Gated communities are usually met with some suspicion and mistrust – in this case it’s rightly founded.  Something is wrong in Sweetville, and The Doctor is red in the face about it.  A bunch of friends reappear to help combat…

THE CRIMSON HORROR
by Mark Gatiss
Directed by Saul Metzstein

People are turning up dead in the canal in Victorian Yorkshire, their bodies in varied states of petrifaction and their skin a lobster red.  Madame Vastra and Jenny are asked to investigate, and when they realize that The Doctor is somehow involved, they hurry to investigate.  A woman is establishing her own ark on dry land, planning to survive the next torrent, not of rain, but of poison.

Mark Gatiss balances comedy and horror with a deft hand, being given the reins on the investigating Silurian and her companions.  This may be the closest we ever get to a completely solo Vastra and Jenny adventure, and it’s a delight.  The Northern accents alone are worth the price of admission.

GUEST STAR REPORT

Dame Diana Rigg (Mrs. Winifred Gillyflower) really should need no introduction, but there are young people who think The Avengers is only a comic book.  As well as playing Mrs Emma Peel (rightly described by comedian Rick Overton as “One generation of boys’ first serious erection”) on The Avengers, not to mention the Countess Teresa di Vicenzo (AKA the briefly Mrs. James Bond) in On her Majesty’s Secret Service) she started out at a high point, and kept on going higher,  In addition to a house favorite The Assassination Bureau (also starring Roger Delgado, the original Master) and a wonderful version of King Lear with Olivier, John Hurt and Leo McKern, she’s gone from Strength to Strength.  She also burning up basic cable in a popular turn on Game of Thrones.

Rachael Stirling (Ada Gillyflower) is Diana Rigg’s daughter, and this is the first time they’ve worked together.  She’s had an impressive career in acting, including a couple episodes of shows featured on Mystery!, which her mother was hosting at the time. Recently she was in Snow White and the Huntsman and the series The Bletchley Circle.

Two guests this episode have the distinction of playing several members of the same alien race, several times, over the course of the new series.
Neve McIntosh and her delicious accent played sister Silurians Alaya and Restac in the two-parter The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood last year, and plays Madame Vastra here.
Dan Starkey (Commander Strax) also played two Sontarans in one story, The Sontaran Stratagem / The Poison Sky. He almost shot Mickey Smith and Martha Smith-Jones as Jask at The End Of Time, and first played the funniest wet-nurse you’ll ever see in A Good Man Goes to War. Since the Sontarans are a clone-race, having one actor play various members makes perfect sense. Christopher Ryan (Mike “the cool person” from The Young Ones) has also played two different Sontarans in different episodes. Dan also appears in Russell T Davies new series Wizards vs. Aliens as Randal Moon, hobgoblin extraordinaire.

THE MONSTER FILES – Mr. Sweet, a parasite species surviving from the Jurassic period, and possibly longer, is far from the first being getting the help of a human, though in this case it might be said that Mrs Gillyflower was the brains of the outfit.

BACKGROUND BITS AND BOBS – Trivia and production details

SET PIECES – Yorkshire was played by Cardiff in this episode, with a picturesque side-street getting a lovely touch-up, including a full set of gates and columns

…IS ONLY A MOTION AWAY – Dame Diana and Rachael Stirling are not the first parent and child pairing to appear on Doctor Who.  Mark Sheppard and his father William Morgan Sheppard both played the same role, that of Canton Everett Delaware III, in The Impossible Astronaut. David Troughton, Patrick’s son,  has appeared a couple of times, once as the Prince in The Curse of Peladon, once many years as Profiessor Hobbes in Midnight, and first, many years before, in his father’s last adventure The War Games.

WHOLOCK – With Gatiss and Moffat also being in charge of the oh-so-very popular Sherlock starring Bilbo and Smaug Benedict Cubmerbatch and Martin Freeman, there are ever going to be in-jokes that trickle through.  An unrecorded adventure of Sherlock Holmes was “the repulsive story of the red leech” as reported in The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez.

“Do you know what an optigram is?” – The Doctor used a process to read the last images off the eye of a Wirrn in a Tom Baker adventure The Ark in Space.  Rather than just one image, he was able to read several minutes of footage.

“Will you be preserved…when judgment rains down upon us all?” – One of the finest bits of foreshadowing i quite a while, Mrs. Gillyflower tells everyone her plans right then and there, and nobody catches it till much later.

