The MAD Book of Mysteries

Since I’m a fan of both MAD Magazine and classic detective fiction, a book like this couldn’t really miss. I also like that it’s full of original stories and not a grab-bag of previously published material, and that all the stories have the same author and artist (Lou Silverstone and Jack Rickard, respectively).

So the line-up of crime-solving all-stars here sounds like the cast of Murder by Death. There’s Hercules Pirouette, Archer Spillane Spayed, Shtick Tracer, Allergy Queen, Charlie China, Perry Maceface, and Shamus Holmes. And there’s also a spoof on G-Men movies now and then, a quick trip to Peanuts-land with Chuck Frown, Private Eye, and a bunch of gags about what cops say vs. what they really mean. Alas, there’s no Nero Wolfe or Miss Marple, though they’re on the back cover. I would have loved seeing them.

The gags aren’t terribly funny but Silverstone knows his stuff and the way he pokes fun at the material will make you smile. He takes digs at Poirot’s long, drawn-out and confusing explanations of the crime, and has Number One Son getting back at his dad for all the mean cracks made at his expense. But the style of humour is mainly geared around running a gag-a-page of snappy comebacks. When Shamus Holmes declares that a murder victim lived near a canal Dr. Whatso says “A canal? That’s eerie, Homes.” To which Holmes replies: “No, alimentary, my dear Whatso!” Because the deceased worked at a candy company you see.

Rickard often gives the supporting characters familiar movie-star faces. James Cagney and Robert Redford, for example, as their era’s representative G-Men. I loved the look of all the stories, though MAD‘s house style of square speech bubbles and sans serif lettering seemed out of place. I don’t know why they couldn’t have played around with that more. Lettering matters.

What I took away the most from revisiting this pocketbook today though is how much the cultural landscape has changed. In the late ‘70s-early ‘80s classic detective fiction could be sent up for a mass audience, here or in the aforementioned Murder by Death, because it could be assumed everyone had some familiarity with these characters. Today I think that kind of awareness belongs to a vanishing few older readers. To be sure, golden age detectives still have their cults, but they aren’t household names anymore. And what’s more, nobody has taken their place. Caricature exploits character, and the old guard had plenty of that. But how can you caricature Inspectors Morse, Rebus, or Gamache? They’re more realistic and psychologically grounded but not as memorable, and give satirists a lot less to work with.

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Aliens: Dead Orbit

Dead Orbit is a one-man show, being written, drawn, and lettered by Canadian comic artist James Stokoe. It’s impressive when someone can handle all these roles as a comic auteur, but there are times when you think a division of labour might have helped. That’s the feeling I had here anyway. I love Stokoe’s art, which turns a space station into a giant, crumbling oatmeal cookie and sees Xenomorphs hiding in the wicker nests of wiring and machinery. I also liked the visual concept he had of turning the impregnated survivors who are “rescued” being burned to a crisp in their cryo pods so that it looks like rotting zombies are giving birth to chestbursters. That was a great touch, typical of the inventiveness found throughout this comic franchise.

The story, however, is hard to follow. I wasn’t sure of the time scheme, as most of the story is a flashback, but I don’t know how much because within the flashback there are a couple of flashforwards, though not as far forward as the story’s frame. This lost me completely the first time through because I got confused as to when Wascylewski was cocooned by the Xenomorphs. And what happened to the salvagers anyway? It seemed like that might be important, and then it wasn’t.

Things were just moving too fast. At one point there’s even a joke made about how quickly the creatures are growing, which is a poke at Alien that is often picked up on. The point remains however that everything here seems to happen in a rush and even at the end I was still wondering a bit about what was going on and in what order.

The supplemental materials describe Stukoe’s original pitch, which was a much more conventional Aliens story featuring space marines infiltrating a planet infested with Xenomorphs. But at some point he decided to go in a different direction, and this is definitely more like the first film than the second. The crew don’t even have any firearms and have to improvise with whatever tools they can find on the ship. Good luck with that!

Perhaps a little too scrambled in terms of its narrative for its own good, this is still another solid instalment in the Aliens franchise, and not to be missed by franchise fans.

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Demon Slayer Volume 2: It Was You

A mangaka is a comic artist who writes and/or illustrates manga. Demon Slayer’s mangaka goes by the name of Koyoharu Gotouge, which is a pseudonym. His self-portrait or avatar in the comics is an alligator that wears glasses.

