Amazing Fantasy Omnibus

The comics collected in this omnibus edition cover a Marvel title that was in flux for most of its short life: from Amazing Adventures to Amazing Adult Fantasy, to simply Amazing Fantasy (the first issue of which contained the debut of Spider-Man). The numbering remained constant though, so Spidey’s first appearance was in Amazing Fantasy #15, even though that was the first in the serie to be so titled.

Anyway, Marvel was spinning its wheels a bit here trying to find its core programming, not yet having landed on superhero fare as its bread and butter. Titles like Fantastic Four and The Hulk were just starting at the same time and in the recurring adventures of Doctor Droom in Amazing Adventures we can see an obvious precursor to Doctor Strange. Instead of superheroes, Amazing Adventures was mainly about monsters, while Amazing Adult Fantasy (“The magazine that respects your intelligence!”) was more like a comic version of The Twilight Zone.

It’s always nice to read an honest critical introduction. In his intro to the Amazing Adventures section Stephen Bissette makes the point that, well, these weren’t great comics. Nowhere close to being up to the level of EC ten years earlier (admittedly pre-Code), they’re only juvenile and silly, culminating in the giant Ssergo being yoinked from the surface of the Earth by a “large sky-hook from Jupiter.” That wouldn’t have impressed six-year-old me.

“Truth be told,” Bissette admits, “what Amazing Adventures became remains far more interesting than what it was.” And what it most immediately became was Amazing Adult Fantasy. It was an unfortunate title even when it debuted in 1961. As Stan Lee tried to explain in a mailbag, “the only reason we put the word ADULT on the cover, is to distinguish our carefully-edited, and literately-written mag from the usual crop of comics which seem to be slanted for the average 6 year old with a 3 year old mentality! Anybody with brains enough to appreciate AMAZING ADULT FANTASY is our type of reader.” Remember, this is the magazine that respects your intelligence! And to their credit, the short stories in AAF (mostly written by Stan Lee’s brother Larry) are all pretty interesting in the Twilight Zone style I mentioned, with lots of last-panel plot twists. “The Terror of Tim Boo Ba!” which graces the cover of issue #9 as well as this omnibus edition is a great example. And there are even a couple of stories that riff on the classic Twilight Zone “To Serve Man” episode. But whether I’d call this stuff brainy is another question. The stories rely pretty heavily on simplistic caricatures, like the guy who builds a fallout shelter in his backyard and says things like this as he locks himself away:

“Goodbye, you poor fools! I don’t care what happens to all of you! But I shall live safely in my shelter and laugh at you when the bombs fall! Nothing can harm me here – nothing! Not even a direct hit by a nuclear bomb! I’ve enough provisions and oxygen to last five years! No matter what happens to the others, I shall survive! And if any of them try to get in to share my safety with me, I’ll laugh at them! I paid for this shelter . . . it is mine alone! . . . Nothing can harm me! No one can hurt me! Ha ha ha . . . let the rest of mankind perish! Who cares?!! I’ll be the last man alive on Earth!”

I don’t have to tell you that things don’t work out quite as he expected.

Still, as corny as it all is these stories are a lot of fun, and Steve Ditko’s art gives them an extra jolt. There’s a thing throughout of placing all-red figures against all-yellow backgrounds that has an electric effect. It’s all about heightening the impact, the visual correlative of the all-caps, all-exclamation mark speech bubbles that were the fashion at the time. I mean, when you have a character introduce himself matter-of-factly by saying “My name is Henry Burke! I’m a scientist!” then you know there’s nothing that isn’t going to feel like it’s being yelled or screamed in your face.

But in our own age of eye-ball grabbing headlines and click-bait thumbnails I think we have to smile. You do what you have to do to get attention in the media economy, and if that means always being dialed up to 11 then so be it.

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The Return of a MAD Look at Old Movies

I started off my review of The MAD Book of Mysteries by saying that since I’m a fan of both MAD Magazine and classic detective fiction it was a book that couldn’t miss.

Well, because I really like both MAD and old movies, when I was a kid this was another favourite pocketbook of mine, even though I know I didn’t pick up on many of the references. At least the more specific ones. I always wondered, for example, who Rhonda Fleming was, and even today I’m a bit surprised that she was a household name in 1970. But the send-ups aren’t of particular movies so much as genres. There’s a circus movie, a submarine movie, a pirate movie, a mad scientist movie, a historical biopic, etc.

