Happy Canada Day everyone! Even those of you not so lucky as to be here in Canada, enjoying the day off!
Book: Souvenir of Canada by Douglas Coupland
Batman: One Bad Day: Penguin
Batman: One Bad Day: Penguin
I’ve said before how hard a task it must be for any comic writer, or artist, to make something new and interesting out of Batman, a character who has been with us almost since comics began. But nearly as difficult now is doing the same for Batman’s line-up of famous adversaries. All the more credit then to the One Bad Day series for taking on this mission, and, from the couple I’ve read, doing such a good job.
One Bad Day: Penguin begins with the all-too familiar eponymous villain sitting on a park bench, a derelict, after having been run out of Gotham by a swaggering gangland upstart named Umbrella Man (a title that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with his having an umbrella). Having hit rock bottom, there’s no place for Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot to go but back up and reclaim his criminal empire, which he does starting with only a gun and a single bullet.
As with the other Batman: One Bad Day books, Batman remains a secondary figure. He probably could stop Penguin, but as Penguin reminds him, things are actually worse in Gotham with Umbrella Man running things. Plus, wouldn’t Batman like to go back to the good ol’ days too? Which is an argument that Batman, surprisingly, buys.
As he goes along, Penguin picks up some muscle in the form of an all-girl gun gang and a really interesting sidekick named Lili. I think Lili may be a new character here, and I loved her. Basically she looks like a little girl with gigantic fists that she uses to beat down guys twice her size.
What Lili and another gang member who joins him share with Penguin is a memory of being a picked-on kid. This is a revenge tour for all of them in more ways than one, as they’re not just taking down Umbrella Man but hitting back at everyone who bullied them when they were growing up. It’s a way of making them more sympathetic as well as filling them out as characters, and while there have been no end of superhero and supervillain backstories like this (it’s something that, unfortunately, a lot of young people can relate to) I thought it worked here.
You won’t be surprised to learn that Penguin regains his perch atop the Gotham crime world, and ends up back running the Iceberg Lounge with his new team of sidekicks. Unlike the One Bad Day: Clayface volume this one feels more like it was meant to reboot the character and launch him into a new series of adventures with a new crew as back-up. I don’t know if that’s how it played out, but as a self-contained story I liked this well enough.
TCF: The Killer and Frank Lloyd Wright
The Killer and Frank Lloyd Wright: The True Story of Mass Murder in Paradise
By Casey Sherman
The crime:
Around noon on August 15, 1914 Julian Carlton, a cook and caretaker at the architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s newly-built mansion, named Taliesin, went on a rampage, killing Wright’s then domestic partner Mamah Borthwick and her two children (from a previous marriage) with a hatchet. He then proceeded to set fire to Taliesin and killed several workman as they fled the burning building. After he was finished Carlton attempted suicide by swallowing hydrochloric acid but wasn’t immediately successful. He died from his injuries while in custody however, and there was no trial.
The book:
I think there’s some false advertising in the title. “The killer” gets top billing, with the “mass murder” at Taliesin being in the descriptive subtitle. But that event is dealt with in just five or six pages and Julian Carlton isn’t give much attention in the book. In part this is because any account of the actual massacre has to be somewhat speculative, as there were only a couple of survivors, neither of whom knew everything about what was going on. Also, as there was no trial there wasn’t a lot of evidence to pore over. Not much is known about Carlton even today, and a criminal profile can’t be taken much further than the conclusion reached by Wright and Edwin Cheney, Mamah’s ex and the father of the two murdered children: that Carlton was suffering from some kind of mental illness that culminated in a psychopathic break. “He must have lost his mind,” Wright would say after the fact. Hectored by the press about what might have been behind Carlton’s rampage Cheney responded “I am sure that he was insane and there was no other reason.”
In his Author’s Note, Casey Sherman says that he “had planned to focus solely on the murders at Taliesin” but had been sidetracked into writing about the relationship between Wright and Mamah. I think it more likely that he realized the murder story just didn’t have enough juice. In any event, calling this book true crime, while not untrue, is still a stretch.
