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Win a Violent Night Digital Code

Win a Violent Night Digital Code

David Harbour brings such verve to his performances that even something as over-the-top as Violent Night brings a smile to your face. The film was a surprise holiday season hit for Universal Studios and now Universal Home Entertainment has given us two digital codes to giveaway to those on the nice list.

To be eligible to win one of these codes, we want to hear your most over-the-top Christmas experience. Did you receive a lump of coal? Find Santa eating the milk and cookies? Find reindeer poop on the roof? Tell us your most amazing story by 11:59 p.m., Wednesday, January 25, 2023. The decision of the ComicMix judges will be final.

From the producers of Nobody and John Wick comes VIOLENT NIGHT, available to own with bonus features on Digital January 20, 2023 and on Blu-ray and DVD on January 24, 2023 from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment. “The greatest Christmas action movie of all time” (CINAPSE) comes home in a collector’s edition that includes over half an hour of never-before-seen bonus content including deleted and extended scenes, a feature commentary, and behind-the-scenes featurettes delivering more of the movie for your Christmas collection.
 
When a team of mercenaries breaks into a wealthy family compound taking everyone inside hostage, they are not prepared for a surprise combatant: Santa Claus. David Harbour (Stranger Things) stars as St. Nick in the “wildly entertaining” (SCREEN RANT) holiday romp, delivering some serious season’s beatings to save the family and the spirit of Christmas.
 
Directed by Tommy Wirkola (Hansel & Gretel: Witch HuntersDead Snow franchise), VIOLENT NIGHT also stars Emmy® winner John Leguizamo (John Wick), Edi Patterson (The Righteous Gemstones), Cam Gigandet (Without Remorse), Alex Hassell (Cowboy Bebop), Alexis Louder (The Tomorrow War) and Beverly D’Angelo (National Lampoon’s Vacation franchise).

EXCLUSIVE BONUS FEATURES ON BLU-RAYTM, DVD & DIGITAL:

  • Deleted and Extended Scenes
    • Family Arrives at the Mansion
    • Jason and Linda in Bedroom
    • Krampus Sees Trudy’s Radio
    • Santa on the Roof
    • Walk to the Manger
    • Family Resolution
    • Bad Dad
    • Cast Call Back
    • Extended Scenes
  • Quarrelin’ Kringle – Cast and crew relay why David Harbour is the perfect brawler for this combative rendition of Santa.
  • Santa’s Helpers: The Making Of VIOLENT NIGHT – Tommy Wirkola and David Leitch have reunited for another madcap, violent fairytale with heart in VIOLENT NIGHT. This making-of will celebrate their spirited reunion as well as the other little helpers.
  • Deck the Halls with Brawls – Go behind the action as we go blow for blow with the new villains of Christmas.
  • Feature Commentary with Director Tommy Wirkola, Producer Guy Danella, Writer Pat Casey and Writer Josh Miller
Supergirl in the Legion of Super-Heroes Spotlight

Supergirl in the Legion of Super-Heroes Spotlight

Striking that classic pose, Supergirl is voiced by Meg Donnelly, best known for her role as Taylor Otto on the American Housewife and as Mary Campbell in The Winchesters.

Kara/Supergirl has a rough run – witnessing the destruction of her home planet, battling an armed Solomon Grundy, and generally struggling to fit into life on Earth. But that’s just the start of her adventure in LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES, the latest DC Universe Movie, coming to 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Combo Pack and Digital starting February 7, 2023 from Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment.

Kara and her mother Alura react to the beginning of the end of Krypton in an opening scene from Legion of Super-Heroes. Kara is voiced by Meg Donnelly (American Housewife, The Winchesters), while popular voiceover actress Jennifer Hale (Mass Effect franchise) provides the voice of Alura.
Grundy’s got a gun!. The monstrous Solomon Grundy is armed with high-tech artillery as he wreaks havoc on Metropolis – until Supergirl arrives on the scene. Grundy is voiced by Darin De Paul (Mortal Kombat Legendsfranchise)

Welcome to the 31st century and the Legion Academy, where a new generation hones their powers with hopes of joining the Legion of Super-Heroes. Devastated by tragedy, Supergirl struggles to adjust to her new life on Earth. Taking her cousin Superman’s advice, Supergirl leaves their space-time to attend the Academy. There, she quickly makes new friends, as well as a new enemy with old ties: Brainiac 5. But a nefarious plot lurks in the shadows – the mysterious group known as the Dark Circle seeks a powerful weapon held in the Academy’s vault. Find out if the budding heroes can rise to the challenge in this all-new DC Universe Movie!

