a movie.... well, we didn't hate it. It's about on the level of a wait-for-DVD movie.... which, as it happens, is what we did.

Those of you out there who are getting so venomous about how disgraceful the Watchmen movie was and how the filmmakers just destroyed it.... clearly, you have never seen a truly bad comics adaptation. Like this one.

Or this one.

Or this one.

Those are cringeworthy comics adaptations. Watchmen is nowhere near being in that league.

What I notice in a lot of the fan press about comics-to-film adaptations is that it seems like we always want the moviemakers to love the comic as much as we do. Hollywood is getting hip to this and so every year they come down to San Diego Comic-Con and occasionally other places, trying to persuade us all that they, too, are comics fans. Sometimes it might even be true, but... so what? Does it really matter if Megan Fox reads comics or Halle Berry doesn't? One of the most pathetic things I've ever seen was the pre-taped announcement Jennifer Garner made for SDCC when they were trying to drum up enthusiasm for the Elektra movie: at one point, Jennifer timidly assured everyone that the costume would be red this time. The whole thing felt like it should have ended with "Just.... just please don't kill me, okay?"

If there's anything wrong with Zack Snyder's Watchmen, it's that it feels like every foot of film was shot with the idea that the first priority was dodging internet fan backlash. The truth is that there's no way it wasn't going to get pasted in the comics press. Because Snyder and company had to make changes, and there are way too many fans out there who regard the original Watchmen comic as Holy Writ. It's the book we wave at people when we try to prove superheroes can be Literature, there are too many people that use it to justfy reading comics, period.

Honestly? A lot of the changes that were made were necessary. You can't do a theatrical-release movie version of Watchmen and get everything in from the book. You just can't. Furthermore, the one big change Snyder and his crew made, the nature of Adrian's plan, strikes me as a better idea than the one in the book.

But then, I'm the heretic who's always thought the original Watchmen kind of falls apart at the end and places it much lower on the list of Alan Moore's work than most fans do. So there's that.

Nevertheless, I think the point stands. If you don't care for the movie itself, that's one thing, but railing about the changes in it from the comic book version seems just ridiculous to me. There will always be changes no matter what work you're adapting. Sometimes those changes work -- X-Men, Stardust -- and other times they don't. We should all know that going in and make our peace with it. Remember what James M. Cain (I think it was Cain) used to tell people when they carried on about how Hollywood ruined his books: "What do you mean? They're right there on the shelf, people still read them."

People still read Watchmen. I don't see that changing. A movie's just, well, a movie. This one was... okay. Not great but certainly not as horrible as it's been painted. I think Watchmen is a project that most of us probably feel too strongly about to ever really judge a movie version on its merits.

*

Amazon keeps trying to sell me old serials on DVD and I have fallen for a few of them.

Batman, from 1943, is generally regarded as not being very good.

For one thing, since it was made right in the thick of World War II, it's very racist. The serial features a Japanese villain, Dr. Daka, who turns his victims into brainwashed zombies.

There are also references to the government "wisely rounding up those shifty-eyed Japs, leaving Little Tokyo a ghost town." Etc.

Nevertheless, it's a mildly interesting historical curiosity -- this is the first appearance ever of the Batcave, an idea the comics promptly stole for themselves right down to the grandfather-clock entrance. Also this is the movie that prompted the comics to slim down the originally plump Alfred the butler to match his screen incarnation, as played by William Austin (Brian tells you more about that here.)

The Batman ran for 15 installments and starred Lewis Wilson as Batman and Douglas Croft as Robin.

The DVD set us back four dollars and that included shipping. For that price, I'd recommend it, but don't spend much more than that.

A much better ride is the 1949 Batman and Robin.

This is a more typical entry in the genre of Saturday-afternoon serials. The villain is the masked Wizard, and part of the fun is guessing his identity. The stunt work and fight choreography is first-rate, and the whole thing is such hell-for-leather fun you can sort of forgive and forget about things like the low-budget special effects and the ill-fitting Bat-costume.

Rumor has it that Hugh Hefner used to screen this for his friends at the Playboy Mansion in the sixties and that eventually led to ABC greenlighting the Adam West Batman TV show and doing it as a serial. Certainly you can see a lot of the elements here that the TV show parodied and there's plenty to laugh at, but I have to stick up for this one a little. It's fun. It always has felt to me like the Dick Sprang version of a Batman movie. Robert Lowery, in particular, plays both Bruce Wayne and Batman with such good-humored vigor that he seems to have stepped right out of a Golden Age comics story.

This DVD set replaces the VHS version I bought fifteen years ago. Both times I paid about seven dollars and that's about right. It's not the best Batman movie ever or anything, but I'd definitely recommend picking up the DVD if you come across it. It's a good time.

*

We have more of these serial collections on deck -- Captain Marvel, Superman, Tarzan -- but haven't watched all of them yet, so I daresay I'll have more to say on the subject...

...Next week. See you then.

30 Comments

• At August 15, 2009, Crash-Man wrote:

  I don't get the hate for Watchmen either.

• At August 15, 2009, Lawrence wrote:

  I don't get the hate for any movie. They're all easy enough to ignore. Although I liked Superman Returns, so ...

• At August 15, 2009, Joe wrote:

  Yes, the hate for movies is certainly strange that these seemingly "ruined" the original version. But another thing that's annoying ...

