In the latest entry of the Sci Fi Songs podcast, musician John Anealio continues his discussions about the influence of Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's anthology Steampunk on his recent creative output. He mentions Jay Lake's "The God-Clown Is Near," Mary Gentle's A Sun In the Attic," and my contribution, "The Steam Driven Time Machine" as particular inspirations.
While I believe the Watchmen movie will NOT be very good (though I'm willing to be proven wrong), I hoped if nothing else that we moved beyond this type of ignorant review when covering anything comic book related. Kevin Maher of The Times heaps lavish praise upon Snyder's adaptation calling it "a mesmerising and brutalising experience, and will be, for some at least, more than worth the wait."
He also declares it "a movie that is reaching utterly beyond the confines of its genre." And then ends his piece with this patently incorrect statement: "But as the first attempt to make a truly post-adolescent comic book movie, Watchmen is, literally, peerless."
What confines? As writers like Alan Moore have proven time and time again, all types of stories--from action/adventure to historical to comedic and all in-between--can be told in the comics medium.
And post-adolescent comic book movies? Clearly, Mr. Maher has never seen or even heard of American Splendor or Ghost World. Two definitely "post-adolescent" comics that were made into creatively successful, mature films.
DC just wrapped up its 4 volume Diana Prince: Wonder Woman reprints. The books chronicle a period during the late 60's, early 1970s in which WW lost her powers, hooked up with a mysterious koan-spouting, blind martial arts expert named I Ching (!), traded her iconic uniform for a white jumpsuit, and bounced around the world seeking adventure.
These aren't the greatest comics stories ever, but they do represent DC's attempt to catch up with Marvel, to make their characters more relevant to the times. So over in the Batman books, Dick Grayson was suddenly shot forward in age and heading off to college. The famous Green Arrow/Green Lantern series dates from this period, as does the Superman sequence, just republished by DC, in which Clark Kent moves from the Daily Planet to Morgan Edge's WGBS and Superman's powers are cut by a third. The writer Denny O'Neil had his hand in all of this stuff. If you think about it, he was the Geoff Johns of his day. DC really gave him the keys to the kingdom.
Anyway, they tried with Wonder Woman. The stories are all over the place, a combo of romance comics with Diana falling in love with just about every man she meets, Avengers-type kung fu action with Diana as Ms. Peel and I Ching as her John Steed. Interestingly, in the final volume two stories pop up written by Samuel R. Delany. One, The Grandee Caper, has WW and Catwoman traveling to another dimension where they meet up with--wait for it---Fritz Lieber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. How? Wha? Delany isn't able to run on all of his usual cylinders in a mainstream comic, but any tale featuring a "dimensional energy transfer matrix machine" is pretty good stuff.
Usually due to space limitations, some of the more interesting elements of many of my interviews end up on the cutting room floor before publication. For example, in my recent interview with Douglas Brode about the book Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone: The Official 50th Anniversary Tribute, I couldn't include the entire story about his first meeting with Rod Serling.
Here is the complete unexpurgated tale:
“As he was getting ready to leave, I just walked up to him,‘Mr. Serling, I’m Doug Brode. I’m one of the new professors here. I would love to do an interview and article with you.' [At the time, Brode was a regular contributor to the now-defunct Premiere-style publication Show Magazine.] Without a moment’s hesitation, he quickly pulled out a piece of paper — didn’t have a business card — wrote down his home phone number, and said, ‘Doug, I’m gonna be busy for the next month. If you can call me one month from today at this number, I’d love to set something up.’ Just like that, and he left. A month later to the day, I dialed the number, and an unmistakable voice picks up at the other end. I started to say, ‘Mr. Serling, you probably won’t remember me.’ ‘Yeah, is this Doug?’ That's the kind of guy he was. 'Are you free for lunch next week?' 'Yeah. Sure.' 'Can you get down to Ithaca?' 'Sure' 'Great. Meet me at the Ithaca spa.' 'Fine' Ithaca spa. So I packed up a swimming suit and a towel since I was going to the spa, right? Well, the Ithaca Spa is a little a diner. It's just a name. I walk in with a wrapped up towel and a bathing suit I didn't need. We sat and talked. He couldn't have been more wonderful and open about everything. Like we were best friends. He mentored me as a writer. And just a few years later, he was dead.”
