Scary Monsters and Super Freaks

Birds of Prey (2020): [Cast and Crew]: Fun outing dominated by Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn, the best thing about 2016's misguided Suicide Squad. Having left the Joker and slightly reformed, Quinn ends up battling foul-mouthed Gotham mob boss Black Mask (an ebullient Ewan MacGregor, all f-bombs) for the life of an unfortunate pickpocket. 

Along the way, she teams up with Rosie Perez's jaded Gotham cop Renee Montoya (like Harley, originally created for Batman: The Animated Series), yet another Black Canary, and another Huntress. The Gotham City Police are especially hapless in this film. Batman and Commissioner Gordon appear to be on vacation for the duration. Recommended.

Brightburn (2019): [Cast and Crew]: Enjoyable, violent, terse story of an evil Superboy-type and the perils of parenting a super-powered sociopath. The end credits suggest a shared-universe sequel that would include Rainn Wilson's loopy vigilante from Super, also produced by James 'Guardians of the Galaxy' Gunn (though scripted by James in that case as well, whereas Brightburn was written by two of his brothers). Bring it on! Recommended.

Swamp Thing (1982): [Cast and Crew]: Totally solid B-movie from veteran horror director Tobe Hooper does a pretty faithful job of adapting the early issues of Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson's DC comic book Swamp Thing. 

Way, way better than the jumbled, misguided 10-episode Swamp Thing TV series of 2019. Louis Jordan makes a good villain as a much more urbane Anton Arcane than that in the comic book. Dick Durock is solid in the rubber suit as Swamp Thing. Adrienne Barbeau is fun as a gender-flipped Agent Cable. Would probably have been better if it had been R-rated to allow for more graphic violence, especially in the concluding battle between Swamp Thing and a mutated Arcane. Recommended.

Godzilla vs. Hedorah (aka Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster) (1971): [Cast and Crew]: Trippy late-stage Toho Studios Godzilla, now clearly a kid's series with an environmental message. Godzilla demonstrates a completely ridiculous ability to fly, a necessity when battling the high-flying Smog Monster. Hedorah's land-walking form looks a lot like Cthulhu after a week-long bender. Often intentionally funny, sometimes horrific, and sometimes with musical and animated sequences! Lightly recommended.

Joker (2019)

Joker (2019): based on characters and situations created by Bob Kane, Bill Finger, Jerry Robinson, Alan Moore, Brian Bolland, and others; written by Todd Phillips and Scott Silver; directed by Todd Phillips; starring Joaquin Phoenix (Arthur Fleck/ Joker), Robert De Niro (Murray Franklin), Zazie Beetz (Sophie), Frances Conroy (Penny Fleck), and Brett Cullen (Thomas Wayne):

Downbeat, revisionist take on Batman villain The Joker's origin story from the guy who directed The Hangover. Somehow, it mostly works. Director/co-writer Todd Phillips lifts much of the movie's written and visual aesthetic from 1970's and early 1980's Martin Scorsese. Hey, if you're going to steal, you can do a whole lot worse.

The result is a super-villain origin story that plays like the offspring of Scorsese's Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, with just a little After Hours mixed in. It's 1981, and Arthur Fleck, who will become The Joker, is a sad-sack, deeply mentally ill man caught in a family and bureaucratic nightmare of an existence. What larks, Pip!

Films derived from superhero properties don't usually deal with the truly down-trodden and desperate. Why should they? That's not the stuff of CGI! That Joker can be read as a small-scale power fantasy seems to have freaked out all the people who let the truly pernicious large-scale power fantasies slide right by without comment. There's certainly nothing attractive about Arthur Fleck's plight or his apotheosis. It seems to me that Iron Man, aka America's Giant Metal Penis, is a far more dangerous movie than this.

And Joaquin Phoenix is indeed a revelation. There's nothing 'funny' about this Joker, nothing crowd-pleasing or attemptedly crowd-pleasing about him in the manner of all previous big-screen Jokers. He's a man who becomes a monster in part because of forces beyond his control. This Joker is, among other things, physically brain-damaged. Yikes. Highly recommended.

