New Pulp Authors Kane Gilmour and Doc Vaughn visit the Book Cave to introduce the listeners to their fantastic novel and web comic, Warbirds of Mars.
Listen to The Book Cave Episode 234: Warbirds of Mars now at http://thebookcave.libsyn.com/the-book-cave-episode-234-warbirds-of-mars
Academy Award Winner Nicole Kidman, Mia Wasikowska and Matthew Goode star in this âdarkly wicked, beautifully executed mysteryâ (Los Angeles Times) by critically acclaimed filmmaker Park Chan-wook (Oldboy).
Following the tragic death of her father on her eighteenth birthday, India Stoker (Wasikowska) meets Charlie (Goode), her charismatic uncle, whom she never knew existed. When Charlie moves in with India and her unstable mother (Kidman), both are drawn to his charming and calming demeanor. But it soon becomes clear that Charlieâs arrival was no coincidence, and that the shocking secrets of his past could affect Indiaâs future…or shatter it completely.
To gear up for the upcoming release of Stoker on Blu-ray and DVD on June 18th â we’ve compiled some of the most iconic Lolita- esque characters in recent cinematic history. Whoâd be your top pick?
The Virgin Suicides â Kirsten Dunst
Part innocent teen, part mysterious seductress, Kirsten Dunstâs portrayal of Lux Lisbon is Sofia Coppolaâs directorial debut is all Lolita. At one hand she does fragile teen in the movie so well, writing the name of âTripâ onto her underwear, yet underneath her girly demeanour, a true female seductress lies. She wraps men around her finger, teases, seduces and finally fools her family and the rest of the neighborhood boys into realizing the true extent of their tragic plans.
American Beauty â Mena Suvari
American Beauty tells the story of a suburban father (Kevin Spacey) who snaps when he becomes disgusted with his stale, repetitive existence. He quits his job and begins a regression into young adulthood, lifting weights, smoking pot, doing nothing, and discovering the overflowing sexuality of his 16-year-old daughter’s best friend, Angela (Mena Suvari). Like the film itself, Menaâs performance is at first dark, somewhat comic, clichéd yet intelligent, scandalous, emotional, and without question one of the most seductive teenage performances of all time.
Taxi Driver â Jodie Foster
Jodie Foster made a huge impact in her performance for Martin Scorsese’s iconic Taxi Driver (1976). Playing opposite the equally mesmerising Robert De Niro, the film really hit its stride when Fosterâs 12-year-old child prostitute, Iris, steps into Bickleâs cab in an attempt to escape her pimp (Harvey Keitel). Â Itâs no real surprise that Foster was great, as this was already her 33rd role as an actress. At only age 14, she already had more performances than some have in their entire careers.
The astonishing thing at play in her scenes is not even that she holds her own with a titan like De Niro, but that she truly carries herself like a grown up, someone who has lived twice the life of any girl her age. This is not a child actress acting adult-like in an amusing way, but a child conveying the utter loss of childhood. A true Lolita.
Stoker â Mia Wasikowska
In Stoker, Mia Wasikowska plays India, an introspective, peculiar, solitary girl who mourns the recent death of her father whilst being constantly at odds with her mother. She finds herself attracted to her mysterious Uncle Charlie who comes to live with them, following the funeral.
Taking on the role of Lolita, the pair engages in a seductive piano-playing sequence alongside a shower scene that somewhat recalls that scene in Psycho, Wasikowskaâs character discovers herself in the shower after witnessing her Uncle dispose of her lecherous classmate. The incestuous relationship between niece and uncle in the film provides much of the pictureâs sense of unease, as India becomes more and more drawn to her charismatic relative.
Lolita â Sue Lyon
The film, that started it all. “How could they make a movie out of Lolita?” screamed the print ads to Stanley Kubrickâs 1962 movie. By changing the 12-year-old object of Humbert’s lust into a 15-year-old, that’s how. Selected to portray Vladimir Nabokov’s celebrated nymphet was Sue Lyon, who was 14 when she won the role. The original novel caused no end of scandal by detailing the romance between a middle-aged intellectual and a 12-year-old nymphet.
Lolita is the object of Humbert’s love, a young girl who epitomizes the seductive qualities of the nymphet. Though she seems to like Humbert at first, over time she grows irritated with him and defies his authority. Beautiful, she is also vulgar, crude, and attached to popular culture.
