Unspeakable

/ Alex Good / 10 Comments

In his book Fire Weather John Vaillant, who is great at these kind of factlets, gives us this:

Words possess spell-casting, shock-inducing power, even in this jaded age, and the English language has accounted for this: something that  is “infandous” is a thing too horrible to be named or uttered.

I’ll admit that when I first read this I thought perhaps Vaillant had meant “infamous” and that there had been a typo. Even spellcheck tells me it’s a mistake. But no, infandous is a word. Dictionaries define it as something “too horrible to mention,” or “extremely odious.” It derives from the Latin infandus, “not to be spoken of.” Apparently Increase Mather spoke of things being nefandous, which meant the same thing but wasn’t as popular.

All of that was, however, long ago. The Oxford English Dictionary entry for infandous tells us “This word is now obsolete. It is last recorded around the early 1700s.” I did some digging and found where it had been used more recently than that, but I don’t think you’re likely to see it around much today.

Words, words, words

The Vault of Horror Volume 1

/ Alex Good / 8 Comments

The Vault of Horror Volume 1

The Vault of Horror was one of three main horror comic titles put out by EC in the 1950s before they got shut down by the government. The others were Tales from the Crypt and The Haunt of Fear, and as I said in my review of The Haunt of Fear Volume 1 the three were basically interchangeable, with the same writers and artists and no difference in the kinds of stories included. They even did crossovers, so that the Old Witch (host of The Haunt of Fear) and the Crypt-Keeper (from Tales from the Crypt) will sometimes show up in these pages to introduce stories. The Vault-Keeper is the guiding force here, and he’s indistinguishable from the other two. To the point where I honestly thought he was an old woman, until he started shooting down rumours about his being romantically linked with the Old Witch.

OK, so what are you getting? Well, for starters it’s issues #12-17. Does that mean that Volume 1 is skipping anything? Not really. As with The Haunt of Fear, EC started publishing stories from The Vault of Horror in another comic called War against Crime. Then, when War against Crime became The Vault of Horror they didn’t change the numbering, for business reasons I don’t fully understand. So issue #12 is really the first issue of The Vault of Horror (something similar happened with The Haunt of Fear, which had started with issue #15 because previously it had been The Gunfighter, and Tales from the Crypt, which had been Crime Patrol).

The stories themselves don’t win any awards for originality. As I’ve previously noted, ripping off classic horror tales was an EC staple, so that’s on the menu again here. The first story is a version of The Wax Museum. “Doctor of Horror” is just the story of Burke and Hare. “Island of Death” is “The Most Dangerous Game.” “Voodoo Horror!” is The Picture of Dorian Gray. Throw in several werewolf stories (set, as always, somewhere on the English moors), a vampire, a couple of practical jokes that backfire, some premature burials, and you’ve got a pretty musty vault indeed.

Not that there’s much wrong with that. I always get a kick out of these comics even when they’re just playing the greatest hits. And there’s at least one story here, “Baby . . . It’s Cold Inside!” that I thought was quite original. Though if you showed me the source for it I wouldn’t be surprised. It was getting to the point where I was feeling that even the stories without an obvious inspiration had to be coming from somewhere. But in any event, I’d probably rate it the best.

Other features include short stories by editor Bill Gaines, some random chortlings by the Vault-Keeper, and a mail bag. With regard to this latter department, I always wonder how many of these letters were actually sent into EC’s (or Marvel’s, or DC’s) offices and how many were made up. Some of them are clearly fictional, but others might have been legit. It was a time when people actually did write letters. They sure don’t anymore.

There’s a sort of manic energy throughout, not just in the typical comic style of throwing exclamation marks at the end of every sentence (even something as banal as “They seat themselves on roughly hewn chairs!”), but in the crazy laughter on almost every other page. There are the “Heh-heh-heh”s of the Vault-Keeper, of course, but also some hee-hees, haw-haws, and lots and lots of “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”s. In a Foreword to this volume by R. L. Stine he writes that “What attracted me to these comics was that they were so hilarious. Has anyone ever concocted such a mix of horror and humor before?” I don’t know about that. It’s not like the stories here are all that funny. But they do trade in a kind of dark humour and even in the most extreme situations it all seems like a lot of fun. Not that that helped them any when the censors came calling.

Graphicalex

Snow squall

/ Alex Good / 19 Comments

Leave the grocery cart! Run for your lives!

Luckily the wind was at my back while I was walking home through this.  Nasty to have it blowing in your face. (You can click on the pic to make it bigger.)

Holmes: The Resident Patient

/ Alex Good / 17 Comments

You might think you know where things are going here. A mysterious man named Blessington offers to set young Doctor Percy Trevelyan up in a private consulting practice. This sounds like a cover, much like inviting Jabez Wilson to become a member of the Red-Headed League and paying him to copy out pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica, or offering Violet Hunter a job to sit in a window while wearing a particular dress.

The strange thing is that Blessington, though he has a shady background involving yet another historical crime that is chasing him down, is on the level. But then why does he want to be Dr. Trevelyan’s benefactor? I don’t know. I can certainly think of better, less complicated ways to drop out of sight.