Death and the Batman

Batman: Gothic (Deluxe Edition) (1990/ Collected 2015): written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Klaus Janson: Writer Grant Morrison's second major foray into the world of Batman (after 1989's Arkham Asylum) hurls the Dark Knight into a literary hellscape of nods to Faustus, Don Giovanni, Lord Byron's Manfred, Fritz Lang's M., Lewis's The Monk, Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, and a host of other horrific antecedents. There's even an exquisitely detailed, Rube Goldbergesque death trap for Batman to escape.

Batman faces an enemy from his past -- his past as a schoolboy at a private school, that is, in the days before Bruce Wayne's parents were murdered and Bruce's journey towards being Batman began. But the enemy threatens Gotham's major mobsters as well, whom this old enemy hunts for revenge. Klaus Janson supplies lots of moodiness and doom as artist. It's one of Batman's most nightmarish adventures, even with the typical splash of Morrisonian postmodernism. This would make a terrific Batman movie, live-action or animated. Come on, DC! Highly recommended.

Death: The Deluxe Edition (1989-2003/ Collected 2014): written by Neil Gaiman; illustrated by Chris Bachalo, Mark Buckingham, Mark Pennington, Mike Dringenberg, Malcolm Jones III, Dave McKean, Jeffrey Jones, P. Craig Russell, Colleen Doran, and others: Neil Gaiman's goth-chick Death gets her solo adventures from The Sandman, two miniseries, and several other places collected here in over-sized hardcover. 

I'd read them all before, but it's nice to catch up with Death, the friendly and understanding embodiment of, well, Death, one of Gaiman's seven Endless personifications of natural forces (the others being Dream, Destiny, Desire, Delirium (nee Delight), Despair, and Destruction because the universe speaks English and enjoys alliteration). 

The bulk of the volume is occupied by two three-part miniseries, Death: The High Cost of Living and Death: The Time of Your Life. I'm partial to the first above all others in this volume, playing as it does with the form of the 'quest' and possessed as it is of a grumpy, teen-aged protagonist saddled with the name Sexton Furnival who goes out one day to commit suicide, instead falls into some garbage, and is rescued by the human avatar Death creates for one day every century so as to experience life among the living. It's one of Gaiman's finest pieces of writing, amplified by the lovely, slightly twee artwork of Chris Bachalo and Mark Buckingham.

The other stories are fine as well, though Bachalo disappears halfway through the second Death miniseries, leaving Mark Buckingham and Mark Pennington to finish up the job without moving too jarringly away from Bachalo's style. That miniseries reunites us with several characters from The Sandman arc "A Game of You" a few years down the road. It's solid as well, though Death is much more of a supporting player this time around. Death's answer to one character's enquiry about The Problem of Evil is glib and shallow, but that may be the point -- she's trying to comfort somebody who isn't very bright, not offer a comprehensive solution to theodicy. 

The volume also includes Death's first appearance in The Sandman, in which she tries to cheer up her mopey Byronic brother Dream, and a standalone issue in which Death is called upon by a very minor DC superhero (Element Woman, or possibly Element Girl) who doesn't know how to die. 

A handful of stories (including one in which Death and John Constantine talk about safe sex!) and a length series of illustrations by various artists round out the volume. There's also an oblique introduction from Tori Amos, reprinted from a 1994 collection: one of the oddities of most of DC's new Deluxe editions is that they contain very little 'new' material. Highly recommended.

Rocketeers, Hellblazers, and Super-sons

John Constantine Hellblazer: Empathy is the Enemy: written by Denise Mina; illustrated by Leonardo Manco and others (2006): Scottish novelist Denise Mina did a year-long stint or so on Hellblazer, Vertigo's then-longest-running title about occult investigator/pissed-off magician John Constantine and his endless mission to protect humanity from Heaven and Hell alike. And she really nails Constantine's character in this tale of sinister not-quite-Christianity simmering off the coast of Scotland.

The only down side? This is only the first part of a year-long story, and ends on something of a cliffhanger. Leonardo Manco's art is suitably moody and impressionistic, though his lay-outs sometimes become a bit confusing. That may not be his fault, as non-comic-book writers often have trouble early on in their comic-writing careers describing sensible lay-outs. Nonetheless, enjoyable and sharply observed horror, with just enough of Constantine's acerbic cynicism. Recommended.

