Walking Guelph

/ Alex Good / 15 Comments

Last week was busy, and it ended with a long walk. The highlight was a stroll downtown on a beautiful sunny day. Here are some highlights. Some of these pics can be enlarged if you click on them.

There used to be a big Best Western hotel just a block down the street from where I live. It was torn down and the plan was to build student housing in its place, as the location is just across the road from the University. But that was ten years ago. They did tear the hotel down but there’s just been a hole in the ground ever since. At least it fills with rainwater and gives a nice fenced enclosure for geese to rest.

Proceeding down Gordon Street we find the Guelph Lawn Bowling Club. You may not have known Guelph had a Lawn Bowling Club. Now you do. In the background you can see our famous covered bridge. To the right (not in the picture) is the Boathouse, which is an eatery where you can get an ice cream cone and then sit and watch the geese and ducks on the river (which we’ll return to).

This is the splash pad in front of City Hall. Kids can cool off in it in the summer. I never have business with City Hall (if I can help it) but I pass by it often.

I had a bunch of errands to do downtown, and these were made more difficult by the fact that the main square, which is called St. George’s Square, is currently under construction. A lot of construction. To get to Scotiabank, where I was heading, I had to wander through a maze of walkways surrounded by barricades. What a mess!

I was tired out by this time so I went to sit for a while in the main branch of the library. This gentleman seems to have had the same idea, but was even more tired than I. Note the poor condition of the carpet. Given that this branch is going to be closed down when the new main library opens I guess they’re not worried about keeping up appearances.

I posted a picture a while back of the construction on the new library, which is just a block away from the old one and only a stone’s throw from St. George’s Square. This is what it looked like then.

And this is what it looks like now. They’re coming along. Lots of construction in this town.

I had to head to a lawyer’s office next and passed by the display window of a toy store where a Guelph Monopoly game was being sold. I had to go in and check it out. Nice conversation piece, but Monopoly is one of the worst board games in the world. I don’t know how it ever became so popular.

A few weeks ago the fabulous Fraggle posted an AI mock-up of Guelph that surprised me. Some of the landmarks were there but they were in the wrong place, or incorrectly rendered. One such location was the Albion Hotel. Well, here is the real place. First opening in the 1860s (under another name) there are a lot of urban legends associated with its history, including a visit from Al Capone during Prohibition (there was a Guelph connection, supposedly). Recently renovated, just last month it was listed for sale for $1. You can’t tear it down because it’s a heritage site so I’m not sure what’s going to happen to it.

The kids were back in school this week, and they were greeted by this cheerful, and maybe overly optimistic sign, at Central P.S.

Directly across from my lawyer’s office is the Guelph Civic Museum. I’ve only ever been in the gift shop. Some day I’ll go through it. I’m not a fan of the glass and stone effect.

My lawyer has been with the family for decades. He’s semi-retired now. The flowers in his front window looked like they could use some attention, but the office has a real old-school charm.

On my way back home I had to take a picture from the bridge overlooking the Eramosa River. In the summer you often see people in kayaks and canoes paddling about on it. But on this day it just looked peaceful.

And that’s a wrap. Hope you enjoyed this quick tour of some of the sites about my hometown. According to my phone I put in 30,000 steps so I was bushed when I got back. I’m not the man I used to be, as the song says.

Mighty Marvel Masterworks: The Incredible Hulk Volume 1

/ Alex Good / 9 Comments

Mighty Marvel Masterworks: The Incredible Hulk Volume 1

When I was a kid I had a paperback collection of the first six or so issues of The Incredible Hulk, so basically the same comics as are collected here. I read that book until it fell apart, but didn’t have any other books like it. I don’t think that experiment really took for Marvel, but this Mighty Marvel Masterworks series seems to be doing well. They’re cheaper reproductions in a smaller format than the Epic Collections, but as long as you’re not a comic purist who gets upset at any tampering with the format or colour of the original then they do the job.

So what we have here is the Hulk’s original origin story, with Dr. Bruce Banner being irradiated from the blast of the gamma bomb he designed. He should have been observing the blast from a safe distance but he had to go out to rescue 16-year-old Rick Jones, who had driven out onto the test site. Rick Jones will, unfortunately, continue to be the Hulk’s sidekick for all of these early comics and he’s a pointless burden. Literally as he holds on to the Hulk’s back as they go hopping around.