Kick Ass â Chloë Moretz
When Kick-Ass was released in April 2010, everybody left the theater thinking about Hit Girl. Maybe it is a testament to the character and not the performance, but the two should go hand-in-hand. The unbelievable charisma of Chloë Moretz was unmatched by any other actor in the film. And weâre talking about a girl who went toe-to-toe with Nicolas Cage and Mark Strong.
Instead of resorting to the obvious and ultimately awkward sex appeal of a female hero, Moretz went with a mysterious badass persona. Hit Girl is the reason Kick-Ass lives up to its name. The other characters and the movieâs style are enjoyable on multiple levels, but without Moretzâs turn as Hit Girl the film just doesnât have the electricity it needed. She left the humor up to her Big Daddy (Nic Cage) and kept a straight face the whole way.
Moretz is definitely a force to be reckoned with, reminding us of a young Jodie Foster without the overwhelming sexuality. Moretz was fun to watch in (500) Days of Summer and was even more graceful in Let Me In. However. Hit Girl was her coming-out character and the world will be able to recognize her because of an off-the-charts charisma that no other female youngster can match today.
Leon: The Professional â Natalie Portman
Most of the performances on this list excel because of the maturity of each youngsterâs character. Sometimes a role is written that way, while others are the work of a dedicated child actor. Portmanâs work in The Professional (a.k.a. Leon) is both.
As the film progresses, her balance of vengeance and progressive maturity is fascinating to watch. The fact she is now in the hands of a quasi-mentally-challenged hired assassin makes her resurgence as a lost soul even more powerful. It truly is all the work of Portman, though; she knew her character backwards and forwards, giving her a realistic quality that bleeds through the screen.
Her face contorts with every emotion, her lust for revenge comes through with an unsuspecting humor and her sex appeal is as uncomfortable as it is realistic. She just fits so snug into this character of Mathilda that itâs hard to tell if she is even acting at times â but there is no doubt she portrayed a character that has experienced something way beyond Portmanâs real life.
In order to win your very own copy of Stoker on Blu-ray, simply answer the following question:
Director Park Chan-wook also directed which iconic cinematic tale of vengeance?
Post your response by 11:59 p.m., Tuesday, June 18 and the decision of ComicMix‘s judges will be final. Open only to residents of the United States and Canada.
In my entire life, there were two times I didn’t hate it.
The first time, in the early 1970s, I was walking out of Central Park with my then-boyfriend. I was wearing a green halter-dress, as was the fashion of the times. There was a group of construction workers having lunch near the park entrance, and when I rounded the corner, one of them, seeing me, fell to his knees.
About a decade later, my husband and I were going to a Halloween party with a movie theme in the Village. He was some version of the Phantom of the Opera, and I was Marilyn Monroe. I had a white luminous plastic halter dress, white shoes (leftover from my wedding – see, you can use them again!) and a blonde wig. As we crossed Houston Street, a man got out of his car and proposed.
Being hassled on the street is part of being a woman. In these two instances, I thought there was a certain amount of spontaneity, some wit. But I still didn’t like it. I didn’t like feeling judged every time I ventured out of my apartment. It didn’t matter what I wore. I could be in sweats, in running clothes, in a down coat, in a suit for work or wearing my baby in a Snugli, and still men would feel entitled to tell me what they wanted to do to me.
“You’ll miss it when they stop,” people said to me. No, I didn’t.
Men don’t do that because they are overcome by love or lust at the sight of a woman. They do it to put us in our place, to let us know that the sidewalks belong to them, not us, and we are allowed to walk about because it amuses them to permit it.
Which brings me to comics.
It was my pleasure to be at Heroes Con over the weekend. A fabulous show, full of talented young people making comics, sharing comics, and selling comics. At least half the floor space is dedicated to Artists’ Alley, my favorite part of any show, and the presence of the Savannah College of Art and Design means there is a lot of talent on display.
I noticed that a large percentage of the artists (Half? I’m not sure) were women, certainly more than I ever saw when I first started to go to shows in the 1990s. Coincidentally or not, there is way less art devoted to T & A on display.
Utopia, right? We’re here, we have ovaries, get used to it.
And then …
At breakfast on Sunday morning, I was sitting next to a lovely group from Orlando. One of the two women took me about a dinner she had been to the night before. She had to get up and leave in the middle because a colleague had made a series of crude remarks to her.
“I’m married,” she said. “He knows I’m married.”
Of course, even if she wasn’t married, he had no right to continue once she made her displeasure known to him. As humans, we occasionally misread cues and make the unwelcome pass. As humans, we can forgive one time. The fact that this guy continued indicates that he’s either really, really clueless, or, more likely, he was telling her that she was there solely for his amusement.