Kara/Supergirl’s primary comfort on Earth is her cousin, Superman. The two Kryptonians have a heart-to-heart rooftop chat in a touching scene in Legion of Super-Heroes. Kara/Supergirl is voiced by Meg Donnelly (American Housewife, The Winchesters), while Darren Criss (Glee, The Assassination of Gianni Versace) reprises his role as Superman.
Who Will Make the Pancakes by Megan Kelso

Who Will Make the Pancakes by Megan Kelso

Comics take a long time to make – especially if the creator has other things to do with her life. (Like: making money, living, family…all of those usual things.) So there are wonderful creators a reader could almost forget about, just because it’s so long between new books.

Megan Kelso is a wonderful creator, a thoughtful writer and detailed artist of stories that are realistic, more or less, and always about people rather than abstractions or genre furniture. I think she’s had only one full-length graphic novel, the interesting allegory The Artichoke Mother, but her shorter pieces have been collected in Queen of the Black Black  and The Squirrel Mother .

And, not to bury the lede, but she just had a new book published: Who Will Make the Pancakes: Five Stories , which has two hundred big pages of Megan Kelso comics, comprised of, as it says, five fairly-long stories.

My sense is that Kelso’s stories all grow out of her life, but aren’t necessarily about her. They might be – that’s always a possibility – but the reader can’t assume.

Actually, that’s a good rule for any creator: the reader can’t assume. 

These five stories are mostly about women – “Cats in Service” is more complicated, closer to the allegory of Artichoke, and “The Golden Lasso,” I’d say, is more specifically about girls [1] – ranging in time and space from WWII-era to the modern day. Since there’s only five of them, I feel compelled to write a bit about each one, but they’re all good, all strong stories. You could stop reading now and just go get the book; I wouldn’t be offended.

Kelso’s most famous story leads off here: “Watergate Sue,” part of The New York Times Magazine‘s experiment with comics storytelling in the late Aughts. (They stopped after eight storylines, by eight great creators. No idea why; there were plenty more people who would have been happy to do it.) What I like about this story is how it’s not exactly about Sue – who is thirty-two and pregnant in the modern side of the story – and not exactly about her mother Eve – who was probably just slightly younger and became pregnant in the historical side, set in 1973-74 – but about both of them, the way they compare and contrast. Kelso shows intensely here: none of these people will explain what they care about or want, for all that they talk incessantly throughout the story. And the Watergate hearings and Nixon’s eventual downfall is not just background, it’s important…but, again, Kelso won’t tell you what to think about that, or how it connects to her characters.

“Cats in Service” is, in its odd way, the most obvious story in the book – or maybe I mean straightforward. It’s a dream- or fable-like story about a family that trained cats to be domestic servants – yes, upright in livery, Downton Abbey-style – and how that all worked out. I don’t know if Kelso meant it as an allegory or metaphor – for domestication of animals or for dehumanization of servants, or something more complex – but it can be read a few different ways, and leaves a reader unsure but wondering.

“The Egg Room” has the most interesting central character in Florence. Kelso’s main characters often run to a type, in visuals and personality: thoughtful, contained, smallish women deeply connected to others. Flo is louder, larger, pushier than that, and she looks different from the average Kelso protagonist, clearly older and maybe even from a different ethnicity. Her story is about…well, a lot of things. One of the strands that spoke to me the most – I’m not claiming this is central, or even important – is how she wanted to make great art, wanted to be creative and productive, but that didn’t happen for her. She’s not the only person in the story, either, but I like to think of it as her story. The title here is another metaphor or allegory, which I won’t try to explain or spoil.

“Korin Voss” is a historical story: the title character is a single mother right after WWII, with two daughters who don’t understand or appreciate her life…as children never do of their parents. She’s one of those people who has unspoken rules about how she lives and what she should do, but doesn’t always live up to the best interpretation of her own rules and has trouble bending her rules to help herself and her family. This one is pretty closely centered on her: it does jump around a bit in time, but not too much – it’s all this era, all this part of her life, all about the changes she needs to make as the world changes around her.