Conan, Volume One (Grosset & Dunlap, 1978) and Conan, Volume Two (Grosset & Dunlap, 1978) Art by Barry Smith
While "researching" a recent Nexus Graphica, I had reason to look through my collection of Comics Of Unusual Size. This set of the big and small and odd of comicdom offers many gems. Deciding that I really should share some of these largely forgotten and sometime rare pieces, I'm taking you through a tour of the more interesting selections.
Here Comes... Daredevil (Lancer Books, 1967) Art uncredited but most likely John Romita
Continuing my tour through some of the more mainstream selections. Throughout the sixties, seventies, and eighties, Marvel produced several mass market (or pocket-sized) paperbacks reprinting several of their titles. The first of these collections were published by Lancer, 1966-67. The books included two Fantastic Four volumes and one each of Spider-man, Thor, Hulk, and Daredevil. The black & white pages were roughly 1/3 the size of a standard comic and had to be read sideways.
Interiors to Here Comes... Daredevil (Lancer Books, 1967) Script by Stan Lee Art by John Romita
Conan, Volume Three (Grosset & Dunlap, 1978) and Conan, Volume Four (Grosset & Dunlap, 1978) Art by Barry Smith
Then in 1977, Pocket began their ten volume reprints of Marvel favorites: Three Spider-Man, one Captain America, two Doctor Strange, one Fantastic Four, two Hulk, and one Spider-Woman. All but the Spider-Woman were in full color. Grosset & Dunlap's Tempo Star six volume full-color reprints of Conan the Barbarian appeared in 1978-79. Both lines chopped up the pages to make them fit on the pocket-sized pages. The color printing for the Conan volumes were particularly well done.
Interiors to Conan, Volume Two (Grosset & Dunlap, 1978) Script by Roy Thomas Art by Barry Smith and Sal Buscema from the "The Tower of the Elephant" by Robert E. Howard
In eighties Marvel began producing their own line of black & white mass market paperback titles under the banner of Marvel Illustrated Books. This series included the usual culprits of Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Daredevil, Hulk and Captain America with the Avengers and the newly-popular X-Men thrown in. Much like the Pocket and Tempo books, these volumes chopped up the pages to accommodate the mass market size.
Stan Lee Presents The Marvel Comics Illustrated Version of Daredevil (Marvel Comics Group, November 1982 Art by Bob Larkin) Stan Lee Presents The Marvel Comics Illustrated Version of The X-Men (Marvel Comics Group, March 1982 Art by Dave Cockrum)
Interiors to Stan Lee Presents The Marvel Comics Illustrated Version of Daredevil (Marvel Comics Group, November 1982) Script by Stan Lee Art by Wally Wood
Much like the DC digests, these books introduced me to several influential bits of comic book history including the legendary Giant-Size X-Men #1 and the incomparable Wally Wood.
Interiors to Stan Lee Presents The Marvel Comics Illustrated Version of The X-Men (Marvel Comics Group, March 1982) Script by Len Wein Art by Dave Cockrum
The flood of stories and images from the former Communist block continues. The Los Angeles Museum of Art is putting on an exhibit, Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures, that serves as a comparison/contrast of the art in the former West and East Germany covering the period from 1945 to 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down. Socialist Realism versus the (and I admit I had never heard this term before) Capitalist Realism. From what I can see, the West German work seems squarely in the modern art mainstream, recognizing that those are contradictions in terms, while the East German paintings seem to hew to the heroic socialist realist aesthetic. The New York Times had an article on the exhibit last week.
Couple this exhibit with the great East Side Story documentary on Warsaw Pact era musicals, and the Animated Soviet Propaganda DVD set Kino did a while ago, and we are getting more and more of a look at the cultural life that was going on behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.
It'd be nice to get out to Art of Two Germanys, but if not, the LAMOA site has both a nice slideshow walkthrough of the show and what it calls a digital timeline that gives a historical context to the linked pieces.