“I once spent hell of a long time trying to get a gobby Australian to Heathrow Airport” – That would be Tegan Jovanka, long-time companion of the Doctor mainly during the Davison years.  Sarah Jane Smith investigated some of The Doctor’s friends, and said that at last report, Tegan was home in Australia, campaigning for Aborigine rights.  The reference is sent home with the following line “Brave heart, Clara”, paraphrasing Five’s motivational to Tegan.

“Doctor and Mrs. Smith…you’ll do very nicely” – Doctor John Smith was The Doctor’s go-to pseudonym when working on Earth during the Pertwee years.  He used it, or tried to, in Midnight.

“And you will have reached your destination” – I want to know how long Gatiss sat in his study giggling to himself over that wildly anachronistic reference to the TomTom GPS (Satnav) system.

“This one’s on me” – Can I just marvel in the delicious irony of a British woman kicking ass in a catsuit in an adventure featuring Diana Rigg?

“It’s you.. my monster” – Not the first time we’ve heard the word “monster” this season.  The line “Every lonely monster…needs a companion” in Hide was also clearly not just about the scary alien.

“Very enterprising” – There’s another parallel to The Snowmen here – in both cases, the antagonist finds something brand new, so different as to be alien (literally in the first case, figuratively here in Mrs. Gillyflower’s case), and in both cases, as The Doctor puts it in The Snowmen, both follow the Victorian ideal and try to find a way to profit from it.  Not even financially, but a way to achieve their ends.

BIG BAD REPORT / CLEVER THEORY DEPARTMENT –

“It’s complicated” – The Doctor was aiming for London 1893, the year after the events of The Snowmen, where The Doctor first met Victorian Clara.  This is the first time Vastra, Jenny and Strax have met Modern Clara, and found her most confusing.  Her look at “herself” in London of 1892 will almost certainly cause some questions to be asked a week hence.

NEXT TIME ON DOCTOR WHO – Neil Gaiman. I could stop there.  But I don’t have to, because there’s also Cybermen, Warwick Davis and Neil Gaiman.  Did I say that twice?  Nightmare in Silver, a week away.

Moonstone Books has released a new anthology called The Avenger: Roaring Heart of The Crucible at their website. The book does not yet show available at on-line retailers as yet, but should be available there shortly.

ABOUT THE AVENGER: ROARING HEART OF THE CRUCIBLE:

The Avenger: Roaring Heart of the Crucible is now available. Moonstone Books’ third anthology collection chronicling new tales of pulp hero, THE AVENGER: ROARING HEART OF THE CRUCIBLE is now available in both softcover trade paperback and limited edition hardcover.

The Avenger: Roaring Heart of the Crucible features stories by New Pulp Authors Matthew Baugh, James Chambers, Greg Cox, Win Scott Eckert, Joe Gentile, CJ Henderson, Nancy Holder, Michael May, Matthew Mayo, Will Murray, Bobby Nash, Barry Reese, Chris Sequeira, John Small, and David White. Edited by Nancy Holder and Joe Gentile. Cover art courtesy of E. M. Gist (soft cover) and Jay Piscopo (hardcover).

The greatest crime-fighter of the 40′s returns in a third thrilling collection of original, action-packed tales of adventure, intrigue, and revenge. Life was bliss for millionaire adventurer Richard Henry Benson until that fateful day crime and greed took away his wife and young daughter… and turned him into something more than human. Driven by loss, compelled by grief, he becomes a chilled impersonal force of justice, more machine than man, dedicated to the destruction of evildoers everywhere. A figure of ice and steel, more pitiless than both,

Benson has been forged into an avatar of vengeance, possessed of superhuman genius supernormal power. His frozen face and pale eyes, like a polar dawn, only hint at the terrible force the underworld heedlessly invoked upon itself the day they created… The Avenger!

Exclusive HC BONUS material: An Avenger timeline by Rick Lai plus solo tales of the Avenger’s aides by Howard Hopkins!

Available in softcover trade paperback and limited edition hardcover from Moonstone Books.

Learn more about The Avenger here.

Well, this weekend Iron Man 3 opens here in the States after having conquered the world. (BTW, when did this become the norm? It used to be a film opened here in the US of A and then around the globe. Is the American market now the secondary market?) What started in one medium – comics – has become big in another.

There certainly are lots of reasons behind it, a principle one being less risk. Comics make great fodder for movies because they are relatively a cheap way of testing and ironing out concepts and stories compared to movies. The risk is lessened and if the product (as with John Carter) bombs, at least the executive who approved it can show it was not an unreasonable risk – in theory. Something new? From scratch? Not with our hundred million, buddy! So having a proven commodity in some form makes it a safer, surer, bet. In theory.