And last is “The Golden Lasso,” which I suspect may be the closest to autobiographical. It’s about a girl named Diana in about 1980-81, when she’s twelve and thirteen. She wants to be good at rock-climbing, maybe because it’s something physical she can do well, maybe because an attractive slightly older boy is a guide, maybe because of a male adult leader. Maybe a lot of maybes: it’s something she grabs onto as a way to stand out, to work hard, to excel. All of that is great, no matter why she found it. Later, as the story goes on, there’s some modern commentary, of Diana talking to other girls she knew then, many years later, about the things they didn’t talk about then. And she does have a golden lasso, like that more famous Diana, in some scenes, which forces the truth, mostly from birds and other creatures. It’s not real. Or it is as real as it needs to be. It’s real for the story; it’s real for Diana, when she needed it.

All of Kelso’s art is supple and smooth; her lines usually thin around rounded figures, somewhat towards the minimalist or ligne claire without heading all the way in that direction. Three of the stories are colored – all in somewhat different styles and ways, I think – while “Cats” and “Korin” are black and white. I tend to see some Carol Lay in Kelso’s people: the roundness, the open faces, the gestures.

These are five excellent, meaty stories, ones that will live in your head afterward and make you think. You should read them.

[1] There’s a long history of men writers using “girls” to mean adult women, at least subconsciously infantilizing. I try to be aware of that, and never to do it. So here I do mean girls, not “girls.”

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

David Harbour’s Violent Night Comes Home Jan. 24

David Harbour’s Violent Night Comes Home Jan. 24

Universal City, California, January 13, 2023 – From the producers of Nobody and John Wick comes VIOLENT NIGHT, available to own with bonus features on Digital January 20, 2023 and on Blu-ray and DVD on January 24, 2023 from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment. “The greatest Christmas action movie of all time” (CINAPSE) comes home in a collector’s edition that includes over half an hour of never-before-seen bonus content including deleted and extended scenes, a feature commentary, and behind-the-scenes featurettes delivering more of the movie for your Christmas collection.
 
When a team of mercenaries breaks into a wealthy family compound taking everyone inside hostage, they are not prepared for a surprise combatant: Santa Claus. David Harbour (Stranger Things) stars as St. Nick in the “wildly entertaining” (SCREEN RANT) holiday romp, delivering some serious season’s beatings to save the family and the spirit of Christmas.
 
Directed by Tommy Wirkola (Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, Dead Snow franchise), VIOLENT NIGHT also stars Emmy® winner John Leguizamo (John Wick), Edi Patterson (The Righteous Gemstones), Cam Gigandet (Without Remorse), Alex Hassell (Cowboy Bebop), Alexis Louder (The Tomorrow War) and Beverly D’Angelo (National Lampoon’s Vacation franchise).
 
With the purchase of VIOLENT NIGHT on disc or Digital, fans are eligible to earn points towards digital movies via the Universal All-Access Rewards program. Members can redeem their points for digital movies, swag and more!  

  • Deleted and Extended Scenes
    • Family Arrives at the Mansion
    • Jason and Linda in Bedroom
    • Krampus Sees Trudy’s Radio
    • Santa on the Roof
    • Walk to the Manger
    • Family Resolution
    • Bad Dad
    • Cast Call Back
    • Extended Scenes
  • Quarrelin’ Kringle – Cast and crew relay why David Harbour is the perfect brawler for this combative rendition of Santa.
  • Santa’s Helpers: The Making Of VIOLENT NIGHT – Tommy Wirkola and David Leitch have reunited for another madcap, violent fairytale with heart in VIOLENT NIGHT. This making-of will celebrate their spirited reunion as well as the other little helpers.
  • Deck the Halls with Brawls – Go behind the action as we go blow for blow with the new villains of Christmas.
  • Feature Commentary with Director Tommy Wirkola, Producer Guy Danella, Writer Pat Casey and Writer Josh Miller
Adventuregame Comics, Vol. 1: Leviathan by Jason Shiga

Adventuregame Comics, Vol. 1: Leviathan by Jason Shiga

Just over a decade ago, Jason Shiga made a big, complex story engine in book format, called Meanwhile… , telling a choose-your-own-adventure-style story with clusters of comics panels connected by “pipes” and numbers, driven by the reader’s choices. It was twisty, it was complex, it was inventive, it was brilliant, it was a hell of a lot of fun. It rewarded an obsessive re-reading, to get to every page, every path, and was equally amusing and thought-provoking.

