Too rushed for regular reviews, so …
One by Bob Larkin. Very 1970s “sexy girl with a sword.”
Next, one by Gray Morrow. I saw this series on the paperback racks but never read it.
Art on this one is uncredited.
All rights to images remain with current holders.
TYG is not a superhero fan like I am so I didn’t ask her to SUPERGIRL (2026) and it vanished from the theater before I had time to go solo. Given the poor box office and lukewarm reviews, I was delighted to catch it streaming recently and discover it was way better than I’d feard.
Based on the Woman of Tomorrow miniseries, this has Kara (Milly Alcock) and Krypto celebrating Kara’s 23rd birthday by getting drunk on a red sun world. Ruthye (Eve Ridley), who’s family have been killed by the Brigands (I deduct a point for having a band of brigands who just call themselves The Brigands) wants someone to help her hunt down the band and kill them. Kara’s not into killing but she gets entangled anyway.
I worried we were going to end up with Supergirl as some variation on the Hot Mess stereotype but no. Even under a red sun, Kara’s very competent and capable and her drinking is less about being a screw-up and more about the trauma she’s been through. Where David Corenswet’s Superman (who cameos) grew up a Kansas boy, Kara grew up Kryptonian, then saw her parents and her city destroyed. To save her, her father sent her to the planet where her cousin lived but it’s not her home the way it is Clark’s.
The movie did have some weak points. In the comics, the brigands trapping Kara under a depowering green sun worked well; here it’s just a pointless deathtrap and easily evaded. I’m also curious, given Superman established Jor-El and Lara as ruthless colonialists, why Supergirl has none of that in her backstory. Were Clark’s parents ultra-right wing Kryptonian? Was Argo City some kind of hippy enclave that rejected Kryptonian imperialism? Perhaps we’ll find out eventually.
A third point was that given Supergirl’s warnings to Ruthye about revenge, the ending worked a lot less well than the comics version. Overall, though, this was a winner. “Krypton didn’t die in a day — the gods are not that kind.”
A CANTERBURY TALE (1944) has an American GI, a British GI and land girl Sheila Sim wind up in WW II Canterbury for various reasons and cope with loneliness, cantakerous locals and the mysterious Glue Man hurling glue on women’s hair before all of them get miraculously happy endings (Sim’s Dead In The War boyfriend turns up alive, for instance). This is an aimless movie with no real plot or character arc, just pretty pictures of England, Still Free — and the Glue Man’s explanation he wants to scare women out of flirting with Yank GIs now sounds creepily sexist. This DVD includes the framing sequence shot for American release which frames everything as the American telling his new bride about Canterbury. It didn’t improve things any. “I must open a window — the caravan is full of moths!”
Cover by Curt Swan, all rights to image remain with current holder.
Filed under Movies
I had only three days of work due to IRL commitments so that was expected. I expected to get further than I did, though: Trixie woke me up about 1AM Wednesday and my brain became too mush to do much.
Let’s start off with last weekend’s date: we went to vote early, ran a couple of errands, then celebrated with Indian food.
Then the work on my three big projects: the stories for next month’s Local Reporter, proofing Watching Jekyll and Hyde and prepping Become the Sky for publication. I put in a bunch of calls for my articles and got most of my immediate questions resolved. Unfortunately I’ll have to spend one day next week watching videos of various Carrboro and Orange County meetings — that will suck up a lot of time.
I finished proofing Become the Sky (cover by Sonya Lano). Odd little quirks and errors (alien names misspelled, one story where all the curly quotes were straight quotes, n dashes where it should be m dashes) cleared away. Now I’m waiting on the revised version of the introduction and I’ll be ready to move to the finish. Hopefully it won’t take too long.
On Watching Jekyll and Hyde, I discovered the most efficient way to make corrections would be to download Adobe Acrobat Pro. Which I don’t normally need but the next best approach — print out, correct in red, scan the pages — would be so much more work. It’s worth one month’s subscription (it may be useful at one point in the Become the Sky process too). However getting to that point wasted an hour or more trying to do the same thing with Preview on my Mac (didn’t work). Then Acrobat Pro proved initially very annoying. Shoving its AI assistant in my face and having multiple little pop-up notices pop up. Once I got past that, it is indeed easy to use. Of course I have 204 pages to cover and I’m now only 30 pages in. Still doable but I’d hoped to be a little further.
On the lighter side, over at Atomic Junk Shop, I looked at a couple of interesting stories by Len Wein. The one with the splash page below (by George Tuska) has, I think, an easy-to-miss connection with Wein’s later creation, Brother Voodoo; another story (not actually by Wein) is the probable inspiration for the Human Target.
I also looked at two types of alternate histories: those which make the alt.characters interesting and those that are just fun. Below is one of the first type, from a Fantastic Four story by Archie Goodwin and John Buscema.
Hopefully the wasted Wednesday won’t derail anything.
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Filed under Uncategorized
I found this in the Nasher Art Museum gift shop during our recent visit.
Like many of the volumes in Abe Books’ Weird Books Room, I find this less of a weird book than a highly specialized one. Which is cool: even if it doesn’t grab me, I love that there’s a niche market out there for subjects like this. What does surprise me, though you can’t tell from the photo, is that it’s a very thick book. I think that’s because it’s got color charts like the one on the cover for most of the mushroom-based dyes, which takes up space.