Stan Lee was just trying out ideas here, looking to see what would work. In the first issue the Hulk is actually gray but this turned out to be too hard a colour to manage so in subsequent issues he experienced a chromatic shift (without any explanation) into the more familiar green. As initially introduced he also turns into the Hulk only at night and is Dr. Banner by day, which was too limiting for the character and so was discarded nearly as quickly as the gray skin. Then for a while Banner built a gamma ray machine that allowed him to change himself into the Hulk and then back again, but you could tell that device was wearing thin already by the later issues here. And finally there’s the question of how the Hulk gets around. In issue #3 Rick easily runs away from him: “Lucky for me the Hulk can’t move too fast!” But later in the same issue the big green guy is literally flying around with his island-hopping jumps.

In short, things were very much in a state of flux and it wasn’t clear what sort of a character the Hulk would be. Though that’s something that has stayed with the Hulk over the years, as evidenced by the different forms and colours he’s taken. Essentially this is another take on the Jekyll-Hyde dichotomy, the “milksop” scientist and the unleashed beast, and it’s always been a live question how much the one bleeds into the other.

The writing is slapdash in the extreme. Apparently Dr. Banner and Rick have excavated that underground hideout where the Hulk can be locked up all by themselves. And when the Hulk breaks the door down and smashes the elaborate mechanism used to shut it, it can be quickly repaired. “Lucky I was able to replace this shattered steel ramrod!” Rick tells us. Lucky indeed. When the Toad Men arrive from outer space their “grapplers” are quickly able to identify “the most brilliant scientific brain on Earth” (which would be Dr. Banner). When the Hulk and Rick and Betty Ross escape from the underground kingdom of Tyrannus the Mighty, Betty is in a state of shock that is like “some kind of amnesia!” Which means she conveniently won’t remember any of their adventures. You can see how comics had a lot of growing up to do. At this point superhero comics were juvenile entertainment and made no bones about it.

Originally published from 1962 to 1963, there’s the usual Cold War overlay, something I mentioned before in my review of the contemporary Ant-Man comics. The Hulk faces off against such Red menaces as the Gargoyle (whose defeat might signal “the beginning of the end of the Red tyranny too!”), Mongo (not a “gladiator from space” but a robot built by the “wily Reds”), and General Fang (a Chinese Communist warlord who leads his hordes against peaceful neighbours). “Do those commies think they’re playing with kids?” the Hulk asks, as he crushes one of their grenades in his hand. If so, they are soon disabused of the notion.

I liked this well enough when I was a kid, which isn’t surprising given that was very much who these comics were aimed at. That’s obvious just from the presence of Rick Jones and the Teen Brigade. These kids are actually the most dated part of all these books, saying things like “Daddy-O.” But that’s the price you pay for being hip.

Graphicalex

Holmes: The Adventure of the Priory School

/ Alex Good / 7 Comments

The canonical Holmes stories usually aren’t that difficult or even clever as mysteries. There are few clues for the reader to weigh and consider, as opposed to Holmes studying matters (sometimes literally) on the ground. Also, because these are short stories it’s not as though a full line-up of suspects can be introduced. So it’s usually obvious what is going on, with things made even more obvious by the way characters are presented. Of course some of this can be attributed to the fact that Watson is narrating, and he knows who the guilty parties are. They aren’t going to be presented in a good light, even in their initial appearance. That’s very much what happens here when we’re introduced to Mr. James Wilder, personal secretary to the Duke of Holdernesse: “He was small, nervous, alert, with intelligent, light-blue eyes and mobile features.”

“OK,” we say. “That’s the guy who did it.” I mean, what’s he so nervous about?

What Wilder did, specifically, is kidnap the legal heir to the Duke, a boy with the improbably noble name of Saltire. In heraldry and vexillology (the study of flags and their meaning) a saltire is a diagonal (or St. Andrew’s) cross. I’ve never heard of anyone being named Saltire, though Saltire is an English surname, deriving not from the heraldic symbol but from the profession of manufacturing or dealing in salt (that is, a “salter”).

Anyway, the boy has gone missing from the Midlands boarding school he’d been staying at and the headmaster, who has the improbably headmasterish name of Dr. Thorneycroft Huxtable, comes to London to enlist the help of Holmes. This Holmes does by the usual method of drawing precise conclusions from vague or slight physical clues. Instead of footprints we have tire tracks and hoofprints to be studied. Holmes can tell what direction a bicycle was going in from the impression left by its tires, the possibility of which is something scholars still debate. But all he really had to do was take a good look at Wilder as well as the Duke himself. Something is clearly not right with the Duke:

He was a tall and stately person, scrupulously  dressed, with a drawn, thin face, and a nose which was grotesquely curved and long. His complexion was of a dead pallor, which was more startling by contrast with a long, dwindling beard of vivid red, which flowed down over his white waistcoat, with his watch-chain gleaning through its fringe.