• At August 15, 2009, Nitz the Bloody wrote:

  I too miss the Middleman, and am glad it's seeing a DVD release. It was hilarious and wacky, in the ...

• At August 15, 2009, Bill Reed wrote:

  I remember liking the Nicholas Hammond Spider-Man. I'm going to leave it where it belongs, though-- in those fuzzy childhood ...

• At August 15, 2009, FunkyGreenJerusalem wrote:

  The people who made the Watchmen movie tried harder to respect the source material than a lot of other movie ...

• At August 15, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  But is it the worst, or can we still point at Schumacher’s coming out party for that one?

  Oh, I really ...

• At August 15, 2009, Matt Bird wrote:

  In college in the mid-90s, we showed "Batman and Robin" one chapter a week before the weekly college 16mm movie, ...

• At August 15, 2009, FunkyGreenJerusalem wrote:

  I’d rate it ahead of not just Schumacher’s Batman and Robin, but possibly even in front of Batman Returns, which ...

• At August 16, 2009, Bright-Raven wrote:

  I think it's a bit unfair to compare the 70s TV camp to today's multimillion dollar budget movies that are ...

• At August 16, 2009, Ted wrote:

  “What do you mean? They’re right there on the shelf, people still read them.”

  Yeah, but people DON'T read ...

• At August 16, 2009, Stephen wrote:

  Yes I own a copy of Watchmen and have read it a few times. But I'm not of the belief ...

• At August 16, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  The problem that I have is that, while yes a movie adaptation will not destroy the original work itself, it ...

• At August 16, 2009, Ted wrote:

  It never has made any difference to me where they rank in the public eye.

  I may not have ...

• At August 16, 2009, Sijo wrote:

  What most fans don’t get is that a movie *needs* to grab a larger audience than just us to succeed, ...

• At August 16, 2009, Adam wrote:

  Watchmen wasn't bad. The problem is one of format: novels, comics, television, and movies are all completely different ways ...

• At August 16, 2009, Edo Bosnar wrote:

  With reference to the Nicholas Hammond Spider-man series in the 70s, as an ardent pre-teen Spidey fan I tried really ...

• At August 16, 2009, Perry Holley wrote:

  “Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park” – anyone remember that gem?

  Unfortunately, yes. One of those movies I thought ...

• At August 16, 2009, Edo Bosnar wrote:

  Yes, I admit I thought the Kiss movie was cool when I was a kid, but now I just find ...

• At August 16, 2009, Greg Geren wrote:

  "Furthermore, the one big change Snyder and his crew made, the nature of Adrian’s plan, strikes me as a better ...

• At August 16, 2009, FunkyGreenJerusalem wrote:

  I mean here we had a pretty good representation of comic book type heroes in the real world, and it ...

• At August 16, 2009, FunkyGreenJerusalem wrote:

  And if you are merely “keeping the themes and the tones” then are you really adapting the work at all, ...

• At August 17, 2009, Ted wrote:

  I’d say you’re adapting the work, but on the other hand, I don’t really care.

  Well, I guess we're ...

• At August 17, 2009, Carlos Futino wrote:

  Really? Don’t get me wrong, Apocalypse Now is one of the finest films ever, but to say that it has ...

• At August 17, 2009, Ted wrote:

  That depends on how we’re defining “outshine”.

  Sure, but I still don't think that difference between Apocalypse Now and ...

• At August 17, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  Just as an aside, for purposes of comparison, we almost got a (badly-rewritten) version of this script by Sam Hamm ...

• At August 17, 2009, FunkyGreenJerusalem wrote:

  Also, I would put Bladerunner in the first category, so your general rule wouldn’t apply there.

  Bladerunner is the sole reason ...

• At August 17, 2009, Ted wrote:

  I just meant they made changes that are unique to the film, not represented by any story, and that ...

• At August 18, 2009, FunkyGreenJerusalem wrote:

  Fair enough points Ted!

  I think we pretty much agree.

  (With The Shining, knowing Kubrick, he probably started out liking the book, ...

• At August 18, 2009, Ted wrote:

  The guy shouldn’t even have been allowed in the same room as the contracts for Watchmen.

  To say there ...

I always enjoyed that, because I am nosy about other people's books and liked seeing what various comics industry people read for pleasure, and the list almost always led me to some books I'd never have run across otherwise. It's the same reason I enjoy our other Greg's periodic "What I'm Reading" posts.

So I decided to revive the Summer Reading List for this week's column. I asked a random sampling of people in and around comics, books, and writing to share their summer beach reading.... "random sampling" meaning comics professionals I had an e-mail address for that I hoped wouldn't dismiss the request as spam. Blessedly, most of them answered. Here's what they sent back.

****

Rachel Edidin, Dark Horse editor: I know I'm omitting a fair lot, but here's what I remember off the top of my head; a mix of the completed, in-progress, and prospective reads, in no particular order:

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
Fluffy by Simone Lia

Sunnyside by Glen David Gold
Straight Man by Richard Russo
What It Is by Lynda Barry
Chunks of the online Apollo Program document archive (I'm a NASA history junkie).

A whole slew of zines and minicomics that I picked up at Portland Zine Symposium.

Highlights include a handful of Jennie Hinchcliff's mail art zines; Boys, by Riley Michael Parker; and a lot of back issues of City of Roses, by Kip Manley.

Thanks. That was fun.

