Tagged: Frankenstein

Mike Gold: Bizarro – Who Am Him?

Bizarro Strip

One of the most enduring DC Comics creations, Bizarro has been with us since 1958 – either debuting in the Superman newspaper strip, according to editor Mort Weisinger, or in Superboy #68 according to where most baby boomers first found him. Either way, that original Bizarro was quite a different being than he is today. In fact, the personality, appearance and modus operandi of Superman’s brother-in-harms seem to differ with just about every use.

Bizarro 1Originally Bizarro was a sympathetic character, the result of an experiment that didn’t quite work. Half-Frankenstein’s monster, half-Quasimodo; he was a manufactured man who grew the most human of hearts over the course of his initial appearance in both the Superman strip and the Superboy story.

That Superboy story sold like a sumbych. Editor Weisinger started putting him in every Superman family title he could – cross-editor crossovers didn’t exist in 1958, except for the Superman/Batman stories in World’s Finest. In less than three years Adventure Comics cover-featured an ongoing Tales of the Bizarro World series.

In this series all the pith was removed and the creature and the stories were played for laughs. That wasn’t hard, as Bizarro’s superpower was to be and do the opposite of what the “normal” did. By now he had his own planet populated by equally imperfect duplications of other beings from both the reader’s universe and DC’s. Bizarro even introduced the Bizarro President Kennedy to the Bizarro Marilyn Monroe. This happened years before we found out that the real Kennedy and Monroe were making the beast with two backs right there in the people’s White House.

bizarro01Weisinger was a very, very well-connected man and he had many friends in high places. In 1976 I asked Mort if he had inside information at the time. He glowed, looked at me and said: “You know what they say.” I replied “Ummm… If I told you I’d have to kill you?” and Mort said “That’s right.”

The Tales of the Bizarro World stories lacked tension and the type of heroic action one associates with superhero comics, and because gravity does work it was necessarily lacking in internal consistency. After a little more than a year, Tales of the Bizarro World was replaced with Tales of the Legion of Super-Heroes, and that ran for about seven years.

You can’t keep a good creature down, and Bizarro has reappeared with a frequency exceeded only by The Joker. But, as I noted at the outset, there was no external consistency to the character. He was a goofy monster, he was a confused construct, he was (most frequently) a monster who acted as a super-villain but with the motivation of a guy who simply does the opposite of what Superman would do. Maybe.

Bizarro 2I wish somebody would sit down and read Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein, published in the 1940s by Prize Comics. Many reprints abound; to start I’d recommend the one Yoe Books and IDW did in 2010. If you’ve never heard of it, it may very well be the best American comic book you’ve never heard of. Briefer is in the same league as Eisner, Cole and Toth, and he managed to tell a great many stories without tripping over the concept. Frankenstein was sympathetic and heroic, pithy and funny, and always a joy to read.

I like Bizarro, particularly that original newspaper comics story. And I like many of the various interpretations of the character that have come our way in the subsequent 58 years. Some are truly brilliant.

Despite DC’s multi-purpose guardianship over the decades, Bizarro has become an accepted term in the English language. The term “Bizarro World” is often used as a metaphor. It’s even in most computer spell-checkers.

And, really, who among us can’t identify with a character is constantly misunderstood?

John Ostrander: A Good Penny

Episode 104

I usually don’t watch horror films or TV shows, and that might surprise some people. After all, I’m known to have written some horror stories, such as DC’s Wasteland. My standard response is that I would rather give nightmares than get them. A bit flip perhaps, but largely true. I have an active imagination (from which I make my living) and the concepts and images from a horror story can stick in my head long after I’ve seen the show.

For example, I went to see The Exorcist when it first hit the movie theaters and, oh my, it played heavily on the atavistic fears of my Roman Catholic altar boy choir boy upbringing. I slept that night with the lights on despite being of college age. Actually, I was in bed but I didn’t sleep that much. Part of me was convinced that the ol’ debbil was gonna git me.

This is an explanation of why I didn’t watch Penny Dreadful when it first showed on Showtime. Recently, however, I got a chance to get caught up with the first two seasons. I didn’t binge watch them; the most I could take was two episodes at a sitting. I found them too unsettling.

The show is set in Victorian London and deals with a number of supernatural threats. A team of sorts is drawn together including an African explorer (Sir Malcolm Murray), his mysterious African servant (Sembene), a witch (Vanessa Ives), an American gunslinger (Ethan Chandler), Dorian Gray (of The Picture of fame) and Doctor Victor Frankenstein and his Creature(s).

If that sounds reminiscent of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, well, it is… in concept. It is also extraordinarily well done. The show’s creator is John Logan and, I believe, he has also written all the episodes. You may know Mr. Logan from his work on other movies such as Skyfall and the upcoming Spectre, as well as Hugo, Rango (such an odd and interesting film!), and Gladiator among many others. A very talented writer and that talent is in full display here.

The production values are first rate – the sets, the costumes, all the details. Think Downton Abbey with vampires. The cast is also primo – and you have an odd James Bond connection with Timothy Dalton (Bond at one time) playing Sir Malcolm and Eva Green (who was Vesper Lynn in Casino Royale) joining John Logan. Harry Treadway, who plays Dr. Frankenstein, was also in the TV mini-series about Bond’s creator, Fleming.

