* Which is by way of saying that Adventures Into Darkness, my alternate-historical RPG supplement mashup of H.P. Lovecraft and Nedor Comics Golden Age superheroes, is now available in the world-beating Hero System version, from Atomic Overmind and Hero Games! Many thanks to dwatts for his heroic Hero assists, and for his nearly as heroic patience while the stars came right on the project.

* There's also a lovely review by kestrell of Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales up on Green Man Reviews: "So where So where should the Lovecraft beginner begin? The answer is, with Kenneth Hite's Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales." I couldn't have said it better myself.

* Tour de Lovecraft got a little more exposure over the holidays, when "cptmachine" featured it as one of his Lovecraftian Christmas gifts -- watch and delight in "Merry Yithmas, Part 2." Thanks, Captain, and belated Merry Yithmas to you!

* And surely every true fan of the Fighting Yank has already seen the wonderfully, weirdly addictive Nedor-A-Day Page.

Y'know, I'm beginning to suspect that there's a pattern behind all this.

Tim Burton's Penguin is a wannabe gothic theatrical impresario with torturous daddy issues.

Bryan Singer's Magneto is an artistic genius with (perhaps justified) persecution paranoia, who continually tries to build something lasting out of discards.

Brad Bird's Syndrome is a self-made genius who desperately wants to be accepted as an equal by his iconic peers.

Marvel Studios' Obadiah Stane is a malevolent corporate pirate who steals intellectual property with abandon.

Frank Miller's The Octopus is a power-worshipping psycho who turns Denny Colt into a monstrous revenant freak.

The interesting thing is how much of Miller's movie still worked, despite all the gratuitous damage and misunderstanding. Filming virtually the entire movie with no blue in the palette (except for the Lorelei Rox scenes -- a reinvention by Miller that I actually kind of approved of) makes no kind of sense, especially given that the Spirit wears a blue suit. But it works. (The other place they put blue? Gabriel Macht's eyes, which look brown in the publicity photos. The color-enhanced Macht, by the way, is a terrific visual match for the Spirit. It's like they sent an Eisner sketch to casting directors.) Miller's cityscape isn't Eisner's at all, but (again) it still works. Even giving the Spirit a sort of quasi-parkour (more Daredevil, really) doesn't jar too terribly badly. And some of it, Miller still gets right -- the fight scene at the beginning, while honkingly wrong for the film, is true to Eisner's original cartoonish fight choreography. The "Wildwood Cemetery" establishing shot is something that we could count on Miller not getting wrong, although (like the fight) it's misplaced in the film itself. Blending P'Gell and Sand Saref into one character is understandable, though only barely forgivable.

As an Eva Mendes delivery system, though -- top notch. A+. I feel like someone complaining the syringe they're shooting up with is the wrong color.

But it is the wrong color, and it's not just the absence of blue. Dolan is wrong (too confrontational). Ellen is wrong (too spineless). The Octopus is wrong, wrong, wrong (too flamboyant, wrong m.o., actually visible), and I could have lived the rest of my life happy without seeing Samuel L. Jackson in blackface. (Silken Floss, surprisingly, is pretty much right, although Scarlett Johansson apparently read her part off the storyboards in looping.) Sand Saref, as discussed above, is half-right for Sand, half-right for P'Gell. Officer Morgenstern is just horribly, horribly, horribly wrong, even though she doesn't appear (to my knowledge) in the original comic.

The fantasy is the wrong kind of fantasy; the violence (mostly) the wrong kind of violence. The jokes mostly don't work and almost always suffer from rotten framing, timing, and presentation. And the whole conceit is wrong. I'm sick of movies about ironically questioning the thing the movie's about. If you're going to pose a movie as an ironic commentary on comic-book conventions, don't film it in comic-book storyboards, don't have first-person narration (which Eisner's Spirit didn't, of course -- that's all Sin City), don't give your hero superpowers he doesn't have in the original material, absolutely don't have Samuel L. Jackson mugging for the cameras pulling cartoon guns out of his hat like the Judge in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and don't be vastly flatter and less human than the seven-page comic insert you're indicting for its alleged two-dimensionality. If you're going to ironically question the Spirit, do it like Eisner did in his own comic, with that beautiful old New York Jewish sense of the ridiculous. I am a bigger Frank Miller fan than most people these days, but he has no sense of the ridiculous.

It seems like an awful waste of an LJ post just to point you good people to an interview with me on technoir's podcast, The Basics of the Game, but not a lot else is going on.

Snow covers my city, the New Capital of the World, as is good and right, but it makes getting out and doing things inconvenient. And cold. Which is good for GURPS Horror 4E, at which I'm plugging along. Next up: re-read all of GURPS Powers to see what else dr_kromm has done that I don't need to. I did have the pretty great brain wave of doing up Powers for all the various Fears from the monster section. That should be good.