Superman and Batman: The Saga of the Super-sons: written by Bob Haney with Denny O'Neil; illustrated by Dick Dillin, Curt Swan, Ernie Chan, Rich Buckler, Kieron Dwyer, and others (1974-1980, 1999; collected 2013): Once upon a time in the 1970's, DC Comics posited an alternate timeline in which Superman and Batman had teen-aged sons who themselves had started haltingly into the family business of crime-fighting. And lo, it was groovy.

I mean, really groovy. Writer Bob Haney never got a grip on the speech patterns of youth culture, but that never stopped him from trying here or on Teen Titans. The art by Justice League of America mainstay Dick Dillin was solid, as it always was from him, with some able fill-ins by Curt Swan and Ernie Chan. Superman and Batman Jr. just wanted to find their own way in life. So they set out across America. And then they didn't. And then they set out across America again.

Well, the whole picaresque, Easy Rider bit does stop and start a bit. Nonetheless, there are some solid stories here, and they are, generally, 'fun,' which is more than I can say for most modern comic books. If nothing else, this is the series in which, inexplicably and jarringly, Superman starts referring to everyone as "fellers" for a couple of issues. Getting in touch with his rural past, I guess.

DC caught the continuity bug late in the 1970's, leading to a nonsensical story which eliminates the Super-sons from 'existence' in fairly brutal fashion. A 1999 story restores them to their rightful writer, Haney, and suggests that they're still out there somewhere, as this year's Grant Morrison-penned universe-hopping series apparently will also establish. Groovy indeed. Recommended.

Rocketeer Adventures 2: written and illustrated by a cast of dozens (2012): IDW's anthology of short pieces featuring Dave Stevens' 1930's hero The Rocketeer is all kinds of fun. And if you don't like one story, there are plenty of others to look at instead. It's an approach that a lot of characters could use more of, which is I guess why DC has been trying it with digital-first anthology comics devoted to Batman, Superman, and soon Wonder Woman. I suppose the only problem is that some of the 'pin-ups' leave you wishing the artists had had time to do whole stories (especially Mike Mignola's lovely, creepy illustration). A third series soon, please! Recommended.

Bar Sinister

I Wear the Black Hat (Grappling with Villains Real and Imagined) by Chuck Klosterman (2013): The always entertaining pop-culture essayist Klosterman delivers a book-length meditation on how current American society decides who its fictional and real-life villains are, and why.

Klosterman loves to set up binary and trinary constructions as if they were the only possible ways to approach a problem ("There are two explanations for this..."), which aids in making the book a source of argument and debate. It's a lot like a really good and really rambling discussion one would have in a bar with someone more versed in popular culture than in the philosophy and literature of the past. There's a faint structure here, but for the most part this reads like about 15 essays on one topic, and not a coherent whole.

Many of the topics are fun and interestingly argued. And the occasional shagginess of the structure contributes to the feeling of this being a terrific bar conversation, wandering a bit as all bar conversations do. And the strongest section of the book, an examination of Batman as related to Bernard Goetz, spawns the best relatively new idea for a movie or comic-book representation of Batman that I've come across in a long, long time.

Also fascinating and bizarre is Klosterman's comparison of O.J. Simpson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as public "villains", especially as Klosterman discusses Simpson's bizarre "tell-all", If I Did It, which may be one of the few books in history to belong to a sub-sub-genre completely unique to itself.

Has anyone else in history tried and acquitted of murder subsequently written a memoir in which he or she convincingly and graphically describes the actual murder as a hypothetical in a memoir otherwise presented as factual? And was said memoir taken away from the autobiographicist prior to release and given to the family of one of the murder victims so that they could attempt to raise funds with its publication? Klosterman manages something extraordinary here: he makes me want to read O.J.'s book. Well, almost. Recommended.

Mumbling Towards Gotham

The Dark Knight Rises: written by Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan, and David S. Goyer; directed by Christopher Nolan; starring Christian Bale (Bruce Wayne/Batman), Tom Hardy (Bane), Michael Caine (Alfred), Gary Oldman (Commissioner Gordon), Anne Hathaway (Selina Kyle/The Cat), Marion Cotillard (Miranda), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (John Blake), and Morgan Freeman (Lucius Fox) (2012): I enjoyed seeing this again, this time on the small screen, but unlike The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises doesn't become more understandable on TV.

