Hell Above, Hell Below

Hellboy in Hell Volume 1: The Descent (2015-2016/Collected 2016): written and illustrated by Mike Mignola: Mike Mignola's Hellboy series moves inexorably towards its conclusion in this, what may be the penultimate volume in the long-running series. The end of the last book saw Hellboy dead on Earth and plummeting into Hell. And now we open, on the borderlands of Hell.

Hellboy is his usual acerbic self as he fights an assortment of demons and, well, more demons. Some have personal grudges against him as he sent them back to Hell during his heroic, monster-fighting career above-ground. Meanwhile, Hell's capital city of Pandemonium is strangely empty, and Satan himself is asleep in a basement. Hellboy has help in Hell, but will it be enough to see his mission through -- if there is a mission?

Well, that's the question. Hellboy in Hell marked the return of Mignola to drawing Hellboy as well as writing it after several years of having Duncan Fegredo handle the art duties. It's a welcome return. Mignola has simplified his line, his shapes, and pretty much everything about his style. It's a marvelous, evocative evolution of cartooning that can attain startling effects both comic and horrific. 

Hellboy's purpose in Hell seems a bit vague, but some of that reflects Hellboy's own rejection of the 'destiny' the first couple of years of Hellboy set up. He's not going to usher in the final act of the Apocalypse, having rejected his demonic heritage. Why, then, does he not remember committing a major act of violence in this volume?

If you've never read Hellboy, this is not the place to start. If you have been following Hellboy, this is pretty much essential as we approach the end of a remarkable horror/fantasy epic. Highly recommended.

BPRD: Hell on Earth Volume 4: The Devil's Engine & The Long Death (2012/ Collected 2012): written by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi; illustrated by Tyler Crook, James Harren, and Dave Stewart: The eruption of Hell onto Earth-Hellboy continues in this collection of two miniseries dealing with Hellboy's former unit, the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defence. Things are grim. Monsters are everywhere. This volume contains two 'snapshots' of the ongoing conflict/apocalypse, nicely scripted by John Arcudi and possessed of a number of fine visualizations of those monsters by Tyler Crook and James Harren. 

An unusual, freaky, and disturbingly visualized Wendigo seems to owe at least some of its visual debt to Jack Kirby's white monkey of fear from his 1970's series The Demon by way of Steve Bissette and John Totleben's visual reimagining of the character early in Alan Moore's 1980's run on Swamp Thing. It's all enjoyable, though a bit light on the textual side of things. Recommended.

Fin Fang Foom!

Simply because I love this Jack Kirby-created Marvel Monster...

Cover by the great Walt Simonson!

Etrigan Again

Garth Ennis' The Demon Volume 1: written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by John McCrea and others (1993-94/Collected 2015): Ennis and McCrea's anarchic, vulgar take on Jack Kirby's non-anarchic, non-vulgar Etrigan the Demon is a hoot for those with a strong stomach. It's no more faithful to Kirby's original conception of a demon who fights on the side of the angels than, well, pretty much every other take on The Demon after Kirby's. Indeed, the only comic book that ever came close to Kirby's energetic mix of super-heroism and the supernatural is Mike Mignola's Hellboy. 

Ennis and McCrea, like Alan Moore and Matt Wagner before them, make Etrigan a barely controlled monster. They make the human Etrigan shares a body with, Jason Blood, into a whiny incompetent. They make the various supporting characters into buffoons and punchlines. So it goes. It all works because Ennis and McCrea are really good at ultraviolent horror comedy. It also works because they introduce their super-powered hitman character (cleverly dubbed Hitman) in the course of these issues. Hitman would get his own series. As is pretty much always the case with Ennis, he'd seem a lot more comfortable and a lot less scabrous writing his own character.

The standout story arc here sees Ennis and McCrea bring back DC's venerable weird war series The Haunted Tank. The cognitive dissonance generated by a story of an American tank haunted by a Confederate general taking on a bunch of resurrected, supernatural Nazis with the help of a nihilistic Demon is a wee bit mind-blowing. Perhaps never moreso than in a scene in which the Demon explains to the Nazis why he finds them repugnant. It's crazy fun, and it allows Ennis to himself resurrect some of the ridiculous maneuvers the dinky little Haunted Tank once performed so as to defeat seemingly endless hordes of vastly superior Nazi machinery.