In response to ratmmjess' challenge of a few weeks ago, I've started re-reading the Smiley novels, which is also good ground-work for the ongoing vampire espionage thriller game. I read them eons ago, and I'd forgotten just how good a writer LeCarre was back in the day, so that's been fun. It's also instilled in me a burning desire to read Declare for the dozenth time, but maybe I'll read that godawful brick by Robert Littell, or my Alan Furst book instead. Once I can get out and do some last-minute shopping, I'll see if there's more Alan Furst lying around used.

No movies to speak of; TiVoed and watched the Will Smith I Am Legend, which is another red-hot brick Akiva Goldsman will be carrying in Hell. You will likely hear my anguished response to The Spirit once I see it in a week or so, although I can bet it will be a threnody on the theme: "Frank Miller has no sense of humor. Will Eisner's The Spirit is good-humored. Discuss." Hopefully, I will be able to ignore Will Eisner at least as much as Frank Miller looks to have done, which may make the movie enjoyable. Cross fingers.

I made French onion soup last night, along with roast potatoes (in olive oil, with kosher salt, pepper, and herbes de Provence) and Craig Claiborne's recommended mushroom accompaniment to venison steaks, which his_regard brought over, along with a bottle of very upscale Chianti. I swapped a glug of that for the dry white that Claiborne recommended, and on Claiborne's suggestion used beef gravy in a jar (!) instead of sauce espagnole, which I didn't make as I don't happen to have five pounds of veal bones lying around. The mushrooms came out better than fine, so there. I swapped about three recipes around for the French onion soup to approach a non-psychotic version, so if you care: ( The Final Version? )

Tonight, I may use up the rest of the baguette on ham-and-Brie sandwiches, or I may make chili, or I may make venison goulash with the leftover steak. More importantly, right about 11:30, Darlene Love sings "Christmas Baby Please Come Home" on Letterman, and it's officially Christmas. Have a merry one, everybody.

* If you're a fan of chadu's sweet supers RPG, Truth & Justice, now's your chance to dig up the horrific past of your campaign -- or to start a new one in the badly color-registered 1940s! Yes, Adventures Into Darkness, the definitive guide to Lovecraftian Golden Age superheroism, is finally available in Truth & Justice format on DriveThruRPG. It's the only place you can see the Fighting Yank engulfed by a shoggoth -- with full T&J stats for both! (And for 32 other heroes, villains, and monsters from Nedor Comics and/or H.P. Lovecraft.)

* But Ken, I hear you say, I've already clicked there! What now? Well, now, you can go vote in the ENnie Awards! While I'm sure you good people were already intending to vote for Trail of Cthulhu for "Best Writing" and "Best Rules," and for Hobby Games: The 100 Best for "Best Regalia," don't forget to remind your less-savvy friends, co-workers, family members, and passersby that those are clearly the kinds of audacious, hopeful choices for change that we have been waiting for. Vote early, but don't even joke about voting often, because if we break this award, our parents aren't going to buy us a new one, young man.

* What? You want to click on something that won't benefit me in any way whatsoever? What is wrong with you people? Oh, well, I live to serve. This link is a year old, but it's still just fourteen kinds of awesome: Middle-Earth Mapped Onto Ice Age Europe. You're welcome. Now vote for me.

My "Golden Age Mutants & Masterminds sourcebook from the alternate history in which H.P. Lovecraft wrote comics for Nedor," Adventures Into Darkness, is now available from DriveThru RPG in the Atomic Overmind section! This version features handy 8.5"x11" sizing, and white page backgrounds to save your yellow toner cartridge!

Adventures Into Darkness is also always available at the Ronin Arts store, as well as e23, Your Games Now, and many other fine outlets.

I extended my stay in the Greater Minneapolitan Area by a day to hang about with John and Michelle Nephew, friends and publishers, and as a great bonus, got to share two meals (one of them the Mandatory Breakfast) with jtidball. Before then, Michelle and I strolled through the Science Museum of Minnesota studying its devolution (common to museums of the Middle Holocene) from museum to playground. We took in the "Star Wars: The Science of Merchandising" exhibit, which had the impressive original four-foot Millennium Falcon model, among other neat props and robots and such, but the real highlight was the extraordinarily magnificent dinosaur collection, featuring as its crown jewel this Triceratops, the best one in the world hands down. Not least because Richard Wagner's grand-daughter gave it a magic ring whilst christening it "Fafner" in 1969. No lie.