There are strings of gags that I’ve remembered for fifty years now. Here is a police captain and his deputy busting into Dr. Fear’s Frankenstein-style laboratory.

Deputy (seeing the corpse on a tabe): This man has no pulse, Captain!

Captain (grabbing hold of Dr. Fear): Aha! And if my powers of detection serve me correctly, I believe this man is the thief! All right, swine, what did you do with that man’s pulse?

Deputy: You don’t understand, Captain! This man is dead!

Captain: Dead? Then he doesn’t need his pulse! We came all the way out here for nothing!

And here’s a bit from the WW2 submarine story:

Lieutenant: Sir, this may sound like a scatter-brained idea, but why not stuff our clothes and some junk and a little oil into one of the torpedo tubes and shoot it to the surface? When they see the oil slick and stuff, they’ll think they got us!

Captain: Not bad, lieutenant, but I’ve got one even better. Why not wait till they hit us, then hold on to everything so that nothing floats to the surface, and drive them crazy wondering!

Credit Dick De Bartolo for the writing there, and Jack Davis for the art. This was a book of new material (that is, not stuff taken from the magazine) and as the title indicates was a sequel to A MAD Look at Old Movies. Unfortunately I never read that one or had a copy and they’re quite expensive now on the second-hand market (where I’m sure they’re not in the best of shape given how well-read they likely were). This makes me wonder why someone doesn’t republish these old MAD books and magazines in some new editions. I’m sure there’d be a market. Just look at how popular the EC Archives titles are. Get on it!

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Mighty Marvel Masterworks: The Avengers Volume 4

I read this shortly after reviewing the Marvel Epic Collection containing The Avengers #1-20. What we get here are issues #31-40, and while the line-up of heroes is mostly the same as at the end of the Epic Collection volume, and I think the spirit of their adventures is similar, things were under different management. Jack Kirby had been replaced by Don Heck and Stan Lee was in the process of letting Roy Thomas take over writing duties. And as much as Lee and Kirby are justly lionized for being two of the creative giants who got Marvel started, I don’t think there’s any falling off. In fact, I prefer what we get from Heck and Thomas over any of the Lee and Kirby collaborations. Comics were growing up fast.

The earlier issues have more of Lee’s hyperbolic salesmanship. “Read this yarn slowly – carefully! It’s just possibly one of the most deeply-moving, off-beat thrillers of the year, and we want you to savor every prize-winning panel!” I wonder what prizes he was referring to. Or there’s this: “Caution! Whatever you do, wherever you go, be sure to hang on to this irreplaceable ish, for it’s certain to become one of the most talked-about collectors’ items in the annals of comicophilia! We kid you not!” Lee said “I kid you not!” a lot, and I think it’s where I picked the expression up.

We’re also still in the days when The Avengers actually weren’t the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. Captain America’s shield is just a regular metal disc that is easily bent or destroyed and then replaced. The Scarlet Witch only seems to know a few basic spells, and her “hex power” is underwhelming. The Wasp is pretty much useless, as always, and forever swooning over the hunky boys she meets. Goliath starts off being stuck in his giant size and one of the storylines has him having to figure out a way to get small again. And he still needs to work on other things. In the final issue the Wasp has to give him a ride because she has wings and he doesn’t and she asks an obvious question: “Why don’t you give yourself the power to gain wings when you shrink?” His lame reply: “Y’know, I’ve been so busy on other projects, I never thought about it! Maybe I will, one of these days!”

As a result, they need to focus on teamwork to fight off the bad guys they face. Especially the mighty Ixar (“the Invincible”). Or the Thinker and his team of B-listers. I kind of liked how the Thinker wasn’t some superhero but just a computer nerd who tries to calculate the best way to take down the Avengers. A computer nerd must have seemed cutting edge at the time. Then in the final issues Hercules unofficially joins the team and he adds some much needed muscle given that Thor and the Hulk are out. Giant Man never seems to pull his weight as a clean-up hitter.

So this is quite entertaining in the mid-‘60s Marvel way. I enjoyed seeing the word “sawbuck” for the first time in a long time, and then realized I’d never had any idea what a sawbuck was. It’s a $10 bill, in case you were wondering, so called because the Roman numeral X looks like a sawbuck, which is a style of sawhorse. Timely trivia aside, the Avengers were on their way here to becoming the franchise they would become but they still needed a lot of work before they’d be fully assembled.

