Dames, Dolls & Gun Molls: The Art of Robert A. Maguire

My review of Dames, Dolls & Gun Molls: The Art of Robert A. Maguire appears in the online version of the San Antonio Current.

The thin 112-page volume, dominated by lush, full-color reproductions, opens with a fond remembrance of her father by Lynn Maguire and a brief introduction to the artist’s early life.

At times, Silke engages in sloppy research. He writes “Gold Medal came out with the first original paperback, Hill Girl by Charles Williams, published in 1951.” While there is no consensus about exactly when the first paperback original came out, numerous books first appeared in paperback during the 1940s, including several crime novels.

The book is a visual delight, but beyond the artwork, it’s a pricey failure. The lack of bibliographic notations for the images (publication dates and publisher), biographical data, and citations make the Dames, Dolls & Gun Molls: The Art of Robert A. Maguire of little interest to the casual fan or scholar. But it sure is pretty.

Check out the entire review at the San Antonio Current.

How To Make Friends With Demons

While reading Graham Joyce's forthcoming novel How to Make Friends with Demons, I discovered this enlightening passage I wanted to share.

Right, I'm going to footnote it for you, but just this once: firstly because I hate the messy intellectuality of footnotes and secondly because, as you will know, it was Goodridge himself who brilliantly identified that the footnoting affliction is itself demonic and is the cause of much of the madness and disorder you find amongst university academics.

Here's what Night Shade Books had to say about their publication.

William Heaney is a man well acquainted with demons. Not his broken family - his wife has left him for a celebrity chef, his snobbish teenaged son despises him, and his daughter's new boyfriend resembles Nosferatu - nor his drinking problem, nor his unfulfilling government job, but real demons! For demons are real, and William has identified one thousand five hundred and sixty-seven smoky figures, dwelling on the shadowy fringes of human life, influencing our decisions with their sweet and poisoned voices. After a series of seemingly unconnected personal encounters with a beautiful and captivating woman met in the company of an infuriating poet, a troubled and damaged veteran of Desert Storm with demons of his own, and an old school acquaintance with whom he shared a mystical occult ritual, William Heaney's life is thrown into a direction he does not fully comprehend. Past and present collide. Long-dormant choices and forgotten deceptions surface. Secrets threaten to become exposed. To weather the changes, William Heaney must learn one thing: how to make friends with demons!

Expect a review of How to Make Friends With Demons in the near future.

Trip Book Selections

I imagine when preparing for a trip, most people concern themselves primarily with clothing, money... that sort of thing. Not me, the foremost thing on my mind is what reading material should I bring.

Sure, I bring the essentials.. change of underwear, clean clothes, toothbrush, etc but I spend a lot of time figuring out the perfect selection of titles for the trip. I live in fear that I will run out of things to read.

During the nineties when I was traveling a lot to promote Mojo Press, I developed a method for determining the optimal selections, which I still use. Several factors include the reason for the trip, where I'm going, and how long I'll be gone all figure in.

If I am going to a science fiction or comic book convention, I never read any sort of fantastical works. By the time my day at a con is finished, the last thing I want is yet more fantastic. No science fiction, no fantasy, no horror, and no comics. For those occasions, I crave westerns, crime and/or some contemporary fiction.

When attending a non-genre book show, science fiction and westerns are the best. Preferably nothing that has to do with contemporary issues.

Vacations have their own set of rules as well. Generally, location plays into it. When we go to West Texas to visit my mother-in-law, westerns are completely out. I'll get enough of that reality on the drive up and the time we spend in Amarillo. Something urban and gritty--ideally a Hard Case Crime-style story or perhaps the East Coast stylings of Philip Roth-- fills the bill.

For the bi-annual sojourns to Tulsa, almost anything goes. Tulsa gives off a different vibe with its odd combination of middle America, the South, and the West. Thankfully, I am always promised a trip to Gardner's, so no matter what I bring, I can always get more.