And by 'understandable,' I mean, 'What the hell was Nolan thinking with the godawful sound-mixing on this movie?

Either Christopher Nolan is deaf or the sound mixing on The Dark Knight Rises was designed for some ideal, 100-channel speaker system that most homes and theatres don't have or Christopher Nolan was trying to make the action-movie equivalent of Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller, with its purposefully muffled dialogue. Whatever. Add in the periodically incomprehensible electronically altered voice of Tom Hardy's Bane and the periodically self-parodic growl of Christian Bale as Batman and you've got a movie that should be sub-titled.

I suppose the other funny thing is that the Nolans lifted a bunch of stuff from Batman comic books for the TV show Person of Interest, and Person of Interest is a better take on Batman than any Batman movie. So it goes. I mean Jesus, Fusco IS Harvey Bullock! Recommended.

I without a Face

'V' for Vendetta: written by Alan Moore, illustrated by David Lloyd (1981-89; collected 1990): Now that V's Guy Fawkes mask has been appropriated by both the Occupy movement and Anonymous, it's getting hard to remember what a violent, anarchic fellow Alan Moore and David Lloyd's original character was. The dystopia of the graphic novel is about ten times worse than that seen in the movie adaptation, and V himself (herself? itself?) ten times more violent and ten times more problematically justified in that violence.

The story started life in the pages of England's Warrior comic magazine in the early 1980's, alongside Moore's other early opus Marvelman (aka Miracleman). If Miracleman was Moore's push-the-limits take on Superman, then V was his Batman: a Batman fighting a dystopic future Britain that strongly resembled the world of George Orwell's 1984. A Batman whose true face and true identity remain forever hidden from the characters in the story and from readers as well. When you put on a mask, you become a symbol.

Moore was initially reacting to the heightening nuclear tensions of the early Reagan/Thatcher era, and to the ruthless economic and social policies of those two genial abominations. The dystopia of the graphic novel is a Great Britain that avoided direct nuclear conflict thanks to its Labour Government severing all nuclear ties with the United States in the 1980's.

The U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. are presumably smoking, irradiated ruins. Great Britain fell into chaos and was soon under the control of a far-right party which now rules with an iron fist and a hatred of civil liberties and anyone different. There are no non-white ethnic groups left in this Great Britain; gays and lesbians have also been exterminated or forced underground.

And so rises V, a mysterious, anarchic freedom fighter who possesses the improbable fighting and planning skills of Batman and the homicidal justice-seeking of the Shadow. Also, he loves Motown music and Thomas Pynchon. He's Anarchy personified, set against Fascism. And he knows he's a monster, which makes him oddly sympathetic, and the ending quite moving. Moore has given him some of the qualities of Mary Shelley's hyper-educated Creature in Frankenstein.

The reactions to the book have been quite telling over the years -- this is, ultimately, a book with a terrorist as its protagonist. But he's a terrorist fighting a terrorist government, a monster set against monsters. And Moore is fairly clear throughout that V's violence isn't to be romanticized, and that there must a price, a price V knows. Having lost his essential humanity at some point, V fights now to allow people the Free Will to choose their own humanity. But Moses cannot enter the Promised Land.

In any case, this book remains thrilling and bracing today, and perhaps even more relevant in a world of perpetual war with shadowy terrorist groups. David Lloyd's moody art hits the right notes, though the book would be better if the entire thing was done in the Black and White of its early Warrior episodes: colour really does nothing to improve Lloyd's art, and indeed somewhat mutes it at points. Highly recommended.

Black Raven

The Raven, 'inspired' by the poem by Edgar Allan Poe, written by David Boehm, Florence Enright, Michael L. Simmons, Dore Schary, Guy Endore, Clarence Marks, Jim Tully, and John Lynch; directed by Louis Friedlander; starring Boris Karloff (Edmond Bateman) and Bela Lugosi (Dr. Richard Vollin) (1935): Bela Lugosi's increasingly buggy surgeon loves the work of Edgar Allan Poe.

He loves it all so much that he's built a hidden torture chamber in his house filled with torture machines suggested by Poe's short stories and poems. He keeps stuffed ravens everywhere. And he loves quoting Poe. The nine-hundred writers who worked on this hour-long movie really went all out in the 'Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe' department.