*

Tom Beland, True Story Swear To God: Ahhhh... the beach. A place where I can grab a handful of comics, my Ipod and one of those coconut rum thingies served in an actual coconut... and enjoy some amazing stories as my whiteness literally makes three people defecate in their swimsuit.

Well, just like you all, I've got a list of books that have made it worth making others lose their eyesight. And those books would be:

Iron Man. Of all the characters at Marvel... I totally don't understand Tony Stark. He's rarely interested me in any way, except for the "Demon in a Bottle" storyline back in the day. But Matt Fraction totally brought me into it. I'm digging Tony Stark and man, every issue is just rocking cool.

New Mutants by Zeb Wells. Dear Lord... this series is as cool as 7-11 Slurpee Cups back in the day. Can't wait to see what's next.

Blackest Night from DC. I KNOW!!! DC!!! Although I got the feeling about halfway through the first issue that "DC" stood for "DECEASED CHARACTERS." Very cool... very creepy. Lovin' it.

RASL by Jeff Smith. It just doesn't get better than new Jeff Smith work to consume.

*

Tony Isabella, writer of Tony's Online Tips, Black Lightning, and more 1970s Marvel scripts than I could ever hope to list: While sorting comic books and other review items sent my way, I came across Noble Causes Archives Volume Two. I'd enjoyed the few issues I'd read of the series, so I ordered Volume One from Amazon and am reading that in between other things.

I also found Savage Dragon Archives Volume Two and plan to get Volume One in the near future. I know I'm not Erik Larsen's target audience for the series, but I admire the heck out of him for sticking with something he obviously loves for so long. I've always wanted to read the series from start to finish...and this will be a good start.

In prose fiction, via the library, I'm re-reading Ed McBain's wonderful 87th Precinct books - Don McGregor introduced me to this treasure back when we were both at Marvel - and reading Les Roberts' Milan Jacovich novels.

In comics, via the library, I'm reading Preacher and Usagi Yojimbo. I have already read all the available collections that the library had of Barefoot Gen and The Boys. When I finish Preacher, I plan to move on to Fables. Now I have a lot of these trades already - just as I have all the McBain books - but they are deep in storage. It's just easier to read them this way.

*

Chip Mosher, writer of Left On Mission and the guy that keeps all of us here at CSBG caught up on everything at Boom! Studios sent us this list:

Comics - Catching up on Brubaker's Captain America run - he used to do LowLife, kids!
Asterios Polyp - Mazzucchelli's sequential work here is genius.

Reich #1-5 - a new find. Great stuff.
Berlin Vol. 2 - Lutes is a master storyteller. Probably my favorite comic ever.

The Hunter - Parker meets Cooke. You can't go wrong with this.

Books- I always end up re-reading The Shark-Infested Custard by Charles Willeford, my all time favorite novel by my all time favorite novelist.
Money Shot by Christa Faust - a new find. She's a spectacular writer.

I'll probably break some spines on my paperback collection of Carter Brown novels. I love the old pulps.

Those Robert McGinnis covers are epic.
I can't wait to pick up Blood's A Rover by James Ellroy this September.
And I might try to pick up that new Pynchon crime book, Inherent Vice.

*

Steve Lieber, of Periscope Studios and Whiteout: I'm reading a few books right now. The first one isn't fun, but it sure is gripping.

Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

Hometown Boy
by Rafael Alvarez

Filter House
by Nisi Shawl

Hell to Pay
by George Pelecanos

*

Kurt Mitchell, co-author of the All-Star Companion books from TwoMorrows (Volume Four of which is now available at finer comics retailers everywhere): This will go down in my autobiography as My Cataract Summer so my summer reading list is shorter than it would be most years. Still, I managed to swallow a tome or two.

Evolution: The First Four Billion Years was certainly my most ambitious read. A massive anthology with an awesome roster of contributors, it offers an up-to-the-minute (as of early 2009), state-of-the-science survey of the field.

The first half of the book is a collection of essays on such topics as the history of evolutionary thinking, the origin(s) of life on Earth, Darwinian gradualism vs. punctuated equilibrium, speciation processes, human evolution, the role of evolution in modern medicine and the continuing debate between evolutionists and the advocates of intelligent design and "scientific" creationism. The second half is an encyclopedia covering facets of the science not covered in the essays, including biographies of the most prominent thinkers in the field (historical and contemporary) and reviews of the major works in its literature. Edited by prominent scientists Michael Ruse and Joseph Travis, the book is written at a level any literate layman can grasp—though I freely admit I was out of my depth in such topics as organic chemistry and molecular biology—and should give the attentive reader a good grounding in the subject.

On a much lighter note, I thoroughly enjoyed Kirby, King of Comics, Mark Evanier’s biography of comic book legend Jack Kirby.

There’s been no shortage of Kirby interviews, analyses and critiques over the years but nobody has brought the pieces together as effectively as Evanier does here. His evenhandedness in addressing the controversies that linger around the Kirby legend, his refusal to either whitewash his faults or ignore his virtues, is a breath of fresh air in our contemporary tabloid tell-all world and especially admirable in an author writing about his personal friend and mentor. Lushly produced and lavishly illustrated, it is a fitting introduction for the general reader to one of our medium’s towering geniuses and a must-have for any super-hero comics fan’s library.

I also read, for the first time in thirty-plus years, two classic Alexandre Dumas novels, The Three Musketeers and The Man in the Iron Mask.