Brandy and I took a trip to New York City last year. That was all about the westerns. Something to get me away from the city and slow the mind down at night.


Several rules apply to any trip.

*Always bring at least two books. Not only might you finish the first before you get home, but what happens if you don't like your initial selection? Then you're stuck having to pick up something on the fly. This leads to overspending and often bad choices.

*Mass markets are preferable to trades or hardcovers. You can pack more choices and they weigh less.

*Never read horror while traveling. Last thing you need is something that makes you uptight and/or paranoid. And if the horror doesn't achieve that, why are you are reading it anyway?

*No comics. They are clunky to carry and are read far too quickly.

*Stay away for anything that requires your complete attention. You won't have it to give. Reading on trips is meant for relaxation. Leave the Umberto Eco at home.

Sometimes, it works out perfectly such as with my recent trip to Pittsburgh. Since it was quick (left Austin at 4 PM on Wed and returned on Thurs at 10 PM) and the focus was on robot toys, I decided on a western (Hanging Judge by Elmer Kelton) and a crime novel (Grifter's Game by Lawrence Block). I devoured most of the Kelton on the trip up and finished it in the hotel room that night. I read the Block during the return trip. Neither are heavy thinkers but generally well-written, entertaining reads.

I actually buy used books to keep around my house for future journeys. Lots of mass market paperbacks awaiting my next trip!

Guest blogging for Geek Dad or Why I Went to Pittsburgh

A week or so back, I wrote about my forthcoming trip to Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University for the unveiling of the Bossa Nova Robotics line. My first piece about the event also happens to be my first contribution as a guest blogger for Wired's Geek Dad.

Prime-8, further evidence of author Chris Roberson’s insightful axiom that “everything is improved by the judicious application of primates,” hits the market first. Unlike previous toy robots, the 12” tall, yellow ape uses specially-designed robotic arms and legs to “knuckle-run” at high speeds. The gorilla’s personality transforms from serene, friendly, and blue-eyed to a crazy, beating the floor, roaring simian. When he gets really pissed off, the ape rips a loud, obnoxious fart. In “Guard” mode he shoots rubber tipped missiles at intruders (perfect against little sisters). The robot receives commands through a video-game style remote. Two users can even engage their individual ‘bots in combat! Intended for ages 8-12, the Prime-8 retails for $99.99.

On the other end of the gender spectrum, Penbo, a penguin covered with pink fur waddles, flaps its tiny wings, and makes cooing sounds. She lays an egg that hatches into a baby, Bebe. Offspring come in four different colors, each with its own unique personality. When the baby rests within the Penbo’s pouch, they sing to each other while the mother joyfully dances. The mother and child converse in their own Penguish language. Penbo plays six different games with the user including tag, hide-and-seek, and peek-a-boo. Two Penbos or Bebes brought together will talk and sing to each other. The adorable Penbo, suggested for ages 4-6, sells for $69.99.

Read more about these amazing robots at Geek Dad.

Wednesday Comics

DC Comics has always been willing to play with the form of its comics and characters, from those giant Superman vs The Flash books back in the 70s to the panoramic Zuda books. And over the past few years, they've experimented with weekly comics--successfully with 52, less so in Countdown, and a return to form in the more tightly focused Trinity, which finished its run a few months ago. As an encore, DC has set up Wednesday Comics for a summer run. Rather than one story serialized in the normal 32 page comic format, Wednesday Comics is done in the style of an old Sunday Supplement--modern superheroes translated to the Prince Valiant age. Each issue consists of 15 pages, each by different creators, over the next 3 months.

Wednesday Comics #1 came out this week. It is on full color newsprint, and each page unfolds to a glorious broadsheet size. So a brief look at some of the stories on offer:

Kamandi by Dave Gibbons and Ryan Sook

Sook (Doctor Thirteen, X-Factor) is a wonderful artist and this is one of the pages that really puts you in the mind of an Alex Raymond or Frank King. As Kamandi may be an obscure character to the wider audience DC hopes to attract, the page basically consists of an introduction to the Great Disaster and Kamandi topped off with a good old fashioned cliffhanger in the last panel.