There's even a modern-dance sequence that interprets Poe's poem "The Raven." They don't make horror movies like this any more.

Lugosi's Dr. Vollin becomes obsessed with the young dancer he saves with his surgical skill. With the unwilling help of escaped murderer Karloff (who gets the more sympathetic role here), he intends to revenge himself on everyone who's wronged him in the first fifteen minutes of the movie. Much hilarity and scenery-chewing ensues, along with some woeful comic relief, some ingenious death traps and hidden rooms (and rooms with hidden properties), and one of Karloff's subtlest performances.

As a strange bonus, Karloff's character ends up looking a lot like the inspiration for the Batman villain Two-Face, just as the protagonist of an earlier horror movie, The Man Who Laughs, is the spitting image of The Joker. Recommended.

Giant-size Swamp Thing

The Saga of the Swamp Thing Volume 5: written by Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, Rick Veitch, and John Totleben; illustrated by Rick Veitch, Steve Bissette, John Totleben, and Alfredo Alcala (1986; collected 2011): The penultimate collection of Alan Moore's career-making run on DC's Saga of the Swamp Thing sees Rick Veitch take over as primary penciller. As previous Swamp Thing penciller (and then-continuing cover artist) Steve Bissette notes in the informative introduction, Veitch's interest in science fiction over horror helped shift the book to a more science-fiction-oriented direction. But first Swamp Thing would travel to Gotham City for a fateful encounter with Batman. Then it was off into space for several issues for an odyssey that would conclude in the next volume.

The double-sized issue featuring Swamp Thing's battle with Batman is a doozy, showcasing as it does longtime Swamp Thing inker John Totleben's second full-art stint on the comic book. It's gorgeous: Totleben's art often looked like he was cutting his fine lines into wood or perhaps copper. It's elegant and old-school without being stiff or anachronistic. This was the time of Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns, so Batman gets a really, really big Batmobile. However, Moore's Batman is much more sympathetic and fallible than Miller's -- and reasonable, in the end, as he and Swamp Thing ultimately resolve their differences without killing each other.

Subsequent issues further develop the character of Swamp Thing's beloved Abigail Cable, reintroduce two horribly transformed characters from Martin Pasko's early 1980's run on Saga, and bring us Swamp Thing's first foray into space travel. One can see Moore straining at the chains of the endless status quo of the mainstream superhero universe here. Things may return to the baseline at the end of each seemingly world-changing event, but logically they shouldn't.

Even if DC wouldn't soon anger Moore and cause him to leave the mainstream forever, one can't really believe, reading these stories, that he would have been much longer satisfied with 'The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same.' Highly recommended.

The Saga of the Swamp Thing Volume 6: written by Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, and Rick Veitch; illustrated by Rick Veitch, Steve Bissette, John Totleben, Alfredo Alcala, and Tom Yeates (1986-87; collected 2011): And so Alan Moore's time as writer of DC's Saga of the Swamp Thing comes to an end after four years and nearly 50 issues'-worth of adventures. When he took over with issue 20, Moore was a British comic-book writer making his American debut. When he finished, he was the most praised writer of mainstream comic books in North America.

Swamp Thing's space odyssey continues, as the muck-encrusted Plant Elemental desperately seeks a way back to Earth and the arms of his beloved Abby. Meanwhile, on Earth, Abby believes Swamp Thing to be dead and starts to gradually move on with her life. Yes, they are literally star-crossed lovers.

The move into space brings Swamp Thing into contact (and occasionally conflict) with some of DC's Silver Age space characters, most notably Earth hero Adam Strange and a couple of really jerky Hawkpeople from Hawkman's planet of Thanagar. Swamp Thing also encounters a creepy machine entity in an artistic tour-de-force for Totleben, who illustrates an entire issue in the sort of heavy-duty collage that really does have to be seen to be appreciated, an issue that also allows Moore to cut loose with a long burst of prose-poetry meant to show the alien-ness of the issue's narrator, a world-sized machine intelligence pining for love in the lonely abyss of space.

