I enjoyed John Cena’s first two movies, THE MARINE and 12 ROUNDS (I thought 12 ROUNDS was one of the best action movies I’ve seen in recent years, in fact), so it should come as no surprise that I watched his latest film, LEGENDARY. This one is much different from the first two, though. It’s not an action movie at all, but rather an inspirational sports movie, the sport in this case being high school wrestling. And Cena’s not the star but plays a supporting role instead, as the older, estranged brother of the misfit high school kid who decides to take up wrestling.
If you’ve ever seen one of these sports/family dramas, you’ll know just about everything that’s going to happen in LEGENDARY long before it gets there. Despite the predictability of the plot, though, it’s a fairly entertaining film with the occasional funny line and good performances all around. Cena is a more than decent actor and does a fine job as the guilt-haunted, black sheep older brother who has problems with boozing and brawling. An actor I’d never heard of, Devon Graye, plays the protagonist, Patricia Clarkson is the widowed mom, and another actor I’m not familiar with, Madeleine Martin, gives an oddball but very effective performance as the kid’s best friend/potential girlfriend. Danny Glover, whose work I’ve enjoyed since SILVERADO, is the Wise Old Black Man. (Morgan Freeman was either out of town that week or else the budget wasn’t big enough to hire him, probably the latter.)
If you enjoy this genre, which I do, LEGENDARY is certainly worth watching. I like John Cena enough that I’ll probably continue watching whatever he’s in, at least for now. Oddly enough, I’ve only seen him in movies. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen him “rassle”.
I think I’ve mentioned before that my introduction to The Shadow was through syndicated reruns of the radio show in the early Sixties. The first Shadow novel I read was THE SHADOW STRIKES!, the second book in the series of original Shadow novels published by Belmont and the first one by Dennis Lynds writing under the Maxwell Grant name. I was a big fan of that series and read all of them as they were published. Then Bantam started reprinting some of the original pulp novels, followed by other publishers doing the same, and I read ’em all. I remember sitting in the university library when I was in college, reading Shadow paperbacks with those fine covers by Jim Steranko. Great stuff. (What’s that you say? I should have been studying? Considering how I’ve made my living all these years . . . I think maybe I was!)
Anyway, at the same time, 1974, Robert Weinberg was publishing the first book-length study of the Shadow pulp series, GANGLAND’S DOOM: THE SHADOW OF THE PULPS, by Frank Eisgruber Jr. I’d heard of this book but never read it until now, in a revised edition published by Altus Press in 2007.
A lot of the information contained in it – bibliographic info about the story titles, publication dates, and actual authors, as well as chapters on The Shadow’s agents and the villains he fought – has appeared elsewhere over the past three-and-a-half decades, but GANGLAND’S DOOM is an important book because it was the first. Not only that, but despite Eisgruber’s modest comments about his writing ability in a new preface, this is a well-written book with plenty of the charm that comes through when an author is writing about a subject he truly loves and enjoys. It’s fun being a fan, and that quality is definitely in evidence here. In addition, if you’ve never read a Shadow novel and don’t know much about the series, GANGLAND’S DOOM is an excellent concise introduction to one of the longest running and most influential pulp magazines that also had an important influence on other areas of popular culture. This is well worth reading and highly recommended.
And since I haven’t read a Shadow novel myself for a while, it’s really put me in the mood for one. Whether or not I actually get around to reading one before something else distracts me (I’m a lot like a puppy that way), who knows? We’ll see.
Yeah, I went back to the old template. I never could get the colors on the new one to look like I wanted them to. Just pretend that you never saw the other one. These are not the droids you're looking for . . .
I changed the look of the blog sort of on the spur of the moment, figuring that after more than six years it was time for something new. So far I like it, but if I decide I hate it I'll change it to something else. No point in standing still.
I started working on a new book today, too, always a good feeling, and got some more details on my schedule for next year, also a plus.
Livia's latest Fresh-Baked Mystery novel is now available. I'm hardly an unbiased reader, but I really like these books. Great characters, very twisty plots, and lots of local color. And I get to sample most of the recipes that are featured in them, too. Highly recommended.
