The Mix : What are people talking about today?
Martha Thomases’ Japan
Our columnist Martha Thomases has spent the past two weeks in Japan with her son, Arthur Tebbel. By all reports, they’ve had a swell time. Here’s some of it, in her own words and pictures:
Kyoto is a city I have always wanted to visit. The traditional Capitol of Japan is known for its beauty and history, its cultural importance. Naturally, the first place I went when we arrived was the Kyoto International Manga museum. The building, a former elementary school, has a collection of more than 300,000 volumes, as well as a great deal of original art. In addition to the permanent collection, there are special shows as well. This is the current show. Not really graphic story, but an assortment of panels by international artists. I am embarrassed to say that the only name I recognized was Mike Mignola.
Everywhere you look, there are books. The shelves on the walls are higher than you could possibly reach.
The permanent exhibition shows the history and techniques of the form. This, I believe, is the “Biff! Bam! Pow! Comics Aren’t Just for Kids!” of Japan.
Here is some original art, I think. Really pretty stuff.
They consider cosplay to be part of manga. This is a current exhibit linking these two powerful cultural exports.
SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman
SUNDAY: John Ostrander
FORTIER TAKES ON PANUSH’S ‘COLD WARS!’
STEIN AND CANDLE
Vol II – Cold Wars
By Michael Panush
Curiosity Quills Press
217 pages
One of the most enjoyable aspects of New Pulp Fiction has been the creation of memorable new heroes by today’s pre-eminent pulp writers. Derrick Ferguson has given us Dillon and Mongrel to name a few. Barry Reese has created a bunch of awesome characters, the most recognizable being the Rook and Lazarus Gray. And the list goes on and on. Which is why this reviewer has become so enamored with Michael Panush’s series, STEIN AND CANDLE : Detective Agency which features two of the most original new pulp heroes ever to grace a page of purple prose.
Mort Candle is an ex-Army sergeant tough-guy private eye who is parts Sam Spade and Mike Hammer. Candle’s fist often speak louder than his words. His partner is a teenage boy named Weatherby Stein, a German youth whose parents were killed by the Nazis. Weatherby’s father was one of the world’s leading authorities on the occult and Weatherby was raised studying arcane lore thus making him, even at a young age, an expert in the dark arts. Thus this duo travels the post World War II globe tackling all manner of bizarre adventures. This is the second volume of their cases and like the first is jammed packed with memorable scenes that assure Stein and Candle a reserved niche in the halls of New Pulp Fiction heroes.
“Tiki Terror,” has the guys flying to Honolulu, Hawaii to solve a bizarre murder of a hotel magnate who was apparently eaten by sharks in his high-rise office far from the sea. While on the island, Weatherby is reunited with his older sister, Selena, a college student studying anthropology.
“Crimson Catch” takes our duo to the mysterious New England fishing town of Innsmouth where they cross paths with Lovecraft monsters from the deep. Panush audaciously swipes the plot from “A Fist Full of Dollars,” having Candle play the part of the instigator pitting two occult clans of fishmen against each other.
With “Mort Candle’s War,” Panush continues the origin saga began in the first volume returning back to the Black Forest where Sgt. Mort Candle and his squad of Screaming Eagles fight a desperate battle to save young Weatherby Stein and deliver safely to General Patton’s Third Army. Great combat sequences reminiscent of DC Comic’s old Sgt.Rock series.
In “Pharoah’s Palace,” Mort and Weatherby uncover an ancient Egyptian mystic operating a casino on Los Vegas and team up with legendary hero, Doc Dearborn and his daughter, Evelyn, to combat this ancient evil.
The fifth tale is called “The Hallow,” and has our heroes visiting rural Appalachia to rescue a miner’s daughter kidnapped by a coven of witches. But before they can formulate an effective strategy, the witches snatch Weatherby and its left to Mort to rescue his young partner with the aid of a con artist turned preacher man.
“Business Proposition,” picks up on the episodic origin story of how the gruff former army sergeant and the special trained teenager hook up again in Brooklyn after the war and what leads them to form their partnerships as detectives who specialize in the bizarre. Easily our favorite tale in this collection.