Swamp Thing also encounters some of Jack Kirby's New Gods in an issue written by Veitch, one that showcases the more satiric, blackly comic and irreverent Swamp Thing that Veitch would be writing a lot more of when he took over from Moore as Saga writer with issue 65. Bissette's first full script sees Abby back on Earth encountering a character from the very beginnings of Swamp Thing back in the early 1970's, when it was written by Len Wein and illustrated by Bernie Wrightson. And there's a Green Lantern to be met before our hero returns home and Moore's stint as writer concludes with the lovely, elegaic "Return of the Good Gumbo." It was one hell of a ride. Highly recommended.

The Invisible Batman

Batman Unseen; written by Doug Moench; illustrated by Kelley Jones (2007-2008): Throwback to Moench's 1990's and 1980's work on Batman, some of it with Jones as illustrator. Batman, plagued by doubts about the efficacy of his Batman persona when it comes to frightening an increasingly unfrightened criminal lot, faces an invisible enemy -- a scientist driven crazy by his invisibility serum.

1980's Moench creation Black Mask, one of Gotham's criminal kingpins, plays a supporting villainous role. Jones's art is as interesting and grotesque as it's ever been, and Moench's Batman is a lot more human than most recent incarnations. The invisible villain isn't all that interesting, and Batman seems to have way more trouble fighting him than one would expect. Not a high point for either creator, but certainly diverting. Lightly recommended.

Batman vs. Cthulhu: The Road to Victory

The Doom That Came To Gotham; written by Mike Mignola and Richard Pace; illustrated by Troy Nixey, Dennis Janke, and Dave Stewart (2000): For a time in the 1990's, DC seemed to release a new 'alternate history' take on Batman every week. Many of them were very good, but the sheer weight of stories about Batman in various historical and fictional locales eventually crushed the whole Elseworlds line that had been meant to showcase alternate takes on all DC's heroes.

Hellboy creator Mike Mignola salvages the concept here in a nice riff on H.P. Lovecraft's (never-named-herein) Cthulhu Mythos, with the title bouncing off the HPL short story "The Doom That Came To Sarnath." Mignola sets the story in the 1920's, when Lovecraft was shifting into high gear on the Cthulhu Mythos, and runs Batman, DC, and pop-culture history through a blender. The story homages both Lovecraft and the Lovecraft-derivative John Campbell novella "Who Goes There?", which would go on to be the basis for three movies named The Thing.

Out of the Antarctic comes a universe-threatening menace, and only globe-trotting adventurer Bruce Wayne can stop it, possibly by putting on that Bat costume he's made. Mignola comes up with some pretty clever, Lovecraftian riffs on familiar Bat-family characters that include the Penguin, Mr. Freeze, King Croc, Ra's Al Ghul, and Harvey "Two-Face" Dent, and mixes in Jack Kirby's Demon, the Green Arrow, and some of his own Hellboy -- which itself homages Lovecraft in its very foundations -- with a plague of lizards and some very Hellboyish tweaks to the Demon and Batman himself.

Fun this definitely is. I don't know much about Canadian penciller Troy Nixey, but he's a good fit for the material: this is a grungy world of Jazz-Age grotesques and squamous, batrachian horrors. It's fitting that Nixey ended up directing a film for producer Guillermo del Toro, 2011's Don't Be Afraid of the Dark. Recommended.

Dreams with Sharp Penises

Book


Beast House by Richard Laymon (1986): I've generally enjoyed the late Laymon's horror stories when I've come across them in anthologies. This is the first novel of his I've read. It comes from relatively early in his career. A small coastal California town offers the 'Beast House' as its main tourist attraction, a house wherein terrible murders have periodically taken place since the early 20th century.

In 1979, two female friends -- Tyler and Nora -- travel there so that Tyler can reconnect with an old flame who's now a police officer in the coastal town of Malcasa. Along the way, they're saved by two recently discharged Marines from an angry driver. At the same time, a successful writer of non-fiction books about hauntings shows up in Malcasa with his assistant at the invitation of a young woman who's found a diary by an early 20th-century woman who writes about her violent sexual encounters with the beast, which she calls 'Xanadu.' Soon, various horrors, many of them violently sexual, are visited upon our group of characters. This is what happens when some bizarre subspecies of humanity develops a penis with teeth. I would love to understand the evolutionary mechanics behind that particular adaptation, especially since the (male) creatures appear to be able to eat with those befanged penises. Oh, the humanity!