But only such direct contact with a mythic entity could rival CONvergence, which was my main reason for being in the area, and oh boy, did I have a grand time. I'd like to extend special thanks to weasel_king for inviting muskrat_john as a fellow Guest of Honor, since I never get to see him at conventions any more. muskrat_john led mollpeartree and myself into the mean streets of South Minneapolis for a Jucy Lucy (a hamburger cooked with a molten core of cheese), and it did not disappoint. Other culinary highlights included the "tasting tree" at La Fougasse (where John and I regaled a thunderstruck Trace Beaulieu with tales of Hot Doug's) and the lobster corn dogs at Ike's (where cajones and chebutykin regaled us with tales of the lobster corn dogs at Ike's).

Other highlights almost too many to mention: I was on fifteen panels, plus the one I crashed ("Game Design"), plus attending opening and closing ceremonies. Some I may have monopolized (though I prefer to say "heavily seasoned") in my Chicagoan-amongst-Twin Citizens fashion, while on others I was one attraction among many, and on the "History and Future of Star Trek" panel I had the rare (for me) experience of being a relative (and relatively silent) mundane as Robert Meyer ("Free Enterprise") Burnett and Daren (scarily uncanny impression of Lenore Koridian) Dochterman led us where no panel has gone before, past the barrier of nerd at the edge of the Galaxy. Mention must also be made of the "Breakfast Cereal Mascot Smackdown" panel, at which petsnakereggie tried his very best to destroy the pancreas of myself, Mark Evanier, Len Wein, cajones, and three members of the Soylent Theater troupe -- we were ordered to consume all defeated cereals, and the most excellent Soylentist Joe Scrimshaw, seated to my immediate left, nearly suffered the fatal consequences of Too Much Science when he combined the lot of them with whiskey.

I only goobed out like a big fanboy goober for Marv Wolfman, but I defy anyone who appreciates the true Dracula to remain unmoved in his august presence. Plus yes, yes, Crisis on Infinite Earths. Whatever. Tomb of Dracula, man, that's where it's at.

Speaking of Dracula, mollpeartree and I watched (she for the first time) Guy Maddin's Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary at Cinema Rex, the great and powerful movie room of the con (complete with free Ike and Mike), where I also saw the premiere of local film-maker Bill Stiteler's hilarious film THAC0, perhaps best explained as Waiting For Godot meets AD&D. And I saw Daren Dochterman's The Empire Strikes Quack, a mashup of Star Wars First Trilogy footage to the soundtrack to Duck Dodgers In the 24th-and-a-Halfth Century.

But an award-winning panel schedule and a good-faith attempt to love Cinema Rex as it deserves meant that many other things could only be enjoyed en passant: I hardly got to any room parties at all (but you know I ate food out of a replicator and drank Romulan ale), missed Connie's Space Lounge almost entirely (thanks not least to the second set by Savage Aural Hotbed and then to fireworks the next night), still haven't seen Soylent Theater (Blue or otherwise), and barely exchanged two words with fellow GoH Eric Flint. I did get to talk with Mercedes Lackey a bit, which I had wanted to do all through the show, and I explained the secret truth of Wall-E to Len Wein (among others), and I talked with lots of other wonderful con staff, con attendees, and fellow panelists -- but not enough.

You know what this show needs? Another day.

Five days.

(Note to Anton: I made it home!)

* I'm off to BookExpo in L.A. tomorrow, so ironically my recent posting drought will likely be broken on the road, with plenty of gloating to boot, if Thoth smiles upon me.

* In the meantime, I should note that drivingblind has tossed me the keys to the Impala and set me loose on Archer Avenue at midnight: I'm signed on to write the "Occult Chicago" chapter of the upcoming Dresden Files RPG from Evil Hat.

* Real quick housekeeping question: What would the general sentiment around here be if I started posting teasers for my "Suppressed Transmission" columns when they hit Pyramid? Would it be, "Thanks, Ken, I'm interested to learn what you're writing somewhere else behind a subscription wall" or "Even more gratuitous self-promotion? Pinch me, I must be dreaming!"

* One of the greatest cartoonists -- one of the greatest surrealists -- of the century, Bill Elder, died two weeks ago. He and Wally Wood were the Marlowe and Shakespeare of comic satire, truer heirs to Hogarth and Gillray and Nast than virtually any overtly political cartoonist of the last fifty years. And Elder could work in any style, such that his parodies were often better drawn and composed than the originals. R.I.P.

* I didn't blog about it, because I figured everybody already knew it, and because I've been crazy busy this month, but Iron Man was freaking awesome -- I'd call it the third best of the recent crop of superhero movies, after The Incredibles and X2. Robert Downey, Jr., is the best actor ever to play a superhero, and Jon Favreau is a writer's director, so the story was in good hands. Every nickel of that $180 million bought a dime's worth of fun. And oh, the rich, gravy-like irony of Marvel making a movie about IP rights -- tell me I'm not the only one of you who heard Evil Jeff Bridges ask "Just because you invent something, you think it belongs to you?" and responded not-so-silently with "Yeah, who do you think you are? Jack Kirby?"