Finally the book wraps with “Crypt Chasers,” a high-balling confrontation between Weatherby and malevolent distant relative who has returned from the dead and plans on unleashing his particular brand of sadism on the modern world. Panush leaves the story open ended, having created what looks to be a recurring arch-enemy for our duo. Making us all the more anxious to dig into the next volume of this terrific series.
We’d also like to applaud Curiosity Quills Press for a gorgeous design package here, from a beautiful cover to fitting interior illustrations that truly enhance each story. “Stein and Candle Vol II Cold Wars” is a fantastic, thoroughly enjoyable book we cannot recommend strongly enough. If you like New Pulp Fiction, Stein and Candle are you kind of heroes. Move over Dillon and the Rook, you’ve got company.
Drawing fully dressed superheroines
http://www.geeknative.com/38733/drawing-the-impossible-fully-dressed-superheroines/
Michael Lee Lunsford’s redesign project is an exercise in character design – do these superheroes feel the same to you even though their costumes are different?
Dennis O’Neil: Giants
The latest issue of Roy Thomas’s fine magazine Alter-Ego arrived in today’s mail. This one was dedicated to the late Joe Kubert, who died some seven months ago. It arrives a couple of days after I learned of the passing of Joe’s contemporary (and my ex-boss) Carmine Infantino. The synchronicity is odd and painful. These two men were excellent artist/storytellers and quite a bit more and they were among the first of their kind; they helped invent comic books.
Years back, when I was chipper and unbald and fanzine folk began asking to interview me, I was flattered and – sure, always happy to open my gob. And so I did. But I wondered: shouldn’t these young journalists be talking to the older guys, the ones who were there at the beginning? Because most of them were already past youth and, as novelist Samuel R. Delany observed at the time, comics were still new enough for interested parties to read almost everything that had been published. Wasn’t this an unparalleled opportunity? Didn’t the happy coincidence of accessible talent and available work provide a chance to really examine, closely, the emergence and evolution of an art form? Because, for obvious reasons, this ideal coincidence wouldn’t be in effect forever. Wasn’t a lot of interesting and potentially valuable information in danger of being lost?
Well, maybe some was lost, or will yet be lost, but probably not as much as I feared. There were interviews that I knew nothing about and a lot of the pioneers still had plenty of talk left in them. And communication was about to boom: the quaint mimeoed and hectographed fanzines were giving way to stuff produced by slicker technologies and those, in turn, were in the shadow of forthcoming electronica, an example of which is before you at this instant. Scholars and hobbyists alike are continuing to investigate and document comics and please allow me a modest hurray.
It seems safe to say that comics are the most documented art form in history (though cinema may have some claim to that honor.) We have large amounts of what. Now, how about some more why? There are, I hereby aver, correspondences between the evolution of comics, particularly superhero comics, and that of mythology/religion. A properly focused exploration into one might reveal something about the others and, storytelling being one of mankind’s primary activities, this revelation could help us discover meanings that have so far eluded us. Another possibility: the influence cartooning in general and comics in particular has had on journalism.
Does anyone sniff a term paper? A thesis, even? Or have such papers already been written? Could be, I guess.
Meanwhile: we have lost two of our founders, and in our usual helplessness, we can do no more than mourn, and we should.
FRIDAY: Martha Thomases
SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman
Check the Kickstarter for Ed Dunphy’s “Mongrel: S.O.B.” Graphic Novel
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1941044501/mongrel-sob-graphic-novel
A werewolf stalks the mean streets of Chicago, seeking vengeance in this full-color horror graphic novel.
Souvenir Book
http://www.comic-con.org/cci/souvenir-book
Information on Comic-Con International’s 2013 Souvenir Book, including our anniversary celebrations and how to submit art and articles to the book. The deadline for submissions is April 19, 2013.
Michael Davis: A Bioshock To The System
Over ten years ago I was in business with Irrational Games and its creative guru Ken Levine. I liked Ken and I liked his company. We were trying to bring a comic book project to life. It didn’t work out but such is life. Years passed and I did my thing and Ken and Irrational Games did theirs.