Laymon's novel is a fairly brisk page-turner, as much a thriller as a horror novel. There are a few too many coincidences to allow for a complete suspension of disbelief, and there's a certain unbelievable laissez-faire feeling to the after-climax that seems designed solely to allow for a sequel without taking into account what the authorities would actually do when confronted by the revelations of the final pages. Enjoyable but pretty slight.


Comics


Batman: The Black Casebook by Bill Finger, Edmond Hamilton, Sheldon Moldoff, Dick Sprang and others, selected and introduced by Grant Morrison (1953-1964; collected 2009): During the 1950's and early 1960's, Batman and Robin appeared in hundreds of stories that are now considered uncharacteristic and, frankly, a little goofy as they travelled to other planets, fought bizarre creatures both alien and Earthly, encountered various forms of mind control and in general just had a lot of bizarre adventures. Most Batman readers and writers since the late 1960's have considered these stories to be 'out of continuity' as they're difficult to reconcile with the urban vigilante Batman who fights grotesque but human villains in a quasi-realistic milieu.

When Grant Morrison started writing Batman in 2006, he began dealing with a number of these adventures as if they'd actually happened in one way or another to the in-continuity Batman and Robin of 2006. He brought back the Club of Heroes -- costumed crime-fighters from various lands who try to emulate Batman's career that include England's The Knight and the Squire, Italy's Legionary and France's Musketeer. And his Batman suddenly turned out to have a 'Black Casebook' which contained all the cases that didn't comfortably fit into Batman's 'normal' crime-fighting duties. Ultimately, the villain behind Morrison's Batman R.I.P. storyline would turn out to be a minor, unnamed character from the paranoiac early 1960's story "Robin Dies at Dawn" (included here), while part of Batman's emergency defense against mind control proved to tie into the 1950's story "Batman - The Superman of Planet 'X'", in which Batman apparently travels to another world to help the Batman of that alien planet.

Most of the stories in this collection are almost defiantly loopy, suggesting Batman as a precursor to such outrageous later heroes as The Creeper, The Tick and The Flaming Carrot. That isn't to say that the stories are knowingly skewed -- they're more like Atomic-Age fairy tales featuring Batman and Robin, fantasies of transformation, instability, dread and wonder. And there's a strange but undeniable logic to these sorts of adventures being published when they were, during nuclear fear of the 1950's, with the first hysteria about flying saucers kicking off in the U.S. in the late 1940's and early 1950's, and with space travel appearing more plausible every day. This certainly isn't a Batman collection for people who want the character to at least somewhat resemble Christian Bale's version. Or Adam West's version, for that matter. But it is a wild ride. Highly recommended.

King, Conan, Bat, Spider

Books:

Under the Dome by Stephen King (2009): At 1072 story pages, Under the Dome is King's longest novel since the complete and unexpurgated Stand came out in 1990 and his third-longest novel overall, also trailing It (1986). King originally started writing the novel back in the 1970's, abandoning it twice before finally starting over to write this one. Thus, the concept of a city trapped under a dome (really more of a capsule extending 47,000 feet up and down) predates The Simpsons Movie (2008). But there were also a number of science-fiction stories and novels that also dealt with such a predicament prior to the Simpsons.

As he did in such novels as The Stand and Salem's Lot, King deploys a large cast of characters for the roving eye of the third-person narrative to examine. The entire town of Chester's Mill, Maine, population about 2000, gets enclosed within a mostly impermeable dome (it allows a small amount of air and water flow, along with all forms of radiation) one October day. Over the course of the next week or so, life under the Dome becomes more and more fraught with problems as the power-lust of a Christian fundamentalist town selectman and the brain-tumour-enabled madness of his son lead to a large-scale reenactment of Lord of the Flies.

King's characters are more well-rounded here than they often are -- the nominal villain, "Big Jim" Rennie, is loathsome but understandable. Small towns and big towns are always afflicted by people like him. The rapid descent of Chester's Mills into chaos and then malign reordering has been especially well imagined by King. For all that, the town's survival or lack thereof remains in doubt until the last few pages, when a human-created wild card combined with the air-retaining qualities of the Dome put the town into the Final Jeopardy round.