As far as I can tell, there’s been nothing else like it since – not from Shiga, not from anyone else. But this fall, what looks to be the first in a series with somewhat smaller (presumably easier-to-achieve) goals appeared, to show that Shiga is back with his pipes and story choices.

That’s Adventuregame Comics, Vol. 1: Leviathan . This one is a small-format book, which cuts down the amount of real estate devoted to the story, and it’s a more straightforward D&Dish adventure: “you” are an adventurer in a tavern in a fantasy land, and “you” get hired by an old sea captain to retrieve a fabled artifact that is at the center of your land, Cloud Harbor.

The story is much simpler than Meanwhile: there’s a “good” ending and a “bad” ending, but all of the other mishaps that could potentially lead to other bad endings tend to dump “you” on an island for exiles and miscreants, and, if you paid attention, you know how to get back from that island to the mainland.

In terms of story structure, if the average choose-your-adventure book is a branching bush – a few choices lead to a lot of different, mostly unpleasant endings – then Leviathan is a latticework, with multiple paths through and around it but almost always another connection that loops back to places you’ve been before.

So, while reading this book, you may find certain sequences of pages come up multiple times, especially navigating around this small world. In that way, it’s a lot like an computer adventure game: even the way Shiga draws the world-view pages echoes classic games like Zelda and early Pokemon titles. The cover reading line does say “Part comic! Part maze! Part game!” and that is roughly true, though the maze elements are pretty simple.

Shiga has always been a rationalist, both at the base level of his stories and in how he works out permutations of his premises. I don’t want to give away the details of Leviathan, but that’s still the case here, even if a fantasy world seems to be an odd choice for such a science-focused creator.

In the end, this is fun and entertaining, with a lot of small details that are important when looping back around and a mostly-serious tone. It’s not as ambitious as Meanwhile, and doesn’t hit the heights of that previous book, but it’s a good, inventive story-machine mostly for younger readers. And the promise of more books like this is also intriguing: will they also be set in Cloud Harbor, or somewhere nearby, or will they be entirely separate stories? With Shiga, I would always bet on the side of complexity and connection, but we’ll have to see.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Mannie Murphy

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Mannie Murphy

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden is a world-famous 1963 semi-autobiographical novel, and the 1977 movie based on it, about one woman’s mental illness and survival. It’s also a bland 1970 country song by Lynn Anderson.

And a number of other books as well. Probably other things. Titles can’t be copyrighted; the evocative ones get used over and over again. But when they’re used for something big in the same area, a careful writer will want to make sure that any baggage from that title are appropriate, that the connotations are resonant, that the title has a purpose.

I have no idea why Mannie Murphy’s debut graphic novel is named I Never Promised You a Rose Garden . But, then, there’s a lot of things about this book I don’t understand: it’s in large part a series of very specific artistic decisions that baffle me.

I want to be clear: this is at least partially a Me Problem. Murphy’s Rose Garden circles a knot of topics that are obviously very important to them, and that they deeply believe are inextricably interlinked. But I did not find the book itself made those connections clear, or told its story cleanly, or could even stay out of its own way consistently.

Perhaps the deepest issue is the place of Murphy in the book itself. This is a deeply told book, with a specific point of view, often angry, politically committed, specific and local to Portland, Oregon. But the book tells us nothing about Murphy; they remain just the voice telling this story – this story which, the book says repeatedly, is personal but will never say why or how – with a few disjointed, random facts about their life dropped in, almost by accident. There’s also a friend named “Alder” who reappears multiple times, maybe as a stand-in for this whole Portland community Murphy is trying to represent, but is never seen on the page.

So we don’t know who Murphy is. Murphy’s voice in this book wants to tell us this is all important, and that we should believe them because they know this world…but gives us no reason to rely on that voice. Worse, the voice rambles and wanders, jumping from topic to topic in a way that may be carefully planned but feels chaotic and disjointed. The occasional wrong word choice or obviously agit-prop smash cut (“suddenly, a hundred years earlier, there were racists!”) only adds to the shakiness.

We want to believe in Murphy. We want to settle in and believe this voice will tell us the truth, connect all these disparate strands into something specific. But, as the book drones on and on, we start to think it’s the comics equivalent of one of those scrawled manifestoes sent into a newspaper, making the grand case for water fluoridation being the world-controlling tool of the Trilateral Commission or that the Alien Space Bats are coming to steal our spleens.

