Check out Part 3 of Lance Star and The Crown of Genghis Kai, a 10-part webstrip by Bobby Nash and James Burns at www.lance-star.com. New strips every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Written by Bobby Nash
Art/Colors/Letters by James Burns
Lance Star: Sky Ranger © Bobby Nash
Click on image for a larger view.
This Monday, REVOLUTION returns to NBC to complete its freshman season. Four months off the air has given Executive Producer Eric Kripke the chance to move the story forward and gives us a lot of answers to the show’s mysteries. Eric, and series star Elizabeth Mitchell, give us a look at what we need to jump back into there series. Meanwhile, DC’s editorial department is shows some turmoil and Neil Gaiman (along with his character ANGELA) are headed to Marvel.
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The Lady Lazarus saga’s final chapter for the tale that is, of the three, the most human: Rebel Angels (Tor Books, Hardcover, $26.99, March, 2013). It’s October, 1939 and our heroine Magda is saying goodbye to her little sister Gisele, sending her off with spymaster Knox to be protected by Churchill in the UK whilst Magda and her fallen angel-man Raziel sallie forth to Baku, Afghanistan to find a way to bring down the Asmodel-possessed Hitler and prevent the wholesale slaughter of millions that Gisele has foreseen. To do this, Magda seeks the primordial magic even more potent than the Book of Raziel, the Lazarus women’s legacy—the Heaven Sapphire. And the last time it was used, all Hell broke loose. The gem is its own creature, not to be summoned by mere words, not even by a Lazarus, the ancient line of witches who can come back from the dead via a deal with the Witch of Ein Dor of the Bible. Everyone is after it and she has to get there first, no matter the cost. And so she has to announce to Vampire Count Gabor Bathory that she is quitting his employ and leaving Budapest once again to try to stop this war—and get his blessing on her clandestine marriage to the man who’d given up Heaven to be with her. What does Bathory do? The only thing a Vampire Count can do for the closest thing he has to a daughter in the face of war—he allows her to escape by throwing the most lavish vampire party ever and invites all magicals, under a truce, to celebrate with him! Even her beloved Eva, now in deep-cover as the SS Werewolf leader Szalasi’s paramour, attends. All the players are on stage for the grand finale in contexts at once perplexing, astonishing, and satisfying.
And that’s what makes this work, even when I can barely suspend disbelief – as with the literal flying carpets of the women of Helena. The human merchant Ziyad is just that in his air of passion in the real sense of the word—to suffer as a mensch, an Aristotelian man, and not merely a human animal. The over-arching emotions and dilemmas in this climax are elevated to what is best and worst in humans, so that infernal and divine are one and meet—as above, so below, the divine reaching down toward humanity and humanity reaching up toward the divine, by either good or evil means, by true hearts of compassion or bloated egos. And the means makes all the difference, so that evil might not triumph over the face of God’s creation, via the human spirit in all of them, even the once-divine. This concluding chapter is not so much an ethical book (that was more for book II), but a passionate one, one that faces despair head-on and says, like Gandalf to the Balrog, “You shall not pass!”
Lang’s prose here is her most calculated—book I is still the book of my heart. But she pulls off things here that made me doubt and yet made them somehow plausible. She’s honest enough that not all of your favourites will survive, but none will be forgotten, and thus stays true to the Jewish concept of yizkor that propels this story: remember so that none truly die forever. There are awww moments that remind you that Lang is also a romance writer, without sending you for the insulin shots. She does not flinch from torturing her characters—see the dungeons of the Baku Institute where the mad scientist Prof. Roskonikoff conducts operations that resemble crude, early frontal lobotomies. This is not a book to be handed to young women without adult supervision. Finally, I will say that, in the end, somehow, a spark of love triumphs and there is, indeed, life out of death. And you can’t help but love that and smile.
Lady Lazarus (Tor, trade Sept. 2010 $14.99, mass market June 2011 $7.99)
Dark Victory (Tor, March ’13, hardcover $25.99, Kindle $9.99)
Although my cable company provides me with hundreds of channels, there are still occasional day parts during which it is impossible to see an episode of Law & Order. Even if I broaden my parameters to include the one with the sex and the one with better writing, there are precious moments when neither Tamara Tunie nor Leslie Hendrix is being a tough-talking, no-nonsense medical examiner.