Superman by John Arcudi and Lee Bermejo

The story begins in medias beatdown with a nice panel of Superman being pounded across the Metropolis skyline towards the reader. Along with Batman and a few others, in Bermejo's painterly style this is just a good normal comics page, reproduced at a larger size.

Deadman by Dave Bullock and Vinton Heuck

A nicely designed page that puts Boston Brand square in the center and is able to get both Deadman's convoluted backstory and the beginning of its murder mystery out on to the table. The art was a bit like the work Darwyn Cooke did on the Spirit last year.

Metamorpho by Neil Gaiman and Mike Allred

A lot of white space--almost a 3rd--taking both the top title and the bottom list of characters. Again, just setting up the background and relationships. Allred is perfect for Metamorpho as it was obvious he would be.

Strange Adventures by Paul Pope

With Kamandi, this page most successfully gives off the vintage newspaper strip vibe. It intro's Adam Strange and Alana on Rann with an attack by the Rock People of Ragathann(!) Pope's style as always straddles the line between mainstream and indie. Subtle, green-greyish coloring as well.

Supergirl by Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Connor

On the other side of the spectrum from Strange Adventures. On first read, I thought that Wednesday Comics lacked a Sugar and Spike humor comic but on reflection, here it is. Amanda (Power Girl) Connor just has one of the most appealing art styles out there right now, a lot like Kevin Maguire way back when he was on Justice League International. And with Supergirl chasing after Krypto and Streaky the Super Cat, 'nuff said.

Wonder Woman by Ben Caldwell

This will probably be the most polarizing strip. It is incredibly dense, with easily the highest panel count that, along with muddy color (at least on my copy) and cursive lettering, makes it hard to follow. With that said, Caldwell gives us a dreamy fairy tale Princess Diana that has the potential to be my favorite of these stories.

Sgt. Rock by Joe and Adam Kubert

Joe Kubert can do anything. Here, Rock is being tortured by the SS as he tells us in voiceover that Easy Co was on a mission to rescue some french partisans.

The Flash by Karl Kerschl and Brenden Fletcher

One of the cleverer pages. It's divided into 2 parts as though it was 2 strips sharing the same page, The Flash and the Mary Worth-like Iris West. First, The Flash strip opens as though it is at the climax of a story that has been going on for months, complete with Gorilla Grodd and a bomb on a speeding subway train. Then, in counterpoint, the bottom Iris West strip features Iris leaving Barry a Dear John letter because of his neglectful ways. And in another nice touch, Iris West is colored in that old school 4 color dot process.

Hawkman by Kyle Baker

And finally, a powerful opening here with Katar Hol ascending with a flock of birds towards a highjacked plane. I haven't been a fan of a lot of Baker's more recent work--his line getting squiggly to the point of annoyance--but his recent miniseries Special Forces was a return to form as is this.

Trust No One

So I’ve been playing with the 70s "american paranoid" idea we talked about at one of our Dark Forces meetings. Leaving aside the paranoid aspects of mainstream film of the period (The Parallax View, The Conversation, etc), I also started thinking about a sub-stream that existed in African-American fiction at the same time. There were quite a few books and at least two films that fit.

Sam Greenlee/The Spook Who Sat By the Door (1969)

"You'd be dangerous in an alley, thought Freeman, but you hung yourself up with judo. Karate or jujitsu, maybe, to slow me down with the chops and kicks. But there is just no way you can throw me in judo, white boy. He wondered whether to fight, or to continue on the defense. He looked at Calhoun, squatting Japanese-style on the other side of the mat, the hatred and contempt naked on his face. No, he thought, even if I blow my scene, I got to kick this ofay's ass. When you grab me again, whitey, you are going to have two handfuls of 168 pounds of pure black hell . . . . "

The Spook Who Sat By The Door is a great conspiracy fantasy novel. Pretty much the entire thing is written in the style above. It's a rare one because for once, the conspiracy is one that we (and by “we” I mean Negroes) put over on The Man.