In this excellent article, foobar basically states that there is no 100% secure OS (contrary to what Mac users like to pretend) and goes on to prove the vulnerabilities in the Gnome/KDE Linux desktops.
I will show how it is possible in a few easy steps to write a perfectly valid email borne virus for modern desktop Linux. I will do so not because I want to put down Linux. Quite the opposite: I like and support Linux, which is all I'm running at home and at work. I'm a big supporter of free and open software as readers of this blog will know. But if there are any security risks, even in my favorite OS or distribution then they will need to be discussed. Even more important: A false sense of security is worse than a lack of security. And unsubstantiated claims of superiority don't help in a reasonable discussion either.
At the bottom of the piece, foobar offers sound defensive advice for any OS.
The easiest solution to prevent this kind of problem is to not just blindly click on attachments that people have sent you. Does that sound like a sentence you have always heard in the context of Windows before? You bet. The point is: Even on Linux this advice should be taken serious.
(Note for Mac users: Many elements of OS X and Linux derive from similar UNIX kernels.)
There is a disturbing lack of resistance to Microsoft's market hegemony among anarchists and activists today. It is counter-revolutionary to design revolutionary fliers on a computer running Windows XP, displaying protest pictures on a computer running Windows XP is not a statement of protest, and using Microsoft software to coordinate anti-capitalist action is not anti-capitalist. To many, however, it seems that there is no other choice.
This guide attempts to present an alternative. The Linux operating system is a successful anarchist project based on open cooperation and rooted in the ideal of freedom. Hopefully the following will help you install Linux after demonstrating the need to resist Microsoft.
While this guide needs an updating, the basic principles still apply.
Stacey Whitman delves into the new, most-likely illegal, and most definitely unethical Facebook Terms of Service.
[Facebook] claim[s] they have all rights in perpetuity to any content here on the site (previously, it was simply a basic right to post your content here on the site and use in marketing, the latter of which was bad enough).
Note this clause--especially the words "fully paid" and "right to sublicense":
You are solely responsible for the User Content that you Post on or through the Facebook Service. You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof. You represent and warrant that you have all rights and permissions to grant the foregoing licenses.
This is making me rethink the whole Facebook thing. Course any management team that includes Bush-apologizer/defender Ted Ullyot should be suspect.
The Best of DCNo. 63 (August, 1985) and No. 46 (March 1984)
While "researching" a recent Nexus Graphica, I had reason to look through my collection of Comics Of Unusual Size. This set of the big and small and odd of comicdom offers many gems. Deciding that I really should share some of these largely forgotten and sometime rare pieces, I'm taking you through a tour of the more interesting selections.
Continuing my tour through some of the more mainstream selections. In the seventies and eighties, digest-sized comics were all the rage. These 4.75 in. x 6.5 in. perfect bound collections usually contained minuscule, often poorly reproduced reprints.
DC's first experimented with the smaller format in 1972 with Tarzan Digest #1. Though a Laurel & Hardy digest was announced (and never produced), DC would only return to the format in 1979 following the DC Implosion.
Beginning with a collection of Superman reprints, The Best of DC ran for 71 issues. Throughout seven years, the series focused on a wide array of DC properties including Batman, the Legion of Super-Heroes, Binky, Jimmy Olsen, and Plop!
The Best of DCNo. 54 (November, 1984) and No. 64 (September, 1985)
Starting in 1980, The "Year's Best Comic Stories" became an annual event as part of The Best of DC. The final issue (No. 71) was the Year's Best Stories of 1985.
The Best of DC No. 71 (April, 1986) and No. 52 (September, 1984)
Later in the same month that premiered The Best of DC, the digest-sized Jonah Hex and Other Western Tales appeared. After three issues, DC canceled the title and replaced it with DC Special Blue Ribbon Digest. Each volume tended to focus on theme. The variety of characters and subjects included the Legion of Super Heroes, Flash, Green Lantern, Ghosts, Secret Origins, Strange Sports, and Sgt. Rock.
