reading books

Macbeth (illustrated by K. Briggs)

/ Alex Good / 10 Comments

Macbeth (illustrated by K. Briggs)

In my notes on the Macbeth graphic novel illustrated by Gareth Hinds I mentioned some of the ways he’d cut and adapted the language of the play, concluding that it wasn’t a full-text Macbeth, nor should it have been.

This Macbeth, illustrated by K. Briggs, is a full-text version of the play, and while I want to give credit to Briggs for her ambition I came away thinking that this sort of thing isn’t well advised. I gave up on the graphic adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? for much the same reason. The text gets to be too much, and if you know the novel or the play that’s being adapted well enough you tend to skim it anyway and just look at the pictures.

I also want to credit Briggs for her striking visuals. She’s got quite an original sense of style, playing a lot with the format of the pages and mixing in various novel bits of imagery, like tarot cards, into a collage. She’ll also flip images upside-down, or present scraps of text or medieval-themed design elements as background. You can spend quite a bit of time on nearly every page, pulling it apart. And there are other creative flourishes I enjoyed too. Macbeth is so often presented, at least today, as a heroic young man that I liked seeing him as a bald, professorial type. At least he looks a lot like professors I had. You could roll your eyes at Malcolm appearing as a Black woman, but given the spirit of the proceedings this barely stood out.

But then there is all the text, which Briggs does try to jazz up as much as she can but which still just feels like it’s getting in the way. To be honest, and not only because I do know the play pretty well and was skimming, I started wondering at one point if the book might have worked better as a strictly graphic presentation, with no text at all. I mean, they made a whole lot of silent films out of Shakespeare’s plays, so, as crazy as it may at first seem, the words really aren’t indispensable.

Graphicalex

Montalbano: The Terra-Cotta Dog

/ Alex Good / 5 Comments

The second Inspector Montalbano novel clocks in at more than twice the length of The Shape of Water, which suggests to me that Camilleri was entering a comfort zone. The physical and social environment were set, from the town of Vigàta and its environs to Montalbano’s regular squad of lieutenants: Augello, the second in command he doesn’t trust; Fazio, who he does trust; Gallo, who drives too fast, Galluzzo, who has the brother who’s a reporter ; Tortorella, who was shot in the gut; and Catarella, who talks funny and isn’t that bright. For a self-described “solitary hunter,” Montalbano has a lot of help to call on. And there are also other secondary characters who recur, like Montalbano’s mistress Livia, Jacomuzzi at the crime lab, the lefty journalist Nicolò Zito, the antiquarian Judge Lo Bianco, and Dr. Pasquano at the morgue. I was surprised that Ingrid, the Swedish babe from The Shape of Water, was back, and that Gegè, the childhood friend turned pimp, wasn’t long for this world, but otherwise the cast of characters already felt quite familiar.

Montalbano himself is also coming into better focus. A gourmand, though he doesn’t cook much himself, he’s also quite a cultured man. By himself he whistles Schubert’s Eighth, and “it came out splendidly, he didn’t miss a note.” When trying to figure out where Ingrid’s housekeeper has come from he tries giving her the name of Gaugin’s Manau tupapau, which she doesn’t recognize and thus eliminates Polynesia. When an old man comes to visit the well-read inspector identifies him as being “a perfect double” of “a jacket-flap photo of Jorge Luis Borges.” Discussing the case with the commissioner they liken the proceedings to something from Pirandello, then Sciascia. In his downtime Montalbano rereads Faulkner’s Pylon . . . for the fifth time! I don’t think there are more than a hundred people alive in the world today who have read Pylon five times. It comes in handy, however, as it gives him an idea on how to draw someone out of hiding.

Montalbano’s not all high-brow though. He likes detective fiction, and at one point decides “that in matters of taste he was closer to Maigret than to Pepe Carvalho.” Carvalho being the name of a detective appearing in novels written by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, a writer from Barcelona who Montalbano feels a connection with due to their having the same surname. Montalbano’s name was, in fact, an homage to Montalbán, so we’re getting pretty meta.

The main case itself here is a historical one, as a pair of bodies are discovered in a cave where they’ve been sealed away for the last fifty years. But as the commissioner recognizes, this is just the kind of case that Montalbano enjoys: “because even if you were to find the solution, it would prove utterly useless. Just the sort of uselessness that you would find amusing and – excuse me for saying so – almost congenial.” The only problem with it, from my point of view, is that it’s not the kind of case that you can play along with. Montalbano only figures out what’s going on because he’s able to talk to a bunch of old people with very good memories, gets lucky by hearing a story relating to the crime scene while out for a walk, and has the fellow who put the bodies in the cave show up on his doorstep and explain everything at the end.