Is this Kirbyesque? No. And Ennis' decision to have Etrigan speak in rhymes all the time -- based on a long-standing, DC-wide misreading of Kirby's original Etrigan , who only occasionally spoke in rhyme -- can make for some truly godawful writing at points. But, you know, Nazi zombies in tanks! Recommended.

Jack Kirby's Spirit World (1970-71; collected 2012)

Spirit World: written by Jack Kirby, Mark Evanier, and Steve Sherman; illustrated by Jack Kirby, Mike Royer, and Neal Adams (1970-71; collected 2012): An oddity caused in part by DC's inability to commit to new projects in the 1970's, Spirit World was supposed to be part of DC's foray into the world of black-and-white comics magazines. And it sort of was.

But DC hedged its bets by creating a whole other shell company to have its name on the covers, constantly downgraded what the book would contain, and ultimately dumped it on the market in such a way that the first issue may have never reached most newsstands.

Jack Kirby and friends put together this magazine, along with In the Days of the Mob, which had a similarly truncated existence. Kirby's Boswell, Mark Evanier, lays out the odd circumstances surrounding the creation of Spirit World. DC comes across as even more bumbling than usual for the time period.

The stories here are a lot of fun, both from the first issue and the never-published second issue. Along with a fumetti and a prose piece, we get some horror pieces that lean on parapsychology rather than the overt supernatural. One of the ghosts is a cousin to the composite ghost-monster of Robert Bloch's classic story "The Hungry House," and Kirby's visualization of such a thing is one of the kicks of the volume. Recommended.

Demon, Barf

The Demon: written by Matt Wagner; illustrated by Matt Wagner, Art Nichols, and Bernie Mireault (1986-87, 1992; collected 2013): Matt Wagner's done fine work on his own characters and on characters for DC. Alas, his work on The Demon, while sometimes lovely to look at, is also a wordy, needlessly labyrinthine, bleak mess.

As originally conceived and executed by writer-artist Jack Kirby in the early 1970's, Etrigan the Demon was a surprisingly jolly demon who enjoyed beating the Hell out of supernatural menaces but otherwise seemed like a loveable scamp. Kirby's Demon is the clearest, most obvious forerunner of Mike Mignola's Hellboy, another good demon.

However, when Alan Moore reimagined Etrigan in a thrilling, disturbing three-part story in Saga of the Swamp Thing in the early 1980's, the ramifications of that reimagination would be an eternal souring of the pot. Moore's Demon was a barely controlled monster. He also spoke in rhymes all the time, where Kirby's Demon only rhymed to cast spells. Thus was unleashed thirty years and counting of an astonishingly misguided reinterpretation of an enjoyable but minor Kirby character.

Wagner's 4-issue-miniseries revamp of Etrigan makes Alan Moore's version look like a sun-filled romp in a jolly, jolly park by comparison. Jason Blood, the Demon's 'host,' is now a bumbling, easily manipulated fool whose personality in no way resembles either Kirby's dedicated occultist or Moore's tragic, sardonic hero. Etrigan is a monster who speaks in rhymes that often, in their utterly confusing diction, pretty much form an airtight case for why Etrigan should not speak in rhymes all the time. At least not when Matt Wagner's writing him.

The art has some flashes of surreal brilliance, especially in a sequence in which demons invade an apartment through the walls.  The annoyingly intrusive frame narration becomes an unwelcome Greek Chorus very, very quickly. The whole thing is dense and unpleasant, and that narrative density serves a story that's actually paper-thin.

Alas and alas and alas, the depressing view of Etrigan has won out over the last 30 years. A Wagner-penned and illustrated standalone issue from the Demon's early 1990's series is a lot looser and more fantastic artistically. Unfortunately, the whole thing is narrated by Etrigan in a series of rhymes. Somebody please make sure Matt Wagner never, ever writes anything in rhymes again. It's horrible. Wagner can be a compelling writer and artist, especially on his own wonderful Mage and Grendel books. Seek those out, not this. Not recommended.