The first was fun, full of improbable heroics, breathless adventure and unforgettable characters (I nominate Milady DeWinter for literature’s most hateful bitch). The last of the Musketeer novels, Iron Mask is slow, cynical, fatalistic, saddled with endless scenes of superfluous dialogue and occasionally incoherent, as befits a book that is actually the last third of a larger novel. Kinda the French equivalent of going from the ‘40s Batman to the ‘90s Batman.

As far as honest-to-god comic books goes, I’m working my way through a complete run of Master of Kung Fu.

Whenever comics geeks discuss Marvel’s best books of the 1970s, MoKF is inevitably mentioned and deservedly so. Created by Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin, what could have been a heartless, mindless attempt to cash in on two hot cultural trends of the early ‘70s—martial arts and pulp character revivals—was from the beginning a thoughtful, even poetic, exploration of the search for spirituality and honor in a violent world that respects and values neither, without forgetting that it was also a colorful action series pitting pajama-clad pacifist and kung fu whiz kid Shang-Chi against his father, the immortal and malevolent Dr. Fu Manchu and other nasty would-be worldbeaters. A series noted for its complex plots, subtle characterization and spectacular fight scenes, it features the career-best work of longtime writer Doug Moench and artists Paul Gulacy, Mike Zeck and Gene Day. I’m loving every minute of it.

*

Novelist Chris Roberson, the man behind MonkeyBrain Books: Until a couple of weeks ago I was serving on the jury of this year’s World Fantasy Awards, which entailed reading everything published in 2008 that could conceivably be called “fantasy.” Since wrapping up the judging, I’ve been desperate to read just for fun. So what have I been cramming into my brain?

Roadmarks, Roger Zelazny

I came late to the Zelazny party, only reading a short story or two of his before I turned 30, but I’ve been making up for lost time as quick as I can. My friend Bill Willingham, who is a dyed-in-the-wool Zelazny fanatic, was flabbergasted that I’d never even heard of Zelazny’s time-travel/road-trip novel Roadmarks before. I just finished the book earlier this week, sorry I didn’t read it years ago. (Not least of which because of the surprised guest appearance by a certain bronzed-skinned pulp adventurer, among others.) Now it’s kicked off a minor Zelazny-frenzy in my head, and I’m revisiting Creatures of Light and Darkness at this very moment.

The New Frontier, Darwyn Cooke, et al

I’m midway through reading Cooke’s adaptation of Richard Stark’s The Hunter, and loving it, but as it happens I was already gradually working my way through a reread of Cooke’s The New Frontier, so it’s interesting to switch gears back and forth. I haven’t reread The New Frontier since it was published a half-decade or so ago, and revisiting it now I’m discovering that it’s even better than I remembered. Ranks among the best superhero comics DC has ever published (and, and by extension, the best superhero comics anyone has ever published).

Shambling Towards Hiroshima, James Morrow.

The first book I read when I got out from under the geas of the WFA was Morrow’s funny and thoughtful examination of monster movies and atomic holocaust, Shambling Towards Hiroshima. Here Morrow literalizes the “Godzilla as symbol for the atomic bomb” by revealing the secret history of a parallel program to the Manhattan Project to breed giant mutated iguanas to invade Japan, all told through the eyes of the star of b-picture monster flicks.

The Sun Inside, David J. Schwartz

This novella by David Schwartz (the author of the novel Superpowers, which is still on my To Read shelf but about which I’ve heard good things) was a pleasant surprise that cropped up in the submissions for the World Fantasy Award. Published by the small press Rabit Transit Press, The Sun Inside is the story of a modern day war vet, wounded in Iraq, who meets a woman on a singles’ website and travels to meet her in person. When he finds himself in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar, things take an odd turn. Somewhat downbeat and introspective, and deservedly so given the subject matter, the novella is nonetheless packed with all sorts of thoughtful reexamination of ERB’s pulp landscape, and recommended for anyone who enjoyed the original Inner Earth tales.

Pandemonium, Daryl Gregory.

This is a bit of a cheat, as I read this one last fall, but I only wish that I hadn’t—so I could read it again now for the first time. Here’s what I said about it when I reviewed it on my blog last fall:

“Pandemonium is Daryl Gregory's first book-length work to be published, and to my thinking it's the single best debut novel I've read in years. The back cover blurb doesn't even begin to do this book justice. This is the story of Del Pierce, a guy who dreamed of being an artist and whose dreams haven't worked out quite as he planned. Del lives in America, but it isn't quite our America. This is a world in which, for at least sixty years and possibly quite a bit longer, various individuals have, for varying lengths of time, been 'possessed.' By demons? Possibly. By telepathic mutant 'slan' who control them at a distance? Unlikely, but not impossible. By free-roaming personalities dredged from Carl Jung's 'collective unconsciousness'? Just maybe. But what does it mean that these demons/personalities/etc. so often appear in the forms of heroes from comic books and pulp novels? The Captain, shield-wielding super-soldier; the Truth, a grim avenger in fedora and trench coat, with twin .45s and a menacing laugh; the Boy Marvel, a hero in red tights and a white cape with a boyish smile. Or that another of the 'demons' is called Valis and possesses an elderly science fiction writer named Philip K. Dick?”

If you’re anything like me, you can’t read that description and not want to rush out and dive right into the book. And you wouldn’t regret it. Pandemonium is one hell of a book, and well worth seeking out.

****

...and there you have it. Many, many thanks to those industry folk who responded.