* I've been reading a bunch of H. Beam Piper, and a crazy book recommended to me by dspitzle, and more stuff about the Gothic, but at least two of those deserve their own entries. Which will come after BookExpo, honest.

I've finally made it into the real section of Previews. Not the realest of the real sections, the DC section at the front, but at least up in the green-sidebar front pages, the pages heroically emblazoned "Comics and Graphic Novels." I've been name-checked in listings way back in the pink-sidebar "Games" ghetto loads of times, of course, but I've become jaded and callous about that.¹

What am I on about, you ask? In this modern era, many of those of us who buy comics do so using the Previews catalog, which we fill out for our Friendly Pusher about three months before delivery date. And for the first time, I have a book in the "Comics and Graphic Novels" section of Previews, namely The Complete Idiot's Guide to U.S. History, Graphic Illustrated, which is on page 206 of the May 2008 issue, under "Alpha Books," which is the imprint of Penguin that handles the Complete Idiot's Guide series. Irksomely, I'm listed as "Ken Hite" instead of "Kenneth Hite," but the artist (the exceptional Leah Hayes) got her name listed correctly, so I imagine that's a win for the book, and hence for me, nonetheless.

A listing in the May issue (usually) means a July release for the book, although the Internet in general claims an early August release, with the exception of the Amazon listing, which holds out (somewhat worryingly) for "December 31, 2025." So sometime between July and Blade Runner, then. Which is, in its own way, one possible arc of U.S. history, and of Previews, too, I suppose.

[1] Not really.

Adventures Into Darkness, my Golden Age supers sourcebook from the alternate history in which H.P. Lovecraft writes comics for Nedor, is at long last available from Ronin Arts, and soon from many other wonderful sites around the Internet. It's been a long time coming, for one and another reason, but I think with the Nedor heroes (and other Heroes of the Public Domain) returning in Krueger and Ross' Superpowers from (IIRC) Dynamite and other comics, the stars may now be right for this project.

Adventures Into Darkness has hero and villain stats (and Sanity rules) for Mutants & Masterminds 2nd Edition, but like Yog-Sothoth, no single mathematical system can hold its hellish form -- it shall soon pervade other dimensions of gaming fun.

And remember, kids! As philreed says: "Please don't forget to click the correct link at PayPal to get back to download your file (you'll see what I mean). Otherwise, you won't get your file for a day or two (since it takes me time to deal with these problems). Click the link and you'll be good to go immediately after paying!"

Many thanks to Phil, and to righteousfist for his thrilling layout and coloring. Check it out!

With his Famous Bowl Taste Test in the Onion A.V. Club this week, Patton Oswalt outs himself as a major Lovecraft geek.

Compare the opening and closing paragraphs with those of "Dagon" -- not a story that would simply jump to the mind of the casual parodist -- and tell me I'm wrong.

And if you haven't read his JLA: Welcome To The Working Week, you missed a pretty great JLA comic, too.

Sorry to have been away from you good people for so long, but I was Immured in writing my first-ever full-size professional comics script, and I dursn't take any time away from the panels and quips and so forth to chat about anything.

Said script is for The Complete Idiot's Guide to U.S. History, Graphic Illustrated, which will be coming out in August 2008 or so the word goes, and I'm still kind of giddy about it. I'm especially giddy because the artist on the book is the incredible Leah Hayes, so I suspect I could have really slacked off and the book would still be awesome. But I didn't slack off, as that would send a bad message to the kids out there who don't happen to be appallingly gifted cartoonists.

The book will be something like Larry Gonick's bravura Cartoon History of the United States, only with more panels and slightly less opinionated, as befits the august "Complete Idiot's Guide" series. Some opinion will still be detectable by fine instrumentation, as the brief was for something irreverent and fun, or words to that effect, and if you're making jokes about history you've perforce left the pure light of Rankean "wie es eigentlich gewesen."

But for these hallowed pixels, I will unburden myself of the opinion that one could construct a surprisingly accurate and compelling American history book by simply writing the inverse of whatever Arthur M. Schlesinger, fils et pere, have to say about any given topic. But especially fils, as he is a contemptible, scuttling toady of a Grima Wormtongue who should have been horsewhipped out of the AHA when first he vomited forth his panegyric to Camelot. Though that said, it would be pretty awesome to discover in his attic somewhere a copy of Schlesinger's Anekdota, in which he reveals that JFK was the son of a demon and killed one billion Libyans in a secret war.

And with that said, Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Well, the manuscript for Adventures Into Darkness has gone off to philreed and maybe now it will stop niggling at me like an empty tooth socket.

I really, really enjoyed this project, which is to say that it was only an intermittent misery. But I iceberged a massive quantity of research, and managed to find some awesome HPL quotes on the topic of adventure fiction, and did an awful lot of Golden Age Comics immersion therapy, and wound up surprising myself more than once, which is always good fun.

