Saw this taped to the wall of the grocery store this week. Alas, post-its don’t work on brick. Anyway, I did go to YouTube as directed and found out that “That’s My King” is a Christian pop song performed by Cece Winans. It didn’t change my life, but I only gave it a couple of minutes. I thought I’d pass the message along though. Happy Easter!
There have been a number of comics I’ve looked at for these Graphicalex posts involving media franchises that have been adapted into surprisingly good comics. I’d single out the Aliens and Simpsons titles as being the most impressive. I think they did a really good job with those.
Godzilla isn’t as well served in this long-running series. I’d be inclined to cast some of the blame on Godzilla himself, as he’s just a big lizard who gets angry and goes on destructive rampages, but (1) that hasn’t held the movies back from being successful, and (2) that’s as much “character” as the Xenomorphs have, and the Aliens comics are great.
So I don’t know why I didn’t enjoy these Godzilla comics more. They’re not bad, and they do tend to follow in the spirit of the movies, but they just don’t work all that well for me.
The story arc, from writer Chris Mowry, has a bunch of shape-shifting aliens (I think they’re called the Cryog) coming to Earth looking to wipe out the human population and take it over for themselves. In this mission they find allies in an undersea kingdom of Devonians who look like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The way they plan to achieve their goals is to unleash a massive kaiju attack (kaiju, in case you don’t follow these things, are giant monsters). In general these big guys line-up on two sides, though there’s no real reason they should. On “our” side we have Godzilla, Mothra, Jet Jaguar, King Caesar, Sanda (the good Gargantua) and Mechagodzilla. On the other side is everyone else. Gigan. Destoroyah. Varan. Biollante. And a whole bunch of other critters whose names I didn’t catch. “I don’t know how you remember so many of these names,” one of the army guys says to a scientist at one point. I could certainly relate.
Yes, the gang’s all here. Though they don’t have much to do except slug it out and then wander off. No matter what happens they seem to be immortal, able to re-form themselves even after exploding. So it’s hard to feel as though much is at stake. In addition, the fights between the kaiju are hard to follow visually. At least I didn’t know what was going on a lot of the time. And, as with the movies, this is what you came in for so it’s kind of important. But at least we get a full buffet of sound effects. Here’s a transcript of seven pages of one battle. Obviously there is no dialogue as it’s all just the big guys:
THOOOMPF, KOOM, KOOM, KOOM, RRNGK, RRRMMMMBLLL, MIRRAWWW, GRRRONNK, WHAM, SKRREEEEEE,THOOM, SLKLRRCH, SLSHH, FZZZT, SKRRREEEEOOONMNGK, THWACK, GRRRNN, GROOONGK, ZZLSSH, MRRWWARRRN, THOOM, KZZT, KATTHOOM SKRRNNGK, MIRRRAWWW, KZZT, FSSSSSHH.
If this isn’t your thing then, aside from my wondering why you’d be reading a Godzilla comic, there’s always the human story. But as with the full slate of monsters I thought there was too much going on here too. Basically there’s a military outfit known as the CKR (Counter-Kaiju Reaction force), and a bunch of youngish science types known as the Kaiju Watchers. The tough CKR leader and one of the scientists seem to have a romance growing, but it doesn’t go anywhere. Ain’t nobody got time for that when there are monsters to be dealt with. Of slightly more interest is the fighting between the Cryog and the Devonians, who have a falling out over who’s going to inherit Earth once they get rid of all the humans. This would have made a decent storyline on its own, though hardly original.
In general, fans seemed to like it. I’m a bit of a Godzilla fan though and I didn’t think it was anything special. Basically Mowry was running a conveyor belt with as many action figures as he could think of coming along to do their thing before moving the story on to the next big fight. The thing about the other franchise tie-in comics I started off mentioning though is that they didn’t restrict themselves to this kind of fan service. They came up with stories and art that added a lot more. That doesn’t happen here and I came away not so much disappointed as indifferent.
Some friends just returned from a cruise on the Danube, and brought me back a little gift that they knew I’d appreciate. This is a bookmark of the Hungarian House of Parliament.