It’s not that I think it’s a great show, although I do kind of like it. I think Vincent D’Onofrio is brilliant, and not only because he did both this and this. I like the fact that someone who played a murderer in an early episode can be a criminal, or even an assistant district attorney in a later episode. I like seeing almost every working actor in New York get at least a few minutes of screen time… and a paycheck.
But mostly, I like how predictable it is.
The original show (which I’ve heard is referred to as “The Mothership”) was originally formatted quite strictly. At the time, the syndication business favored half-hour programs, so the idea was to run the series on broadcast as an hour-long drama, and syndicate it as two half-hours – Law and Order. I’ve never heard of that happening. All the re-runs I watch last the full hour.
And they all follow a fairly predictable pattern. There’s a murder, and the police first identify a suspect, who turns out to be a false start. Then they find the real killer and arrest him/her. After that, the lawyers take over. In addition to the murder, the suspect probably has another ax to grind. Maybe this person is a rabid environmentalist, or anti-abortion, or can’t get the affection of mommy or daddy. There is angst. Deals are offered. Deals are rejected. The trial takes place. Usually, the prosecution wins. When they don’t, it’s clear the jury was bamboozled.
All is right with the world.
The two spin-offs don’t separate the cops from the lawyers with quite the same egalitarian rigidity. In fact, both concentrate more on the police, to the point that there are hardly any lawyers at all in CI. This is fine by me.
The sexual politics of these shows are terrible. The male lawyers do all the work. With the exception of Kathryn Erbe and Mariska Hargity, the lead cops are men. (Sidenote: Kathryn Erbe’s partnership with D’Onofrio might be the most feminist ideal on all of television.)
I like to have the shows on while I work. It’s a way to tell time without looking at a clock. It’s entertaining if I pay attention, but not so distracting that it interrupts a run of productivity.
It would be a service to freelance writers everywhere is there was a cable station exclusively devoted to the various shows. Combined, they’ve been on the air for about 40 seasons, more than enough to fill a schedule. They could add in tie-ins, like Homicide: Life on the Streets (a much better show) and Oz, which both share a few cast members and a co-creator.
The biggest problem will be that the demographics are probably too old to attract quality advertising, and ads for catheters supplies are disgusting.
Which brings me to comics.
I love the comics I read as a kid. I even love the comics I read in the 1980s. There are comics I enjoy today, but I rarely have that sense of discovery and wonder I had back then. But I don’t really expect to be knocked out in the same way. I’m older. I’ve seen those tricks before. It’s difficult to invent something I haven’t already seen.
Some friends lament the fact that today’s titles aren’t like the older stuff with which we fell in love. And I get it. I’d like to be young again, too. I’d like to be a desirable demographic.
But I can reread the comics of my youth any time I want, and I do.
Please don’t put these ads in my comics.
SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman
SUNDAY: John Ostrander
UPDATE: Round 5 of the Mix March Madness 2013 Webcomics Tournament is closed. Vote in the Final Four now!
We’ve gone from over 300 webcomics down to the Elite 8, and with your help we’ve raised over $2000 for the Hero Initiative since the tournament started. Voting for this round lasts until 9PM EDT on Saturday, March 23– get your votes in!
Young and mostly silent Jake, the enigmatic hero of the television program Touch, doesn’t look ancient. Nor does he look particularly Greek. But ah – might he be a reincarnation of Pythagoras? Or at least a fictional character inspired by Pythagoras?
Who?
Okay, for you hordes of non-philosophy majors pit there: Pythagoras was probably the first guy who called himself a “philosopher.” He lived about 2500 years ago and he taught that all things were connected, that what he called the One was at the base of everything and that this One expressed itself in numbers. Or such is my admittedly sketchy understanding of Py’s riff.
And Jake? Well, Jake is this kid, about ten, who doesn’t speak but writes or otherwise communicates numbers to his father and eventually, after exciting adventures, Jake’s numbers tie diverse things/people/events together and provide the solution to that episode’s problem.