For instance, I initially began the GM Advice Section ("Write Comics the Lovecraft-Nedor Way!") with a long injunction to not play this game as cosmic horror. It's not the point, I wrote, and you can't do it. Don't, can't, shan't, mustn't. I worked up a real head of dudgeon. But then it hit me -- what kind of ass writes a game implicitly promising something (a Lovecraftian horror take on the Golden Age of Comics) and then spends five or six paragraphs telling the customer that he can't have it? It would be like writing a D&D supplement in which you prate at people that the only proper way to clear out a dungeon is with Gandhian non-violence.

So I went back and tore all that out and worked up some advice that might actually make the customer happy. You can blend hard-core cosmic horror with the Golden Age of Comics. It's not easy, and it's not as perfect a blend as Lovecraftian cosmic fantasy with Golden Age superheroics, but it can be done, and I would have been cheating my customers if I'd stuck with my first lazy instinct. So I backed off from committing fraud, and I learned more about my art, and mutatis mutandis I wound up writing some pretty swell Sanity rules for Mutants & Masterminds.

But none of that useful learning and improvement made the project take less time, sadly. I swear, the only thing worse than writing is not writing, and when a project really gets its hooks into you, it's hard to switch gears and write, say, a long-overdue "Out of the Box" Year In Review column. Which I'm hopefully going to go do now.

I can't imagine it being particularly controversial to maintain that we live in the true Golden Age of Comics right now. For one thing, the greatest writer in the medium's history -- Alan Moore, for those just joining us -- is still in his vigorous prime. Moore's career is probably, what with the desuetude of the space program, the most thrilling thing going on in the world today. It's like being alive as Shakespeare debuts Macbeth, not knowing that King Lear is coming next year.

For another thing, well, there's everything else from Spiegelman to Seth to Ellis to Morrison to Baker to Ware to Kovalic to stuff I don't even know about because there's too much first-rate material out there to keep track of. (I can barely keep track of all the first-rate material in roleplaying games, which is a much smaller art form in every sense, although one could argue that this is the Golden Micro-Age of RPGs, too.) The four-panel newspaper strip is still pretty dead, but one can't have everything -- James Whale aside, there wasn't much great horror film in the Golden Age of Hollywood, either. (And I suppose we should be grateful, on the newspaper comics front, that Bill Watterson didn't get stabbed in Deptford by the Earl of Essex' button-men.) For those who like guesses, I'd say this Golden Age of Comics will run until about 2012, give or take -- 30 years is about how long Golden Ages seem to go -- but who knows? The Italian Renaissance had at least two Golden Ages, depending on if you're a Botticelli man or a Titian man, and it sparked two Dutch Golden Ages in a row to boot.

And as Ben Schwartz points out in the New York Times, we also live in a Golden Age of reprinting the reason there's a previous contender to the title "Golden Age of Comics." Not even in the actual Age of Herriman, Eisner, and Kirby could you reliably acquire such good, complete runs of First Golden Age comics with such little effort, and as Timbuk3 once pointed out, "it's only getting better." I'm collecting the Krazy & Ignatz series, of course -- Herriman is the greatest writer-artist in comics history -- and Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon reprints and the Milton Caniff Steve Canyon reprints.

In superheroes, the horrific reverse-Turner mutilation that is black-and-white compilation aside, we've got the Marvel Masterworks and the DC Archive Editions, which latter include a complete run of The Spirit, which is the greatest single adventure comic ever, and which run I own just enough of in grossly inferior magazine editions to make repurchasing a quality version unjustifiable to the Austerity Gods. But triple -- quintuple -- my comics budget (please!) and I'd still be caught short by the incredible wave of reprinted greatness available.

So next time you, like me, curse the Fates that prevent you from being able to buy everything good at the comics store, remember to thank Auntie Clotho for letting there be a Golden Age there to drown in.

From the LJ of irishspy I see that Martin Nodell* has died. Green Lantern has always, always been my favorite superhero, although my GL was Hal Jordan, whose creator (Julius Schwartz) died some time ago. But I actually met Martin Nodell at a comic convention, and he was as gracious and sunny as they came, and although I'm sure he heard "Green Lantern is my favorite superhero" more times than I've heard the El go by, his reaction to me saying it to him was one of pitch-perfect startled pleasure. Somewhere, I have a GL comic autographed by him with a little Alan Scott sketch in it.

Apparently, Nodell studied at the Chicago Art Institute before moving to New York and comics immortality -- a nice hometown connection between me and the man with the ring.

* He also co-created the Pillsbury Dough-Boy, although he never, to my knowledge, revealed to the world the harrowing World War One experiences that gained the friendly pastry confidant his name.

I really wish I could remember where I read the following immensely insightful piece of criticism:

The modern novel is merely a narrow subgenre of the Gothic.