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Sherlock Holmes: The Final Problem

Most graphic adaptations of classic literature are massive disappointments. They tend to either go with a generic comic-book look or adapt the work in some way that makes a mess of the source material, often without even being interesting.

Swiss artist Hannes Binder’s illustrated version of Conan Doyle’s “last” Sherlock Holmes story, “The Final Problem,” is a wonderful exception. I put last in quotation marks because this is the story where Holmes was supposed to be killed off, falling from the Reichenbach Falls, only Doyle had to bring the great detective back due to popular demand. Even though it’s not really much of a story, it’s always been a favourite among illustrators because of the iconic scene where Holmes and Moriarty grapple at the top of the falls before plunging to their supposed deaths. That’s a moment you get here as well, though I think it’s worth pointing out that it’s not an event that is ever described in the story itself because in fact it never happens.

Binder’s black-and-white scratchboard technique is well suited for evoking mists and smoke and spider-webs, as well as hinting in a way I can’t really explain at a sort of aural quality. I think this latter is something Binder is conscious of too, as the full-page drawings of a screaming mouth and then an ear point toward the same thing. The mouth and ear are also suggestive of vortices that, like Moriarty’s sinister web, draw us in to our doom. Then the illustrations of a falling brick or a utensil shattering a dessert explode in ways that don’t require any textual effects. We can hear them well enough.

The text is abridged and adapted quite a bit, but in a way that I thought was remarkably efficient. And I liked the way Moriarty, a figure almost entirely absent, at least as a physical presence, from the story, shows up as a glowering atmospheric presence, a demonic eye of God. Binder isn’t just doing his own thing here but is making something distinctively in his own style while respecting the source. Holmes has been illustrated by a lot of different artists, right from the first published versions of his stories, but Binder doesn’t take a back seat to any of them.

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Saga of the Swamp Thing Volume Five

I liked the introduction to this volume by artist Stephen Bissette where he talks about how Alan Moore’s interest in the grand cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil that ended the previous storyline had been waning and that a change in direction was necessary. As I’ve said before, I think Moore is at his best when he keeps his feet on the ground, and I didn’t like where the “American Gothic” story ended up.

So things start off on a slightly better foot here. But only slightly better because the new storyline is all about the romance between Abby Cable and Swamp Thing, which for some reason fascinated Moore but which I don’t care for at all. I don’t think of Saga of the Swamp Thing as a romance comic. The plot is also predicated on the absurd legal problems Abby gets into when it’s made public that she’s been getting physical with Swampy. It’s a real stretch to see why she’d be prosecuted for this to the degree she is, but you just have to take it as a given so that Swamp Thing can rocket through the Green to her rescue by turning Gotham into a botanical garden full of hippies. This is “the greening of Gotham,” which I take it is a nod to Charles Reich. But there’s a dark side to this too, suggested by the title of one issue as “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” Bosch’s carnivals have an ambiguous colour to them.

Anyway, with Swamp Thing becoming “very nearly a god” there are a bunch of people who want to take him down. Batman tries using a Super Soaker filled with defoliant but that gets him nowhere. Then Lex Luthor figures out, somehow, that Swampy’s ability to zip away into the Green and regenerate himself whenever he’s in danger can be blocked by an electronic jammer. So after being tagged with one of those he then gets napalmed, which sends his spirit to a blue planet while a despairing Abby heads back to the bayou. They both dream of each other, in their different ways.

The “blue heaven” Swampy is exiled to looks interesting, with Rick Veitch giving us a different take on the sort of psychedelic otherworldliness you get in the Doctor Strange comics. But I also thought Moore’s writing went over-the-top again, with the shades of blue likened to “the color of saxophones at dusk . . . of orbiting police lights smeared across tenement windows . . . of a flame’s intestines . . . of the faint tracery of veins visible beneath the ghost-flesh of her forearm’s underside . . . of loneliness . . . of melancholy. The blues.” But this is the complete Moore, and you have to take him all together. I really wonder what the average comic reader thought of it though. In any event, Moore’s run with Swamp Thing was nearing the end. In fact, he was writing Watchmen at the same time as he was working on the stories collected here, which is both a sign of being in a particularly hot creative phase as well as an indication that his attention was starting to wander.

