We haven’t had time to watch many movies lately, but we got a chance to watch this one over the weekend. It’s based on a video game, so you can expect lots of action. After an opening that’s extremely reminiscent of the DARK ANGEL TV series (little kids having their heads shaved and barcodes tattooed on them, intensive martial arts training, being held prisoner in a snowy compound . . . I mean, come on, it’s the exact same thing!), we jump ahead and find out that those kids are being raised to be professional assassins who work for a mysterious organization known only as (you guessed it) “The Organization”. One of them who grows up to be known only as Agent 47 (Timothy Olyphant, who played Seth Bullock on DEADWOOD) is in Russia to carry out an assignment when he’s set up and betrayed by his own employers. That causes him to turn on The Organization and go after them to find out who’s responsible for double-crossing him.
The plot’s pretty hard to follow, although I’m fairly sure it does all make sense of a sort in the end. Also, I kept asking myself why in the world a bunch of professional assassins who work for some super-secret organization would walk around with their heads shaved and barcodes tattooed on them. Not exactly inconspicuous, is it? But a movie like this isn’t really about making sense. It’s about staging bloody, over-the-top action sequences and looking cool, and HITMAN succeeds pretty well on both those counts. Olyphant does a pretty good job as Agent 47, in a part that doesn’t require him to say much, and the supporting cast is okay. There’s a little too much quick-cut editing in the action scenes for my taste, but I’ve seen worse. And as gory as it is, it’s not as gory as it could have been. There’s actually a little restraint here and there.
HITMAN is pretty much a live-action cartoon, but there are touches of humor here and there and it moves fast. Overall, I enjoyed it and thought it succeeded in what it set out to do. I don’t ask much more than that from a movie.
If you haven't done so yet, head on over to David Cranmer's new Beat to a Pulp webzine and read Patti Abbott's story "The Instrument of Their Desire". It's an excellent story with one of the best opening paragraphs I've read in a long time, as well as some very nice twists in the plot. A great beginning to what promises to be a fine webzine.
First of all, the three graphic novels from the Nineties reprinted in this very nice trade paperback collection – BATMAN & DRACULA: RED RAIN, BATMAN: BLOODSTORM, and BATMAN: CRIMSON MIST – don’t take place in the regular Batman continuity. They’re alternate versions of Batman – “Tales of the Multiverse”, according to the cover. I believe at one time DC also referred to this sort of thing as “Elseworlds” stories. When I was a kid, anything outside the established continuity was called an “Imaginary Story”. I always loved the concept that some superhero stories could be more “imaginary” than others.
I missed these particular stories when they were first published, so they were new to me. Author Doug Moench spins a yarn that could only be told in an alternate DC Universe. Simply put, Batman becomes a vampire, just as the collection’s title says. This takes place in the first of the stories during an epic war against Dracula, who has come to Gotham City to expand his legion of undead followers. Batman’s allies in this struggle are vampires who have overcome their thirst for blood and dedicated themselves to wiping out Dracula. Even though the Lord of the Undead is defeated, things don’t turn out too well, and Batman is left a vampire himself, although a “good” one, much like the TV character Angel would be a few years later. The Joker enters the plot in the second story and makes things even worse, and they continue to spiral downward for Batman in the third story, which involves many of the villains from his rogues’ gallery, such as the Penguin, the Riddler, Poison Ivy, Two-Face, and Killer Croc. And if Batman has always been the most noirish DC hero, that’s really true here, as he struggles against evil both without and within.
This is classic Batman with a horror spin. Doug Moench was one of my favorite comics writers during the Seventies, based mostly on his great run on MASTER OF KUNG FU with artist Paul Gulacy. (And, boy, I’d love to read all those issues again and see how they hold up.) His scripts on these three Batman stories are excellent, with plenty of action and angst. Speaking of Paul Gulacy, the artwork in this collection by Kelley Jones reminds me a little of Gulacy’s work, as well as Berni Wrightson’s. I’m not always a big fan of Jones’s art – his human figures get a little elongated and bizarre-looking for my taste – but it’s really good in these stories, especially the first one, RED RAIN. I’m glad I was able to catch up to these three stories all in one book, and if you’re a Batman and/or horror fan, I think you’ll enjoy them, too.