Then Irrational Games launched Bioshock.
Fuck. That game was a game changer.
I sent Ken a note congratulating him on the success of the game. I never heard back from him. That’s fine; those things just don’t bother me. I don’t dwell on why people do what they do or don’t do. He could have just ignored me because he’s such a big shot now or he may never have seen the email or another 50 thousand reasons why he did not respond.
Bioshock is still one of my favorite video games and that’s true rather I heard back from Ken or not. When the second Bioshock game out I loved that game as well. It seemed to be to be a bit harder than the first one and truth be told I’m still not done with it.
In fact I’ve been stuck on the same level for… let’s see…about two years.
No. I have not been playing the game constantly for two years. I pull it out every few months to try and beat that level, fail, then put it away for another few months.
More than a year or so ago I hear about a new Bioshock. Bioshock Infinite.
Some time after that I see some of the screen shots from the game and start to hear some of the hype surrounding the game.
I’m all in. Man, I’m all the fuck in.
I can’t remember the last time I was so jazzed over anything. Oh wait, I can remember. I was dating this Asian girl and…wait, now that I think of it, Irrational Games treated me just like that Asian girl.
They both promised something great yet that greatness kept being delayed. Over and over again. Bioshock Infinite was delayed then delayed again and frankly I got a little pissed waiting for it.
Then I thought that might be a great way to reconnect with Ken. I’d send him a funny email making light of the delays. After a little thought I decided not to do that. I realized I didn’t think the delay was funny so the odds of the guy who was sure to be taking some flack over it thinking it was funny was slim to none.
So I just waited.
Then the wait was over. For only the 3rd time in my life I went to a midnight release of a video game. When I arrived back home I started to play and at first I was not happy. The game starts with some puzzles, which I just hate.
I hate puzzles in fucking video games. I’m not buying a shooter so I can figure out how to unlock a door so I can start shooting.
Fuck that, I just want to shoot mofo’s. I don’t mind a level where I face a challenge as long as that challenge is how to survive not how to figure how many turns it will take to unlock a door and the only way you can do that is by finding a piece of paper that has the correct number of turns on it but first you have to decode that fucking paper.
Fuck that.
This is not 1993 when video games had to be clever, no it’s 2013 and I want my video games simple. George Bush simple, that means no puzzles! If George Bush had to deal with puzzles we would have had World War III…twice.
As is my policy I at least try and figure puzzles out so that’s what I did. I gave it a try and-son of a gun-I did it! What, you ask, would have been my alterative to trying to solve the puzzle? Looking up the solution on the net would have been my next move.
Duh.
No, whenever I’m stuck in a video game I don’t run to the net. If that was the case I would not still be on the same level on quite a few games as I am now, Bioshock 2 being just one of them.
I’m done with the puzzles but I’m still not shooting anyone. Now. I’m starting to get really pissed. And then, as if an answer to my prayers, a gun appears in my happy little hands.
Now I’m happy!
No, I’m really happy! This game is turning out to be worth the wait and living up to all the hype.
Then I see something that makes me want to get on a plane, fly to Boston and put my foot up the ass of Ken Levine.
Irrational Games is playing the race card.
There is an element to this game that deals with racism. In case you have not played the game I won’t say anymore than that. I’m not a dick so regardless of how I felt when first seeing that backstory I won’t go into detail.
I’ll just say I saw an image that made my blood boil. Fortunately for me I realized that more than once I’ve assumed the wrong thing regarding race so with that in mind I decided to continue shooting people until more of the backstory was revealed to me.
I’m glad I did.
I no longer want to put my foot up Ken’s ass which would most likely be a mistake as Ken does not strike me as anyone’s Bitch. That said – I love this game. Irrational Games pull off something remarkable and I’m not just talking about gameplay. That is not to say that some people of color won’t have a problem with the game (they will) but I’m not them and I love this game.
Well done, Irrational Games. And Ken don’t worry about returning my call, it’s only been a bit more than a decade. Bioshock Infinite took a while and look how good that turned out.
THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil
FRIDAY: Martha Thomases