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Swamp Thing: Volume One

It’s called Swamp Thing but that character (the transformed Alec Holland) only briefly appears a couple of times, once in a flashback. Instead this is the Daughter of Swamp Thing, a teenage girl named Tefé, who has come about through – here I take a deep breath – Swampy temporarily possessing the body of John Constantine and having sex with his (Swampy’s) wife Abby and impregnating her with an elemental spirit known as the Sprout. After she’s born, Tefé inhabits the body of a girl named Mary Conway, who was terminally ill. Tefé loses her memory of being the Sprout when she becomes Mary, but it all comes back to her when she gets angry, leading to her shedding the body of Mary and being reborn as the platinum-haired Tefé Holland. With her hair she’s supposed to look like her mom Abby but I kept being reminded of Sabrina the Teenage Witch. She even operates a bit like a witch, as her super powers involve casting what amount to plant-based spells that kill or incapacitate people. In any event, now conscious of her powers she starts crisscrossing the U.S. having various adventures while different people (federal agents, a samurai-style killer from the Green) try to hunt her down.

There’s real talent on board here – from headline author Brian K. Vaughan, the distinctive art of Roger Peterson, and John Costanza’s lettering – but something about it wasn’t working for me. I didn’t mind changing the focus from Swamp Thing to his daughter, but she’s pretty much just a drifter here. At one point she has a mission to find the Tree of Knowledge (not the one from the Bible, at least I don’t think) but she doesn’t know where it is or what it does and by the end of this run she’s basically given up on it. Along the way she picks up a couple of (male) drifter friends: an ex-Marine named Pilate and an ex-smokejumper named Barnabas who’s had half his face burned off. Together they steal vehicles and crash in abandoned apartments or other temporary accommodations as they just . . . drift.

Basically, Tefé wanders into one bad situation after another and punishes evildoers. She’s on a lobster-trawling ship where one of the crew goes crazy, so she kills him. A girl gets raped by a band she’s a fan of, so Tefé fixes them (I think literally). A hobo tries to rape her so she skins his arms. A guy selling flowers at a roadside stand upsets her so she chokes him with pollen. A guy who killed the man in the apartment next to him is immobilized and handed in to the police.

You’ll note that none of the bad guys she punishes are supervillains or have any special powers at all. Either of her drifter friends could easily kick their asses, if she’d asked them. Her victims are certainly no match for Tefé, and she usually disposes of them in a couple of panels through her ability to manipulate the tissue of flora and fauna. After a while this started to not be very interesting. Meanwhile, the big story playing in the background isn’t moved along very quickly and we don’t really find out much more than the fact that certain people, some of them likeable and others not, are after Tefé.

So on the one hand I appreciate Vaughan and his team trying to go in a new direction, and I like the meatiness of the writing, which is very character-driven. I’m sure Vaughan must have been thinking of Alan Moore’s run with Saga of the Swamp Thing and what he did to basically re-invent the title and make it his own. But there is no larger compelling story being told here and no conflict either. Perhaps that was still to come in the series, but I have to say that after this first volume of the series I wasn’t enthusiastic about reading more.

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The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes

This first Avengers Epic Collection volume reproduces Avengers #1-20, published from 1963 to 1965. So let’s return to the heady days when Iron Man had all-yellow armour that rusted in the rain, Thor turned back into Doctor Don Blake if he lost contact with his magic Uru hammer for more than 60 seconds, the Wasp was swooning like a lovesick schoolgirl over every hunky hero she met (even Kang the Conqueror turns her head: “I’ll be he’s not bad-looking under that silly headgear he’s wearing!”), and the Hulk actually had hair on his chest. (You win a special trivia prize is you named Hulk as one of the original Avengers, because he didn’t stay on the roster for long). We’ll also return to the days of Rick Jones and the Teen Brigade, a bunch of Marvel superfans who don’t really do much of anything but sometimes get in trouble and need rescuing. And since this was the Cold War, we’ll return to the repressive communist Asian state of Sin-Cong and its brutal warlord leader the Commissar. This particular issue came out in 1965, naturally, and Quicksilver’s questioning of American involvement is prescient: “I thought our purpose was to battle crime! Why need we concern ourselves with international affairs?” Captain America, however, overrules him: “We’re supposed to avenge injustice, right? Well, when liberty’s threatened, justice goes down the drain! That’s it in a nutshell!” And so what would have been a timely debate on American foreign policy is nipped in the bud.