With some authors, you can be aware of their work for years, even decades, without ever reading any of it. That’s the way it’s been for me with William MacLeod Raine. If you’re like me and practically grew up in used bookstores during the Sixties and Seventies, you saw plenty of paperback Westerns by Raine. While he was never as popular as Zane Grey, Max Brand, or Louis L’Amour, Raine was prolific and a strong presence in the Western field for many years. Now, of course, he’s barely remembered, and based on ARIZONA GUNS, the first of his novels I’ve read, he deserves to be not only remembered but read.
Born in England in 1871, Raine moved to the American West ten years later and lived through much of the time period about which he wrote. Like Walt Coburn and another English immigrant, Fred East (who wrote as Tom West), Raine was an authentic Westerner with experience as a cowboy before he became a write
r. ARIZONA GUNS was originally published in 1919 by Houghton Mifflin under the title A MAN FOUR-SQUARE. There were at least two paperback reprints under the title ARIZONA GUNS, which despite having a classic B-Western sound to it, isn’t appropriate at all. Not one bit of the novel takes place in Arizona, and the only connection is that one of the characters mentions having gone there.
Instead, nearly all the book is set in New Mexico Territory, in the fictional Washington County. If you’re sharp enough to realize that there’s a real county in New Mexico named after a famous president, you’ll have a pretty good idea where this story is going. Yep, this is another fictionalized version of the Billy the Kid saga, with the “Washington County War” taking the place of the real-life Lincoln County War. In Raine’s version, the young hero is named Jim Clanton. After growing up somewhere in the Appalachians and being involved in a feud there, Clanton goes west in search of his enemies who have fled the mountains. He winds up joining a cattle drive up the Pecos, fights outlaws and Indians, becomes friends with a cowboy named Billie Prince, meets up with his old enemies, makes new enemies, romances a couple of beautiful young women, and eventually winds up on the wrong side of the law. By this time, Clanton’s friend Billie Prince has become a lawman, making him the Pat Garrett stand-in for this story, and when Clanton is accused of murdering one of the local cattlemen, Prince has to
form a posse and go after him.
Raine veers off from history in various places, so the story winds up being only loosely based on the Lincoln County War. Because of this, he’s able to throw some nice twists into the plot, especially where various romantic triangles are concerned. Romance plays a big part in this book, as was common in Westerns of the time period, especially the bestsellers authored by Zane Grey. ARIZONA GUNS reminds me quite a bit of Grey’s work, in fact, although it’s not nearly as flowery and melodramatic. Raine slips in a dark undertone to an otherwise happy ending, too, which sets it apart from Grey’s novels and the other popular Westerns of the period. The writing is a little old-fashioned in places (what else would you expect from a book written ninety years ago?), but it holds up well, the style tough and spare for the most part.
I’ve always liked Zane Grey’s plots, and when he finally got around to writing action scenes, he produced some corkers, but I also find it hard to wade through the long-winded prose in his books. If you’re the same way, I think you’d enjoy William MacLeod Raine’s novels, at least based on this one. I definitely intend to read more of them.
I was in the mood to read a horror novel, and having heard good things about Edward Lee’s work, I decided to try one of his. I knew his books have a reputation for containing a lot of extreme violence and a considerable amount of sex, so I wasn’t really surprised to encounter both of those things in THE BACKWOODS. It’s the story of high-powered Washington D.C. attorney Patricia White, who returns to the small town in rural Virginia where she grew up for her brother-in-law’s funeral. What she finds there are all sorts of sinister, dangerous secrets, including a clan of mysterious backwoods folks who practice an ancient religion of their own and a series of bizarre murders that have no rational explanation.
