So okay, we can get our superhero fix without leaving the house. (And isn’t this what we all desire? And pass the chips…) SyFy’s Alphas, which is watchable, is back doing its weekly thing and this week we’ll see the debut of Arrow, based on a character who’s been around for 71 years. I mean, of course, Green Arrow created by Mort Weisinger and George Papp and, shall we say, “inspired” by The Green Archer, first a novel by Edgar Wallace and later a movie serial, and further inspired by the success of another costumed vigilante, Batman, who was getting mighty popular along about 1941.

I know very little about the television incarnation of – let me confess – my favorite arrow slinger beyond this: the TV folk are using the character’s first origin story, which has Oliver Queen, one of those soigne millionaires who littered the pop culture of the pre-war era, shipwrecked on a deserted island and learning to be a whiz with a bow in order to survive. That’s what I know. I don’t want to know more.

We are saturated with information about our entertainments and I wonder if that doesn’t get in the way or responding to them as evolution intended. We know that this actor is feuding with that actress and they’re both mad at the producer and… I guess we can still perpetrate a willing suspension of disbelief (which your English teacher told you was vital to enjoying fiction). But maybe such suspension doesn’t come as easily as it did in the pre-information age and maybe we bring to the story expectations fostered by show-biz venues which influence, for better or worse, how we respond to what we’re being shown. Maybe it’s becoming a chore to bring to the enterprise what some meditators call “bare attention” – simply responding to, and being amused by, what’s there in front of us. As for being surprised by plot twists and the like, once a staple of light drama… good luck!

Am I blowing smoke? If I am, I’m blowing it into a fan.

I used to enjoy Mel Gibson movies. But I can’t, not any more, not after his anti-Semitic ravings and espousal of Neanderthal Catholicism, all of which was thoroughly reported in the media.

A few months ago, I saw a Batman movie. I thought it was a fine movie and I still think so. But I knew that Talia – let me confess – my favorite daughter of a maniacal mass murderer, was in the story somewhere and I kept trying to jump ahead of the screenwriters and guess exactly when she would appear who she would turn out to be. (I was wrong.) Yep, nifty flick, all right, but maybe my enjoyment of it was just a bit dimmed.

On the other hand…Marifran said that if she’d known that the cult portrayed in the fine new film The Master was based on Scientology, she would have enjoyed it more.

It is not a one-size-fits-all universe.

But, dammit, I know that there’s information about Arrow available on the net. And I’m not going near it.

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

Art: Diana Leto

New Pulp Author Martin Powell and Diana Leto, artist of The Halloween Legion visit the Earth Station One podcast to spill all the spooky secrets behind the world’s weirdest heroes. The Countdown to Halloween Interview with Martin Powell & Diana Leto begins at 0:34:28 on the podcast.

Earth Station One Episode 132: Dexter and Other Serial Killers–
ESO continues the Countdown to Halloween with a psychotic episode! Mike Faber, Mike Gordon, and Bobby Nash are joined by Jessa Phillips, Jason De La Torre, and Dan Rynn to reveal the demented, deranged, maniacal, and downright freaky schizoids we admire. I mean condemn. Or rather those we identify with, and by that I mean we highly disapprove of. And speaking of straightjackets, we chat with Martin Powell and Diana Leto about their Halloween Legion project and they each take a twisted turn in The Geek Seat. Plus, the usual crazy Rants, Raves, Khan Report and Shout Outs.

Join us for yet another episode of The Earth Station One Podcast we like to call: Dexter and Other Serial Killers at www.esopodcast.com
Direct link: http://erthstationone.wordpress.com/2012/10/10/earth-station-one-episode-132-dexter-and-other-serial-killers/

Unless you haven’t been paying your electric bill, you probably are aware that the first James Bond movie, Doctor No, was released a half-century ago this week. You might not be as aware that several months earlier DC Comics released the comic book adaptation as part of its Showcase series. Editor George Kashdan said he didn’t understand why DC picked up the book except for the fact that the artwork was in hand and the rights must have been cheap.

Several months before that, the people who actually produced the comic book – Classics Illustrated’s British division – released the adaptation as issue 158A of their series. This explains why DC’s comic had the look and feel of a Classics Illustrated title. Just to complicate matters, Dell Publishing released Doctor No in Europe as an issue of its Detective Stories title.

At the time, I couldn’t care less. I was an 11-year old comics fan and, like most my ilk, a voracious reader. The Showcase issue had a text piece that discussed Ian Fleming and his super-spy creation. The next time my parents schlepped me out to Marshall Field’s department store I sought out the paperback novels only to discover they cost an unheard of 50¢ apiece. Most paperbacks were 35¢, some were still 25¢. I reluctantly passed, but I kept an eye out for the movie. I almost forgot about it when Doctor No finally came out.

