Fresh from the comix world: A 2010 STAPLE! report

My coverage of the 2010 STAPLE! appears in the March 10 issue of the San Antonio Current.

The Austin self-styled “Independent Media Expo” STAPLE! celebrated its sixth annual show on March 6. By combining a focus on independent, alternative, and small-press media with independent-friendly comic-book-shop sponsorship and an affordable entrance fee, Chris “Uncle Staple” Nicholas, co-creator of the online comic series You Chose Right The First Time, created the first significant and viable comic-book-centric, alt-media expo in Central Texas.

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Featuring a mish-mash of seemingly unrelated exhibitors, the 2010 STAPLE! abounded with odd delights.

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STAPLE! offered a full slate of programming events, including sessions with the guests and a performance of the radio play The Intergalactic Nemesis: The Living Comic Book (theintergalacticnemesis.com).

The so-so depression : I review Mr. Shivers

My review of Robert Jackson Bennett’s Mr. Shivers appears in the Feb 3rd San Antonio Current.

In Robert Jackson Bennett’s lackluster debut novel, Mr. Shivers, Marcus Connelly rides the rails seeking vengeance for the murder of his daughter. Joining up with similarly driven individuals, Connelly searches Depression-era America for a killer, the mysterious title character recognizable by distinctive facial scars. To further denigrate his already cliché-ridden tale, Bennett adds a fallen preacher, hobos with hearts of gold, a carnival fortune teller, and a corrupt small town sheriff to the mix.

As you probably gathered I didn't think too highly of Mr. Bennet's effort. Though...

Not all of it is terrible. There are flashes on panache as Bennett skillfully produces several exciting action sequences. He even manages to insert a surprise or two in the otherwise largely by-the-numbers story.

Visit the San Antonio Current site to check out what else I had to say about Mr. Shivers.

Something weird this way comes

As part of the San Antonio Current's decade recap, I provided an overview of the 21st century's first new literary movement, New Weird.

Early in the aughts, a new creative force emerged. Worldwide political events, crystallized by the 1999 Seattle WTO protests and the terrorist attacks of 9/11, energized a self-aware readership that embraced New Weird, the 21st century’s first major new literary movement. Books such as China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000), Jeff VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen (2001), Paul Di Filippo’s A Year in a Linear City (2002), K. G. Bishop’s The Etched City (2003), and Steph Swainston’s The Year of Our War (2004) birthed a revolutionary, real-world, postmodern literature that often included surreal elements found in urban fantasy, horror, science fiction, and political thrillers.

Of course the earliest New Weird authors began working in the style well before it was acknowledged as a movement. Miéville and VanderMeer, often seen as leaders of the movement, produced works containing New Weird concepts for smaller presses throughout the ’90s. The development of a moniker provided a marketable identity for publishers, which resulted in much larger venues for the work. Both authors’ careers benefited from the increased exposure, much like those later identified with the movement, most notably Jeffrey Ford and Jay Lake.

Check it all out in the current San Antonio Current.

My review of Finch

My review of Jeff VanderMeer's latest novel Finch appeared in today's San Antonio Current.

The first two volumes of The Ambergris Cycle, City of Saints & Madmen and Shriek: An Afterword, introduced a fascinating story sequence centered on the city-state Ambergris and its unusual inhabitants and happenings. Typifying the uniqueness of VanderMeer’s world, fungoid creatures of unknown origin, dubbed the gray caps, occupy the city’s extensive underworld catacombs and drive many of the stories. Finch, the third and climactic volume, returns to VanderMeer’s singular creation some 100 years after the events recounted in Shriek.

Finch’s weeklong investigation unveils a seedy underworld littered with revolutionaries, hustlers, femme fatales, and characters from his own questionable past. Cataloging this novel’s strata, twists, and feints will occupy fans and critics for years. All aspects of the story interact with elements of the prior Ambergris adventures, though Finch stands entirely on its own merits; the three books of the cycle can be enjoyed in any order.

As with all of VanderMeer’s works, this layered tale ultimately satisfies as it barrels to a momentous conclusion. If Finch is indeed the final Ambergris story, and I have my doubts that it is, VanderMeer left his creation with an extraordinary novel — one of the finest of his young career — and completed a cycle that encapsulates the very best of the New Weird.

Check out my Baker's Dozen interview with Jeff Vandermeer and the remainder of this review.

My review of the latest Graham Joyce novel

In the most recent San Antonio Current, I reviewed Graham Joyce's latest novel How to Make Friends With Demons.