As reported by Curt Phillips on the PulpMags Yahoo Group:
"Western writer Herman Hascal Giles died Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2010, in a hospice facility in Bristol, Tennessee. He was 88. Giles was well known locally as a former newspaperman and had been the publisher of our leading regional newspaper - The Bristol Herald Courior - for 30 years beginning about 1950, but pulpfans will remember him as Hascal Giles, the author of 5 novels and several dozen western short stories for MASKED RIDER and other western pulps."
He also wrote several Steve Reese novels for RANGE RIDERS WESTERN
and came out of retirement in the Eighties to write several stand-alone
traditional Western novels that were published by Zebra, I believe. I hate
to admit it, but I don't think I've ever read anything by Hascal Giles. I
probably ought to remedy that. Rest in peace.
I know I said I wasn't going to be posting as much, but yesterday I hit a million words for the year again, sixth year in a row, and I think that's worth noting. Last year I didn't reach a million words until December 1, so I'm a few weeks ahead of that pace. I'm very grateful to the editors who have faith in me and give me a chance to write that much, and to Livia for everything she does to make the process work as smoothly as it does. (And let me tell you, she does a lot!)
As with so many of these books, I can tell you where and at least roughly when I bought my original copy of this novel. I picked it up used at Thompson’s Bookstore in downtown Fort Worth during one of those long-ago, seemingly-endless-at-the-time junior high summers I spent watching old movies on TV, playing sandlot baseball, kissing a girl who was spending the summer with her cousin who lived down the street from me (I wish I could remember her name!), and reading mass quantities of comic books, digest magazines, and paperbacks. I probably read most of it on my parents’ front porch stretched out on one of those folding lounge chairs made from interwoven strips of green and white plastic that left a crosshatch pattern on any bare skin that came in contact with them for very long.
But what about the book, you say, or am I going to spend this entire post waxing nostalgic? Well, I can tell you that I remembered it as one of my favorites from the Tarzan series and one of my favorite Burroughs novels, period, because it was so goofy and over-the-top. When I recently came across a copy of that same Ace edition with the Frazetta cover, I decided it was time to reread it and see how it holds up after all those years.
I’m happy to report that I enjoyed it just as much, if not more, this time around. It’s certainly the funniest Burroughs novel I’ve ever read.
Tarzan himself barely appears in the first half of this book. It’s the story of a group of filmmakers who go to Africa to make a picture about a “lion man”, a boy who is raised by lions and becomes, well, the king of the jungle. This allows Burroughs to make considerable fun of Hollywood, including the casting of a novice actor and champion marathon runner as the Tarzan-like Lion Man. Any resemblance to champion swimmer Johnny Weissmuller I’m sure was completely intended. By this time in his career, Burroughs had already gone through the experience of producing his own Tarzan movie, the serial THE NEW ADVENTURES OF TARZAN, starring Herman Brix (later known as Bruce Bennett), so he’s able to paint a satirical picture of Hollywood executives, directors, and writers, along with the other members of a motion picture company on location.
Not surprisingly, the movie safari runs into a lot of trouble. They’re attacked by hostile natives, betrayed by some of their own, and split up to endure some assorted adventures, as Burroughs employs his usual technique of cutting back and forth between parallel storylines. So far, so good, although other than the humor there’s really not much to distinguish TARZAN AND THE LION MAN from most of the other books in the generally lackluster second half of the Tarzan series.
But then, halfway through, Burroughs comes up with a twist so bizarre that I remembered it vividly more than four decades later, and that plot element, which I can’t even describe without ruining it for any potential readers, dominates the rest of the book. Reading it now, it made slightly more sense to me than it did the first time around, but it still requires a considerable suspension of disbelief. Burroughs makes it work, though, and he’s not content to leave things that way, either, but instead piles on more and more goofiness, throwing in plot twists almost all the way to the end.
And what an ending. The final chapter serves as an epilogue to the book and is one of the best things Burroughs ever wrote. Which is why I issue this warning: if you happen to read the Ace edition of this book, don’t read the foreword by Camille Cazedessus, Jr., which gives away ’way too much of what happens, especially in the end.