Book: Twilight of Empire: The Tragedy at Mayerling and the End of the Habsburgs by Greg King and Penny Wilson
I’m pretty sure that the first time I read Vengeance is Mine! I knew there was a twist coming in advance. Mickey Spillane had wanted to write a book where the big reveal at the end was withheld until the very last word. So knowing that going in I had things figured out pretty early. There aren’t that many very last words that are going to do the trick. “When you’re writing a story, think of it like a joke,” is a bit of advice Spillane had for writers. “What’s a great punchline? Get the great ending and then write up to it.” And that’s exactly how Vengeance is Mine! plays. It’s quite brutal, in ways that were already by this, the third Mike Hammer novel, starting to wear, but it also has a bit of tongue in its cheek. I don’t think Spillane took himself that seriously.
But if Vengeance is Mine! ends with a bang it also kicks off with quite a needle-drop. (Another bit of Spillane wisdom for writers: “The first chapter sells the book and then the last chapter sells the next book.”) Here’s how we begin:
The guy was dead as hell. He lay on the floor in his pajamas with his brains scattered all over the rug and my gun was in his hand.
Damn. Whether you’re into pulp or not, that’s a heck of a way to hook a reader.
The backstory is that Hammer met up with an old war buddy visiting the Big Apple and they’d gone out to party, leaving Mike “Whisky-drunk and out like a light with no memory of what happened.” Except he’s in a hotel room with a dead body. Sort of like Jane Fonda in the movie The Morning After.
It’s a great way to get things started, but it’s also a bit of a stretch and seemed to me to be both awkward and unnecessary as a plot device. In any event, not much is made of the situation beyond Hammer temporarily getting his gun permit pulled so that he has to get Velda to nominally take over the investigation, a job she turns out to be more than capable at. The other thing the set-up introduces is a conflict between Hammer and a District Attorney. Hammer can’t stand the guy and, being Hammer, isn’t afraid to tell him exactly what he thinks of him when he shows up at Mike’s apartment and tries to give him the third degree:
“Show me your warrant to come in my house and do that, then I’ll talk, you yellow-bellied little bastard. I’m going to meet you in the street not long from now and carve that sissified pasty face of yours into ribbons. Get out of here and kiss yourself some fat behinds like you’re used to doing. I’ll be all right in a few minutes and you better be gone by then and your stooges with you. They’re not cops. They’re like you . . . political behind-kissers with the guts of a bug and that’s not a lot of guts. Go on, get out, you crummy turd.”
There’s no subtlety in Mike Hammer! Maybe that’s how he got his name.
I mentioned earlier how I don’t think Spillane took himself all that seriously. I think that’s especially the case here, as he seems to have been having some fun with setting up his “punchline” of an ending. Even though Juno is a goddess (or, more pointedly, “a queen and she didn’t want to be. She wanted to be a woman”) there’s just something not right about her, just one thing that he can’t put his finger on. Maybe it’s her clothes that “covered everything up and let your imagination fill in the blanks.” Perhaps it’s her man hands. Hmm. It’s all kind of funny (both ha-ha and weird) that Mike Hammer could be so easily fooled. “Me, a guy what likes women, a guy who knows every one of their stunts . . . and I fall for this.”
And then there are all the pokes and double entendres. He comes on to Velda but says he’s “afraid of that rod you use for ballast in your handbag.” Yes, Velda does have a gun in her handbag, but is there a nod here to another woman in the book who is packing? Then when Hammer is looking at the bullet holes in the hotel room and realizes he almost got shot in the balls when he was passed out drunk he says “another inch higher and I would have been singing tenor and forgetting about shaving.” This is a book that has more than it’s share of dick references. When the D.A. stands over Hammer “so I could admire his physique, I guess” while berating him, our hero can only groggily remark to himself that “The D.A. was getting a big whang out of this.” What exactly is Hammer noticing and remarking on here? You be the judge.
The actual story I didn’t find very interesting. What makes it worth a read is the further insight we get into Hammer’s psyche, which isn’t very deep but is plenty dark enough. There’s a lot more on the mutual attraction (if that’s not too tame a word) between him and Velda. And if you want to know why they don’t just go all the way it’s because he’s haunted by the ghosts of all the women he’s gotten involved with who have met violent ends. Including the ones he killed himself, like in I, the Jury. And it’s a record he keeps up here as his girl-of-the-week Connie ends up another victim. So he’s protecting Velda by keeping her at a (relative) distance.