So: what are the topics of Murphy’s Rose Garden? First, the overdose death of River Phoenix in 1993 – Murphy clearly identified with or loved the actor Phoenix was, and there’s a semi-buried note of wanting to find people to blame for Phoenix’s death throughout the book, that this needs to be someone’s fault. Related to that – partly because Murphy seems to be most focused on Phoenix in the movie My Own Private Idaho, partly because what’s most important to Murphy all of the time is how Portland anything is – is the filmography of Portland local Gus Van Sant, who Murphy seems to loathe with the heat of a million suns.

The first section of the book stays mostly focused on Phoenix and Van Sant and Keanu Reeves, the other lead of that movie, as Murphy passive-aggressively attacks Van Sant over and over again for…this is not quite clear to me. There’s a sense that Van Sant is just wrong – about the people and places of Portland, about what queer life is like, about everything and anything in the world. To Murphy, every single artistic choice Van Sant made is the wrong one and everything he did was horrible…except that Murphy is also clearly obsessed with Van Sant and his movies. There’s also an implied theory of art that needs to be correct – that some viewpoints, some stories are just wrong, and can be discarded because of that, and that the good people will obviously know which stories and themes and ideas are right and which are wrong.

Along the way, Murphy uses first names exclusively, as if these were close friends and not famous people that the pre-teen Murphy, as far as I can tell, never met or interacted with. “Gus” does this, and “Keanu” surely must feel like that, and obviously “River” is a dark, tormented, perfect, lovely soul, too good for this world. It’s all personal, as Murphy takes that tween-fan connection and bases a whole implied theory of Portland, queerness, and white supremacists on what seems to be primarily the first awakenings of sexual desire.

From that first section, Rose Garden swerves hard into white supremacy. You see, one character in Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy was loosely based on a locally-known Portland-scene guy, who led a hate-crime murder somewhat later and also appeared on an episode of Geraldo with a bunch of skinheads. As with many things in Rose Garden, the sequence of events is muddy – I’m never sure if this is just the way Murphy is telling the story, jumping to ideas as they come to mind, or if they’re being deliberately obfuscatory about dates that don’t line up to tell the clean story they want to be true. And, again, everything Van Sant ever did is either deliberately evil or accidentally malevolent, according to Murphy.

(Note: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Van Sant movie; I have no dog in this fight. But it’s really, really important to Murphy.)

All of the connections in Rose Garden are on that level: things that are so blindingly obvious in Murphy’s head that they can just jump from one thing to another, leaping decades or centuries or from film criticism to racist murders and get right into the thorny messy details that an outside reader doesn’t know or recognize or, frankly, often care about.

Most of Rose Garden is about the specific Pacific Northwest manifestation of white supremacy, as seen from the outside. Looking back on the book, I’m surprised there’s no queer critique of the obvious homosocial nature of that movement: Murphy seems to think of anyone in any level of that mindset, from any time in the past two hundred years, as equally evil and culpable for all bad things, utterly unredeemable and horrible and never distinguishable as individuals. For Murphy, Portland is the epicenter of evil white people, and that’s it.

But every American city has a racist past. Every American state is based in some way on white supremacy. Every region in the US has a history of cops killing people – usually POC, usually poor, usually low-status – that stretches to the present day, and a history of those cops getting away with it. I find it really hard to believe that Portland and Oregon are vastly more so than, for example, Birmingham and Alabama. So Murphy’s arguments comes across as special pleading, at best, or, more often, as a failure to see a large picture and a relentless focus on the parochial.

Bluntly, Murphy never makes the case that this place is different. Rose Garden never shows an understanding that other places even exist, that larger systemic problems exist, that any of this is more than just personal. In the end, I came to believe that Murphy cares about these issues because this is where they live and the people they know.

And, to quote Terry Pratchett, “Personal isn’t the same as important.”

Rose Garden‘s physical form also tends to aim in that personal direction, to make it look like a scrawled personal manifesto rather than a reasoned, generally-applicable argument about the wider world. Murphy’s pages are all split, half hand-written scripty text and half blue-wash images, one big picture per page. Again, it’s personal without being specific: Murphy doesn’t give away many details of their life here. It’s all public stuff: what school they went to, the media they cared about, people in the wider world. The viewpoint is personal, but Murphy doesn’t particularize it: we never learn what kind of person Murphy is, besides the clichés of someone who really liked River Phoenix and really hated white supremacists.