“I could write about this guy,” I said. “Tell me his name.”
“No, I can’t do that,” she replied. “I see him at all the shows.”
There has been a lot of discussion about gender issues in comics lately, by me and by my esteemed colleague, Mindy Newell. And it’s not just here, but at other sites as well.
And it’s not just comics. Female gaming fans are complaining more, noticing that the sexism they see around them is supported by the very corporations trying to sell them games, as if they can’t be demeaned anytime they want, and for free.
If you aren’t a woman, maybe you think this is a tempest in a teapot. Maybe you think, as a commenter on one of the links above, that the battle for Equal Rights is over, and that women are just looking for things to complain about so we can continue to be victims (because being a victim is so much fun). If you think that, you’d be wrong.
You can re-write this article and substitute “queer” or “African-American” or “Hispanic” or “Asian” for “female.” It’s all the same problem. You can try to change it because it’s the right thing to do, or you can try to change it because more kinds of comics mean better kinds of comics, which we all want.
But, please, for the love of all that is fun in life, let’s change it.
SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman
SUNDAY: John Ostrander
Look, up in the sky…It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s…
…a whole lot of really, really numerous photons striking a large, white rectangle.
Or: it’s remembered images and sounds careening around the inside of my skull because, pay attention now, Superman and I go back a long way.
He’s one of the first fictional people I can recall meeting, though whether our first encounter was in one of the comic books Dad bought me after Sunday Mass or as voices emanating from Mom’s kitchen radio…the details of Supes’ and my initial acquaintance I do not remember, and who cares?
I next saw Supes on a movie screen, perhaps smaller and shabbier than the one mentioned in the second paragraph above, but serving pretty much the same purpose and.. Was I outraged? Disillusioned? Shattered? Or mad?
The problem was the flying. The grade-school me was anticipating watching the Man of Steel leave the ground and zip around he sky because… well, that would be an exciting thing to see. Then – the big disappointment. First the Easter Bunny, then Santa Claus, and now…What kind of bushwa was this? Superman goes behind a rock or something and then he flies up, up. and away. Only it wasn’t him flying. No, even to a kid it was obviously some kind of drawing, like the animated cartoons that often appeared before the cowboy pictures Iliked. Movie magic? Or a dirty stinky cheat?
But I wasn’t done with Superman, nor he with me. I won a story-writing contest that was fostered by the Superman-Tim club. Club membership, which cost Mom a dime, consisted of a card, a Superman pin and a monthly magazine that featured contests and jokes and puzzles and stuff. I don’t know how many contestants won prizes – maybe everyone who entered. And the prize wasn’t great: some kind of cheesy board game with cardboard cutouts that got moved. But hey – I’d gotten rewarded for writing a story! Wonder where that might lead!
Next came the Superman television show shown in St. Louis on Sunday morning well after Dad and I returned from church. Not bad. Okay way to kill a little time before the Sunday pot roast.
Then a long hiatus. Bye for now, Superman. Was it to be bye forever?
No. Years later, by then a freelance comic book scripter living in Manhattan, an editor named Julius Schwartz asked me if I’d like to have a go at Superman. I had some misgivings. Superman was… too establishment for me. Too goody-two-shoes. And too powerful. Melodrama turns on conflict. So how do you create conflict for a dude who could tuck all the gods of Olympus into an armpit, his suit apparently lacking pockets, and still have room there for the gods of Egypt and a few sticks of deodorant? Could I do that every month? I had some doubts. But I was a professional with mouths to feed and so I took the gig. Julie agreed to let me dial down the superpowers thing and let me make another change or two and off I went. For a year. I walked away from Superman and I’m not sure why. Just because I wasn’t enjoying it much? A lot of freelancers might consider that a pretty lame reason for dumping a paying gig and I’m not sure I’d disagree with them. But dump it I did and once again, sayonara Superman.
But never say never. I’m going to the movies, probably this weekend.
FRIDAY: Martha Thomases
SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman
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| Cover Art: Mike Manley |
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| Art: Mike Manley |
New Pulp Publisher, Airship 27 Productions shared artist Mike Manley’s newly completed cover painting for the upcoming Robin Hood novel by I.A. Watson. This new Robin Hood novel is the third in the trilogy series. Volumes 1 and 2 are still available from Airship 27 Productions.
Look for more news on the upcoming Robin Hood book 3 as soon as they are available.
Stay tuned pulp fans.