Well, those of you who have read very many horror novels will know right away where some of these plot elements are going, and I was somewhat disappointed that there weren’t more plot twists along the way. Lee does include some surprises in his story, though, and tells it in fast-paced, evocative prose that’s fun to read. I found enough to like here that I’m definitely interested in reading more of his books. Although it’s not for everybody, I’d recommend THE BACKWOODS to anyone who likes the novels of, say, Richard Laymon – which I do, quite a bit.
I’d like to pass this book along to someone else who might enjoy it. So if you’re an Edward Lee fan and don’t have a copy of THE BACKWOODS, or if you haven’t read him but would like to try his work, it’s yours if you’re the first one to email me and ask for it. The email link is in my profile, if you don’t have the address already.
This is the first post from the new house. We moved in today, and while there’s still a lot of stuff in the mobile home and we’ll be carrying things over here for days, if not weeks, we now officially live here. It’s hard to believe that it’s only been a little over ten months since the wildfire destroyed our original house and my studio. That seems like a whole other lifetime.
I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who’s helped us get here. I’m not going to start listing names, because I’d be bound to forget someone. But scores of people – family, friends, total strangers – came forward to help us. People sent money and books. Some showed up with money, books, household goods, furniture. It was amazing. So thank you all for everything you did to lift us up out of the terrible situation in which we found ourselves.
The one person I will name is my beautiful wife Livia, who picked this family up, put us on her shoulders, and carried us to the point we are now: in a new home, starting a new life. Thank you so much.
Regular blogging resumes tomorrow. Life goes on. And thank God for that.
Nostalgia is about to be wallowed in. Consider yourself warned.
In the summer of 1964, my sister’s boyfriend had been telling me about this science-fiction author he’d been reading named Edgar Rice Burroughs. The name was familiar to me, probably from the Tarzan movies that one of the local TV stations ran constantly on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, but I’d never read anything by him. I asked John to loan me one of the books, and so one Friday evening when he came over, he brought along a copy of A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS, the sixth book in Burroughs’ Martian series, in what was then a fairly new Ace Books edition with a cover by Roy G. Krenkel. (At the time, of course, I had no idea who Krenkel was, and Ace didn’t mean a whole lot to me, either. Those things were soon to change.)
According to John, these Mars books by Burroughs were a blend of science-fiction – they had flying machines and invisibility rays and four-armed green men in them, after all – and swashbuckling adventure. So I sat down on that Friday evening to read the book, expecting to be entertained. Let’s just say that A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS more than met my expectations. Most of Burroughs’ Mars novels feature his iconic hero John Carter, an Earthman transported to Mars, or Barsoom, as its inhabitants call it, where he fights monsters, mad scientists, evil cults, giant white apes, and assorted other villains, all the while romancing the beautiful princess Dejah Thoris, who loses her clothes more than any heroine short of a Spicy pulp. I discovered all that later, though, because this book, while it uses the same background, features a Martian hero, Hadron of Hastor. To tell you the truth, I don’t recall all that much about the plot. It’s been a lot of years since I last reread the book. But I recall vividly how I sat up late reading it that night, flipping the pages until I just couldn’t stay awake anymore. I finished it first thing the next morning and was hooked. I had to have more Burroughs, all the Burroughs I could get my hands on, as soon as possible.
So I read all the other Mars books, pretty much in order from that point, although I skipped around a little because I couldn’t find some of them right away. It doesn’t really matter all that much, anyway, except for the first three books of the series, which need to be read in order. I found a copy of TARZAN AND THE LOST EMPIRE at the library and read it. That was my first Tarzan novel, but over the next few years I read most of them, too, often in Ace editions with Krenkel covers. Those babies were everywhere back then. John loaned me some of the books from the Venus series. In the more than four decades since then, I’ve read probably three-fourths of Burroughs’ novels. Every now and then, I still pick up one that I haven’t read and go back to being eleven or twelve years old again for a while.
But it all started on that summer weekend in 1964 with A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS, a book that, as it turns out, is really a fairly average entry in Burroughs’ canon. I love it anyway, and always will.