So, in the end, I want to believe in Rose Garden and to agree with its stances. I mean, I am against white supremacy – I hope anyone reading this can agree with that. And it is sad when young talented people take a lot of drugs and kill themselves. But Rose Garden is confused enough, and gets in its own way so much, that’s about as far as I can go. And that’s disappointing, but I think Murphy is still a young creator – there’s plenty of time to do more, to get more specific, to tell better stories, to make a clearer case. The energy is there, the spark is clear: it just needs focus.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Lugosi: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Dracula by Koren Shadmi

Lugosi: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Dracula by Koren Shadmi

There seems to be a decent-sized, and maybe still-growing, sub-genre of graphic novel biographies out there in the world. I’ve been away from that end of publishing for a while now, so I can’t speak authoritatively to the reasons why, but my cynical side thinks they’re aimed at the middle-grade need-to-do-a-report crowd, the modern equivalent of heavily illustrated “junior biographies” from my day.

But maybe there’s a serious adult market for comics biographies of random people – who knows? The world is big and full of unlikely things. I’m definitely seeing more of them, for whatever reasons.

Such as this random book today: Lugosi: The Rise & Fall of Hollywood’s Dracula , from the cartoonist Koren Shadmi. Shadmi is Israeli by birth, and some of his early comics stories were first published in France, but he’s now resident in New York and works in English. 

I’ve seen two very different books by Shadmi before: recently his fictional graphic novel Bionic , and a while back his debut short-story collection In the Flesh . From his website , I see he’s got a bunch of other books, roughly mixed between non-fiction and fiction, coming out more-or-less annually for the past decade – Lugosi is his most recent book, published last year.

It’s a fairly standard biography in comics form, starting with a loosely related introduction by a vaguely famous person (Joe R. Lansdale, the horror writer) that talks a lot about the subject of the book and very little about Shadmi’s work. Shadmi frames Lugosi’s story through the lens of a 1955 stint in rehab, near the end of his life, and returns to that frame periodically, mostly for a few panels or a page. I see that structure a lot in non-fiction comics – The Incredible Nellie Bly, where my post hasn’t gone live yet, does very much the same thing – but I think it’s mostly a fashion or style; it doesn’t necessarily add a whole lot to the chronological story to know that the subject eventually got old. At best, it’s a dash of pathos when we’re reading about an arrogant, womanizing guy who we might not be inclined to like all that much. (And we are doing that here.)

Other that returning to that frame story periodically, to show Lugosi in the grips of delirium tremens for dramatic effect, Shadmi tells Lugosi’s life in order, starting off with the usual early material on his youth in Hungary and how he got to America. The bulk of the book covers his American career, starting with the Dracula play in New York in 1927, when Lugosi was already in his mid-forties. The play is a hit, it goes on tour, Lugosi ends up in Hollywood, he stars in the film version – and his career is launched. From there, the book is a sequence of this movie and that one, feuding with Boris Karloff, and so on, with a few highs and a whole lot of mediums to lows. But Lugosi mostly kept working, and he made a lot of money for a while, so it’s hard to feel too bad for him when he cheats on yet another wife and runs through all of his money again.

Speaking of which, Lugosi was married and divorced four times – I don’t remember if the book gets into #3 much; there’s several decades of turmoil in his private life to get through here – and clearly was chasing a lot of other women for a long, long time. The book mentions the chasing without dramatizing much of it, besides the reason for one of his divorces, but the reader gets the sense that Lugosi was always on the make until nearly the end of his life.

Lugosi does what it aims to do: tell the story of a quirky, interesting life, hitting the moments that the people who really care will want to see – especially covering all of Lugosi’s late work with Ed Wood, the often-proclaimed worst filmmaker in the world. Lugosi’s life doesn’t make much of a story, and it’s not really uplifting, since he was a grandiose horndog who mostly made crappy horror movies and died half-forgotten, but Shadmi tells it truly and honestly, which is all anyone can do.

If you want a comics biography of Bela Lugosi, I don’t see that you could expect anything more comprehensive, fair, and thoughtful than this one.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Snow, Glass, Apples by Neil Gaiman and Colleen Doran

Snow, Glass, Apples by Neil Gaiman and Colleen Doran

I’ve mentioned the short story “Snow, Glass, Apples” before – it’s both one of Neil Gaiman’s best, most pointed short pieces and one of the most successful of the Ellen Datlow/Terri Windling-inspired burst of revisionist fairy tales from the early 1990s. (I see that my memory was slightly false – I thought it originally appeared in one of the “Red As Blood” anthologies, but it was a standalone chapbook and then reprinted in the 1995 Datlow/Windling annual.)