Of course, you’ll suspect, this time entirely correctly, that the Russian nobleman and his burly son aren’t what they seem to be. All Holmes needs to be convinced is a look at the footprints they leave.

I didn’t think any of this was terribly interesting. What I found myself most intrigued by was the opening paragraph:

In glancing over the somewhat incoherent series of Memoirs with which I have endeavored to illustrate a few of the mental peculiarities of my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I have been struck by the difficulty which I have experienced in picking out examples which shall in every way answer my purpose. For in those cases in which Holmes has performed some tour de force of analytical reasoning, and has demonstrated the value of his peculiar methods of investigation, the facts themselves have often been so slight or so commonplace that I could not feel justified in laying them before the public. On the other hand, it has frequently happened that he has been concerned in some research where the facts have been of the most remarkable and dramatic character, but where the share which he has himself taken in determining their causes has been less pronounced than I, as his biographer, could wish. The small matter which I have chronicled under the heading of “A Study in Scarlet,” and that other later one connected with the loss of the Gloria Scott, may serve as examples of this Scylla and Charybdis which are forever threatening the historian. It may be that in the business of which I am now about to write the part which my friend played is not sufficiently accentuated; and yet the whole train of circumstances is so remarkable that I cannot bring myself to omit it entirely from this series.

Accepting Watson’s division of cases into those that (1) show off Holmes’s analytical method to best advantage, despite being of little importance, and (2) more dramatic or remarkable cases where Holmes had less work to do, I wasn’t sure how such a scheme would work in practice. Even Watson’s two examples don’t strike me as obvious. Was he classifying A Study in Scarlet as of the first type: a “small matter” despite being an account of novel length and involving adventures on different continents with historical actors of some prominence? And was “The Adventure of the Gloria Scott” supposed to be a more significant case, despite showing little in the way of method (as I put it: “Holmes’s great skills at detection aren’t put to much of a test”)? Or did Watson have them the other way around?

As it is, “The Resident Patient” strikes me as not sailing between the Scylla and Charybdis so much as foundering on both. It’s neither very remarkable (at least within the canon) nor a case where, as Watson admits, Holmes’s role was “sufficiently accentuated.” It is only a simple Holmesian entertainment.

Holmes index

Cemetery Beach

/ Alex Good / 10 Comments

Cemetery Beach

With that title, and a bleak if indeterminate cover, I went into this thinking it was a horror comic. It’s not. It’s an SF-action title set in some future with an alternate history where interdimensional travel was discovered a hundred years ago. Our hero is a “pathfinder” named Mike Blackburn who has been sent to explore an off-world dystopia that we set up back in the early twentieth century. Whatever the idea behind the place was in the first place, it’s now basically a fascist state run by a Baron Harkonnen figure.

Mike begins the story being interrogated in one of the state prisons, but he quickly escapes along with a rebel chick named Grace and they spend the rest of the book running away from the army/police and trying to get to Cemetery Beach, which is where Mike’s transport back to Earth (a place natives call “oldhome”) is parked.

There are things to like here. Artist Jason Howard does action well and there is a lot of action on tap here. It’s really just one long chase scene, with lots of explosions and vehicle crashes. There are series of pages with no dialogue, or even sound effects, at all. And I was intrigued by some of the hints at world building by Warren Ellis. There’s a germ pool on the planet that keeps people alive forever but has the side effect of turning them into “mushroom cancer soldiers.” The relation between Earth and the place Mike goes to reminded me a lot of Frank Herbert’s Dosadi. And I liked the way the fashion sense of the natives has stayed stuck in the 1930s, which fit the fascistic tone.

But these are all just hints that something bigger is going on. As noted, the plot doesn’t allow any time for expository dialogue beyond quick descriptions of the different zones Mike and Grace are traveling through. And the series itself, which ran for seven issues, breaks off abruptly, as though there was more to come. But I don’t think it’s been continued in the years since it came out in 2019.

So it’s not bad for what we’ve got, but it still feels a bit like half a comic. It’s frustrating that some of the interesting avenues for exploration that are opened up remain unexplored. If you just like the shoot ‘em up and blow ‘em up stuff though I’d recommend it.

Graphicalex

Signs you may (just may) be getting older

/ Alex Good / 17 Comments

A couple of reminders that things are only getting worse.

(1) Recovery time for any aches, pains, or injury just keeps getting longer.

I’ve always had a bit of a bad back. As in it’s OK most of the time but roughly every 18 months it just goes on me for no real reason. I don’t overwork it or do anything to put it out, but it just goes. And by that I mean I can’t get out of bed, or stand up straight if I do get out of bed.

Now in the past, and this has been recurring since I was a kid, these flare-ups have usually only lasted 24 hours. After that I’m on the mend. In just a couple of days I’m pretty much full strength. But my most recent attack lasted a full week. I’m still not 100%.

It’s the same for anything that goes wrong. Any pain you used to go bed with, knowing that it would be fine when you woke up the next morning, now takes days or weeks to get better. I pulled a muscle in my rib area last year and it took three months before I could lift anything.