See, Dan Freeman (get it?) is a righteous brother who worms his way into the CIA's affirmative action program, learns every trick in Mr. Charlie's bag and then takes it back to the streets. Under the guise of working for a lib'ral welfare agency, he recruits street gangs to form an army, first in Chicago, then the rest of the ghettos. . . ready to light the dynamite that'll bring this whole rotting mess down. Ivan Dixon made it into a low-budget but faithful movie back in 1973.

Chester Himes/Plan B

The only other black folks' conspiracy novel I've found is Chester Himes' similar Plan B, which has a cool beginning. A mysterious stranger brings a package to a Harlem apartment. The man who opens it discovers an M-16 with the message: "Warning! Do not inform police! Learn your weapon and wait for instructions! Freedom is coming!!"

Unfortunately, Himes died before he could finish it and what was published by the University Press of Mississippi was a complete mess---full of interracial sex (which he had previously explored in the novel Pinktoes) and long, useless diversions. Anyway, towards the end, more and more rifles are delivered to the ghetto and people take to the rooftops. The cops go bonkers, driving tanks into the heart of Harlem, killing indiscriminately and the brothers head underground, systematically destroying Wall Street's lines of communication and generally giving whitey hell. And that's as far as Himes got. Himes no doubt would have cleaned this book up before publication but he died of "natural" causes in '84.

Most of these types of novels focus on a plot against black people. No doubt the authors and everyone reading were familiar with the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, in which the federal health department failed to treat a group of men who had the disease to study its effects. With that, combined with other Church Commission Classics like the MK Ultra CIA experiments, pretty much any plot element you could think of was believable back in the 70s. So . . .

The School on 103rd Street/ Roland S. Jefferson (1976)

The peckerwoods build giant facilities underneath ghetto schools capable of performing mass lobotomies on the black population. . . . just in case. One of the books W.W. Norton published under its late, lamented Old School Books imprint.

The Man Who Cried I Am/ John A. Williams (1967)

An expatriate writer stumbles on the "King Alfred" plan, a detailed manuscript setting out how the US government can initiate a final solution for the Negro problem in America in 72 hours. . . just in case.

At the end of the novel, our hero receives a nickel-plated gift to the back of the head from the CIA for his stellar detective work. This is probably the most literary of these novels, really a meditation on a man's life (the protagonist is dying of cancer) with the apocalyptic reveal done almost as an anticlimax.

As an aside, I remember hearing something like the King Alfred plan discussed as absolute fact a long time ago at my barbershop while I was waiting to get a haircut.

Three The Hard Way (1974)

Gordon Parks’ film features more ofay trickification as a right wing group develops a serum designed to wipe out black folks. Jim Brown, Jim (Black Belt Jones) Kelly and Fred (The Hammer) Williamson handle their bidness. . . . .

Being "Taken"

I saw the movie Taken a while back at the discount cinema outside of Austin. I paid $1.50 to watch ex-CIA officer Liam Neeson rescue his daughter from white slave traffickers and can honestly say I got my money’s worth, but no more, because I never completely engaged with the material. Part of it was due to the standard movie thriller ridiculousness – firing guns in small apartments without deafening any of the occupants, or even alerting neighbors – but more of it had to do with its betrayal of how the best thrillers should work, and with a fundamental flaw with this type of thriller.