The word “grotesque” should trigger you, and the beard is the icing on the cake. Even though such full-length beards were the fashion around the time this story is set (possibly 1900 or 1901, according to most Holmesians), the clash between the vivid red beard and the white waistcoat is a remarkable image. “OK,” we say. “This guy is somehow involved in it.” And Holmes has no trouble fingering him for his involvement (the nature of which turns out to be something quite bizarre), while making sure in advance that Holmes is going to collect, in full, the reward money for finding the lost Saltire.

Holmes index

Moving in

/ Alex Good / 18 Comments

This is the week the students move back into residence at university, with classes starting next week. So lots of fresh-faced youngsters are bustling about, their eyes aglow with the joy of learning, full of idealism, hope, and a desire to change the world.

Who will tell them that nothing lies ahead but disappointment, despair, debt, and the crushing of all their dreams? Not me! That will come in time! In the meanwhile, long line-ups at the bank, the grocery store, and good luck finding a place to park at Wal-Mart. As I’ve shown before, this lot is usually pretty deserted. But not today!

Asterix and Cleopatra

/ Alex Good / 9 Comments

Asterix and Cleopatra

Asterix and Cleopatra is one of the classic Asterix comics. Perhaps the best known and best loved. I’ll always cherish it for the scene where tiny Dogmatix jumps into Obelix’s arms and he says “Dogmatix! You nearly knocked me over!” This is funny because Dogmatix is so small and Obelix so big, but ever since, with all the dogs I’ve had, whenever they’ve come up to me for a hug I’ve always told them that they nearly knocked me over. That’s how tightly some throwaway line read in childhood can weave itself into your life.

Anyway, Asterix and Obelix, joined this time by Panoramix the village druid and the newly named Dogmatix, are off to a Cecil B. DeMille version of Egypt, where Cleopatra is having a torrid affair with Caesar. In an opening argument the Queen of the Nile makes a bet with Caesar that she can build a palace in only three months. In order to make this a reality her clueless court architect Edifis has to travel to Gaul and enlist the help of you-know-who. So once again we have the formula of a journey out and back (the pirates are thumped again, or rather scuttle their own ship rather than have to take a beating), ending up with a celebratory banquet back home. Along the way there’s a lot of local colour, from the imperial architecture (which I loved as a kid) to the clever way the Egyptians speak in hieroglyphics. These speech bubbles rhyme and even cross over with the always creative grawlixes, which aren’t just typographical characters but take the form of storm clouds and skulls.

As a comic it’s also very smart. You have to be on your toes to catch the jokes that are happening even in the margins. And then there all the Latin tags and historical winks. As Asterix is leaving he says to Cleopatra “If, one day, you want to build something else in Egypt, a canal between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, for example . . . well, then call upon someone from our land, by Toutatis!” This is a nod to the fact that it was a French company that was in charge of building the Suez Canal in the 1850s. I think most readers, especially French readers (and we’re talking about children here), would have got that in 1965. Today I’d bet against that sort of general knowledge.

I don’t know if this is my favourite Asterix story, but it’s the one that first comes to mind whenever the subject of Asterix comes up. Not all of these comics have kept their glow over the years but this one has and it made me happy that I decided to revisit the whole series.

Graphicalex

Zucchini jailbreak

/ Alex Good / 13 Comments

I was walking past this fence on my way to the grocery store and was impressed by a zucchini vine that was making a climb for freedom, escaping someone’s backyard.

On my way back from the grocery store I noticed that this little guy had found the mother lode and was getting busy. He didn’t even want to slow down to get his picture taken.

Tales from the Crypt Volume 2

/ Alex Good / 9 Comments

Tales from the Crypt Volume 2

In my notes on The Haunt of Fear Volume 2 I mentioned how EC editor Al Feldstein had written every one of the stories in the collection, as well as the “The Old Witch’s Niche” and the text-only shorts. I also mentioned how he was doing most of the writing for the other EC bi-monthly publications. At least he was for Tales from the Crypt, because he again gets sole writing credit for all 24 of the comics in this volume and probably wrote all the short stories as well, though these are uncredited.