DC Special Blue Ribbon DigestNo. 16 (December, 1981) and No. 19 (March, 1982)
After 24 issues, DC Special Blue Ribbon Digest ended in 1982 and was soon replaced by the digest-sized last gasp of the legendary Adventure Comics. Beginning with no. 491, the now-completely reprint series limped its way to an ignoble conclusion with no. 503.
The DC digests introduced me to some of my favorite characters and series. My first exposure to the Doom Patrol, the O'Neil/Adams Green Lantern/Green Arrow, Plop!, Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, and countless others first occurred within those tiny pages.
According to Bell Labs: "At 11:31:30pm UTC on Feb 13, 2009, Unix time will reach 1,234,567,890."
That's right at approximately 5:31 PM CST, the UNIX epoch (which began on January 1, 1970) measured in seconds will reach the sequential number 1234567890. Beyond being a very nerdy and very cool fact, this number doesn't really signify anything but it didn't stop Jon "maddog" Hall from writing a humorous piece about the momentous occasion occurring on Friday the 13th.
I intend on being at the place where I have the best chance of surviving this potential catastrophe and where I can personally do the most good:
=>Martha's Exchange Restaurant in Nashua, New Hampshire, USA<=
While our friends at Bell Labs (er, ah, Lucent....O.K. "Alcatel-Lucent") strive to understand this phenomenon, I will be doing my civic duty by drinking fine beer, and maybe an Islay scotch. This is hard to do while you are holding your breath, but I will suffer through. Who knows, perhaps the U.S. government will give us a "bailout" to study this issue.
And for those who can't/won't do the math or programming to figure out the exact epoch time, Chris Rowe has supplied this handy countdown site.
While "researching" a recent Nexus Graphica, I had reason to look through my collection of Comics Of Unusual Size. This set of the big and small and odd of comicdom offers many gems. Deciding that I really should share some of these largely forgotten and sometime rare pieces, I'm taking you through a tour of the more interesting selections.
Now for a more mainstream selection. In the seventies and eighties, digest-sized comics were all the rage. These 4.75 in. x 6.5 in. perfect bound collections usually contained minuscule, poorly often reproduced reprints. Gold Key with its extensive library of licensed properties was an early adopter of the format.
Golden Comics Digest No. 9 (1970) and No. 48 (1976)
Beginning in 1970, Golden Comics Digest ran for 48 issues concluding with a volume of Lone Ranger, Tonto, and Silver stories. Golden Comics Digest No. 9 featured tales of Tarzan, Korak, and Brothers of the Spear. This particular collection included the complete Russ Manning adaptation of Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar. Manning also contributed to the volume's other offerings.
From Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar by Russ Manning (Golden Comics Digest No. 9, 1970)
Other issues of the Golden Comics Digest focused on Gold Key's various cartoon licenses, Little Lulu, Turok, and others.
Mystery Comics Digest No. 6 (1972) and No. 23 (1975)
Running for only 26 issues between 1972-1975, Gold Key's Mystery Comics Digest reprinted many excellent stories from their mystery/suspense/fantasy/science fiction anthologies Ripley's Believe or Not, The Twilight Zone, and Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery in a three issue rotating schedule.
From "The Shield of Medusa" (Mystery Comics Digest No. 6, 1972)
Lukas Foss died last week. He probably wasn't much of a household name. Foss spent years as the conductor of the Buffalo Symphony Orhestra, where he championed and recorded a lot of 20th century music. I suspect a lot of composers' only commercial recordings--many for Naxos--were done by Foss. He himself was a composer of note. Like a lot of his contemporaries, his early work was very out there in terms of tonality or the lack thereof. As time went on, Fossapparently embraced more mainstream style, even writing an opera based on Twain's The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.
Personally, I knew him from one piece. Years ago, and I have no idea why I bought it, I had a cassette (that's how long ago it was) of his Baroque Variations (1967). This was a clever little thing, very 60s, that consisted of three movements, each based on a classic composer of the period. So the first movement was "On a Handel Larghetto," the second "on a Scarlatti Sonata," and the third "On a Bach Prelude 'Phorion'."