For the first time in quite a while, I spotted somebody reading in public today. (Actually, Livia saw him first and pointed him out to me.) An older man sitting in a car in the local Wal-Mart parking lot was reading a paperback copy of Herman Wouk's THE CAINE MUTINY. I had a hard time not thinking about strawberries for a while.
Nobody tagged me with this meme that’s going around, but I’m going to take part in it anyway. Here are the authors I’ve read for the first time this year:
David Jack Bell, THE CONDEMNED
Dean Ballenger, GANNON #1: BLOOD FOR BREAKFAST
Michael Chabon, GENTLEMEN OF THE ROAD (no, I haven’t read KAVALIER & CLAY, but I’ll get to it sooner or later)
Christa Faust, MONEY SHOT
Neil Albert, THE JANUARY CORPSE
James Rollins, SANDSTORM
Mat Johnson, INCOGNEGRO
Harlan Coben, THE WOODS (followed by several others by him)
Charles Bukowski, FACTOTUM
Ross Laurence, THE FAST BUCK (evidently his only novel)
Robert Novak, CLIMB A BROKEN LADDER
Simon Oliver, THE EXTERMINATORS: BUG BROTHERS
Charles N. Heckelmann, RIVER QUEEN
Graham McNeill, WARHAMMER 40,000: THE KILLING GROUND
Edward Lee, THE BACKWOODS (reading this one now, comments in a day or two)
Not an extensive list, but I’d read more by anybody on there.
Back in the Seventies, Bat Lash was one of the regular features in the comic WEIRD WESTERN TALES, along with Jonah Hex and El Diablo. The stories featuring him were probably the most traditional in that group, but they still managed to be off-beat in a MAVERICK sort of way. Bartholomew “Bat” Lash was a drifting gambler who read poetry, wore a flower in his hat, romanced every good-looking woman he encountered, and tried to avoid violence. Of course, he was never very successful at that, so it was lucky he was fast on the draw and good with his fists.
The character has attracted a number of devoted fans over the years and continues to make occasional appearances, usually as a guest star. A recent mini-series brought him back as the lead, however, and it’s now been collected into a very nice trade paperback. BAT LASH: GUNS AND ROSES finally gives us an origin story for the character and finds him as a young man in Texas, the son of a former outlaw who’s trying to go straight and run a horse ranch. Bat’s romance with the beautiful daughter of the local cattle baron leads to all sorts of trouble, including a clash with the corrupt local sheriff who wants the young woman for himself.
Authors Sergio Aragones and Peter Brandvold take this standard set-up and throw in some nice changes on it. The story definitely doesn’t play out the way I thought it would. Every time things seem to be leading up to a cliché, Aragones and Brandvold find a way to put a new spin on the plot. And the art, by comics veteran John Severin, is just wonderful. I enjoyed Severin’s art for years back in the Sixties and Seventies, especially on SGT. FURY AND HIS HOWLING COMMANDOS (and what a great comic that was, by the way, silly title or not). Severin hasn’t lost any of his skill, and looking at his panels in these stories was great fun for me.
As some of you know, Pete Brandvold is a good friend of mine, and I know that this mini-series was a real labor of love for him. He’s a fine writer, and in tandem with comics legends Aragones and Severin, he’s produced an excellent Western mini-series. Highly recommended.
We haven’t had time to watch many movies lately, but we got a chance to watch this one over the weekend. It’s based on a video game, so you can expect lots of action. After an opening that’s extremely reminiscent of the DARK ANGEL TV series (little kids having their heads shaved and barcodes tattooed on them, intensive martial arts training, being held prisoner in a snowy compound . . . I mean, come on, it’s the exact same thing!), we jump ahead and find out that those kids are being raised to be professional assassins who work for a mysterious organization known only as (you guessed it) “The Organization”. One of them who grows up to be known only as Agent 47 (Timothy Olyphant, who played Seth Bullock on DEADWOOD) is in Russia to carry out an assignment when he’s set up and betrayed by his own employers. That causes him to turn on The Organization and go after them to find out who’s responsible for double-crossing him.