There’s lots of different sources – books, games, amusement park rides, television, even the theater. Joss Whedon’s follow up to The Avengers last year? Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. Why? Because he’s Joss Goddam Whedon and The Avengers made bazillions of dollars which means that for his next movie he gets to do whatever the hell he wants… at least until the box office receipts on that comes in.

The problem is – not everything translates well. I recently finally saw the movie version of the musical Les Miserables which in itself is an adaptation of the novel by Victor Hugo. I’m a fan of the musical, having seen it several times on stage, so I looked forward to the movie.

I was… whelmed. I enjoyed it and I have a DVD of it (yes, I need to move up to Blu-Ray or whatever else is coming) and I’m sure I’ll watch it again several times. Hugh Jackman was fine in the lead and, in a year that didn’t have Daniel Day Lewis owning the Oscar for his performance in Lincoln (adapted in part from Doris Kearns Goodwin biography, Team of Rivals) would have gotten him the Oscar as Best Actor. Anne Hathaway did score a Supporting Actress Oscar for her work as Fantine. However, there were several miscastings. Javert – the antagonist-  should be intense, driven, formidable and ultimately tragic and Russell Crowe was none of those things. He was doughy. He was there.

Crowe was Oscar material compared to Sacha Baron Cohen who played Thénardier, the innkeeper. The character is a louse, a con man, a parasite but in every production I’ve seen, he (along with his wife, played in the film by Helena Bonham Carter, also badly cast) brings down the house in his songs. The character should be charming, a rogue, and funny and Cohen was none of that.

What really unsold the movie to me was the direction by Tom Hooper. Prosaic, uninspired, functional – it served its purpose, it got the basic job done, but I found no “wow” in it and the theater always gave me “wow.” The stage productions always swept me along; the movie version plodded.

That brings me to my central argument – maybe it couldn’t. Movies are often very literal. Les Mis on stage works because of its theatricality. Stage makes great use of suggestion, illusion, metaphor. It engages the imagination, makes you see what may not be there, makes you a partner in the production whereas movies have to show you and you become an observer. What was magical becomes pedestrian.

I’m not sure that something that begins as a stage musical ever translates well into film. Yes, Chicago was an exception but it found cinema versions to create a heightened reality that mimicked the stage production. It wasn’t a translation; it was a re-invention for the cinema – which Les Mis was not. Musicals that are created for movies fare far better, Wizard of Oz being a superb example.

Comics also work like musicals. The imagination must be engaged to fill in what happens in the gutters, in between the panels. The movies made from comics succeed when they re-invent them for the movies.  I don’t need them to adapt a specific storyline; they are most successful when they are true to the concepts but re-imagine them for the films.

That’s why Iron Man 3 succeeds and Les Mis just lies there. Apples into oranges, my friends.

MONDAY MORNING: Mindy Newell

TUESDAY MORNING: Emily S. Whitten

Bobby Nash and Sean Taylor with their 2013 Pulp Ark Awards.

For the first time since the Pulp Ark Award winners were announced, Ruby Files co-creators Bobby Nash and Sean Taylor got to hold their Pulp Ark Award for Best New Pulp Character: Rick Ruby at the Free Comic Book day event at galactic Quest Comics in Buford, GA.

Congratulations to Bobby and Sean.

Bobby’s award: Best Author

Rick Ruby’s creators.

Best New Pulp Character: Rick Ruby

A prominent website associated with Macmillan Publishing showcases Pro Se Production’s latest blockbuster anthology! This week, “Drums of the Ogbanje” by Mel Odom is a feature expert on www.criminalelement.com. The tale is a zombie pirate adventure from the anthology Black Pulp, edited by Tommy Hancock, Gary Phillips, and Morgan Minor.

Black Pulp is a collection of stories featuring characters of African origin, or descent, in stories that run the gamut of genre fiction. A concept developed by noted crime novelist Gary Phillips, Black Pulp brings bestselling authors Walter Mosley and Joe R. Lansdale, Gary Phillips, Charles R. Saunders, Derrick Ferguson, D. Alan Lewis, Christopher Chambers, Mel Odom, Kimberly Richardson, Ron Fortier, Michael A. Gonzales, Gar Anthony Haywood, and Tommy Hancock together to craft adventure tales, mysteries, and more, all with black characters at the forefront.

http://www.criminalelement.com/stories/2013/04/black-pulp-drums-of-the-ogbanje-mel-odom-zombies-pirates

Criminal Element is a community website featuring daily content for fans of the crime and mystery genres in all of their forms.