William Heaney, head of the the UK’s National Organisation for Youth Advocacy, leads a troubled life. His wife left him for a celebrity pastry chef, his teenage son hates him, and his oldest daughter has moved back in with him — and brought along her boyfriend. Heaney can also see demons. In his latest novel, How to Make Friends With Demons, Graham Joyce brings these entities to vivid life for his readers, too.

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According to Heaney, common demons include the “messy intellectuality” manifested in compulsive footnoting, the “collecting demon,” and demons that feed on various emotional ailments. Alcohol is not one of them, but rather “a series of volatile hydroxyl compounds that are made from hydrocarbons by distillation. The fact that it is highly addictive or that it can drive men or women to extreme and destructive behavior does not make it a demon.” Heaney, incidentally, spends large portions of the novel in pubs, often inebriated.

*snip*

Leaping forward and backward through time, Joyce expertly weaves a cohesive novel that essentially chronicles a mid-life crisis. The book successfully explores a range of emotional states with a heady combination of horror, humor, and wonder, while maintaining its center on the kindhearted, confused, and at times delusional narrator Heaney.

I previously blogged about How to Make Friends With Demons back in July.


Read the entire review.

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.

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.

Who reads the Watchmen?

My non-geek guide to the Watchmen graphic novel appeared in today's San Antonio Current.

In 1986, DC comic books ran advertisements featuring new costumed characters, and asked, forebodingly, “Who Watches the Watchmen?” Later that year, Watchmen, written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons, premiered, forever changing both comics and film.

As is typical with my articles, I included some historical trivia.

After DC acquired the rights to the little-known Charlton Comics’ line of superhero characters in 1983, rising star Moore developed a series to showcase the heroes. DC managing editor Dick Giordano rejected the unsolicited proposal, but encouraged Moore to rework the idea employing original characters. Joined by artist Dave Gibbons, the duo re-imagined the old heroes to suit their unique vision. Charlton’s Peacemaker, Captain Atom, Blue Beetle, Thunderbolt, and the Question evolved respectively into Comedian, Dr. Manhattan, Nite Owl, Ozymandias, and Rorschach. (Not based on a Charlton character, Silk Spectre draws inspiration from a conglomeration of female heroes.)

There's even some literary analysis throw in.

Initially appearing in 12 individual comic-book issues, each 32-page chapter of Watchmen (except for the final installment) offered 25-28 pages of sequential story followed by prose text that enhanced or clarified the complex tale. Commonplace in comics since the 1940s, extensive text rarely formed an integral aspect of the overall tale. Usually, they were stand-alone pieces of short fiction featuring the lead character or, in the case of themed anthologies, functioned as a bonus story. To fully enjoy, and at times even comprehend, Moore’s multilayered epic, all the text pieces need to be read in the order they appear and considered within the larger work. The seemingly random, incongruous prose plays an essential role in the overall narrative.

Check out the rest of the article.

Tripping through the ‘Twilight Zone’

My interview with Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone: The Official 50th Anniversary Tribute author Douglas Brode appears in the Feb. 4 San Antonio Current.

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.”

The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death review

I'm poking my head above ground briefly to share my San Antonio Current review of Charlie Huston's latest crime thriller The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death.

Despite self-aware prose and excessive gore, The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death barrels at a frenetic and exciting pace to a satisfying, inconclusive threads-akimbo conclusion on page 280. Unfortunately, L.A. resident Huston, in typical Hollywood fashion,felt compelled to tie up all of his dangling story lines and rambles on for another forty pages, sanitizing his otherwise deliciously dirty world.

Continued...

Time to return to my burrow. More geekiness to come...

Chris Roberson's End of the Century

My review of Chris Roberson's End of the Century appears in today's San Antonio Current.

Chris Roberson wisely dedicated his 14th novel to Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, and Kim Newman, three authors who pioneered the difficult to execute non-linear, historical, time-travel adventure. Following in their perennially successful footsteps, Roberson’s End of the Century recounts three unique interrelated tales from three distinct time periods.

A World Fantasy Award finalist and winner of the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History Short Form, Roberson ultimately delivers a superior multi-linear novel worthy of the authors to whom he dedicated End of the Century.

My review of Bradley Denton's Laughin' Boy

My review of Bradley Denton's Laughin' Boy appears in the latest San Antonio Current.

Throughout his riveting satirical novel, Denton successfully incorporates text equivalents of several early 21st-century mass communication modes, including video clips, newsgroup posts, sound bites, internet group chat, talk shows, and web pages alongside the more traditional-looking therapy transcripts and linear prose episodes. He wisely centers the story on the tragic tale of Laughin’ Boy, forcing us to take a hard look at contemporary media and its ability to derail society from the important to the trivial.