As for me, I have the usual pile of books to be read on my nightstand; this week saw the arrival of The Lone Ranger Rides North, another Fran Striker Lone Ranger novel from 1946, as well as Enemies and Allies, the new Superman-Batman prose novel from Kevin Anderson.

Those probably will get written up in this space at some point, but you can bet I'll also be on the lookout for some of the items mentioned by our panel of respondents above. I hope this list leads you to some fun reads too.

See you next week.

10 Comments

• At August 7, 2009, Adam wrote:

  Greg, you know Marvel has a comic adaption of at least one of those two Dumas novels, right? Of ...

• At August 7, 2009, Bright-Raven wrote:

  It was sort of odd seeing Christa Faust's MONEY SHOT as a "new find" by Chip Mosher (I think MS ...

• At August 7, 2009, Tom Fitzpatrick wrote:

  I'm currently reading Andrew Vachss' Another Life. A Burke novel.

  Why in the seven hells hasn't anyone adapted all his ...

• At August 7, 2009, Chip Mosher wrote:

  Bright-Raven --- yes, it's a "new find" by me. :P

• At August 7, 2009, Gavin wrote:

  I have that big Kirby book...great volume. Read it all in one sitting, which wasn't hard to do, and ...

• At August 8, 2009, Matt Bird wrote:

  Great column, Greg.

  The Ed McBain 87th Precinct novel you pictured, "The Pusher", contain my all-time favorite piece of dialog from ...

• At August 9, 2009, Edo Bosnar wrote:

  Yeah, great column, but crap, now there's going to be yet more books on my growing "to read" pile. Because ...

• At August 9, 2009, Lou Bank wrote:

  A quick clarification to Tom Fitzpatrick's post:

  The comics adaptations of Andrew Vachss' writing consist solely of HARD LOOKS and CROSS. ...

• At August 9, 2009, Randy Raish wrote:

  Greg -- Another stellar effort. I'd like to start a fan club. Could we call it ...

• At August 13, 2009, Kent Allard wrote:

  Ed McBain's passing was a great loss to the world

I originally was hired by Seattle Parks and Recreation to teach at the Alki Beach Art Studio, and I'm still on staff there.

It's called the Bath House, because it actually started as a bath house in the early days of Seattle. In 1911 or thereabouts, someone had the nutty idea that Alki Beach would be a great place to put a swim resort.

Clearly, this person had never actually tried to swim in Elliott Bay, which is rarely warmer than fifty degrees and usually closer to forty. The swim resort folded quickly once this became common knowledge, and the city bought the property that eventually became Alki Beach Park.

Most of the Pavilion was torn down but the city hung on to the Bath House, and it became the studio for the art classes offered through Alki Community Center. It hasn't been an actual bath house for close to a century, and we've been an art school for almost thirty years now but somehow the name stuck anyway. At the Bath House you can find pottery classes, painting classes, a gallery... and me, doing my thing.

These days, the Cartooning program is so well established at the middle school level that I only do a couple of beginner classes in drawing at the studio, but I'm still around for things like the annual art fair and so on.

One afternoon not too long ago I had a drawing tutorial with a couple of charming little ten-year-old girls, Inga and Inger. (They were in no way related, and looked nothing alike; Inga was blonde and plump and a little bit of a diva, while Inger was dark-haired with wide blue eyes and endlessly curious about everything except her lessons. Still, it tickled me that two girls from different schools had such nearly-identical names and interests, and I always looked forward to "Tuesday with the Ingas," as we'd come to call it around the studio.)

Neither one of them was terribly interested in what I was trying to show them that day, which was how to draw the shoreline outside our window using a simple one-point perspective.

There was a thump from the other room and Inger seized on that as a distraction. "What's that noise?"

"It's just Aaron, our pottery instructor. He's locking up." I waved at him through the partition. "Hey, Aaron."

Aaron poked his head in. "Hey, 'sup? Drawing class? Right on! You girls should pay attention, you got a good teacher there. You'll set the alarm?" he added.

"Yeah, I got it. They finally gave me a key and everything. Only took fourteen years," I told him. "You go on home, we're covered."

Aaron waved and was gone.

Inga said, "Why did it take fourteen years?"

"It's a long story," I said. "It has to do with the time they were going to tear the place down..."

"Tear this place down?" Inger was horrified. "They can't do that!"

"No, no, it's not going to happen," I hastened to assure them. "We're solid now, it all worked out. Mostly because of Aaron's predecessor Sylvia. She used to teach pottery here and it's because of her, really, that we're still in business. A lot of other people helped too, I even did some stuff. But it was really Sylvia."

"What did she do?" Inger wasn't going to let it go, and now Inga was interested too.

"You really want to know?" I raised an eyebrow. "If I tell you the story, will you get some work done for me? Quid pro quo. I talk, you draw. Deal?"

The Ingas agreed instantly, and I thought about it for a moment. "I can only tell you about when I came into it. This was a long time ago, before the remodel. About seven or eight years ago, I guess. I was finishing up down here one night and Sylvia and her assistant caught me just as I was leaving..."

*

In my early years at the studio, I had little to no interaction with my fellow instructors or other artists there, due largely to what I came to know as the Coffee Incident.

I didn't realize it was an incident at the time. There was a coffeepot at the studio and I drink a lot of coffee. So I'd make coffee and drink it.