Instead, what you’re mainly getting here is an account of Wright’s early life, focusing on his marital and extra-marital relationships. While living with Borthwick, Wright was still married to his first wife, who refused to divorce him. The tabloids at the time had a lot of fun with the scandalous side of this, and even took to calling Taliesin a love nest and “bungalow of love.” As one critical minister put it, “Monogamy is society’s domestic ideal.” Wright, for his part, would deride this morality as “the gospel of mediocrity,” preached from the pulpit of the press to the man on the street. His was the master morality of the Nietzschean superman, which he described to a reporter in the following terms:
I want to say this: laws and rules are made for the average . . . The ordinary man cannot live without rules to guide his conduct. It is infinitely more difficult to live without rules, but that is what the really honest, sincere, thinking man is compelled to do. And I think when a man has displayed some spiritual power, has given concrete evidence of his ability to see and to feel the higher and better things of life, we ought to go slow in deciding he is acting badly.
You can get away with this, at least some of the time, if you’re a genius. And I think Wright was. But it sure is annoying.
I’ve discussed a couple of Sherman’s books before on this site. Hell Town I couldn’t finish. A Murder in Hollywood I thought just a rehash of an old story. That latter judgment I would repeat here. There have been a couple of books recently that dig deeper into what happened at Taliesin, and I was left again wondering how much trust I could put into Sherman’s account. For example, he quotes something “reportedly” said by one of Borthwick’s children to her just before Carlton killed her. The source given for this is a contemporary newspaper story. I couldn’t figure out where they got it from though, as all the participants were dead except for Carlton, and he was an unreliable witness who was not doing a lot of talking.
Noted in passing:
Carlton came to Taliesin as the result of a recommendation from a man Wright knew in Chicago. For her part, Borthwick thought Carlton and his wife (the two both worked at Taliesin as a package deal) “simply too good to be true.” Wright called them “the best servants I have ever seen . . . Julian especially seemed to have an intelligence above the average and a good education for one of his class.” Only a few days earlier “he seemed perfectly normal.”
This despite the fact that Carlton was apparently behaving in an increasingly paranoid and disturbed manner and just before the massacre had been given his notice due to issues he’d had with workers at Taliesin. This made me wonder to what extent Carlton, a Black man and a servant, was an “invisible man,” in Ralph Ellison’s phrase. The ideal servant, after all, or at least the “perfectly normal” servant, is one you don’t notice. That’s a big part of the job.
Takeaways:
As noted, Carlton came recommended to Wright. I’ve had glowing recommendation letters written about me. And some that were slanderous. Both were filled with lies. Recommendations are worthless.
MAD’s Don Martin Comes on Strong
MAD’s Don Martin Comes on Strong
There’s no way I can divorce my reading of these MAD paperbacks from the memories I have of them from fifty years ago, when I was just a little guy. They’re real trips down nostalgia lane, and on that score alone I can’t not enjoy them.
These stories by MAD regular Don Martin haven’t dated as much as a lot of the other vintage MAD books I’ve reviewed here. There’s less cultural and political stuff being sent up and more gags. What’s surprising though is how well Martin handles long-form comic storytelling, even if his punchline style of humour still comes out in the violent final panels that have guys being flattened by steamrollers or locomotives, or struck by lightning (“KAR-RACKK . . . ZAP!”). There’s even a couple of musicals thrown into the mix, with a take-off on A Star is Born and a chaotic opera that fittingly ends up with a pile of corpses on stage. And for the highbrow readers (of which I’m sure MAD had many) there’s no question that “Beauty from the Beast” was inspired by Jonathan Swift’s “The Progress of Beauty” (1719). I’m sure I didn’t get that when I was a kid, but I remember being reminded of it when I first read the poem later.
As a final note, I was surprised to find when I went looking for images of the cover for this one online that several of the stories had been uploaded in full to YouTube. That’s a platform that truly is eating everything!
Bookmarked! #150: Here Be Dragons
We’re celebrating my 150th bookmark post with an erudite dragon that flew in all the way from England courtesy of the fabulous Fraggle!
Book: A Rainy Dragon Day by Julie Völk
There goes the neighbourhood V
Ugh. This is going to be a monster. The whole neighbourhood is full of styish mid-century modern bungalows and this thing is going to be three stories. Eventually all the bungalows on the street are going to be pulled down (one side of the street has already been bought up) and these big townhouse-style residences will be everywhere.