All the comics here were written by Stan Lee and illustrated first by Jack Kirby and then by Don Heck. Lee was in full carnival barker mode. Here’s some bumf from the covers and title pages: “This is the issue you’ve been waiting for!! One of the greatest battles of all time!!” (#3), “A tale destined to become a magnificent milestone in the Marvel Age of comics! Bringing you the great superhero which your wonderful avalanche of fan mail demanded!” (#4), “Caution!! Don’t tear this magazine or wrinkle the pages or get food stains on it! We have a hunch you’ll want to save it as a collector’s item for a long, long time!” (#6), “The Mighty Avengers Meet Spider-Man! And the only blurb we can write is ‘Wowee!’” (#11), “A Marvel tale of most compelling excellence!” (#12), “You’ll gasp in amazement at the most unexpected final panel you’ve ever seen!” (#13), “Possibly the most memorable illustrated story you will read all year!” (#16).

Did the comics deliver? I think so. Once the barker had drawn you in he did a good job presenting a three-ring circus of action. The plots here are madcap. I’ll just break down one issue (#14) as an example. Are you buckled in? Here goes:

This issue begins with the Avengers racing to get the Wasp to a hospital because she’d been struck by a bullet at the end of the previous comic (in case you were wondering, that was “the most unexpected final panel you’ve ever seen!”). At the hospital they’re told that her lungs will collapse in 48 hours unless she’s operated on by a Norwegian lung-restoration specialist named Doctor Svenson. Since Thor is the only one who “can span the ocean in minutes” he flies off to Norway, tears the doctor, protesting, out of his lab, and flies him back the U.S. At the hospital, however, it’s discovered that the doctor is actually an alien, and when his mask is pulled off he dies because he can’t breathe Earth’s oxygen.

Consternation! The Avengers now have to search the entire planet for the aliens who abducted Doctor Svenson and replaced him. They figure this will take them eight hours. After this time has expired they haven’t found anything, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Obviously the aliens must be hiding out in one of the uninhabited parts of the globe, which they quickly reason must mean either the North or South Pole. Thor sticks his hammer out the window of the Avengers’ jet and it points to the North Pole, so that’s where they head next.

Landing at the North Pole they start digging through the ice and end up falling into a giant subterranean alien city (the North Pole apparently being solid land underneath the ice). The aliens capture them by hitting them with a paralyzing ray. This forces them to stand immobile while Kallu, the leader of the Kallusians, explains how they came to Earth fleeing a more warlike group of aliens. Because the Kallusians can’t breathe Earth’s atmosphere they kidnapped Dr. Svenson, who designed masks that allowed them to deal with our air. Thor then jumps on Kallu (he’d only been feigning being paralyzed since the ray doesn’t work on immortals, you see) and the Avengers break free and there is a big fight (“And so, the inevitable battle begins . . .”). The action is interrupted though when Dr. Svenson shows up and agrees to help the Avengers, while at the same time the bad aliens, with their “robot detectors,” discover where the Kallusians have been hiding (it’s hard not to think that The Empire Strikes Back stole something from this part), forcing the Kallusians to scramble their battle fleet and head into space. Dr. Svenson successfully operates on Jan (the Wasp), and the Watcher makes an appearance to say that he’s been observing all of this and won’t make any comment other than to say that “the power of prayer is still the greatest ever known in this endless, eternal universe!”

That’s a lot of plot in only19 pages of comic, especially with all the time spent running around and fighting.

There are things here that would continue to be of importance with the Avengers, no matter what form their changing line-up took. In particular the way that in-fighting and personal squabbles would be as greater or even a greater threat than any supervillain. It’s also refreshing to see heroes who aren’t quite so powerful. Iron Man being hit with an “emery dust pellet,” for example, causes his joints to stiffen. And Captain America is frequently disparaged as someone with no super powers at all. He’s basically just an athletic gymnast who knows how to fight. And when the Swordsman shows up in the final two issues he’s no different except that he has a sword instead of a shield. And still it takes the Avengers two comics to defeat him, and even then he mostly gives up because he doesn’t want to fight alongside the Mandarin.