Baroque Variations is the sort of mid-century classical that feels old in newness, if that makes any sense. It sounds very time specific. Like a lot of science fiction, you could probably guess its creation date within a year or two. Foss took the scores of each one of these small classical works and sort of played with them. For instance, with the Handel, he went through and simply erased some of the notes. Writing that sounds ridiculous, but the result is that the music, which would normally gather a narrative drive isn't allowed to do so. It has a weird start and stop to it, the music seems to drift in and out. In the liner notes (remember those?), Foss said simply: "I composed the holes."
The movement derived from the Bach is just outrageous. Again, the familiar underlying music is there, but it jitters in and out of the foreground, loud then soft, while all around it are out of place snaps and bangs of percussion instruments, an organ providing bottom at the end. The liner notes quote a New Yorker review of the original performance: "The thing reminded me of Marcel Duchamp's celebrated gesture of painting a mustache on Leonardo's 'Mona Lisa'. Shortly after that, Mr. Duchamp stopped creating art altogether and devoted himself to chess. A similar move by Mr. Foss might benefit the future of the art of music."
That's the sort of review you dream of getting. All I know is that I found Baroque Variations compelling. To the point that I still had the cassette years after I no longer had a cassette player and would think about it now and then hoping that it might come out on CD. As far as I can tell, it never did. About a month ago, I was thinking about the music, went on eBay and bought an old copy of the record. Baroque Variations is side 2. Side 1 and no doubt the big draw at the time was John Cage's Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra. I got the record a day or so before reading that Foss had died.
You have no doubt been looking for a link to Baroque Variations or some of Foss' music. Sorry, I tried but I couldn't find any online. And I don't have one of those newfangled space age USB turntables that would let me create an audio clip. But to give you a taste of a similarly Duchampian piece of the era, here's a link for some of John Cage's 4'33''
Henry Slesar's animated version of Neil Gaiman's acclaimed YA novellaCoraline featuring the voices of Dakota Fanning and Teri Hatcher opens today to bore the snot out of movie goers. While exceedingly beautiful, the movie rehashes well trodden turf: Young girl hates parents... runs away to a magical land with cool parents... discovers the new parents are even worse than the originals... girl escapes and decides her real parents are okay. Throw in a senseless and dull quest and you have essentially the entire film minus the gorgeous scenery. While much like Slesar's previous efforts (The Nightmare Before Christmas, Monkeybone), the vivid animation thrills, but after an hour of the dull story, I begin to nod off. The 3-d, as with most films, does little to enhance the movie.
My wife Brandy, an avid Gaiman fan, remarked that Coraline was as “hollow as the dolls it portrays.” Essentially, a shallow animated remake of the vastly superior Pan's Labyrinth, the scenes voiced by the dynamic British comedic due Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French offer the few entertaining moments of the film. You're better off staying home and reading the original book.
Animation 9/10 Story 5/10
As any geek knows, 1966 and 1977 were important years that both informed and divided a nation. In the former, Star Trek beamed into the American consciousness, launching perhaps the most loyal and rabid group of fandom. Eleven years later, George Lucas, relying on dazzling special effects and the remodeled film serials of his childhood, captured the hearts of an entire generation of eager fans with Star Wars. Since that moment, the camps have engaged in a ceaseless, nonsensical war for geek supremacy. Kyle Newman's insightful and charming film Fanboys brings the battle to the big screen.
In 1998, five former high school friends take the ultimate road trip to George Lucas' fabled Skywalker Ranch to steal an early print of the long awaited Star Wars Episode One. Along the way they encounter Trekkies... sorry... Trekkers, in several what are bound to become classic geek film moments. With an excellent cast (including the adorable Kristen Bell) and geek cameos galore (William Shatner, Seth Rogan, Billy Dee Williams, Kevin Smith, and Carrie Fisher), Newman successfully incorporates all this and many of varieties of geekdom into a throughly enjoyable road trip film. Fanboys is a MUST SEE geek film.