Like an amazingly high percentage of baby boomer men and near-adolescents, James Bond was the coolest guy I’d ever seen on the big screen, and I immediately became a fan. By now I was actually 12 and able to afford a 50¢ paperback, but I couldn’t find Fleming’s Doctor No. I settled for Live and Let Die, and I was enthralled.

Over the next several years I devoured every Fleming novel, even reading the new ones as they were serialized in Playboy (I looked a bit older than my age, particularly if I didn’t buy it along with my week’s comics). I was in line for the debut of every subsequent movie, and I followed the James Bond newspaper strip in the Chicago American. The latter was a British strip that quite faithfully adapted Fleming’s books, and in my mind most of those adaptations were better than the books themselves. Here’s a fun fact: Modesty Blaise creator Peter O’Donnell wrote the Doctor No adaptation. But I wondered why DC didn’t do any more adaptations.

So did Carmine Infantino when he became publisher. In 1972 he discovered DC had a ten-year option on Bond, and that option was about to run its course. He approached Jack Kirby and his old pal Alex Toth and probably others, but then something terrible happened: Sean Connery announced he was quitting the series. Carmine let the option expire.

Clearly, DC would have made a fortune off of 007 had they picked up the series when the second Bond movie was made. Or even the third, Goldfinger, which truly launched the mega-fad. But the company was starting to doll itself up for a sale and the folks in the trenches were busy with the imminent launch of the Batman teevee series.

Perhaps the most popular heroic fantasy figure in movie history, James Bond never achieved an on-going comic book series. Many movies were adapted, some by guys like Mike Grell, Tom Yeates, and Howard Chaykin. A handful of original mini-series and one-shots were released, but nothing more.

The movie series went on and on and on, but most Roger Moore entries were more reminiscent of Adam West than of Sean Connery. The series started to improve after Sir Roger outgrew the part and Barbara Broccoli took over as producer, and Daniel Craig’s reboot in 2006 brought new hope and great entertainment to the masses. As Adele fans know all too well, the next Craig Bond flick, Skyfall, comes out in a few weeks.

But I got to tell you, as a baby boomer Bond boy, I feel greatly cheated.

An Alex Toth Bond comic?

Damn.

THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil

The great television series Naked City used to close each episode with the famous tag, “There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them.” It’s very compact size and dense population means people are intersecting in new and unusual ways all the time. This has given rise to some wonderful fiction such as Kissing in Manhattan and some less memorable fare such as the recently released film 30 Beats. Using a heat wave as the through-line the heat is also a metaphor for the sexual tension between ten various New Yorkers. Structurally, it owes a great deal to Max Ophuls’s La Ronde but never comes close to its brilliance.

The cast is headed by sexy Paz de la Huerta (Boardwalk Empire) and Lee Pace (Pushing Daisies), and the film was written and directed by Alexis Lloyd. The cast also includes Condola Rashad, Justin Kirk, Thomas Sadoski (The Newsroom), and Jennifer Tilly. Its tag line, “New York City, in the heart of summer: a heat wave transforms the city into a tropical zone. Ten characters are drawn, one after the other, into a ring of love and desire, each one caught beyond his or her control in a chain reaction of seduction, impulses and self-discovery” is certainly catchy but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

Given the rich possibilities, it’s a shame the film runs a lightweight 88 minutes and doesn’t really bring any of the characters to real light or allow them any depth. As a result, there’s a lot of sweat and plenty of exposed skin, but you’ve seen better on any late night Cinemax production.

Out today from Lionsgate Home Entertainment, it’s billed a comedic romance but the comedy is fairly tame and the romance is of the heaving bosom variety. There’s the older woman (Ingeborga Dapkunaite) seducing the virgin (Ben Levin) at a spa only to learn she was hired by dad to be his first sexual experience. While a cliché situation, Lloyd allows their inner thoughts to come through, making this awkwardness somewhat sweet. It also promises this could be a good little film, but then we’re shown she was only inspired this one time. The rest is a series of clichés without redemption as character A meets up with character B and after sex, character B hooks up with character C and frankly, the characterizations are as flat as this description. That the core cast is between 25-35 also steals chances for some interesting comparisons among the generations.

There’s the tarot reader helping the young man overcome erectile dysfunction with the aid of some crystals and the chiropractor who gets it on with one of his patients. Every encounter between characters culminates in sex, without fail, and each exchange robs the actors of a chance to actually invest any emotion and feeling into their characters. There’s far too much sex (believe it or not) and nowhere near enough depth.

It’s always a shame when a film about sex is just the sex and nothing about those who commit the act. A more adult approach would have taken this concept, heat wave and all, and really made the audience melt.