Some examples of understatement are surprising sixty years later. Baron Zemo is built up as Captain America’s arch-nemesis, with Cap chasing after him to avenge the death of Bucky Barnes. But when he finally manages to kill him (by tricking Zemo into causing an avalanche that buries him, so Cap hasn’t killed him directly) it’s presented in a couple of tiny panels and almost seems like an afterthought. Today a moment like that would be given epic treatment.

The one thing I’m really glad they got rid of was the character of Rick Jones. He’s a completely useless tag-along who starts out riding on the Hulk and later is adopted by Captain America. And he even gets snippy about it. When Cap comes back from South America with Rick in tow, he (Captain America) is greeted by the other Avengers as a returning hero while Rick sulks in the background, muttering “And what am I – a fever blister?” I doubt he’d even rate that high. But somehow he thinks he’s going to be a real Avenger someday. When Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, and Quicksilver join the team he’s still sulking in the background, thinking to himself “It isn’t fair! Those three Johnny-come-latelies are now official members and Cap still won’t let me be a full-fledged uniformed Avenger!” No mention of what Rick can do, but he wants a uniform and a membership card anyway. Maybe kids reading the comic were meant to identify with him, but I don’t think that’s likely. He’s just too big a wimp. Marvel would later give in and award him a power-up, but here in the early days he’s hard to take.

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Solo: The Deluxe Edition

Solo was a limited run of comics consisting of a dozen 48-page issues, with each issue being illustrated by a different artist. Some of the biggest names in the biz were recruited and given creative freedom to tell whatever stories they wanted, using DC characters as they saw fit. In some cases the artists also wrote their pieces but they also worked with writers. This Deluxe Edition collects the complete run.

Here’s the line-up:

#1 Tim Sale (with Jeph Loeb, Brian Azzarello, Darwyn Cooke, and Diana Schutz)

#2 Richard Corben (with John Arcudi)

#3 Paul Pope

#4 Howard Chaykin

#5 Darwyn Cooke

#6 Jordi Bernet (with John Arcudi, Joe Kelly, Andrew Helfer, Chuck Dixon, and Brian Azzarello)

#7 Mike Allred (with Laura Allred and Lee Allred)

#8 Teddy Kristiansen (with Neil Gaiman and Steven Seagle)

#9 Scott Hampton (with John Hitchcock)

#10 Damion Scott (with Rob Markmam and Jennifer Carcano)

#11 Sergio Aragonés (with Mark Evanier)

#12 Brendan McCarthy (with Howard Hallis, Steve Cook, Trevor Goring, Robbie Morrison, Tom O’Connor and Jono Howard)

I’ll say right away that the art here is great. I have my favourites and others that I didn’t like nearly as much, but I have to acknowledge that even the ones that weren’t my thing were highly creative. As a portfolio of some of the best people working at the time (the series ran from 2004 to 2006) it’s a treasure chest.

That said, I really didn’t think much of most of the stories. They’re all over the map in terms of genre and tone, even within some of the individual issues. And a lot of the time they just felt like flimsy excuses for the art. Which I guess you should expect in what was a consciously art-driven project. Darwyn Cooke won an Eisner Award for his issue and I had no disagreement with that, as in my notes I had it down as one of the best. But overall I thought there were more misses than hits when it came to what was actually being illustrated, and I can’t say that any of the stories stayed with me for long.

Just as a final note, I have no idea why, for such a deluxe hardcover edition, they put Mike Allred’s drawing of Batman doing the Batusi on the cover. That’s no way to sell a book.

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Utterly MAD

In my review of the Visions of Poetry edition of Poe’s “The Raven,” illustrated by Ryan Price, I mentioned how I had memorized the poem as a kid from a Mad magazine adaptation. Well, the book I read that adaptation in was Utterly MAD. I’ve kept it around a long time now.

The stories collected here are mostly long-form satires of established properties like Robin Hood, Tarzan, Little Orphan Annie, and Frankenstein. And then there are a couple of cultural pieces, one on adapting novels to the big screen and the other on supermarkets. The latter I guess being something new at the time (the book’s first printing was in 1956).