I call the cave business the main case because there’s a bunch of other stuff going on about mafia turf wars and local murders and heists, but this remains on the level of background noise. As I noted in my review of The Shape of Water, Montalbano’s Vigàta is a fantastically violent place. I don’t know how realistic that is, though. Perhaps no more so than Montalbano reading obscure Faulkner novels. I’m sure you wouldn’t find many inspectors as well read as Montalbano today anywhere in the world, and probably not even in the 1990s, which really was a different world when it came to the place books had in people’s lives. Then again, Italy might also just be very different in that respect. Meanwhile, that the high culture rubs shoulders with such violence and ubiquitous crude insults feels like more than just local colour. If Sicily really is like that then I don’t think I’d feel very at home.

Montalbano index

Macbeth (illustrated by Gareth Hinds)

/ Alex Good / 15 Comments

Macbeth (illustrated by Gareth Hinds)

Even though Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s shortest plays (I think only The Comedy of Errors has fewer lines), most productions still make a fair number of cuts, and we shouldn’t be surprised that a graphic novel adaptation, coming in at 134 pages, would be any different. Gareth Hinds doesn’t go wrong in getting rid of Hecate’s appearance before the witches in Act III Scene v (which Shakespeare might not have written), as well as the long and (in my opinion, tedious) exchange between Malcolm and Macduff in Act IV Scene iii. This isn’t a full-text Macbeth, nor should it be.

Purists may take fairer exception to places where the language has been simplified or expurgated. Among the foul ingredients going into the witches’ cauldron, for example, there’s a “Finger of birth-strangled babe / Ditch-delivered by a drab.” That second line, identifying the strangled babe as having been birthed by a prostitute in a ditch, is omitted by Hinds. And at another point a notorious crux is done away with in Macbeth’s concern over washing the blood from his hands:

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

Should that final line read “Making the green one, red”? As in making the green ocean red? Or should it be read as saying “Making the green, one red”? Meaning making the entire ocean turn red? Hinds avoids the problem by changing the line to “No, this my hand will rather stain the great seas crimson.” Which is at least clearer, if you’re no fan of ambiguity.

As far as Hinds’s visual representation of the play goes, I think there’s good and bad. The good takes the form of a lot of interesting concepts like the witches first appearing as birds perched in a tree, Macbeth’s elongated shadow taking the form of a dagger as he sets off to kill Duncan, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth literally wading in blood after the scene with Banquo’s ghost (where Banquo’s ghost takes several different, monstrous forms), and Lady Macbeth’s obsessive hand-washing represented by multiplying sets of scrubbing hands. The not-so-good is mainly down to Hinds’s figures, which all look stiff and artificial to me. Adding to this effect is the lettering, which is just a regular font that doesn’t go well with the action and adds a layer to the generic feel. I wonder if comic lettering is a dying art now though. Too bad if it is. It’s something we often overlook, but it can make a difference.

Graphicalex

The Haunt of Fear Volume 2

/ Alex Good / 7 Comments

The Haunt of Fear Volume 2

This second volume of The Haunt of Fear collects issues #7-12 and I think the first thing you should know about it is that every one of the 30 stories (I’m including the text-only stories that appeared once in every issue) was written by editor Al Feldstein. Plus I’m pretty sure he was writing “The Old Witch’s Niche” which was the mailbag feature. At the same time, even though I’d have to check this, I’d be pretty sure he was writing a lot of the stories for EC’s other titles, like Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror, Weird Fantasy, etc. So if there are some duds in the mix here, or the action starts to follow a formula, are you surprised? When EC was operating at its peak in the early 1950s Feldstein was an absolute engine.

But this isn’t to say he was a one-man show. EC’s stable of regular artists were becoming well known to a hungry fan base. Names like “Ghastly” Graham Ingels. Johnny Craig, Jack Davis (probably my favourite, though it’s close), and Jack Kamen. What’s more, Feldstein knew these guys were the real stars, and in the later comics collected here he started a regular feature profiling “The Artist of the Issue.”

The first two stories are representative of EC near its best and then near its worst. “Room for One More!” has a young man who wants to be buried next to his deceased parents in the family mausoleum. But there’s only one spot left in the crypt, so he has to kill off all his relatives and make sure their bodies are never found so he doesn’t lose his spot. As he puts it:

“No! I won’t be cheated out of my rightful place! After the last spot is filled, the rest of us are to be buried in the soil! Well, not me! I’m not going to be stripped of my flesh by crawling worms and rotting grave-mold! After I die, I want to be put in a silk-lined casket . . . and placed in the cool clean air of the Whitman crypt!”

He does a good job carrying out his plan, but of course his murdered relations come back from the grave and tear him to pieces and then take over the last spot for themselves.