Bunny love
Was out walking one day last week and there was a woman taking this little guy’s picture. Then, the very next day, I was walking past the exact same spot, at the same time, and he was there again. I’m afraid he might not be the brightest bunny, especially as he let me get quite close to take his picture. If he doesn’t smarten up he won’t be long for this world! (You can click on the pic to make it bigger.)
Something is Killing the Children Volume Three
Something is Killing the Children Volume Three
This third volume of the Something is Killing the Children series collects issues #11-15 and even though it kept on after this (and may still be going, for all I know) things are brought to a conclusion here with the adventures of rogue agent Erica Slaughter in the Wisconsin town of Archer’s Peak. All the “big-toothed scary things” are killed and while the Order of St. George (not a team of heroes, it turns out) has suffered some uncomfortable exposure, they at least manage to find a fall-guy and hush things up.
Given how this volume ends I think I’ll take a break from the series. A break that may be permanent. I haven’t liked this comic much, and all the mumbo-jumbo mythology about the monsters and the familiars that the monster-killers carry with them didn’t interest me. I’m not into the story, or the characters, or the art.
Another flower house
I had an earlier post about a house I pass by when I walk downtown that has a really wild front yard. This is the front yard of a house I walk by when I’m going in the other direction. It’s not quite as flowery, but it definitely goes for the wild look.
And here’s a picture taken from the other side.
I know people who don’t like this sort of thing but I think it’s actually a lot of work (though you it’s true you don’t have to spend as much time cutting the lawn). I don’t think I would be able to manage it, but I do have the same sort of thing going on in my front garden.
Batman: Off-World
Batman: Off-World
Usually it’s a bad sign when familiar characters go off into space. In terms of horror franchises it didn’t work for Jason, Pinhead, or the Leprechaun, with each of those movies being clear indications that a shark had been jumped. So Batman in space wasn’t an idea I was keen on. “I have no business battling alien empires,” he reflects at one point. I could not agree more.
Given all that, I thought Jason Aaron did a decent job with this this six-part series. The set-up is, admittedly, crazy. Batman gets his butt kicked by some muscle that a Gotham gangster has brought in from way out of town. Specifically, he’s a goon from the Slag Galaxy. How he got to Earth I’m not sure, but I may have missed that part. Anyway, Batman figures that the only way he can beat the goon is to actually go to the Slag Galaxy himself and train against this new competition. So he gets on board an experimental rocket ship and off he goes.
The Slag Galaxy is a brutal place that’s run by the Blakksun Mining Company. The BMC have a mercenary force of War Stormers that go around enslaving the populations of various planets, resulting in mass orphanization. This of course gets Batman’s back up since he has a soft spot for orphans, not to mention injustice generally. So he decides to take on the BMC as part of his training, which proceeds with the assistance of the requisite sexy alien (a Stormchaser named Ione with lots of tattoos), a giant war wolf, and a Punch Bot that likes to get into fights (and lose them).
It’s pretty brutal stuff, as Batman works up the corporate ladder until finally taking on the co-CEOs of the BMC, a pair of baddies called the Blakksun Twins who rule the galaxy with “lawful omnipotence.” Wrath Blakksun is a tall dominatrix warrior woman while her brother Whisper is a nerdy-looking runt who makes people’s heads explode when he says something to them. They’re actually quite a creepy couple and I was only let down by how easily Batman manages to withstand Whisper’s dirty talk. It seems all you have to be is tough enough and you can take it. And we all know Batman is the toughest guy there is. Even if, as always, his code doesn’t allow him to kill any aliens. Which makes his taking out whole armies of mercenaries a bit hard to swallow, but at this point we just have to roll with it.
Then . . . back to Earth and a rematch with the goon he fought at the start. Who this time doesn’t stand a chance. It’s a tidy ending, and things are even set up for Ione to launch as she adopts the Batman mantle back in her galaxy (her sidekick, the Punch Bot. is now Bat-Bot for good measure). I think I can live without those adventures though, at least for a while.
Alex Good 