The site features original short stories and excerpts from upcoming crime and mystery novels along with daily blog articles.

Every convention we attend, the same cadence occurs several times over.

“Sir! Miss! Can I tell you about our comic book?”

“Sure.”

“Awesome. It’s called the Samurnauts. It’s about a team of Samurai Astronauts, led by an immortal kung fu monkey, fighting zombie cyborg pirates in space!”

“Jeez! What were you on when you created that!?”

“…pie.”

And with that comes a wink and a nod from our potential customer. You see, they think we’re being coy. Here’s the kicker though – we’re not lying.

I make no qualms about why I make comic books. I am absolutely still a kid at my core. When I go to Wal-Mart or Target for sundries? I always walk through the toy aisle – and not for my son. My DVR is chock full of cartoons. Better than that? Matt and Kyle, my Unshaven Cohorts, are one in the same. When we Unshaven Lads take our show on the road, we fill literally hours of time discussing the minutiae of superheroes. We dissect the books we read, TV shows we watch, and of course… map out our own little corner of the great-and-powerful world of sequential fiction.

It really comes as no surprise to me why then we end up with a pitch as we do with the Samurnauts. It literally all started out at a Bakers Square – as most all of our creative jaunts do – just brainstorming. On one fateful occasion we came to discuss how we’d create the most marketable creation known to man. We pulled together the common threads of those cartoons and comics we loved so much growing up. The sage warrior/mentor of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The color-coordinated weapon-driven team action adventure of the Power Rangers. And the villains? Well, we just piled on as many adjectives as we could until we felt we had something. And we laughed. Because to us, this was just a joke. A flight of fancy so that we could make a fake ad to take up space in the next issue, that would become a huge in-joke to our growing fan-base.

And then, after tackling horror, and R-rated super heroics… with a third issue to complete our first series in front of us… we came back to that shared pie-experience, and faux advertisement. The Samurnauts was simply too good to pass up. Not because we felt like parodying commercial crassness (like TMNT and the Power Rangers), but because we’d literally thrown our own nerd-gauntlet in front of ourselves. Our brainstorming produced a pitch so insane, that to not do it justice would be a sign that maybe we shouldn’t be making comics in the first place. And then folks? We did what we Unshavenauts do best. We created a world, and treated it with reverence.

We make comics because we can’t stop building worlds. It’s not enough to declare we have a kung fu monkey. We have to know that he practices Hou Quan. We have to vet out that his hou gun is formed from the cosmically irradiated metal of his shuttle craft. We have to know that he was launched as Albert V, the fifth monkey to be shot in space, secretly, in April of 1950. And yes, we even have to know that the worm hole he travelled through carried with it the chronal energies that made him intelligent and immortal. I make comics because it’s those insane details that make our comic worth reading. Beyond the hilarious pitch that sells it… our comic takes itself seriously. It’s really perhaps the only way we can say with a straight face that we needed only a few slices of pie to give birth to something so crazy.

And it’s that respect we pay, in building a universe from a silly set of adjectives, that earns us our keep on the convention floor. When your pitch is as insane as the Samurnauts, the customer-in-waiting could quickly determine if our zeal is merely style over substance. Upon flipping the book open and seeing fully painted pages opposite completely digitally drawn portions, it’s clear that our tongues may be firmly in cheek… but our hearts are on our sleeves. Just as those cartoons and comics of our youth took themselves seriously, we too employ the power of not forcing the wink on the audience. When they see that we start with the tropes – the lantern jawed leader, or the bad boy with a heart of gold – we don’t shy away from giving them a little depth to boot. And when they see that we’re willing to not only have a kung fu monkey on the cover, but we have a real back story, and a generation-spanning tale to tell? Well it’s clear that we owe Bakers Square a debt of gratitude.

My intent here is not to necessarily shill my product to you. You’ll note I’m not even mentioning Unshaven Comics’ website has a store where you can purchase the Samurnauts: Curse of the Dreadnuts #1. You’ll relish the fact that I’ve no need to mention we’ll be in Fort Wayne, Indiana on May 11^th, or Detroit, Michigan on May 17^th hawking our wares. At the beginning of this lil’ column, my only intent was to give you a glimpse inside the madness that is my collective mind with my bearded cohorts. Amidst the literally thousands of pitches we will hurl on convention floors this coming year… now you’ll appreciate it when we meet that knowing nod with a smirk of self-confidence.

“What were you on when you created that!?”

We’re on the best drug of all; a big toke of youth, and a friendship of 20 years.

SUNDAY: John Ostrander

MONDAY: Mindy Newell