For a near-1100-page novel, Under the Dome moves quickly and assuredly to its climax. You'll probably end up liking a number of characters, which makes the ruthlessness of King's narrative -- this is not a novel where all the 'good guys' survive, or even most of them -- all that much more appealing. Perhaps most appealingly, none of King's major characters are writers or artists. After Lisey's Story, Duma Key and Cell, that's something of a relief.



The Essential Conan: The People of the Black Circle by Robert E. Howard, edited by Karl Edward Wagner: Even though there are hundreds of Conan books and comic books both new and out-of-print, finding unexpurgated, un-'improved' versions of Robert E. Howard's original stories from the 1930's isn't easy. The successful paperback packagings of the Conan stories from the 1960's edit out the saltier parts along with the most overt sexism and racism.

Beyond that, the editors of the Conan stories for Ace Books also needed to fill as many paperbacks as possible. That's not easy -- there actually aren't that many Conan stories relatively speaking, though in total they probably equal about one Lord of the Rings. Not bad, given that Howard committed suicide when he was 30 and that he wrote more than a hundred stories about characters other than Conan. The editors of those Ace Books 'retrofitted' a lot of non-Conan Howard stories to be Conan stories, changing names and place names, and they also finished up some story fragments and wrote entire stories based on Howard's notes. Howard's original barbarian would eventually be buried under all these additions.

Howard's Conan is indeed the supreme fighter of the movies and short-lived TV series. However, he's also extremely bright, a master of dozens of languages and dialects by his mid-20's, and a highly competent military tactician and strategian. The pre-last-Ice-Age Hyborian world he wanders through is a crazy quilt of countries that resemble historic countries from across the breadth and span of human history -- essentially, dynastic Egypt, 19th-century Afghanistan, Golden-Age Greece and 1000 AD Scandanavia are all contemporaneous. And magic, of course, works.

In this collection, Conan combats a number of menaces human, natural and supernatural. The stories are superior adventures for the most part, and one recognizes certain scenes that the makers of the first Conan movie cherry-picked for that movie, most notably the crucifixion of Conan in "A Witch Shall Be Born." Conan can take punishment with the best of adventure heroes -- in the story, he apparently recovers from being crucified without the aid of magic as he does in the movie.

Howard's prose style is also quite interesting, much moreso than that of most of his imitators. While Howard was relatively young when he wrote about Conan, he was a voracious reader who also apparently swallowed a thesaurus, thankfully after checking the definitions contained therein. The result is prose that moves from the descriptive to the baroque, along with a sense of story structure that grows by leaps and bounds over his short career. If you enjoy fantasy but have only experienced Conan through other media or through various new Conan novels, I'd recommend looking up Karl Edward Wagner's attempt to bring the real Conan back from the 1930's.



Comics:

Secrets of the Batcave by about 100 writers and artists (1940-2001; collected 2007): A fun collection of predominantly Golden Age Batman stories involving the Batcave, its development, and the various trophies found inside. Of primary geek appeal are the stories detailing the origins of the giant Lincoln penny and the robot T. Rex seen literally hundreds of times in the background of hundreds of scenes set in the Batcave over the last few decades. The filmmakers really should get around to giving Batman a trophy room. Because giant pennies are cool.


Essential Spider-man Volume 4 by Stan Lee, John Romita, Jim Mooney, John Buscema and others (c. 1969-1970): The evolution of Spider-man into the most tormented superhero of them all continues apace here as the book zips ever closer to Stan Lee's retirement as a full-time writer. The legendary John Romita does a lot of design and layout work here, though he pencils relatively little of this collection, leaving Jim Mooney and others to ape his style as best they can.

Where original Spidey artist Steve Ditko's Spider-man actually looked like a gawky teenager (well, at least for awhile) and his characters looked at least nominally realistic, Romita's Spider-designs are slick, action-oriented work -- really, the defining Marvel art-style of the 1970's. Spider-man's popularity exploded under Romita's pen, but I much prefer Ditko's art (and his often wonky plots and villains). Still, quite enjoyable, though Peter Parker's angst does get grating after awhile. Subsequent writers would tone this down a bit -- there are times where Parker sounds as tortured and whiny as Lee's Silver Surfer, also being published at roughly the same time as this version of Spider-man.