Josh Hartnet portrays Ethan Chandler, the American gunslinger with a dark and secret past. Despite that past, the character is one of the most decent persons in the show. Sembene is portrayed by Danny Sapani who shares a Doctor Who connection with Billie Piper (Brona, Lily) who, of course, was Rose Tyler on Doctor Who. (Yes, I’m nerding out.) You see quite a bit more of Ms. Piper here. Quite a bit more.

I don’t know Reeve Carney who appears as Dorian Gray, but he’s very effective in a very unsettling role.

My favorite character, however, is Frankenstein’s Creature, played by Rory Kinnear (another Bond connection – he’s been Tanner in the last few Bond films). He is a monster, yes – he can be brutal and murderous and full of rage. He is also the most heart-breaking character in the show. He knows what he is and, by his very appearance, knows that he has no place where he fits in. He suffers most from ordinary humans (who can be the biggest monsters in the show). His longing, his despair, his rage all make him, as one character says of him late in the second series, the most human of them all.

The reason I like the show so much is the characterization. All the characters have multiple levels and all are flawed. My own theory is that you can’t really experience horror unless, on some level, you sympathize with the characters. If you don’t feel something for them, you won’t feel anything for what happens to them. You can be shocked, yes, but you don’t really feel anything. What is the point if you don’t feel? Horror is something that happens to people that we know. There can be sensation, sure, but if you don’t identify with those going through the horror, it means nothing. It’s just incident.

I should probably also mention that there is violence and sex and nudity (both male and female, although mostly female); this is pay-cable TV, after all. If any of that might bother you, give the show a wide berth. None of it ever seems gratuitous to me. I should also mention that the second season is even more unnerving than the first. A third season is projected for next year and I approach it with both anticipation and dread.

I realize that I’m late coming to the Penny Dreadful party but I think the show can be streamed and certainly it’s available on DVD and Blu-Ray so I feel justified in recommending it which I do most heartily. If I was writing horror for TV, this is the type of story I would like to tell.

Martha Thomases: Funny, You Don’t Look Booish

Boo!

It’s Halloween today, when we laugh at death and taunt ghosts, witches and demons. Traditionally, we dress up in costume as something that scares us, exorcising our fears through make-up and disguise. If this was still a barometer of what we are afraid of, most women (and girls) are terrified of sex. And of nurses, police officers. And of sexy nurses and sexy police officers.

Which brings us to comics. Of course.

There have been a lot of scary comic books over the decades. Some were so scary that Congress felt the need to step in. Some scared me and didn’t scare you, and some scared you and didn’t scare me. That’s why there is room in the comments.

Alan Moore has written the most comics that scared me the most. From all the bugs to vampires that figure out how to be out in the daytime (stay underwater where the sun can’t reach you) to menopausal werewolves in his Swamp Thing, to super-powered conspiracies in Watchmen and assorted creepy Lovecraftian monsters in various one-offs, Moore’s work regularly freaks me out.

Most of us don’t believe in Lovecraftian monsters, werewolves, vampires or other tropes of the horror genre. I’m not even really afraid of bugs or conspiracies – although please keep both out of my kitchen and bathrooms and, actually, my entire apartment, thanks.

Most literary critics consider that classic monsters of horror to be metaphors for the things that are really able to hurt us. Frankenstein is about men who want to create life without a womb. Dracula is about the dangers of desire. Zombies reflect our fear of infectious diseases.

You know what’s scary right now? Sugar and the people who sell it.

And fundamentalists.

And Ebola.

These are things that can’t be fixed with a stake through the heart or a healing crystal. These are things that can still kill you when the masks are off, and the candy is all gone.

They are also not things that will inspire a single noble hero, or a small group on a quest. Instead, to fight them we will need an educated and engaged citizenry acting together to do the right thing. It means putting down the remote. It means getting off the couch.

That’s the thought that scares me the most. Not the ghouls on the street tonight, but the ones elected next Tuesday.

 

ALL PULP’S A BOOK A DAY TAKES A LOOK AT EDISON’S FRANKENSTEIN

ALL PULP’S A BOOK A DAY TAKES A LOOK AT EDISON’S FRANKENSTEIN

http://www.bearmanormedia.com/

-EdisonsFrankenstein.jpg

THE COMPLETE TORTUROUS STORY of the 1910 film
version of Frankenstein is narrated in this 100th Anniversary edition.
Everything you ever wanted to know about the classic first
Frankenstein film and then some. This highly researched document
begins in the dusty archives of Thomas A. Edison and follows a
trail of evidence that leads through the tattered pages of pre-
Hollywood film history. The story unfolds of the making of the
film and its disappearance on to the actual re-discovery of the
long-lost 1910 Frankenstein film starring Charles Ogle, Augustus
Phillips, and Mary Fuller, and finally getting it released on DVD.
Helped step-by-step with obscure Edison Manufacturing Co.
documents and numerous rare photographs, many published for
the very first time, this motion picture, its unknown impact on
later Frankenstein films and intertextuality are finally revealed and
brought back to life.

Created in a style that appeals to all audiences, author Wiebel
brings forth a living book from dead tissues. Edison’s Frankenstein
stands on its own in the world of horror filmography and is a
welcome edition to any library.

“Of the over 400 books on Frankenstein that I have in my library,
this is the gem of my collection and the one I’ve been
waiting for.” – Forrest J. Ackerman