Possums of the Unknown

Mark of the Vampire: written by Guy Endore, Bernard Schubert, John L. Balderson, Tod Browning, H.S. Kraft, and Samuel Ornitz; directed by Tod Browning; starring Lionel Barrymore (Professor), Elizabeth Allan (Irena), Bela Lugosi (Count Mora), Lionel Atwill (Inspector Neumann), Jean Hersholt (Baron Otto), and Henry Wadsworth (Fedor) (1935): Enjoyable, concise (61 minutes!) remake of Browning's mostly lost silent film, London After Midnight.

Lionel Barrymore clearly has a hoot playing a vampire-fighting professor called in by the police somewhere in Early Hollywood Europe, where none of the accents match, to solve the murder of one man and the harassment by vampires of his daughter and her fiance. Lionel Atwill is his usual sturdy self as the inspector in charge of the case, and Jean Hersholt does some version of a European accent that could be German, could be Russian, could be almost anything. As everyone else in the movie has either American or British accents, it's a bit anomalous.

Bela Lugosi appears in several scenes, but doesn't speak until the last one of the movie. There are some nice special effects for the time, and an enjoyable atmosphere of menace and decay. The ending is a humdinger. Also, dig that possum incongruously wandering around a European castle! Maybe he's looking for the armadillo Browning put in Dracula's castle in his version of Dracula (1931)! Recommended.

The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy 1931-1951: written and drawn by Chester Gould (Collected 1970): The nostalgia boom of the late 1960's and early 1970's led to a lot of comic strips from the 1930's and 1940's being collected in hardcover. This is one of those collections.

Dick Tracy's Golden Age, which this collection covers, was one of the finest and most popular in the history of dramatic American comic strips, with a readership that may have been up to 70% of the American reading public at its peak.

By the late 1930's, writer-artist Chester Gould had reached his stylized peak of artistic form. And it's quite a peak for the dramatic comic strip, one matched perhaps only by Milton Caniff and Harold Gray.

Tracy now fought increasingly grotesque villains with increasingly descriptive names and increasingly horrifying actions. The graphics are amazingly, well, graphic, and this in a collection that actually censors the more violent endings of some villains, including one in which a Nazi spy ends his life impaled on a flag pole waving the American flag. Tracy's Rogue's Gallery is a clear influence on Batman's similarly twisted foes, while Tracy's use of forensic methods also foreshadows the Batman's expertise in that area.

The reproduction of these strips is mostly competent, especially later in the run. The large Sunday panels are missing, which means certain key events are referred to but not shown. A serious reader would want to track down some of the excellent contemporary reprint volumes of Dick Tracy, but this is certainly worth picking up used as a sampling of the great detective. The stories are clever, suspenseful, and very entertaining. Recommended.

　

Horror and War

Books:Nailed by the Heart by Simon Clark (1995): I'm pretty sure this is the prolific and gifted Clark's first novel. As debuts go, it's a dandy. Clark's strength as an idea man in all his novels is, basically, what I think of as the ability to 'turn left.' What one thinks is going on isn't what's actually going on, and Clark isn't afraid to go with wild and wooly explanations for the supernatural events in his novels. That he's a deft hand at characterization on the fly doesn't hurt either -- like Stephen King, Clark gives the reader sympathetic, flawed characters trapped in extraordinary circumstances.

Here, a young family purchases an old sea fort on the east coast of England with the hopes of turning it into a hotel. The view is spectacular, as is the fort itself. The residents of the adjacent small town are friendly enough, though no one's all that happy about the fort being occupied again. And then, of course, things start to happen. In ancient times, the site of the fort was a pagan holy place. Now, something seems about to visit. More than one something.

There are monsters here, though not all the supernatural forces are monstrous. Old and new human evil drives the plot, while terrible and pitiful things come out of the sea. Clark's later novel Darkness Demands forms a companion piece to this one, as both are concerned with the sorts of sacrifices old gods demanded of their followers. There are a few rough patches of prose here, but overall Clark produced a really admirable first novel. Recommended.



Books:
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20 (2008) edited by Stephen Jones (2009): The sad, early death of American writer and anthologist Karl Edward Wagner in 1995 ended Wagner's superlative series of DAW Books Year's Best Horror anthologies. Jones's series has picked up the slack in recent years. With a larger, longer format, the Mammoth series can include more story pages than DAW ever could, and supplement them with detailed 'Year in...' sections and an exhaustive necrology for the year in question.