What I was not aware of was that at the time there was a certain amount of bad blood between the studio artists. In addition to classes, the studio offered open hours for artists who wanted to use the space as their work area to do their own stuff, and a group of middle-aged beach ladies had largely co-opted the place as their private club. They'd paint, they'd do pottery, they'd hang out. However, schisms and feuds were often bubbling under the surface. The painters were usually mad at the potters and the potters were mad at the painters. Instructors would occasionally be waylaid by one faction or another and forced to listen to the litany of crimes the other side had committed.

I worked largely with kids, so I missed most of this. The first I'd heard about any controversy over the coffee thing was when an elderly lady stopped me one evening and told me if I was going to drink coffee I had to put in a quarter for each cup. I handed her a ten-dollar bill and told her not to bother me again until that ran out. The next day I brought in a three-pound can of Folger's and stuck it in the kitchen with a note-- a little caricature of me saying people should feel free to help themselves, I'd keep us in coffee, but only on the condition that they not badger me ever again about putting quarters into the kitty.

I probably should have been more diplomatic, but I was younger then, and I've never been good with office politics. I honestly thought I was being amusing, and in my defense I did buy the coffee for everyone, damn it. But for the following two years none of the studio artists dared to speak to me. Neither the potters nor the painters. Occasionally I'd meet someone new and after a moment they'd say, "oh, yes, you're the one who drinks coffee." Seriously, this went on for two years. Actually a little longer. Until that night.

All of this is by way of explaining that when Sylvia and her TA stopped me that evening I had only the vaguest idea of who they were. I figured it was just some new variation on coffeepot politics and I was gearing up to politely but firmly excuse myself and catch my bus.

Sylvia was a couple of years older than me. Our paths didn't cross much. I knew she did pottery, she taught, and she was beautiful. Not so much in a whoa-baby way, but elegantly pretty, like a classical portrait.

Her assistant, whose name I could never remember, was the closest I'd gotten to making a real friend at the studio. She was a plump cheerful girl who always looked a little surprised that people were actually talking to her, she often seemed painfully shy. However, she had endeared herself to me by genuinely taking an interest in my kids and poking her head in the Tuesday Cartooning class every once in a while when she was monitoring the pottery open studio.

Sylvia was soft-spoken but nevertheless you could tell she had a will of iron, she always carried an air of focus and fierce determination with her no matter what she was doing. In fact, that evening in the studio was the first time I'd ever seen her look nervous or upset; in retrospect, that's probably why I didn't give in to the impulse to brush them off and head out.

Sylvia handed me a paper. It was a form letter asking me to e-mail the Seattle Parks Commissioner, the Deputy Mayor, and a bunch of other city officials over the new Pro Parks Levy plan to---

"What the hell?" I burst out. "They're closing us down? Killing the school? Are you serious?"

"They want to make it a rental facility," Sylvia said, sighing. "It's beachfront property, they think they'll clean up."

"So they're fucking over the students because they think they'll get more money hosting corporate seminars and bar mitzvahs down here?" I was livid. "Are they nuts? Have they ever tried to actually park a car on the street down here in June? For Christ's sake, there's no street parking, everyone knows to walk or take a bus.... the idea that they're going to get a bunch of middle-management types down here for rentals is insane, we're not even close to anything....." I trailed off, spluttering with fury. All thoughts of catching the bus were long gone. I took a breath. "What do you need from me?"

"So you'll help?" Sylvia looked a little shocked, then embarrassed. "I mean... I'm sorry, I didn't mean to sound so surprised."

I grinned. "I don't take myself seriously, Sylvia, but I take my students very seriously. They're not joiners. This art program is their one thing. I'm sure not going to have it taken away from them because some asshole at Moneyswine Incorporated wants to host his frigging corporate retreat on the beach. Whatever you need, I'm your guy."

Sylvia and her TA winced a little at my language but looked pleased at my vehemence. "Well, write those e-mails... and we're having a meeting on Saturday. This is wonderful, thank you, I'm glad you're on board," Sylvia said.

"No problem. What time Saturday?"

"Ten AM," Sylvia's TA said.

I flushed. "I'm sorry, I'm a bad person, I've forgotten your name, even though I see you here all the time. I don't think I've ever actually introduced myself. I'm Greg."

"I'm Julie."

*

"So, that was how it started," I told the Ingas. "We had meetings and we had a rally one day, got the West Seattle Herald down here for that and we made as much noise as we could. The Herald really helped us, they gave us a front page and quoted me and Sylvia and they took pictures of the potters working in the studio... it was a real turning point. That was the rally, we had a big open house. I got a lot of the cartooning kids down here for that, it was actually a great day.

"I got to introduce some of my kids to the other teachers and I think it was the first time everyone was on the same page. The painters forgot about fighting with the potters and all of us instructors finally got to know each other and we had students and parents all promising to do whatever they could -- and Sylvia and Frances, the other pottery teacher, had done this genius thing. They had all these pre-addressed envelopes to the Mayor and the parks commissioner, and blank paper. Anyone who came to the rally and said they wanted to help, Sylvia or Frances or Julie would ask them if they could just take a minute and write a note... and then we mailed them all. I think it had to've been at least a hundred, probably more. All hand-written letters, a lot of them from kids and the rest from mothers and dads, begging them not to kill the art school. That was the day when it really felt like we had turned a corner, we started to think we could actually win."

"So what happened?" Inger asked. Both girls were rapt with interest by this point.