As so often with successful things, it’s part of different clusters – all those anthologies of nasty fairy tales, first, and then more recently an odd program that seems to be trying to turn every one of Gaiman’s best stories into individual graphic novels. (See How to Talk to Girls at Parties  and Troll Bridge ; I’m pretty sure there have been several others that I missed.)

So, in 2019, Colleen Doran adapted “Snow, Glass, Apples” (the short story) into the standalone graphic novel Snow, Glass, Apples  – which is what I’ve just read. Like most of the “Neil Gaiman Library” and similar projects (the Coraline  adaptation, the two-volume Graveyard Book  adaptation.) that I’ve seen, it’s a very respectful adaptation, using as many of Gaiman’s original words as possible and just illustrating them rather than attempting to transform the prose story into something new.

Which, somewhat ironically, is the opposite of how Gaiman works when he adapts things – he’s always been deeply transformative – but he’s a Big Deal and his fans want Pure Gaiman, so I assume his editors and publishers know exactly what they’re doing.

Snow, Glass, Apples is thus pretty much exactly the short story, or at least very large chunks of the prose of that story (which is pretty short to begin with), illustrated in a detailed, mostly Art Nouveau style by Doran, on mostly flowing, panel-less pages full of gorgeous, evocative art. If you know the story, this is it, literalized and illustrated by Doran. If you don’t know the story, this is nearly as good a way to discover it. (I’m enough of a purist to insist on that “nearly” – the original precise prose is better.)

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Ordinary Victories, Vol. 1 by Manu Larcenet

Ordinary Victories, Vol. 1 by Manu Larcenet

I may have this wrong, but here goes: Ordinary Victories is a series of four somewhat autobiographical bande dessinees by French cartoonist Manu Larcenet, originally published in French from 2003-2008 and published in two omnibuses in English soon afterward. The current English-language editions are back to being published individually, and seem to only be available in electronic formats. Their main character is a photojournalist named Marco Louis, and in the course of this first book he meets a woman, Emilie, who has a longer-term relationship with. (I also saw the second omnibus way back when, and wrote about it for ComicMix.)

At almost the same time – as in, starting the previous year, 2002, and putting out five volumes through 2008 – Larcenet also started a more specifically autobiographical series of books, Back to Basics, which he did with Jean-Yves Ferri. (See my posts on Back to Basics volumes one and two .) Basics features “Manu”, who looks almost exactly like “Marco” in Victories, but who is actually a cartoonist. Manu’s partner, “Mariette,” also bears a very close resemblance to “Emilie.”

I have the very strong suspicion that Victories is only very slightly less autobiographical than Basics, though it’s in a much more serious mode: this is more of a soul-searching “what should I do with my life” kind of story, while Basics is a lighter “moments from our crazy life out in a goofy rural town” story. I also think that Victories is largely about the years before Basics: they don’t tell the same story, or tell it in the same way, but, together, they tell two phases of Larcenet’s life.

So all that was in my head as I read this first book of Ordinary Victories : wondering how much of Manu is in Marco, and how much of Marco I could retroactively read into the Manu of Basics. But they are separate projects, in different genres: they may show complementary views of one life (or, maybe, they really don’t, and I’ve misunderstood), but they are still each their own things.

Marco is around thirty. He’s had a solid career, on the dangerous and unpleasant side of taking pictures professionally, but is on an extended break from it. He’s been seeing the same therapist for years, and thinks he’s “better” enough to stop now. But he’s starting to have panic attacks, for no obvious reason. This is the story of how he starts to move on from that moment – perhaps even more, he has to get to a point where he wants to move on. He has to see something in the future that he wants to change for, to move on from smoking “Big Fat Joints!” with his brother and thinking about how he used to work as a photographer.

Along the way, Victories is mostly a slice-of-life story. Marco sees his brother and his parents, he meets and starts dating Emilie, and he semi-regularly runs into an older man who lives near his new rural cottage. I’m not sure at all if this “rural” is the same “rural” as the Ravenelles of Basics – this could be two different ways of looking at basically the same move, or two stages of getting further away from the bustle of the big city. Or, again, they could be two different stories doing different things with some of the same material from Larcenet’s life.