It's true, ennit? The 20th century novelist (paradigmatically, say, Updike) writes only about the emotional lives of his characters, and such conflict as there is is in their inability to adequately or fully or (and here's what Updike has in common with Radcliffe) authentically feel or express those emotions. That's the Gothic conflict -- Authentic Love Thwarted -- and usually presented in about as tedious a fashion as you can imagine. Modern novels even symbolize the various blocks and obstacles and expressions of emotion in baldly obvious emblems, just like the Gothics with their storms and dungeons.

And a number of things recently got me thinking of that statement, and that it might even be too narrow itself...

* We saw the French rotoscoped cyberpunk thriller Renaissance on Tuesday,¹ and like most cyberpunk, it was essentially just "noir with databanks." And noir, it occurred to me, watching those 21st-century cartoon cops jump around in Haussmann's Paris, is a very Gothic form. A noir begins with a break in the surface of order -- usually a murder. The hero (usually a Byronic antihero type, or at best a Melmoth) is drawn into the newly opened gap, and discovers the cause of the break is something from the dead past. Often, there is a threat to a young woman's romantic happiness; the villain is usually an aristocrat -- in America, a rich businessman, although so much noir winds up involved in real estate that we're never too far from the wuthering heights. The villain (if only to make the hero seem normal) is usually bizarrely sexualized or perverse, often interested in bloodlines, purity, and the legacy of some authoritarian past. Unlike the early Gothics, noir seldom ends with Love Triumphant, although this may be less because we're all grownups now than because the essential immaturity of the Byronic hero prevents it.

* My Shakespearean dramaturgy game is heading for its climax, and the next game will likely be strongly influenced (again) by Planetary -- which, it suddenly occurred to me, is also readable as a Gothic serial. Planetary recapitulates the Gothic tension between the archaic and the modern -- these "dead" pulp/pop fictions are broken bones sticking up through the skin of the Oh-So-Sophisticated Modern Comic-Book World, and the Planetary team have to set them, or bury them, or at least witness them like Manfred witnessing the giant helmet. Every story in Planetary is of the form: "Old pop culture thing is still here/surprisingly active/vitally interesting despite us being all newfangledy. Often, it is our very newfanglediness that lets us see just how still here/surprisingly active/vitally interesting that old boring dead thing is." Essentially, then, a Gothic.² Ellis is even beginning to bring in the Gothic concerns with lineage and corrupt authority as he wraps up the book, and what is Snow but a pulp Melmoth? Hell, even the story structure sometimes mimics the Gothic "story within a story within a story."

* So as I was walking home tonight, I was wondering -- so what isn't Gothic? Fantasy is still pretty much a deracinated form of the Romance, although Tolkein hits at least the Sublime pretty hard with his dying races and elder-time artifacts. SF is almost the anti-Gothic, with its general lack of concern for its characters' emotions, authentic or otherwise. Similarly, the SF tension is not between modern order and the grotesque shadowed past, but between modern modes (if only implicit in the author's knowledge of a modern reader) and the strange foreshadowed future.

* But then it hits me -- 2001: A Space Odyssey is almost a perfect manque of The Castle of Otranto. An eerie giant black object suddenly appears, shattering the orderly world. As the characters are drawn into the vortex, more gigantic black structures lead them onward. The character most associated with the modern -- Manfred or HAL -- becomes dangerously unstable, finally killing someone under their protection in a monomaniacal frenzy. But finally, the last apocalyptic giant black thing reveals the truth of the hero's lineage -- Theodore is the rightful heir to Alfonso; Dave (and humanity in general) are the rightful heirs to Space-time, or something.

So I'm reading Fowles' The Magus right now, because it fits in my jacket pocket and I'm on the bus a lot for CIFF, but next up is Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables, the first great American Gothic.

[1] Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous set design. Some of it was merely one pixel above architectural drawings, some was lurid Winsor McCay futuropolitan city-scapes out of Le Corbusier's absinthe dreams. And dare I say -- very Gothic?

[2] Every so often, Ellis reverses it -- Superman, Wonder Woman, and GL *aren't* still here, because the sh/sa/vi Fantastic Four done kilt them. Sherlock Holmes isn't still here, because his century (and his kewlness) has passed on to Snow.

On an impulse, I bought Derek McCulloch and Shepherd Hendrix' graphic novel Stagger Lee (available from Image) and this, my friends, is How To Do It. It purports to tell the story of Lee "Stag Lee" Shelton, who killed Billy Lyons on Christmas Eve of 1895 in a fight over a Stetson hat, and who became the subject of the folk song "Stagolee" aka "Stackolee" aka "Stagger Lee" aka "Wrong 'Em Boyo" aka etc. Our set may be most familiar with the Nick Cave version, which tells an almost entirely different story, as it happens.