Then there’s Hammer’s personal brand of violent psychopathy. Here are his thoughts as he prepares for the final showdown and thinks about how the killer must be terrified knowing the force of vengeance that is now pursuing him:
He’d check old papers and court records and ask questions, then he’d know what I was like. He’d know that I didn’t give a damn for a human life any more than he did. I was just a bit different. I didn’t shoot anything but killers. I loved to shoot killers. I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather do than shoot a killer and watch his blood trace a slimy path across the floor. It was fun to kill those bastards who tried to get away with murder and did sometimes.
I started to laugh and I couldn’t stop. I pulled the Luger out and checked it again when it didn’t need it. This time I pulled the trigger off half cock and let it sit all the way back ready to nudge a copper-covered slug out of the barrel and into a killer’s face.
How are we to read this? As over-the-top comic-book glorification of violence? As parody? Taken seriously, it’s quite unpleasant. But I don’t know how seriously to take it. I’ll leave things by saying that Spillane is a writer I can only manage in small doses, not just because he’s quite repetitive but because the effect can be numbing.
A couple of years ago I wrote this:
What I’ve noticed happening just in the past month though is that not only do there seem to be more ads, but the ads themselves are getting longer. Much longer. Much, much longer. Ads that run for a minute and a half are now not uncommon. But I’ve also seen them run 4 and 5 minutes, and (this was the record) one a couple of days ago that was 8 minutes and 30 seconds! That’s not an ad, it’s a full infomercial. This goes beyond being annoying, to the point where it actually has had the effect of driving me away.
It’s no secret why they’re doing this. They want you to pay for a premium service where you don’t have to see ads. Or so they say. I don’t know how true that is (sponsored ads, I assume, are still included), or how long it’s likely to last. I can remember when cable TV became a big thing and it was known as Pay-TV and the deal was you paid a subscription and you got to watch everything with no ads. That’s not cable TV today.
Still, I’m scratching my head at advertising that’s so deliberately alienating. Who wants to watch an eight-and-a-half-minute ad? Absolutely no one. That isn’t an irritant, it’s a nuclear bomb being dropped on the platform. It’s a message to everyone that if you’re not paying for a subscription they don’t want you there at all. That seems self-defeating to me. But Amazon is still going strong despite its enshittification and I suspect YouTube will still be in business even after it’s become so overwhelmed with advertising it’s barely functional. There’s a lot of room for things to get shittier yet.
And boy did they! Given my shock and amazement at ads that were 8 minutes long I had to revisit this post today as I just watched a podcast where, right in the middle, they dropped an 18-minute advertisement! What gives?
Yep, we’re really getting down to the coffee grinds stage of snow mountain. Heavy rain yesterday and everything warming up. But it’s still holding on.
As long-time readers will know, this little fellow is my signal that spring is on its way! And this week he’s back.
Saw this guy yesterday morning just enjoying the wide open spaces before all the people show up. It’s my favourite time of the day too! Once I took his picture he stood up and walked away, looking annoyed. (You can click on the pic to make it bigger.)
Part of the Graphic Pops series, this is a well done pop-up version of the classic Sherlock Holmes novel. The tale is told in graphic novel form, with most of the text coming in French flaps, leaving the paper artist (David Hawcock) to do his thing in seven showpiece spreads. I thought these were very good, with only a couple (the apartment at 221B Baker Street and Baskerville Hall) being a bit dull. The others are all striking (as pop-ups should be) and make good use of the form for some imaginative effect. The one pull tag is in the spread where Watson draws his gun in the hut on the moor, which also has a door flap to reveal Holmes as he first puts in his appearance. There are a pair of rhyming spreads with the hound and Holmes standing dramatically on clifftops. And there’s a final appearance of the hound’s head that is neat because as it unfolds/pops-up you see inside the hound’s mouth, until its jaws snap shut when the book is fully open and the covers laid flat.
I keep thinking Brass Butterfly was the name of a proto-metal band in the ’60s, or a kung-fu master in a martial arts film of the same era. Around here though they’re bookmarks.
Book: Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Alex Good 