This all leads to the old 'If you buy one horror anthology this year...' chestnut. This year is no exception. Entries from big names that include Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Brian Lumley and Ramsey Campbell sit alongside excellent stories by lesser known writers (to me, anyway). Horror today seems perpetually on the cusp of being drowned by lame series novels about vampires, werewolves and zombies; the Mammoth anthology is one antidote to this feeling. Cleverly imagined new horrors and cleverly retrofitted old horrors abound. Also one sinister Hobby Horse, a Cthulhu by way of Robert Service piece, and a disturbing reverse werewolf. Highly recommended.


Comic:



The Losers, written and pencilled by Jack Kirby, inked by Mike Royer and D. Bruce Berry (1974-75; collected 2009): Among the many oddities of Jack Kirby's early 1970's tenure at DC Comics was his 12-issue run on Our Fighting Forces, a WWII book starring four C-List DC war comics heroes (Captain Storm, Johnny Cloud, Gunner and Sarge) collectively called The Losers (the name would later be used for the ex-CIA team comic adapted into the 2010 movie).

Kirby served in Europe in WWII, so there's a certain amount of verisimilitude herein, but it's Kirby's wild imagination applied to the traditional war comic that yields most of the pleasure here, whether in big two-page action spreads or in a series of fascinating supporting characters and odd but vaguely plausible stories that touch on everything from the 1936 Berlin Olympics to Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" to a science-fiction fan PFC with a science-fiction plan to destroy a massive piece of Nazi artillery. The stories boom along, thrilling and over too soon. Highly recommended.

Red Menaces

Comics:


Devil Dinosaur Omnibus Edition by Jack Kirby and Mike Royer: Comics legend writer/artist Jack Kirby co-created Captain America, the Fantastic Four, the comic-book Thor, Iron Man, the Silver Surfer, the original X-Men and thousands of other comic-book characters for a variety of publishers in a career that lasted from the late 1930's until his death in 1995. Devil Dinosaur, a Marvel comic that lasted nine issues back in 1978, is not generally considered to be Kirby's best work or his best creation. However, mediocre work from Kirby is still far more interesting than the best work of hundreds of comic-book creators.

I expected to really hate this book, so I was pleasantly surprised by how enjoyable it is. The concept is faintly ridiculous, even for comic books: in a somewhat confusing past in which fur-covered protohumans and dinosaurs co-existed, a smart little primate with the unfortunate name of 'Moon-boy' and the giant red T. Rex he saved from a fire and named 'Devil' protect the valley they live in (and its assorted dinosaur and mammalian inhabitants) from a variety of menaces. Their opponents include colonizing aliens, giant ants, a giant spider, a witch, a tribe of dinosaur riders, and an angry giant human. Moon-boy and Devil are sort of like Spider-man, in that they're often hated or feared by the very beings they work to protect. But it's all in a day's work.

Devil Dinosaur was apparently created in part because Marvel hoped that the child-friendly characters and storylines (a heroic dinosaur and a child protagonist fighting various giant things) might allow them to sell the rights to an animation studio. This didn't happen, though Kirby himself would go on to do a lot of conceptual and design work for animation studios in the late 1970's, 1980's and early 1990's (Thundarr the Barbarian is one of Kirby's design projects. for instance). A six-year-old child who likes dinosaurs, or someone like me, would probably enjoy this book. Recommended.


Tintin in the Land of the Soviets by Herge: Before the 22 graphic-album adventures of Belgian kid-adventurer Tintin and his dog Snowy that are still popular today, there was this bizarre early 1950's volume, a comic inferno trip through the Soviet Union by reporter Tintin and his faithful pooch. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this thing is fucking bananas. Originally serialized in about 50 parts, this plays like a full-length anti-Soviet Itchy and Scratchy cartoon. Accidentally buying this album for a child who enjoys the other Tintin adventures would probably be a big mistake, unless that child is Charles Krauthammer. Recommended, but deeply weird.


The Superman Chronicles Volume 6 (1941) by Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster and others: The sixth volume of DC's chronological reprint series of Superman's early adventures is a lot of fun. Superman is still a vaguely socialist firebrand rather than the paternal Establishment Man he would soon become with the advent of WWII for the US. So he fights various plots against the little guy both as Superman and Clark Kent (including a fake talent agency. Seriously.). He also fights Luthor, who is, as always, a dick, and a variety of other superpowered villains, including The Ghost, a radioactive killer suffering from terminal radium poisoning. I like early Superman a lot. When he threatens to throw a criminal into the propellers of an airplane unless the criminal talks, he's not necessarily bluffing -- he's like a super-powered Jack Bauer who works only for himself. Highly recommended.