It's a great evocation of Gilded Age St. Louis criminality, race, and violence. The art does its own share of the work, drawing blacks and whites in the same basic brown line-work, forcing the reader to occasionally closely examine the page to see who's which color -- and to then recoil at his own racializing impulse. It's a brilliant choice, and it foregrounds the issue in a way that simply wouldn't be possible in another medium. Though it wouldn't be a proper American folk item if it didn't add its own layer of racial confusion to the mix -- McCulloch winds up making Lee's lawyer black, when he was actually white. Ooops. To his credit, he admits it, and the story is still a truthful one, just no longer a (purely) historical one.

McCulloch interweaves the story with a history of the "Stagolee" folk song -- although calling a song that was originally composed most likely in ragtime piano bars a "folk song" is no doubt, to a certain breed of pedant, like calling Paul Bunyan a "folk hero." There was a "genuine" folk component to both "Stagolee" and Paul, but the commercial versions piled on so rapidly that by conventional standards they both stopped being "folklore" and became "product" within a few decades at most. (Folklorists sneer and call such things "fakelore." Why it's worse for the Red River Lumber Company to lie about Paul Bunyan than for some drunken Irish lumberjack in Bemidji to do it, I don't quite get.) Of course, that's been the case with every American folk tale, pretty much ever -- by historical standards (which could use a good stiff dose of Heisenberg, actually) I don't think there's a "pure" folk version of anything in America.

Nor should there be -- I love the market. I love literacy, and civilization, and making a buck, and ownership, and intellectual property. Commercialism is how us American folk do things. I'm not one of those aesthetes who demands that "the folk" be kept in anonymity, isolation, and squalor to suit my William Morris notion of kultur. I'm glad that American folk have recording studios and earnest white musicologists and newspaper columns and the Red River Lumber Company and British rock stars and advertising circulars and Jerry Bruckheimer and Image Comics and everything else that propagates the words or music of the common man to anyone with $17.99 and an interest. If you've got both, pick it up.

* I owe a brim-touch to rfmcdpei for pointing me to John J. Reilly's Weblog, from whence I discovered a whole page of stuff like this. I don't believe that President Lovecraft, desperate Anglophile that he was, would invade Canada, but I like the hubris inherent in this project. The project, I should clarify, of making Lovecraft President, not the project of invading Canada.

* I have no opinion (yet) on Infinite Crisis, because I made the decision early to only buy it in trade paperback, which is quite frankly a decision I should be making more often about all comics. However, I can say that The Omac Project is pretty neat, and a good use of Greg Rucka's talents, and that Day of Vengeance was pretty cool, too, even if the Phantom Stranger does spend most of the book turned into a mouse. Any occult super-team in which Detective Chimp is the brains of the outfit is all right by me, anyhow.

* Slightly related note, courtesy of Darren Watts: "Geoff Johns is Roy Thomas for the 21st century." He's right, you know.

* I found George Pal's 1953 War of the Worlds on DVD for $12 at Virgin Megastore -- it has two commentary tracks (one featuring Joe Dante), the original Welles radio broadcast, a making-of feature, and a short on H.G. Wells, along with the original theatrical trailer. Pal's version, though it diverges from the novel in its own right, is so still the king; this DVD is a great deal. I saw the amazing new DVD for the original King Kong, but didn't buy it -- too rich for Austerity. I remain in awe of what a real studio will do for marketing these days.

* Here are some more dismissive reviews, just for wordwill:

Aeon Flux is whatever the next iteration is beyond "desperately stupid." It pains me to think that I now don't know what the worst movie I've seen this year is, given that I also saw Elektra. This is the kind of trouble that heterosexuality will get you into, apparently.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire had a pretty fair script, and sadly pedestrian direction from Mike Newell, especially after the high grim wonder that was Cuaron's take on Movie Three. The saving grace about following Chris Columbus, though, is that you'll never be the biggest hack on a project.

Pride & Prejudice was way too Brontë, not nearly enough Austen. The dancing was nice, though, and it's always good to see Brenda Blethyn get a paycheck.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang plain frickin' rules. It's basically the "noir Scream," and yes, in theory that should produce nothing but vapid tail-chasing, but damn was it done well. "Fawn." Heh.

* Less abruptly, though perhaps even more dismissively, Michael Crichton's novel State of Fear is about 400% better than The Da Vinci Code, which puts it at roughly "terrible." In this novel, our Patronizing Know-It-All Auctorial Voice actually has to find more sidekicks two-thirds of the way through the book because he's already lectured the first two into inanition. Imagine if John Galt kept flying you around the world to stop ecoterrorists, and just ... wouldn't ... shut ... up. It's the kind of book where the Cartoonish Liberal TV Star says "There's no such thing as cannibalism." One guess how he dies. It's also the kind of book where our Super-Secret Agent Man has to bring a lawyer and a receptionist along on a pirated Gulfstream to stop eco-terrorists, because he apparently doesn't have access to, say, Delta Force. I know that Crichton hasn't written a good book, properly speaking, since Eaters of the Dead, but normally he's rather better at writing bad ones than this. Congo, for example, was a wonderful terrible book, as was (in a different way) Rising Sun.