"They finally had a hearing, a big town-hall meeting, over at Alki Elementary School. And we packed that room. I'd sent a letter home with all my middle-school students, saying if they thought their kids were getting anything out of my class then would they please come to this hearing and tell the South Seattle Parks Commissioner." I paused, lost in the memory for a moment. "The Cartooning students and their parents alone filled up two whole rows of seats. I'll tell you, just thinking about that moment will keep me warm at night for years, looking out across that room and seeing all my kids and their folks, watching Devin's dad thundering away like the wrath of God at that weaselly South Seattle Parks guy... man. I'll never forget that. That was amazing."

"Why was he weaselly?" Inger wanted to know, always alert for nuance.

I laughed. "Well, you have to remember I'm biased. But we were sure he wasn't really telling his boss the truth. See, the Parks commissioner was a guy named Ken Bounds. We had tried and tried to get him to meet with us, we wanted to make our case in person. But the South Seattle guy and his assistant, a nasty hatchet-faced lady, just weren't going to let us do that. They hated us and they especially hated the studio artists, they thought we were running some kind of private club down here. And sometimes the painter ladies did give that impression," I admitted. "...but we were still a school. And Julie was sure that the South Seattle people were lying to Mr. Bounds, she'd seen a copy of some report or something, I forget what."

"Did you get to meet with him?" pressed Inga.

"Yes. Sylvia arranged it. She was working up at Parks during the day, she did consulting and stuff at the main downtown office there. This whole thing was really hard on her, because she knew that every time she fought with the South Seattle Parks people they would find nasty little ways to get back at her at her day job, she was worried all the time. But she really cared about the school and the pottery studio and she didn't want it taken away." I smiled. "She loved my students, too. Every time she saw what you kids were doing -- well, you know, not you, but kids like you -- it would just light her up, she'd laugh and clap her hands, you'd think it was Christmas morning. She just loved to see people do art."

"What about the meeting, though?" Inger wanted to know.

I snorted. "That was the funny part. It took less than twenty minutes. Bounds was actually a really nice guy. We made our case and then the South Seattle people chimed in and said they couldn't justify the school when it was so much more expensive than a rental would be, and that was how we caught them lying. Because, see, we'd never said not to do rentals. We just didn't want them to cancel our classes. We were totally okay with sharing the space. It was the South Seattle Parks people trying to make it an either-or thing, because they really just wanted us out. When we explained to Bounds that we would share, he just snorted and said he didn't have any problem with that and let's figure out a floor configuration for a remodel that worked for everyone. And that was that. It took all the air out of the South Seattle guys. We'd won." I waved a hand. "And here we are. Studio space on either side and the big area in the middle for people to host their parties, or whatever."

"So what happened to Sylvia?" Inger asked. "Why would she leave? You said she loved it here so much."

"She didn't leave," I said, a little bleakly. "She got sick."

*

Privately, Frances, Julie and I were sure that Sylvia's stroke was brought on at least partially by the stress she was under during her day job at the downtown Parks Department office. The battle to save the Bath House art school had made her unpopular in certain quarters, and as a freelance consultant, Sylvia had none of the protections a staff employee would have had. I'm sure that every day she went in to work she wondered if it was her last day.

But Sylvia was the kind of person that was very gracious and self-contained, and rarely unburdened herself to others. She would have considered that selfish.

So none of us saw it coming. And since Sylvia lived alone, it was almost eight hours before anyone found her after the stroke.

I heard about it at the studio and immediately rushed up to Swedish Hospital to see her. Patricia, one of the studio potters, gave me a lift into town. When we arrived, we were surprised to see Ken Bounds himself leaving Sylvia's room. He didn't say anything, just nodded briefly at us and then the nurse escorted us in.

It made us both heartsick to see Sylvia, usually so elegant, with the right side of her face sagging and tubes coming out of her nose, her color blotchy and her hair a stringy mess. She could only speak in a gasping sort of whisper and words came hard. But she was glad to see us.

"Don't talk," I told her. "We just came to tell you we love you and we've got everything at the Bath House covered. You just need to get well."

Sylvia's left hand, the only one she still had the use of, flailed for a moment and then clamped on my forearm.

"Hulp..." she said.

"What?" I said. "Help? What do you need?"

Sylvia shook her head. "Nuh.. hulp me. Hulp... Frances. Atsha ssudio. Classhes."

"I promise," I said instantly. "Frances and I are on it. The school will be fine."

"Dun fight wi' potters."

"Hey, now." I grinned at her. "We're all done fighting. That's all done. We won. You just do what your doctors say and get better."

"Rest...now..." Sylvia closed her eyes.

The nurse nodded at us and Patricia and I made a hasty exit. I excused myself to go to the men's room so Patricia wouldn't see me tearing up.

*

Sylvia eventually was released to an assisted-living facility on lower Queen Anne Hill. After the initial groundswell of support from the teachers and studio artists, most of her visitors dropped away. I tried to make it a point to get up to see her once every couple of weeks, at least. And I know Frances would make regular visits. But except for her boyfriend, Steve, we were pretty much it.

Steve was a big burly fullback of a guy, a deep-sea fisherman. I'd never met him until Sylvia was hospitalized. "Never had much use for artists," he confided to me. "Used to piss me off, how much time Sylvia spent at that goddamn studio. But I'll tell you what, you and Frances are the only ones that come see her."