(2) You can’t see or hear as well.

I’ve always watched movies with subtitles on. I don’t know if that’s so much because my hearing is going though or because of poor sound recording. Only recently, however, I noticed for the first time I was having trouble reading a book with some really small print. Or maybe I just thought it was small.

Because I’m shortsighted I’ve never worn glasses to read, But I find with this book I have to hold it at just the right distance to be able to read it comfortably. This is a bit worrying, as I do have a lot of books with small print (all those Penguin Classics Dickens novels!) and I’m wondering how big an issue this is going to be moving forward. I suppose at some point I’ll be having to get large print editions out of the library to manage.

Mighty Marvel Masterworks: Daredevil Volume 3

/ Alex Good / 12 Comments

Mighty Marvel Masterworks: Daredevil Volume 3

Say what you will about Stan Lee as a writer, he certainly knew how to work at speed. This was especially the case during the 1960s, when he was churning out copy for a whole series of Marvel titles. Each of the comics collected here, published in 1966-67, was written by Lee and illustrated by Gene Colan, and on the masthead of issue #32 they even ask “How do they do it, month after month?”

Well I don’t know how they kept up such a pace, but they managed surprisingly well, despite some obvious lulls. One such low point being issue #28, where Daredevil has to take on aliens looking to strip-mine Earth: “Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s Planet!” This comic begins with a six-page intro that is quickly dismissed as “one of the longest prologues on record” in the playfully self-referential style that Lee favoured at the time (“Stan” even has a Batman-style cameo when Daredevil says hi to him as he’s climbing past an open window).

On the other hand, the volume concludes with a great four-parter that has DD taking on Mr. Hyde and Cobra, a pair of bickering supervillains. Mr. Hyde splashes a “potent chemical” in Daredevil’s face that’s meant to blind him, which of course doesn’t mean anything because he’s already blind. But, for some unexplained reason, “since the man without fear is already blind, Hyde’s formula affected his super senses instead – making them totally useless!” So until he finds the antidote, Daredevil is pretty much totally helpless, though he does make a fair run of things for a while, pretending at times to have gotten his sight back. This is a lot more difficult than pretending to be Matt Murdock’s twin brother Mike, a cool “hipster” (the word meant something different back then) that Matt invents to confuse Foggy and Karen as to Daredevil’s secret identity. This makes for a decent storyline as well.

Otherwise what we get here is what fans of the comic had come to expect. First and foremost there’s a blind superhero whose other senses are so advanced he can identify people by their heartbeats (or, in the case of the Owl, “his powerful birdlike emanations,” whatever that means). In fact, Daredevil can even fly a jet, a point that has to be dealt with by “Sly Ol’ Stan” thusly:

To save you the trouble of writing scathing letters to us, we’ll explain here and now how the sightless D.D. can pilot a plane! He feels the vibrations of the needles and dials within the instrument panel, and his own natural radar sense takes care of the rest!

The second feature common to most Daredevil comics is a B-list supervillain, or pair of B-list supervillains who never seem to get along that well. I’ve already talked about Mr. Hyde and Cobra. Among the other baddies teaming-up here are Leap-Frog (he’s got springs in his flipper-style footwear!) and Stilt-Man, and the Masked Marauder and Gladiator. That we find out the Masked Marauder is really just the landlord of the office building that Nelson and Murdock operate out of feels right. He’s found his niche.

The third recurring feature is the guest appearance by another Marvel superhero. Here we get Ka-Zar, Spider-Man, and Thor. They’re all stronger than Daredevil so he mainly has to just survive the scraps he gets into with them by jumping out of the way.

The final thing to note is the self-reflexivity and self-deprecating humour I mentioned earlier. For issue #26, “Stilt-Man Strikes Again!” a note right on the cover admits “It’s one of our least-inspired titles, but the story’s a blast!” At several points in the volume sound effects are drawn attention to. Daredevil bouncing off the top of a car with a “BTANNG!” for example, gets this notation from “Scrupulous Stan”: “Special note for those who may read this story aloud: in the sound BTANNG, the second N is silent!” This will come in handy for the Leap-Frog character, who jumps around with a PTANNG!, a SQUANNG!, and a FTINNG! And later we’re told of a “PTOW!”: “In reading this story aloud . . . the first letter in the above sound effect is presumed to be silent!” That’s from “Stickler Stan.”

Overall then, an entertaining collection that I’m sure gave fans everything they wanted, or at least were expecting. And maybe a few things they didn’t. As usual, Lee is just embarrassingly bad with anything to do with romance. At one point we see Matt alone in his apartment with a framed photo of Karen. Why a blind man has a photo of the girl he has a crush on is hard to figure, but he picks it up to address her thusly: “Karen, my darling . . . even though I cannot see you . . . your beauty is like a living thing to me! In my mind’s eye I’ve devoured your features hungrily . . . greedily . . . like a starving man!” Which is a lot of what the Little Rascals used to call mush. But the fact that he says these lines while “looking” at a photo of Karen feels almost like camp.

Graphicalex