The best thrillers traditionally concern ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances. They may have specialized knowledge or hobbies (see the narrator of Geoffrey Household’s sublime Rogue Male), they may possess specialized skills (see Rambo, sans the John, in David Morrell’s brutal but effective First Blood), but on they whole they are regular people who must overcome incredible odds in order to survive. (In this respect, they resemble American naturalists such as Jack London, whose protagonists faced incredible challenges, many of them natural, that were often too great for their own modest abilities.) Law enforcement either cannot or will not believe their circumstances, either because they believe the protagonist to be delusional, or because they believe the protagonist to be the actual danger, or because they themselves are complicit in the conspiracy against the protagonist. The antagonists themselves are often smarter, better equipped, better manned and better funded, which means that the protagonist must learn to outsmart his or her opponents. He must learn that he is better than they. It is something Hitchcock understood when he made The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Man Who Knew Too Much and North by Northwest, and which the first-time director of Taken turns upside down.

Taken’s protagonist is ex-CIA. He is better trained than his Armenian antagonists they have more people and more money, but aren’t any smarter than your average street thugs, making them little threat. (Indeed, they resemble the Spangled Mob in Ian Fleming’s novel Diamonds Are Forever, who has significant manpower but nothing in the way of brains.) This bleeds the film of suspense because it treats the viewer not to an ordinary man overcoming extraordinary odds, but a trained professional picking off second-rate criminals. It’s like watching an exterminator kill roaches or a pimply teenager play a video game: mildly amusing, but lacking in any real involvement. A better way to have handled the material would have been to have Kim, Neeson’s daughter, once captured, overcome her captors and escape. Instead, actress Maggie Grace spends most of her time staggering through her scenes in a drugged state. By focusing on Neeson’s professional, the filmmakers fuel a power fantasy of justifiable homicide.

If Taken upends the standard thriller format, it retains the thriller’s fundamental flaw: nothing actually happens. Neither the world nor the characters that inhabit it change. In the thriller, sabers may rattle, but in the end the protagonist manages to keep the world in the same shape it was before bad people decided to do bad things. It upholds the status quo, keeping the social order instead of transforming it, even if the transformation might be horrifying.

This is not always the case. Change occurs in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, as well as in the film version of The Sum of All Fears, but for the most part the protagonist’s challenge, for all of the events that unfold, involves keeping change from the Hegelian “becoming” into “being.” This is exactly the opposite of how fiction should work.

The world of the thriller is rigid, frozen, unchanging. But things change. Things do change, even in what we consider escapist fiction. Think of Frank Herbert’s Dune, in which Paul Atreides is left by the Harkonnens to die in the desert. He does not fight to restore the old social order, but instead ursurps it, turning Arrakis over to the Fremen. And Gully Foyle in The Stars My Destination does not try to return PyrE to its rightful owners, but instead gives the entire solar system the ability to use PyrE…for their own benefit, or their own destruction. Even the most recent Star Trek movie, by destroying the planet Vulcan and altering the entire series’ time stream, changed the very universe on which its initial template was built.

It would be nice to see a thriller, either in film or in print, break this mold. If the very nature of fiction is change, then the thriller could benefit from letting their protagonists change the world, rather than letting it stagnate.

Crazy sort of folk: Lansdale takes a 'Vanilla Ride'

My interview with Joe R. Lansdale appears in today's San Antonio Current.

“[The Hap and Leonard stories] are crazy sort of folk tales mixed with reality, but it’s always the social and cultural issues and the two characters that drive the series.”
— Joe R. Lansdale

“Vanilla Ride was written under the influence of the [G. W.] Bush period. I was probably a little bit harder on some of the things going on then,” said Lansdale. “Religion, I’m often very hard on. That doesn’t mean I believe everyone who is religious are evil people. You talk about the extremists.”

In March, the University of Texas Press issued Chicken Fried and Sanctified: The Portable Lansdale, which conferred upon him some literary cred.

“Rightly or wrongly, I seem to be transcending just this genre label and [am now] being thought of just as an American writer. I think it’s because my themes are so American, even if I’m writing something that has a more of a genre construct or feel to it. There is something to the way I do it that appeals to people who might not ordinarily read genre fiction,” he says.