Most of the humour hasn’t aged well. There are a lot of little gags that play out on the edges, but the verbal ones especially don’t land. Plus I think you’d probably want to be acquainted with the source material. “G. I. Shmoe” is a take-off, I think, of a G. I. Joe comic, but I didn’t get the punchline every woman delivers where they ask him if he’s got gum. And “Little Orphan Melvin” won’t work unless you have some idea of the original characters, how they talk and relate to one another, and the sorts of situations Annie finds herself in. Other stories, like “Robin Hood” and “Melvin of the Apes” just weren’t funny. Maybe they thought the name Melvin was funny. Also the Yiddish word “fershlugginer.” Sometimes the crammed visual style does work passably well, as with the “Frank N. Stein” story and the trip to the supermarket, but overall it wasn’t working for me.

That said, I love this little paperback for two stories that, for whatever reason, have stayed with me. Obviously one is the adaptation of “The Raven.” This is typical of the crammed style I mentioned, with lots of different stuff going on in every cell, including a lot that’s totally unrelated to the poem, like a dog that outgrows the narrator’s apartment. But where I give them the most credit is in including the full text of the poem and having all kinds of fun with it, from emphasizing the fearfulness of the narrator, hiding in his room, to presenting the lost Lenore as a beefy, cigar-smoking lady who presses clothes. To some extent, I’m still not sure how much, this interpretation of the poem has for me become a part of it that I can no longer disentangle from what Poe wrote.

The second story that stands out is “Book! Movie!” This is meant to illustrate how Hollywood takes gritty, realistic novels and cleans them up, turning them into tinselly trash. Which is something that I think probably happened a lot more often in the 1950s than it does today. Anyway, the Book part tells the story of a loser living in terrible poverty who cheats on his wife and is caught by a blackmailer (though I don’t know what the blackmailer could be thinking he’d get out of it). The guy then kills his mistress and the blackmailer (with lots of “Censored” dots covering up the gouts of gore) and is pursued by demons back to his home, where he learns that his wife, who he hates, has invited her twin sister to live with them “forever.” The man collapses in despair, saying: “This miserable hopelessly hopeless situation is just perfect for a book ending.”

The Movie part turns the man and his wife into an affluent couple who even sleep in separate beds. As was the custom on screen at the time. The man is pursuing an affair (because he can’t stand that his wife is a slob), and is caught by a blackmailer. He then kills his mistress and the blackmailer with a revolver, which mysteriously doesn’t leave any traces of blood (the man in the Book story had used a knife). Returning home, his wife runs to his arms and says that from now on she’ll be a perfect helpmeet and keep a tidier house, and they skip off together over the rainbow while singing about joy.

As I say, I think this phenomenon of the Hollywoodized/sanitized novel is probably not as big a thing today, but the outline presented here has always stuck with me as a way of thinking about how page-to-screen adaptation works.

As for the cover, I’m not sure how well it would fly in the present age. Probably a little better than Token MAD, and in both cases I’m hoping the sense of irony would help it out.

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Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Pursuit of the Flesh

Not just Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, meaning his intellectual property, but a comic actually written by Clive Barker (and Christopher Monfette). Which I can’t say pays off very much as I didn’t care for the writing. There’s a lot of heavy breathing from the Cenobites that’s all just mumbo-jumbo. If you go back and watch the first movie, Pinhead doesn’t actually talk much. Just a handful of lines. In Pursuit of the Flesh he’s making speeches like this: “It is fruitless to wonder how this came to pass . . . History has no place in hell. We live our deaths within a final, unending chapter. Unraveling, unfolding, forever. And there is no prologue for us but pain.” There’s a lot of this stuff, and while it may sound cool, it means exactly nothing.

As far as I could understand it, the flesh being pursued here was that of poor Kirsty Cotton. Why? I think it has something to do with Pinhead wanting to become human again and he needs to provide her as some kind of blood sacrifice to the demonic powers that be. But I don’t know. And the reason I don’t know is that this book only contains the first four comics in a series and it’s not a complete story arc. It breaks off with a cliffhanger. So I’m not sure what was really going on.

If you want gore, you got it. Those chains with the hooks at the end get a lot of play. Many bodies are torn apart, and the art renders it all quite well. It’s a good looking comic. The story, however, was hard to follow. Something about a team of hell-hunters who each have experience dealing with the Cenobites trying to turn the tables and shut them down. Kirsty seems to be their leader. But it all’s kind of hazy and I didn’t grasp the mythology. The Clockwork Cenobite was a neat addition though.

Not sure I’ll keep going with this series. I’m curious, but not eager. And I watched all the movies!

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