It’s silly, but in the crazy EC manner, indulging their penchant for corpses coming back to life and meting out rough justice. The next story, “The Basket!”, is just derivative though. I think even the thickest EC readers will have twigged to the fact that the wicker basket Mr. Cabez always carries on his right shoulder disguises his second head, a wicked Siamese twin. So the big reveal, which so many EC stories build to, is a disappointment.

I’m sure Feldstein knew that story was a loser. He even spends a later story, “Ear Today . . . Gone Tomorrow!”, with the Crypt-Keeper playing a series of gags on the reader’s expectations. Sure you know where the fertilizer company situated right next to a graveyard is going to find a solution to their need for bone-meal, but do you know what’s going to happen next? And after that? I didn’t, even with the groaner of a title. But then I didn’t think a story called “The Irony of Death!” was going to be set in an iron foundry either.

Another thing Feldstein knew, without needing the results of the readers’ polls for their favourite stories presented in the next issue’s “Old Witch’s Niche,” was that people saw the “text” instalments (short stories without any accompanying art) as skippable filler. “Aw . . . go ahead!” the Witch says just before one. “Read it!” She’s begging you! (Unfortunately, that particular story is one of the worst.)

Mostly then this is just a fun mix of silliness and gore, with stories that usually show some greedy person getting their just desserts. Oddly enough, it’s in the story “Poetic Justice!” that this looked-for comeuppance most disappoints. More satisfying is a story where a guide lets his client get captured by headhunters and the shrunken head returns to pay him back in a manner that plays like a version of those stories about disembodied hands doing people in. Only this time the head has to roll around on the floor and trip the guide up before biting him to death. Because it’s only a head, you see. “The Gorilla’s Paw!” is another riff on the theme of being careful what you wish for. It’s all that sort of thing, familiar themes endlessly repeated, and yet it doesn’t get old.

What does wear a bit is the Old Witch, the Crypt-Keeper, and the Vault-Keeper constantly pestering readers to send away to get their copies of 5”x7” autographed photos of the three GhouLunatics “as we actually appear in the inhuman flesh.” Only 10 cents apiece or 25 cents for all three. I always wondered what these pictures actually were, and it was only from reading the EC history Foul Play! that I found out they were photos of artist Johnny Craig made up to look like the three different characters. I imagine if you have any of these original pictures now in decent condition they’re worth a lot of money.

Graphicalex

Montalbano: The Shape of Water

/ Alex Good / 13 Comments

This was the first of Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano’s novels, and given how short it is it’s a real master class on how to set the table.

Two introductions are essential. The first is to Inspector Salvo Montalbano himself (“nervous and surly,” a quickly irritated man of appetites) and what will be the key recurring characters in the series: his friend’s sexy daughter, his Genoese mistress, and all of Montalbano’s officers, who are sort of like Maigret’s “Faithful Four” team of detectives. The second necessary introduction is to Sicily, and in particular the town of Vigàta. The main thing you have to know here is that this is a world of nearly infinite corruption and violence. Or, in Montalbano’s understanding, “the stupidity, the ferocity, the horror.” I mean, the town of Porto Empedocle, which is where Camilleri was born and was the model for Vigàta, only has a population of 15,000, but in these books the place seem to have murders occurring daily. But then English country villages have the same problem with an overabundance of homicide in the works of Agatha Christie.

Introductions are necessary because I think most readers will take a while to get adjusted to the new terrain. One thing I think really helped here is that the English translator, Stephen Sartarelli, has done a great job with a text written in what is apparently a mix of dialects (Italian, Sicilian Italian, and strict Sicilian). I knew I was going to enjoy this from the first page when I encountered some wonderful run-on sentences that kept a great rhythm. And some translator’s notes at the end helped inform me on several things that I was wondering about, like the relationship between the carabinieri and the local police, and the conversion of lire to dollars. I was, however, left puzzling over how Montalbano’s arrangement with Livia worked. Sicily to Genoa seems like a long-distance affair. Couldn’t he have found a girl a little closer? Does Livia even speak Sicilian?

Now the mystery here, especially for such a short book, struck me as quite convoluted in its mixture of family and politics and sexual shenanigans. It’s not that hard to keep straight though as there’s only one real suspect, and they behave in a wildly suspicious manner. The actual murder, however, isn’t as important as Montalbano’s uncovering all the other dirty stuff that’s going on.

Montalbano index

Batman: One Bad Day: Penguin

/ Alex Good / 9 Comments

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.

Graphicalex

TCF: The Killer and Frank Lloyd Wright

/ Alex Good / 9 Comments

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.

True Crime Files

MAD’s Don Martin Comes on Strong

/ Alex Good / 15 Comments

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!

Graphicalex

Something is Killing the Children Volume Three

/ Alex Good / 12 Comments

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.

Graphicalex