Tales from the Crypt Volume 1

Another EC horror comic series, very like The Haunt of Fear and The Vault of Horror. Same editor, same stable of artists and writers, same back story of migration from being part of an earlier title (Crime Patrol, in this case) to being its own series (originally The Crypt of Terror and then Tales from the Crypt).

As with the other EC horror comics there’s a genial host in the form of the Crypt-Keeper, who along with the Vault-Keeper and the Old Witch formed a triumvirate that EC tried, unsuccessfully, to brand as the Three Ghoulunatics. There were also a lot of crossovers between the three titles, and in one case there’s even a reprint of a story. “House of Horror” appeared first in The Haunt of Fear #15 (May-June1950), where it’s credited to “Ivan Klapper.” It runs again here in Tales from the Crypt #21 (December 1950-January 1951) where Al Feldstein is named as the author. I assume Ivan Klapper was a pseudonym Feldstein used but I haven’t been able to find any source for this.

Sticking with writing credits, the flash-fiction short stories interspersed with the comics aren’t attributed to any author. In The Haunt of Fear and the The Vault of Horror writing credit is given to either Feldstein or publisher Bill Gaines. I’d assume that they were responsible here as well, but I thought these stories were really inferior in quality so I can’t say for sure.

The contents are mostly in line with what you’d expect from EC at this time. There are werewolves. A vampire. And lots of digging up corpses and burying the living. The writers also seemed to have a thing for the use of quicksand as a plot device. I wonder what happened to quicksand. You used to see it a lot in the pop culture of the 1950s and 1960s. Not so much today. Same as those mail-order chemistry experiment kits that were advertised for $1. “Safe! Harmless!” they say, but I don’t think they’d pass muster now.

One thing that I thought set these stories slightly apart is that they’re more inclined toward rational explanations for a lot of the seemingly supernatural goings-on. A villain may be trying to drive someone insane by manufacturing spooky happenings, or it may be left up in the air as to whether the horrors were all just being imagined. Also, whenever possible scientific explanations are reached for to make things seem a little less crazy. So reviving the corpse of an executed killer by giving it an electric shock? Sort of Frankenstein-ish, but you can roll with it. And the best story in this volume, “℞ . . . Death” (written by Feldstein, art by Graham Ingels) also has a pseudo-scientific explainer thrown in at the end where the prescription that a fellow has been taking turns out to be digestive enzymes that eats him alive, turning him into a puddle of black tar.

Finally, keeping with “℞ . . . Death” I was also pleased to see that it was voted the readers’ favourite story in the next issue’s Crypt-Keeper’s Corner. This led me to think that maybe they weren’t just making those polls up, which is something I’ve always been suspicious about.

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Simpsons Comics Colossal Compendium: Volume Three

Not a bad collection. Some interesting longer stories, especially a huge three-parter about Krusty’s attempt to revive the flagging fortunes of the Radioactive Man comic. Radioactive Man seems to be a popular figure in these comics, perhaps for all the self-referential humour. They certainly do a number on the overuse of crossover plots here.

There’s also a lot of the usual surrealism, as when Professor Frink’s “Cool Juice” turns all the male inhabitants of Springfield into hipster Rat Packers, or when Milhouse’s dream life interacts with reality in chaotic ways. But there are also the jokes that land closer to home, like Homer telling Bart not to get angry at the news (“The TV can’t hear you, no matter how loud you yell, boy. Believe me, I’ve tried!”) and the way the Springfield Library is saved by becoming a homeless shelter. Also worth noting is the inking by Andrew Pepoy, which goes deep into heavy shadow effects. I liked the way it looked.

I thought the shorter stories were all duds, and to be honest I couldn’t see the point in several of them.

The papercraft Springfield building is the Kwik-E-Mart. It looks like it’s just a box with no add-ons, so not very interesting.