* And on the general theme of me mouthing off, my newest Out of the Box is up, devoted to supers games from Pulp Hero to Capes.

* I'll just note, up front, that my annual Halloween Out of the Box column is up. In it, we tackle the Ten Most Influential Horror RPGs. And no, number one is not Call of Cthulhu. Wooo!

* Should you get a chance, I thoroughly recommend buying the latest issue of DC's Solo, featuring the smooth stylings of Mr. Michael Allred. It has Wonder Girl -- Silver Age Wonder Girl -- on the cover, and indeed "Teen Titans vs. Doom Patrol," set in 1969 or so in which the Titans throw a party in Bruce Wayne's unused penthouse -- which it seems is directly above Elasti-Girl's penthouse, where the Doom Patrol are trying to get some sleep. Then wackiness ensues. Also, "An Hour For Hourman" is the best take on the one-joke Hourman joke, like, ever; it recalls the best character bits from Space Ghost Coast-to-Coast. But that's not even the best thing in the issue -- that palm belongs to quite possibly the most conservative comics story I've ever read, "Batman A Go-Go," a savage indictment of the whole post-Miller Dark Age sensibility. Complete with the Riddler quoting Edmund Burke, and Alfred dissing Nietzsche. Also, there am Bizarro. Me hate Mike Allred!

* Having read volume two in John Birmingham's alternate-WWII series, Designated Targets, (featuring the survivors of a GWOT-hardened 2025 multinational task force centered on the fearsome U.S.S. Hillary Clinton -- "named for the most uncompromising wartime President in the history of the United States" -- hurled back to 1942 in time to accidentally sink most of the U.S. Pacific Fleet before Midway) I have decided that the real creative tension exists between Birmingham's fannish desire to stuff the thing full of tiresome in-jokes, and his authorial desire to really sell the difference between the Greatest Generation and Our Glorious Selves. All the faffing around with "sub-plasma grade munitions" and whatnot is just candy. A lot of time travel stories give lip service to the whole "past is another country" thing; Birmingham is far closer to getting it right than most.

Jim Aparo is dead.

He was perhaps the first comic book artist whose name I noticed, way back in my First Bloom of Comic Love, when my dad would stop at the drugstore, buy one issue of every comic depicting someone hitting someone else, and throw them in the back seat to keep me quiet. (mollpeartree does the same thing, except that she subcontracts the comics purchasing to me.) There was a reason, my seven-year-old brain figured out, that Aquaman only looked really cool in Brave and the Bold, but like a dork in Justice League of America. There was a reason that the Phantom Stranger was the Best Ever, except maybe for the Spectre. ("He turned that guy, into a mannequin, and he melted him! Melted him!") Eventually, the penny dropped -- somebody drew these heroes that way, on purpose. It wasn't just that DC Comics followed Batman around with a Bristol Board and a camera, this was a choice, made by a real artist. An artist named "Jim Aparo." The Spectre wasn't cool -- he was, like Jessica Rabbit, drawn that way.

Hence, every single artistic opinion I have ever had owes not a little to Jim Aparo, who taught me what "style" meant before I knew it.

What else can I say? The Batman comics in Heaven look a heck of a lot better starting today, that's for damn sure.

Now here's something I'd completely forgotten. At one point or another, I was apparently asked to work up something for an anthology of short fiction based on White Wolf's Trinity RPG. For whatever reason, I never finished it; either I got busy with Last Unicorn stuff, or I couldn't make the human voice work, or the anthology filled up before I got down to it. Since there's not likely to be another Trinity anthology coming up, and since the setting is pretty restrictive, I thought I might post it here rather than let it molder away on the hard drive unfinished -- it's not a story, yet, but there's one or two nice phrases there, I think.

I'm fairly sure that it's obvious even in its skeletal form, but the story's narrator is one of the evil Aberrants who didn't go into space exile, but stayed behind in the FSA, hiding out in a human secret identity. The ending is a pretty embarrassing Bret Easton Ellis ripoff that I hope I would have changed in the final version. I strongly suspect that I hadn't quite worked out my protagonist's motivation for staying behind, which is another reason I'm in no great hurry to try finishing it at this late stage of things. One other thing: The rows of "YYY" are Psi-Psi-Psi in the original ms., but I don't want to wrassle with character translation. My notes to myself are in italics; finished prose (heh) is in plain text.

Anyhow, enjoy.

( Mild-Mannered )