I’ll be honest with you. You might find this book stupid, silly, and ridiculous and think that I’m crazy for recommending it. What can I say? It worked for me, otherwise I wouldn’t have remembered it so well and enjoyed it so much 45 years later. It’s really not representative of the Tarzan series, other than TARZAN AND THE FOREIGN LEGION, which has some of the same sort of humor although it’s played much more straight for the most part. But if you want to read a book that’s almost a MAD Magazine version of Tarzan, written by the character’s creator himself, look no further than TARZAN AND THE LION MAN.
Well, actually, we're not. I haven't hunted rabbits since I was a kid visiting relatives in West Texas. However, the reason this blog has gone silent in recent days is because Monday I got an email from one of my editors wanting to know the ETA on the current manuscript. Seems the publisher wants to move it up several months on the schedule. So I'm trying to wrap it up in time to send it to him next week. I have a Forgotten Books post lined up for tomorrow (although it's not an official Forgotten Books week), and I'll have one for next week as well. Other than that I'll just be writing most of the time. Of course, don't get me wrong, this is a good thing.
Possible SPOILERS ahead.
Several people recommended PLANET HULK to me as one of the best things Marvel has done in recent years, so I finally got around to reading it. Unlike a lot of storylines, you don’t have to have read 400 previous issues to know what’s going on. If you have even a basic grasp of the Marvel Universe you can follow this one. Several brainy superheroes – Reed Richards, Tony Stark, and Dr. Strange among them – decide the best way to deal with the Hulk is to send him to a distant uninhabited planet where there’s no one to hurt him and no one for him to hurt. The Hulk has always professed a wish to be left alone, so they decide to give him that life. They get their chance when S.H.I.E.L.D. sends the Hulk into space to deal with the threat of an artificially intelligent satellite that’s gone rogue. Reed and Stark modify the shuttle carrying the Hulk so that when he’s finished with his mission, it will carry him off into deep space to the sanctuary planet they’ve selected. (All this is told in a run of issues collected in PLANET HULK PRELUDE, which I’ve also read.)
Unfortunately, things don't go as planned. The shuttle carrying the Hulk goes through some sort of mysterious portal instead, and he finds himself on the savage planet Sakarr, where he is enslaved, forced to fight for his life as a gladiator, leads a rebellion, winds up as the king of the whole place, and falls in love. I hope that’s not too much of a spoiler, but honestly, if you’ve ever read Robert E. Howard or Edgar Rice Burroughs, you’re gonna know where this epic yarn is going pretty much every step of the way. It’s not quite “Hulk as Conan” or “Hulk as John Carter”, but it’s close to a blend of the two with some influence from Harlan Ellison as well, by way of the classic Ellison-plotted Hulk story, “The Brute That Shouted Love at the Heart of the Atom”. (Funny, when I bought that issue and a handful of others at Lester’s Pharmacy and took it home to read on a summer morning, I never dreamed I’d be writing about it more than forty years later.)
Despite having a pretty good idea what was going to happen, I really enjoying reading this massive collection. As scripter Greg Pak mentions in an afterword, the whole storyline had its genesis in four words: “Hulk”, “alien planet”, and “battleaxe”. That would have gotten my blood pumping, too, as it did Pak’s. His scripts are excellent, with plenty of action, some colorful back-story, the occasional poignant moment, and the even more occasional touches of humor. There’s an effective cameo appearance by another major player in the Marvel Universe, too.
I wasn’t as fond of the art by Carlo Pagulayan, Aaron Lopresti, and various other hands. Some of it’s great, including a number of full-page panels reminiscent of Frank Frazetta’s Conan illustrations, but there were too many pages where the action was confusing and difficult to follow. I know, you’ve heard that complaint from me before about today’s comic books, but I like to be able to tell what’s going on. Overall, the art is okay, and you certainly shouldn’t let it keep you from reading this collection if you’re a fan of the Hulk, but I would have loved to see this storyline illustrated by, say, Neal Adams and Tom Palmer. That’s just me, though. The whole thing is good enough for me to give this one a solid recommendation.