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Alien: Black, White & Blood

This oversized volume is part of Marvel’s Black, White & Blood series, which is distinguished by its use of a mostly black-and-white format with coloured accents in red to show blood (with a bit of green mixed in for Xenomorph blood here). You may think of the sort of thing that was done with colour (and its absence) in Frank Miller’s Sin City comics, and I think that’s a good analogy for both the level of violence on display as well as the noir sensibility. Noir referring both to the heavy and dramatic shadow as well as a lack of traditional good guys in an amoral universe.

The Alien run consisted of four issues, each with a part of a long story, “Utopia,” as well as two short pieces. They all have different writers and artists, but the same letterer (Clayton Cowles), which actually provides a lot more of a sense of continuity than you’d expect. I would have even appreciated cover pages for each of the individual stories because it’s easy to miss where one ends and another is getting started.

The large format makes covers and full-page spreads into poster-size art that you just want to enjoy. I’ve commented before on the cheaper reprints in the Marvel Masterworks and DC compact comics lines and how hard they can be to read, and it’s a real treat to read a big book like this that looks so good throughout. I especially liked the chonky stylized turn that Claire Roe gives her story, with illustrations that look almost like woodcuts.

If you want one word to describe the general sensibility I’d say it’s bleak. And that’s saying something considering these are Alien comics. There are no happy endings, and most of the stories are very unhappy in brutal and ironic ways. Even “Utopia,” about a ship full of socialists looking to colonize a new planet as a worker’s paradise, took a dark turn I found surprising. Mankind is clearly something to be surpassed. The final line in the book is “Any chance to eradicate humanity’s ugliness is beautiful.” That gives you some idea of where you’re going.

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Druuna: Carnivora

Another part of the Druuna saga, a story cycle that runs in place, never really going anywhere because time and place have no meaning in the Druunaverse. We’re told that Druuna’s boyfriend Shastar has become pure energy and his mind integrated with the ship’s computer, within which he is joined with the ship’s captain, Lewis. But they can both still make themselves manifest either through dreams or virtual reality. Meanwhile the monsters are proliferating and creating “replicants” of the crew members: exact doubles who don’t even seem to know that they are replicants. Well, some of the time they do, but most of the time they don’t. So Druuna doesn’t even know if she’s a replicant. In her human form she’s something special, not quite a sub- or ur-human “prolet,” but also something different from the more civilized crew members. More civilized, I think, mainly because they wear more clothes. Druuna doesn’t like wearing clothes. Or maybe she does but just often finds herself without any.

There’s sex. And violence. And sexual violence. And various attempts, all futile, to explain what’s going on. I love how Shastar actually tries to draw a diagram to show Druuna what’s happening . . . and it’s of no use at all. As near as I can figure it, there are two dimensions, one good the other evil, and the ship has come up to the boundary between them and the monsters are spilling over from the evil dimension and contaminating our own. At the end the character of Doc figures out some way to go back in time and avoid all this. Or maybe he doesn’t and it’s a dream and they’re all replicants now. I couldn’t tell you.

You just have to learn to let go with Druuna. It’s not meant to make sense. Judged against the other books in the series I’d probably rate Carnivora near the bottom because there’s more talk and less coherence than usual. Even the minimal structure of the hero’s journey is dropped, as it’s not clear if Druuna is actually on her way anywhere or has any particular mission. I barked out a laugh when, after talking to Shastar (or his avatar) she says she has to return to the ship’s crew to pass on the message that they’re in danger. As if they hadn’t figured that out! Most of them have already been killed and eaten! But if you’re a fan then none of this really matters. Nor, I would argue, is the sex all that important. You’re just here for the crazy.

Postscript: My hardcover edition of this book is basically in mint condition. When I last checked there was only one for sale, used, on Amazon for $545. If I just hold on to mine for another thirty years I’ll be rich.

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Big Trouble in Little China (Legacy Edition Book Two)

I enjoyed the first volume of this series so much that two years later I had no trouble remembering where it left off: with Jack Burton being transported into the twenty-first century as a roadside attraction. Usually two years is more than long enough for me to forget plot lines entirely.