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| Van Allen Plexico |
Author Lisa M. Collins interviewed noted New Pulp Author and White Rocket Books publisher, Van Allen Plexico.
Plexico is also the host of The White Rocket Podcast, which you can listen to here.
You can read the full author interview here.
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| Art: Neil T. Foster |
New Pulp Publisher, Airship 27 Productions shared art from the “new” Green Lama series on their Facebook page. This new Green Lama series from Airship 27 Productions features interior illustrations by artist Neil T. Foster.
Look for more news on the upcoming Green Lama anthology series as soon as they are available.
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| Cover Art: Mark Sparacio |
On his blog, New Pulp Author Win Scott Eckert shared the final cover design for his upcoming novella, The Scarlet Jaguar. The cover was painted by Mark Sparacio with design work by Keith Howell.
A Pat Wildman adventure, The Scarlet Jaguar is a sequel to the Philip Jose Farmer/Win Scott Eckert collaboration The Evil in Pemberley House.
The Scarlet Jaguar will be available July 2013 and is available for preorder now, direct from Meteor House.
Danger surrounds actress Kelly Hu today.
As the nefarious China White in Arrow, she plays the head of an assassins syndicate that goes head-to-head with Green Arrow; and in her new role as Cece on The CW’s The Hundred, she’ll be facing incredible odds in an enthralling, futuristic thriller.
But at no time was she in more danger than when she kissed Kirk Cameron in her debut role on Growing Pains.
Hu is among several notable actors whose careers took flight after taking their initial bow in a guest appearance during Season Three of Growing Pains. Four-time Academy Award nominee Brad Pitt played his first character with an actual name in the ninth episode of the season, “Who’s Zoomin’ Who?”; The Hangover star Heather Graham doubled that feat by portraying her first two “name” characters as Cindy in “Michaelgate” and as Samantha in “Some Enchanted Evening”; and Butch Hartman, best known as the creator of the popular Nick animated series The Fairly Oddparents, had one of his first credited roles in the “Michaelgate” episode.
Season Three of Growing Pains is now available as a three-disk DVD set through the Warner Archive Collection.
For Hu, Growing Pains was truly a launching pad for a very busy career. Fresh out of high school, Hu filmed the episode – a season-opening two-parter entitled “Aloha” – and then moved to Los Angeles before it aired.
“The day (the episode aired), I put a full page add in Variety and sent out letters to agents announcing that I was ‘now available for west coast representation’,” Hu recalls. “I got 20 calls from agents before the show even aired that night.”
She also got fan mail. More to the point, hate mail. In the episodes, the Seavers take a family vacation to Hawaii – where Mike (Kirk Cameron) became infatuated with a young local girl named Melia (Hu). The island romance sent Cameron’s legion of young female fans into a tizzy.
“Kirk Cameron was my first on-camera kiss,” Hu says with a knowing smile, “and I got all kinds of death threats from little girls who were jealous that I got to kiss him.”
Now a veteran of more than 40 primetime series, not to mention films like X2, The Scorpion King and The Doors, Hu says the Growing Pains experience represented one new lesson after another. Even at the craft services table.
“It was on the set at breakfast my first day shooting in LA that I saw my first bagel,” Hu says. “I pointed at it and asked out loud, ‘Is that a bagel?’ and Tracy Gold, in her very New York accent, replied, ‘You don’t know what a bagel looks like!?’ I didn’t. I was a little girl from Hawaii. There was a lot I still hadn’t been exposed to yet.”
Coming in 2013 from Another Sky Press. Noir meets its grim future in a post-apocalyptic Melbourne infested with all manner of hard-boiled dames, grifters and gumshoes. Concocted by a motley crew of writers and comic book artists, ‘The Tobacco-Stained Sky’ is a sordid, unforgettable journey into the perfect storm.
An anthology by Another Sky Press based around the noir/dystopia of Andrez Bergen’s novel ‘Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat’ – with several other unique writers and artists involved, including Josh Stallings, Guy Salvidge, Jay Slaton-Joslin, Andrew Chiu, Marcos Vergara, Michael Grills, Nathan St. John, Harvey Finch, Liam José, Chad Eagleton, Julie Morrigan, Gerard Brennan, Paul Brazill, Gordon Highland, Nigel Bird, Tony Pacitti, Chad Rohrbacher, Chris Rhatigan, Drezz Rodriguez, Devin Wine, Andrez Bergen, and Matheus Lopes.
Learn more about The Tobacco Stained Sky here.
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