I only mention this because Gotouge is both author and artist for Demon Slayer, which I don’t think is the norm. Even though manga is a more conventionalized artistic style than its form of storytelling. You can even buy books on “how to draw manga.” Meaning how to draw comics that look like every other manga comic. Anyway, what led me to bother pointing this out is that my response to this second volume of Demon Slayer has split into a good-bad dichotomy and Gotouge is responsible for both.

I like the story. Toshiro is still a young man on a mission to save his sister Nezuko from her infection with the demon virus. This leads him to fight a series of demons, beginning with the sad, fat demon he was in the middle of fighting in the previous volume, and a trio of demons who have been terrorizing Tokyo. This is all standard stuff, but there are some interesting twists, like the way the trio of demons keep popping in and out of a transdimensional bog. As he slices and dices his way through these bad guys Toshiro finds out the name of the chief demon, the one he has to locate if he wants to save his sister. This is some dude-ish fellow named Muzan Kibutsuji. When Toshiro finds Kibutsuji he’s disguised as a family man with a hip-cat sense of style. He sort of looks like a 1930s American gangster. Toshiro confronts him at one point, but Kibutsuji has a legion of demon obstacles to throw in his way. None of that is going to stop Toshiro’s commitment though. As he bracingly declares at one point: “I’ll follow you to the depths of hell and your neck will feel the edge of my sword!”

This all seemed good, or at least acceptable to me, and I managed (just) to keep up with all the new rules regarding demons and how to fight them that were being tossed out. I only wondered at why Toshiro had to fight the trio of demons with the box he’s using to transport Nezuko still strapped to his back. That was ridiculous.

But then there’s the art. I don’t like the way this comic is drawn. The action has already become repetitive and is confusing to boot. Unless you already know what the Seventh Form Drop Ripple Thrust-Curve is and can see that movement happening. In quite a few places the drawing seemed almost like rough preliminary sketches and I don’t know what Gotouge was doing with the eyes of some of the characters. I don’t think it was just the demons who had bug eyes, and even if it was I thought it looked bad.

Will I read any more of these? At this point I’m not sure. Looking ahead, I know that the series goes on forever. And while I liked the story well enough it’s not a comic I enjoy looking at. So I think I’ll take a bit of a break anyway before I continue.

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Druuna: Morbus Gravis I

I still have the first appearance of Druuna in North America, an issue of Heavy Metal magazine that came out in 1986. More specifically, and regrettably, it’s a copy of that issue as it hit the newsstands in Canada, with several pages removed by state censors. Canada was very tight about sexy stuff back in the day.

Heavy Metal (a magazine that I believe has stopped print publication) had a reputation for publishing adult-themed SF comics, but even so Druuna pushed the boundaries. The brainchild of Italian writer and illustrator Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri, Druuna was a raven-haired bombshell pin-up living in a weird post-apocalyptic urban wasteland where people are mutating into tentacle monsters at the hands of a disease called Evil. It’s a dystopian world where everyone, even the mutants, is driven by sexual lust. Which is a fate of affairs that Druuna is both a victim of and that she exploits as she tries to save herself and her lover Shastar (who is now far gone with the disease).

In terms not only of the plot but the world-building the results are hard to keep straight. From Wikipedia: “During the more than thirty years of publication of Druuna’s adventures in Morbus Gravis, the plot has evolved through several stages, differentiated with numerous jumps in the storyline, with some attendant inconsistencies.” That’s putting it mildly. I was never sure what exactly what was going on, and I don’t think Sepieri was either. That said, I always thought there was more to it than just a futuristic setting for a string of hardcore sex scenes, many of which involved threatened or actual rape. There’s a dream (or nightmare) logic to the proceedings, and in the blurring of technology, sex, and body horror I think Serpieri saw a ways into our future. Druuna could be thought of as a virtual reality porn program that has gone viral in the worst way, blurring the line between love, lust, and sex addiction in ways that have come to seem more and more relevant. Druuna is both the ultimate object of sexual desire and someone who is turned on by that objectification, a male fantasy but also a transcendent figure who reigns over her fallen world of mechanical desires.

This is the ‘80s epic of SF T&A, and right from the start, with Druuna lolling in bed for three pages like a post-apocalyptic odalisque, you know where you are in terms of genre if not in the cosmos or space-time continuum. And forty years later it still works. It’s a comic that’s stuck with me, like being haunted by a sexy ghost. And I’m not going to complain about that.

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