By the end of Victories, Marco finally is ready to move out of his comfortable box. I won’t say why, or how – the way to learn that is to read the book. But he does it, and he does it in an interesting, believable way, and we the readers want to see Marco succeed: maybe not go back to being a photojournalist, but to find something to do with the rest of his life. And I plan to see how that plays out in the next book, and, probably, to re-read the back half of the series again a decade later to find out how Marco ends up and see how that all hangs together once I’ve started from the right place.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

REVIEW: Star Trek: Prodigy Season 1, Volume 1

REVIEW: Star Trek: Prodigy Season 1, Volume 1

Star Trek has endured since 1966 largely in part to the creators refusing to speak down to their audiences. Whereas “The Cage”, the first pilot shot in 1964, was deemed “too cerebral” by NBC execs, the show that made it on air rarely stopped being thought-provoking. When the three season mission ended, its next iteration was on Saturday morning television, where, once again, the writers and production team refused to dumb things down.

The best that the universe first imagined by Gene Roddenberry does for the viewer is present allegories and mine the human condition, optimistically seeking the best way for humanity to act. Its positive message was a balm in the turbulent 1960s and has been needed ever since.

That explains why the latest entry, Star Trek: Prodigy is so good, as it furthers the human adventure through a fresh assortment of alien characters. Designed for younger audiences, it arrived in fall of 2021 on Paramount+ before airing on Nickelodeon, ensuring it reached the widest youthful audience possible. And for the first time, their technical consultant was focused more on STEM education than scientific accuracy (there was that, too).

Paramount Home Entertainment today is releasing Star Trek: Prodigy Season 1, Volume 1, the first ten episodes.  Normally, I object to splitting seasons into halves like this, seeing it as a cash grab. However, creatively, the series, given a two-season commitment, was designed into four ten-episode arcs, so this works.

The basic premise begins in the faraway Delta Quadrant where we meet six people trapped on the Tars Lemora prison colony. Overseeing the prisoners is The Diviner (John Noble), a tyrant if ever we’ve seen one. Things get rolling when he dispatches the robot Drednok (Jimmi Simpson) after the escaped Medusan Zero (Angus Imrie). Before long, another prisoner Dal (Brett Gray) gets to escape, encounters the Diviner’s daughter Gwyn (Ella Purnell), and we’re off. The search for Zero leads to a rock slide that reveals the long-buried Federation starship Protostar. Before long, Dal, Gwyn, Rok-Tahk (Rylee Alazraqui), a Brikar; Jankom Pog (Jason Mantzoukas), a Tellarite; and Murf, a Mellanoid slime worm, are aboard the ship, activate its engines and rocket off the world, with the Diviner’s forces in pursuit.

They don’t know one another, and no one understands how to operate the alien starship until they activate the ship’s training hologram, which is a recreation of Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew). Over the course of the first arc, they get to bond, learn how to operate the ship, and rocket ever closer to Federation space.

The stories are never less than imaginative with nice doses of action, drama, and humor, maintaining far better pacing than the overly frenetic other kids’ series Star Trek: Lower Decks. In the hands of series creators Kevin and Dan Hageman, they are abetted by writers Julie and Shawna Benson, Diandra Pendleton-Thompson, Chad Quandt, Aaron Waltke, Lisa Shoop Boyd, Nikhil Jayaram, Erin McNamara, and Keith Sweet.

Trek fans certainly will welcome the cameo appearances from beloved characters, from Spock (Leonard Nimoy in archival footage) to Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden). When the real Vice Admiral Janeway turns up, there’s cause for rejoicing. The rest of the vocal cast is strong, with excellent work from Noble, Gray, and Purnell. Recurring vocal artists Jason Alexander (a major Trek fan), Billy Campbell, Ronny Cox, and Daveed Diggs keep things engaging.

The series is set in 2383, five years after Janeway’s Voyager safely returned from the Delta Quadrant and we’re told the show will reflect the galactic events of the era, so we’re just before the Romulan attack that burned Mars.

The package includes two Blu-ray discs and four collectible cards. The 1080p high definition transfer is excellent, preserving the rich colors of the universe and all the CGI wonderment. The 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio is up to the challenge of recreating the fine music, familiar sound effects, and dialogue. There are multiple special features which are all worth a peek, notably The Kobayashi Maru and The Prime Directive. Other features include The Tradition, The Protostar Pack, Gadgets & Gear, and The Protostar.

The show is quite fun to watch and the computer animation gives the entire series a unique look and feel, without losing that Star Trek feel. If you haven’t caught the show by now, this is your chance.