I smiled at him. "So maybe some of us artists are okay?"

Steve snorted and let out a bitter laugh. (I had a hunch that bitter laughter was the only kind he was getting lately.) "Hell, brother," he clapped a hand the size of a canned ham on my shoulder, "You artist guys are her family."

Sylvia had good days and bad days. Sometimes she was very animated and happy, and other times she was wistful and sad. But unlike Steve -- or Frances or me, for that matter -- she was never bitter about what had happened to her. "I just have to learn how my new brain works," she would say. "But I'b goi'g to make art again."

She never tired of stories about my students. One time she asked me what was new, and I told her about how my Madison kids had decided that we would go as a class to see the new Spider-Man movie. She loved that.

"Tell me abou' Spider-Man," Sylvia said. "I don' know abou' him."

So I told her the story. I told her about how Stan Lee had done it as a lark, a sort of put-on of Superman, taking every cliche about Superman and Clark Kent and standing them on end to get Spider-Man. She kept wanting to hear more, and I got lost in the story myself, narrating the tale of how bookish Peter Parker had been bitten by a radioactive spider and given great power, and how the death of his Uncle Ben had taught him that with great power also came great responsibility.

I have often thought about that particular night since, especially when I see comics fans sneering at Stan Lee's writing as being dated or corny. I'm sorry, but someone who can write a story so powerful that even just having it narrated at third-hand by a guy visiting you in the hospital, it still can grab you and make you forget your own tragedy for a little while.... well, dated or not, that's a story from a writer who's got some game.

*

"Sylvia eventually married Steve," I told the Ingas. "During the week she still lives in an assisted-living place, but on the weekends she comes to her old apartment here on Alki and stays with Steve. Up there, just across the street." I pointed. "That's her building."

"What about everybody else?" Inger asked. "What happened to them?"

"Well, we all kind of scattered a little bit," I said. "We were closed for a year and a half here, they still had to build the new Bath House. I moved over to the Community Center, because drawing classes are easy to move, but pottery and painting just took a break till they got the new place built.

"So a lot of folks moved on. Frances moved to Oregon for a year, though she's back now, but by then we had taken on Aaron for the pottery classes. And Colleen's new too, she teaches painting now. And Sarah's our new studio assistant, you've met her. But they're all new, which meant that I was the senior instructor by default, I'm the only one left from the old days. So they finally decided it was okay for me to have my own key." I shrugged. "We all kind of found a new groove. Parks even manages to rent the place out once in a while. Mostly for weddings and receptions and stuff. The beach is a romantic place."

"What about the other assistant lady?" Inga demanded.

"Julie?" I grinned. "Why, I married her."

The Ingas squealed with delight.

"We got thrown together a lot, during the whole studio fight," I explained. "And then, after Sylvia had her stroke when Frances needed help with classes and stuff, Julie and I were together a lot then too. What I never knew was that even before all that, from the very beginning, Julie actually always asked for the Tuesday shift so she could hang out with me. But I eventually figured out what was going on. I told you the beach is good for romance."

The Ingas thought that was the best ending ever. Girls love romance.

Which is why I thought this would be a fun story for the column this week. Happy anniversary, baby.

And everyone else... I'll see you next week.

16 Comments

• At August 1, 2009, Bill Reed wrote:

  I am far too moved to make the cheap coffee joke I was going to make. You win this round, ...

• At August 1, 2009, Penny wrote:

  I too squealed with delight at the end of your story. Everyone loves a good love story and you ...

• At August 1, 2009, Da Fug wrote:

  That is a fun story! And you'd think the kids would at least work a little harder knowing someone ...

• At August 1, 2009, Kevin Decent wrote:

  Greg, this might be the best thing I've ever read from you. When I discovered your columns I read ...

• At August 1, 2009, Michael P. wrote:

  Knowing how that part of the story ends, I chuckled when I got to "'I'm Julie.'"

  I also laughed my butt ...

• At August 1, 2009, Sebastian wrote:

  Wow. Coffee Politics. Thanks, Mr. Hatcher. You had me on the edge of my seat the whole time. That ...

• At August 1, 2009, chad wrote:

  cool story amazing that one fight over coffee united a group of art teachers and led to true love how ...

• At August 1, 2009, Bright-Raven wrote:

  Happy anniversary to both of you. I *thought* it was this week, and I meant to send an e-card. Mea ...

• At August 2, 2009, bad trotsky wrote:

  When you write about your students and related things your writing steps a notch. It comes across how much you ...

• At August 2, 2009, Danielle Leigh wrote:

  *sniff* Beautiful story. Thank you for sharing.

• At August 2, 2009, Greg Burgas wrote:

  This is why I don't drink coffee. That's the real moral of the story!

• At August 2, 2009, Edo Bosnar wrote:

  What a great story, and well told. Happy anniversary - and many, many more!

  I'll add my vote to Kevin Decent's ...

• At August 2, 2009, Brian wrote:

  That was a fantastic story! Probably one of the best things I've read on your column.

• At August 5, 2009, patri wrote:

  Greg,

  I didn't know you were a writer as well as an artist! Nice story, well developed plot and a ...

• At August 5, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  Just so you all know, Patri is the current featured artist in our gallery at the Bath House. She is ...

• At August 6, 2009, Teebore wrote:

  Fantastic column, better than ever. I too grinned at "I'm Julie".

  I'd read your memoir...