This collection contains three main storylines. In the first, after being brought out of suspended animation in the year 2015, Jack meets up with some of his old pals (and their children), and gets involved in a plot to take down a billionaire who collects pop culture artefacts from the 1980s. One such artefact being Jack’s rig the Pork Chop Express.

We’re introduced here to the girl who will become Jack’s new sidekick, his buddy Wang’s daughter Winona. Though of course Winona thinks of herself as more than a sidekick, and it’s her skill in martial arts that saves Jack’s bacon more often than he saves her. She’s also helpful in explaining the changes that have taken place in America since the Reagan years, which is the source of lots of the usual kinds of jokes stemming from Jack and Winona speaking what amount to different languages.

The second story has Jack and Winona and the rest of the gang heading off to Macao to take part in a poker tournament and rescue Margo Litzenberger from Koschei the Deathless. Here they are reunited with Egg Shen, who inadvertently sends Jack and Winona back to 1906 San Francisco, just before the earthquake is about to hit. This marks the beginning of the third story. In San Francisco Jack and Winona meet a younger Egg Shen and also get the origin story for the evil wizard Lo Pan before sorting out their respective timelines.

I liked this just as much as the first volume. The period gags are all on point, from the A-Team spin-off in the first story, to the Harry Potter kid in Macao, to Jack’s ongoing hunt for a payphone. And plot-wise it keeps spinning off in all kinds of crazy directions, including a crossover event revisiting scenes from the movie. The only place it dragged for me was in the primer on the rules of Texas hold’em, as presented by the Three Storms. And I guess the land developer/casino operator who becomes a nativist politician in San Francisco was a bit unnecessary. It’s interesting to note how often this character kept popping up in comics around this time.

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Saga of the Swamp Thing Book Four

In my notes on Saga of the Swamp Thing Book Three I talked about how I preferred the back-to-basics Swamp Thing stories that played like X-Files “monster of the week” episodes to the epic storylines involving some grand cosmic battle between good and evil. I felt that way again here, as I really enjoyed the introductory stories about the druggies eating some sweet potato that has fallen off Swampy’s back and going on hallucinatory trips, and “Ghost Dance,” about the legacy of a gun manufacturer playing out in a haunted house (a story that was a personal favourite of Alan Moore’s). But once we get back into the preparation for a final battle between a newly awakened power of evil and the forces of light, I thought things weakened. Sticking with the comparison to the X-Files, you spend all this time building up the main storyline or “mytharc” about Fox’s missing sister and alien abductions and black oil, but when you finally go on board the mothership you know you’re going to be disappointed. I mean, where do you go from a build-up like what we get here: “This is ultimate dark, ultimate light. The forces and the stakes here are fundamental and absolute . . . and whichever side meets its final destruction this day, everything will be changed.”

That said, I thought the final battle was well choreographed. A host of characters are assembled. John Constantine is holding a completely useless séance with a group Neil Gaiman describes as “the detritus, the flotsam and jetsam of the DC occult universe.” Swampy is in hell (or thereabouts) and is joined by Deadman, Phantom Stranger, the rhyming demon Etrigan, and the Spectre. They’re trying to stop the aforementioned evil. Or maybe it isn’t evil. Maybe it’s just misunderstood. In any event, the glowing hand of God descends from heaven and the world just continues on its merry way. “Nothing has happened. Everything has happened.” Good and evil are necessarily linked, you see. Can’t have one without the other. According to Gaiman’s introduction, Moore thought this had something to do with the Manichaeism of American culture, and what happens is an answer to Swamp Thing’s questioning if there is “some truth . . . that may be divined . . . from the entrails of America.”

Well, colour me unimpressed with these flabby conclusions. Getting to them was a lot of fun though, even if Swampy himself remains a remarkably passive as well as ponderous figure throughout. I think maybe Moore came up with the character of John Constantine just to liven things up. I do like what Moore did with this series, but at the same time I don’t think he was ever as interested in Swamp Thing as he was in doing his own thing.

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