How does Jake manage his feats? Well…in short, he seems to be a superhero. No costume, no flamboyant displays of abnormal prowess. But we know that Jake has some kind of metahuman ability – he’s a mutant, maybe? – and that there are others like him, and finally that some person or organization has dispatched a geeky assassin to exterminate them.
Though there are echoes of earlier superhero sagas here – Watchmen and the X-Men titles come immediately to mind – Touch is a novel iteration of the superhero concept, and as original as anything in our story-saturated culture is likely to be. That it’s also well-written and acted is a nice bonus.
But what really pleases me about it is what I understand to be its central metaphor. Unlike most of our televised mind-gum, Touch is not extolling the essentiality of family, though Jake’s relationship to his father is important, nor does it glorify the Individual, nor assure us that right makes might, which is why the good guys inevitably out-bash the bad guys. Instead, it displays a notion common to ol’ Py and modern quantum physicists – the Higgs boson crowd – and Buddhists and feel free to add some examples of your own. That notion: everything is connected.
Which is obvious when you think about it, despite the political howls when our current president observed that, sorry, nobody accomplishes anything without some kind of help. You wouldn’t be reading this without the biosphere and the biosphere depends of interaction of gravity with mass and particle and millions of years ago a lobe fish crawled onto land and began the evolutionary journey toward becoming Justin Bieber and and and…and some thirteen-point-seven billion years ago the Big Bang happened and here we are, watching teevee, and passing the popcorn.
I doubt that Touch’s creators are in the business of teaching us cosmology. Their job is to entertain, and in my living room, they do. But they do so without lading on dramatic tropes whose overuse has given them cliché status, and since you and I are united, maybe you’ll join me in being grateful to them.
FRIDAY: Martha Thomases
SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman
Lance Star and The Crown of Genghis Kai, a 10-part webstrip by Bobby Nash and James Burns continues at www.lance-star.com. New strips every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Written by Bobby Nash
Art/Colors/Letters by James Burns
Lance Star: Sky Ranger © Bobby Nash
Click on image for a larger view.
Mechanoid Press shared their latest press release with All Pulp. Saddle up for a trip to the Weird West.
PRESS RELEASE:
Contact: James Palmer
palmerwriter@yahoo.com
www.mechanoidpress.com
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Mechanoid Press Enters the Weird West
ATLANTA, GA—Mechanoid Press, the publishing imprint of writer James Palmer, is ready to head into the West with an all new anthology of Weird Western stories called STRANGE TRAILS.
STRANGE TRAILS will be the second anthology from the fledgling imprint, and this announcement follows close on the boot heels of publication of their popular collection of giant monster tales MONSTER EARTH, co-edited by Palmer and comics veteran Jim Beard.
“I’ve always been intrigued by the Weird Western,” says Palmer. “The subgenre encompasses everything from fantasy to science fiction, steampunk, and horror. It’s a fun mishmash of different styles and ideas.”
STRANGE TRAILS will include stories by familiar names in New Pulp and Weird Westerns, an all-star lineup sure to please new fans and aficionados alike. Writers for this book will be:
Tommy Hancock
Barry Reese
Joshua Reynolds
Joel M. Jenkins
Edward M. Erdelac
“I sought out people who were not only fantastic writers, but who have written Weird Westerns before,” says Palmer. “And I couldn’t be happier that they all said yes.”
Palmer is hoping for a mid to late summer release. So saddle up, oil your raygun, and mind the zombies. It’s going to be a weird ride down some Strange Trails.
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About Mechanoid Press
Mechanoid Press is an independent publishing imprint specializing in Science Fiction and New Pulp print and e-books. For more, visit www.mechanoidpress.com, like us on Facebook (www.facebook.com/mechanoidpress), or follow the robot revolution on Twitter (www.twitter.com/mechanoidpress).
New York City Center has arranged for fans to get a special discount on tickets for It’s A Bird… It’s A Plane… It’s Superman! Seven performances are slated to run from March 20th through March 24th.
$24 – Balcony Sides (reg $30)
$48 – Mezzanine Center/Sides, Balcony Center (reg $60)
$86 – Mezzanine Center/Sides (reg $115)
Visit NYCityCenter.org, call CityTix at212.581.1212, or visit the Box Office at 131 W 55th St, and use code “COMIC”.
And check back here soon for our review of the show!
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