Even with the high geek quotient, perhaps the best part of Fanboys is that it can be enjoyed by the non-hardcore geek as well. There are plenty of genuinely humorous moments. So, it's safe to bring your not-as-geeky S.O. to the film.
Using Carol Serling’s words as a framing device for each chapter, Brode reviews and analyzes some 80 of the show’s 156 episodes. Since several books, most notably Marc Scott Zicree’s exhaustive The Twilight Zone Companion, have explored the entire run, Brode decided to take a different approach. “I wanted to do a book where I only focused on the great ones and put the other ones aside.”
Not merely a puff piece, Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone portrays a complex view of the famed auteur. Brode is the author of more than 30 books, and this delicate balance is central to his body of work.
“I try to show in all my books, beginning with Shakespeare — even going back to Sophocles — to Spielberg today with Disney and Rod Serling in-between, the people I consider the great artists, popular entertainers, the ones who reached the masses — they are the ones who have a very balanced view,” says Brode. “Their politics are not easy. The artists who most move the masses are the ones who have that Yin/Yang between progressivism and traditionalism. And as I show in the book, Rod Serling is exactly that way.”
On the other end of the phone, a woman with a heavy Asian accent asked me if I was the Rick who wrote Nexus Graphica for Sf Site.
"Um.. yeah. Why?"
"We'd like to promote your book."
"What?"
"In your column you feature several of your books."
"Um.. I wrote about those books. I did not write them."
"The X-men is not your book?"
*chuckle* "No. I WRITE about OTHER books."
"Well, you have a book, right?"
"Yes.. but it came out several years ago. Who are you and what do you want?"
"You were targeted by our website because of your quality writing. We would like to promote your book." She went on to tell me she was from Book Whirl and they successfully promote books, though she didn't offer names of any clients.
The site itself is slick, though makes the common mistake of too much info on the title page, obscuring their message. And the Barnes & Noble and Amazon links near the bottom give the false impression that they are sponsored by the bookstore giants.
From their ABOUT US:
Quote:
BOOKWHIRL.com is an online book marketing company, specializing in providing affordable, effective online book publicity marketing services for authors.
Through its inexpensive, specially designed services BOOKWHIRL.com enables authors to promote their products and connect to readers in a more effective, efficient system – and achieve bigger book sales.
BOOKWHIRL.com employs an experienced team of online marketing strategists, ad copywriters, graphic artists, and web designers whose combined expertise ensure an effective online marketing campaign — at easily affordable rates.
Our mission: To empower upstart authors all around the world by offering highly-effective online book marketing services at easily affordable rates.
I was not very impressed. You call an author without really knowing what they do? Obviously, I don't own the X-men and the tiniest bit of research reveals that I've never even written the X-men. And I'm suppose to take you seriously?
Then there's the pricing. While not terrible, their services are way too fragmented-- potentially obscuring the actual costs-- and the charts offer little indication of what you get for your money.
The site only lists four clients. Is that all they have? And though they apparently focus only on newer writers, you would think if their pr was so good, I would have heard of at least one of them. I am, by reputation, very tied into the book trade. Something somewhere should have come to my attention about one of their authors.
When I asked the their telemarketer where they were located, she told me Iowa. No indication of that on their site.
Reading the fine print reveals that Book Whirl is owned by Yen Chen Support, an Asian business process outsourcing company. I'm sure Yen Chen is a fine company, but nothing on their site lends me to believe they know the first thing about the book industry on any continent. (Though apparently they use Linux, which does give them Brownie points.)
If you are an author looking for some promotional help, you are better of contacting someone like Deep Eight proprietor Matt Staggs. He may not have the whiz bang of Book Whirl, but he knows the biz and understands the various Internet marketing opportunities. Plus, Matt knows who owns the X-men.
"Rick, can I get your email so we can check in with you in a few months?"
"You can get it from the column."
"Um.. where is that?"
"Sf Site. Scroll down and click on Nexus Graphica. The new column went up yesterday."
"I don't see it. Please tell me your email."
"Forget it. I'm not interested in your services. Don't contact me again" *CLICK*