“So,” as I said in that earlier review, “if there are some duds in the mix here, or the action starts to follow a formula, are you surprised?” You certainly shouldn’t be. And I wasn’t. There are a number of recurring EC horror archetypes. Reduced to its most basic elements a classic EC horror story features a murder for gain with the victim returning from the grave (sometimes after being buried alive) in order to exact a gruesome revenge on their killer.

I think that synopsis might describe two-thirds of all the horror stories EC published. Now Feldstein did his best to add little twists. Like the first story here being about a man coming back from the dead, except it’s told in the second person. But there are few real surprises. Riffing on a Poe story is to be expected, and that it’s the less well-known “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” doesn’t change things up much. Nor is it that big a twist when a developer disturbs an ancient Indian burial mound and the spirits thus released come back from the dead to scalp him.

If I wanted to be really critical I’d also focus in on the letters in “The Crypt-Keeper’s Corner.” I thought that very few, if any, of these were real. They read like plugs for the very comics you’re reading. And the constant pitching from the three GhouLunatics to buy their pictures got a little wearing.

These caveats in place, I still enjoyed all of this. I liked the in-jokes and odd bits of humour in the background (like the ship the honeymooners are on being the S. S. Pinafore), as well as all the contemporary historical details. I think having a television in your living room in 1951 meant you were pretty well off, for example. Or the Black Widow murderer having to buy seven funeral wreaths for a total of $14 and leaving the florist muttering “Fourteen dollars! The beast . . .” I looked it up and a basic funeral wreath today will run you around $200. I guess that’s inflation. And there was one language reference I had to look up, when a pair of cops examining the body of a murdered husband refer to him as a “poor old gink.” “Gink” isn’t a word that’s encountered much nowadays, but it does, or did, have the meaning of a foolish or unfortunate person. I’ve never heard it used before.

But my favourite story was the one with two medical students who need a dead body to study anatomy on, or else they’ll never be able to graduate! Corpses are expensive you see, and aren’t covered by their lab fees. So of course they decide to dig a freshly-buried one up. But they can’t dig it up themselves, even though they’ll both be present at the exhumation, so they have to enlist the help of Clem, “the rather stupid college handyman.” This leads to further problems, as you might expect, but I just laughed at the notion of the two students being unable to dig up a fresh grave by themselves and needing to pay a general labourer the whopping sum of five dollars to do it for them while they watch. I mean, Feldstein needed Clem to deliver the punchline at the end of the story but it’s still funny how useless the would-be doctors are.

So it’s another entertaining collection, though I wouldn’t recommend reading a lot of these all at once since EC horror was pretty much of a piece. Just dipping into them every now and then is the way to proceed.

Graphicalex

Holmes: The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist

/ Alex Good / 11 Comments

Doyle himself wasn’t happy with “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist” and I don’t think that’s a judgment many readers would disagree with. In his prefatory remarks Watson says he’s writing it up for public consumption because of “the ingenuity and dramatic quality of the solution,” but then immediately adds that it does “not admit of any striking illustration of those powers for which my friend was famous.” In fact, the main powers Holmes displays are his pugilistic skills, which he gets to use in a tussle in a pub. Otherwise, the detection is of the order of what Holmes notices when Violet Smith first comes to visit him. He immediately determines that she is a musician, as her “spatulate finger-ends” either come from typing or playing piano and “there is a spirituality about the face . . . which the typewriter does not generate.” Hoo-boy. Miss Smith is on firmer ground when she deduces that her employer has romance on his mind when he looks at her because, despite his being a gentleman, “a girl always knows.” I’d take that to the bank ahead of any noticing of spirituality in someone’s face.

It’s a wildly melodramatic plot, with a young couple’s path to matrimony being blocked by a sinister conspiracy hatched in a far-off land (South Africa in this instance). It’s remarkable how often Doyle returned to this same situation. Luckily for the young lady here the bad guys have a falling out, with the nice one (the gentleman) not being able to bear the thought of the ruffian “owning” Miss Smith. By which he means marrying her. I don’t think there’s any irony intended in that verb. That’s what putting a ring on it meant in 1903.

So there are the aforementioned fisticuffs. And some bicycle chases through the countryside. And one great exchange at the end:

“You’re too late. She’s my wife.”

“No, she’s your widow.”

His revolver cracked, and I saw the blood spurt from the front of Woodley’s waistcoat.

Don’t worry, Woodley isn’t dead. But he’ll go to prison when he recovers. That comeback though should have been fatal.

Holmes index