Movies:

Superman/Batman: Public Enemies, starring the voices of Tim Daly, Kevin Conroy, Clancy Brown and Alison Mack (2009, animated): Based on the first five-issue arc of the Superman/Batman comic series, this DC animated movie keeps much of Jeph Loeb's story intact while the character design emulates Ed McGuinness's art style rather than the more familiar Paul Dini/Bruce Timm designs that started with Batman: the Animated Series back in the early 1990's and continued through Superman and Justice League/Justice League Unlimited. Daly, Conroy and Brown reprise their voice roles from the 1990's Batman and Superman series as Superman, Batman and Lex Luthor respectively.

A war-and-economic-depression-plagued USA elects Lex Luthor president. Things seem to go well for awhile, though Luthor tries to make all superheroes work directly for the US government. Guess what two heroes refuse? Then a giant Kryptonite meteor is discovered on a collision course with Earth, and Luthor turns out to be even worse at disaster prevention and response than George W. Bush. This animated movie is pretty much one long fight scene. It's enjoyable, but characterization pretty much has to fall by the wayside. Still, it would make a great template for a live-action movie. Recommended.


Green Lantern: First Flight, starring the voices of Christopher Meloni, Tricia Helfer, Victor Garber and Michael Madsen (2009, animated): The Green Lantern Corps is the intergalactic police force of the DC universe, keeping peace and order under the supervision of the immortal blue aliens known as the Guardians. This animated movie puts Earth Green Lantern Hal Jordan (voiced by Law and Order SVU's Meloni) through his initial paces as a Green Lantern, while throwing in story elements from about 30 years of Lantern mythology.

The "greatest Green Lantern of them all", Sinestro (voiced nicely by Victor Garber and doomed by that name to a life of evil), takes Hal under his wing as they investigates the murder of Hal's immediate predecessor, Abin Sur. Someone is trying to create a competing power battery -- yellow to the Corps' green -- so as to destroy the Green Lantern Corps and take over the universe. Test pilot Hal Jordan appears to be in over his head, but like Earth people in any number of scifi plots, he makes up for his lack of training with grit, imagination, and a tendency to hit bad guys with giant boxing gloves made out of the ring's mysterious green energy that can do pretty much anything the wielder can imagine.

I enjoyed this quite a bit. The plot's awfully busy for an origin story, though (in GL's origin back in the 1950's comics, he simply gets his ring from an Abin Sur terminally wounded in an accident. Boy, those were the days of brevity when an origin story was something to get over with!). Highly recommended.

You're All Alone

Book:

The Sinful Ones (a.k.a. You're All Alone) by Fritz Leiber: It sometimes seems as if science fiction exists partially to repeatedly ask the question 'What is reality?' and then offer a nearly endless variety of possible answers to that question. Fritz Leiber's short novel starts off in the 'One ordinary day...' mode before quickly veering off into one of the more disturbing examinations of 'reality' ever put to paper. You're All Alone, Leiber's original title for the novel, sums up this paranoid fantasy about whether or not a person can ever be certain of the reality of the people and things around him or her. In a very vague way, this is a vacuum-tube era version of The Matrix, but without kung fu or computers or any easy answers. Or a Messiah, for that matter. Highly recommended.


Comic:


Essential Fantastic Four Volume 5 by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, John Romita, John Buscema and others: Jack Kirby's last twenty or so issues of his original Fantastic Four run appear here, along with a handful or issues illustrated by other hands. We again do a lot of revisiting of villains and situations, including Mole Man, the shape-changing alien Skrulls, the Submariner, Doctor Doom in what may be the best Doom story ever, and the antimatter Negative Zone and its bizarre inhabitants.

The most pivotal storyline included is that of the birth of Franklin Richards, first child of Mr. Fantastic and Invisible Girl. He'll undergo some serious rapid aging over the course of about twenty issues, going from birth to what appears to be two years old, prior to settling back into the more sedate 'normal' world of superhero aging. Highly recommended.