Happy Friday!
Filed under Miscellanea, Reading
The title is a quote from this slacktivist post, dealing with the fear some evangelicals have that there must not, ever, be other ways to interpret the Bible than the one their church follows, because those other ways are Sinful and lead to Damnation. And make it harder to justify racism, misogyny, hostility to immigrants or whatever else their church may have embraced.
Case in point, the right wing’s calls for more Christians in government only apply to their kind of Christianity: preach a liberal message and they demand you shut up (as Vaclav Havel could have told us).
That put me in mind of Robert Altemeyer’s insight in The Authoritarians: people who crave an authoritarian leader (something that occurs across the political spectrum but is currently very high on the right) typically want their leader to lay down the moral law: black is black, white is white, the boundary is clear and there is no gray. Anyone who questions where the boundary is drawn or whether there are not in fact some gray areas must be smacked down hard. All of which stems partly from the belief that society is a fragile house of cards: move one card and the whole thing will collapse.
That fear leads to malice in the form of intolerance. For immigrants; right-wingers routinely describe immigrants in their community as a change they never asked for. Also intolerance for gay marriage. For women working outside the home. For the end of Jim Crow. Dammit, the system works, why are people trying to change it? And from the point of view of the people who benefit, it does work; that it doesn’t work for everyone and may work very badly — well it’s still better! It’s the nostalgic gloss that imagines the 1950s as a sitcom with mom at home and blissfully happy to be so.
Not that it’s all fear. Joel Webbon being horrified there are non-Christians in his neighborhood is just a racist shit, but he validates the fears of people who are merely uncomfortable. When the late Charlie Kirk claimed he was scared to get on a plane with a black pilot, I doubt he was scared at all. Again, it feeds fear in others.
Then we have the fear of some men that they’re not manly enough to be a real man. That’s a fear one can be sympathetic too, except so many men try to prove it by drawing sharp lines between them and all things feminine. Women can’t have a man’s job, can’t sleep around like men, have to stay clearly below men in status and rights (but don’t worry, the guys will treat them well if they behave … yeah, right). Ditto blacks and other people of color — one old-time complaint among white workers was that if the boss let black men work the same jobs, suddenly they were doing “n-word work” which was unacceptable.
And once you accept the hierarchy is right — whether it’s right based on God, aristocracy, race or biology — then any tampering with it is inherently bad: “He wants each of us to know our place. And to stay in it. Otherwise, there would be disorder. And God doesn’t want disorder.”
As I’ve written before, Isaiah Berlin captured this fear well years ago: “Men may be divided into those who are in favour of life and those who are against it. Among those who are against it there are sensitive and wise and penetrating people who are too offended and discouraged by the shapelessness of spontaneity, by the lack of order among human beings who wish to live their own lives, not in obedience to any common pattern.”
I agree it’s discomfiting when the world changes but it’s been changing longer than any of us have been alive. Bad change should be fought but when the arc of the universe is trending towards justice, we should be on justice’ side, even if it’s uncomfortable (and it often is). As Yoda told Luke, acting from fear does not end well. And it can indeed lead to the malice of the dark side.
Filed under Politics
Walt Simonson’s 1980s run on Thor is one of the comic book greats. His six issue Wonder Woman arc, “Game of the Gods,” isn’t in the same league, but it is entertaining. It comes right between Phil Jimenez and Greg Rucka but I didn’t get around to blogging about it until (obviously) now. Creative credit goes to Simonson for plotting, Jerry Ordway for drawing and Adam T. Hughes for the covers.
We open with a gathering of mystics in the late 1800s who discover signs that the Shattered God is returning to Earth. Then Trevor Barnes, whom she dated during the Jimenez run (he decided being a superhero love interest was more than he could handle) begins worrying when he can’t reach her.
Cut to a funeral that culminates in Diana, in the white pantsuit associated with her depowered years at the end of the Silver Age (though her clothes in that era had a lot more variety), emerging from the grave. The funeral party then turns to monsters and tries to kill her, but fails. At the end of the issue she’s alive but amnesiac, and holding a clay figurine of an infant that the monsters coveted — funny, when she smooths over a cut in the clay arm, a cut on her own arm heals. What’s with that? Simonson said in an interview the inspiration was Hammer’s classic Kiss of the Vampire which opens with an ominous funeral.
The second issue went boldly where no scripter had gone before. Putting Wonder Woman in civvies is one thing, but cutting her hair? Even the depowered years never crossed that line. But you see, Diana soon finds she’s being followed; her shadows are human but possessed, and they wither and die once the possessor leaves them. Fortunately she stumbles into the salon of Becca Doherty, hair stylist and diehard WW fangirl (“You kick butt better than Superman!”). She gives Diana a crash course in who she is even if Diana doesn’t remember it. With Becca’s guidance, Diana successfully turns into Wonder Woman, but devoid of tiara or bracelets, still amnesiac (her attempt to make sense of her superhero life is hilarious). Meanwhile, the Amazons discover that Olympus is empty, the gods gone — hmm, do you suppose there’s a connection? And to strange things happening on Oa, which is situated at the center of the universe?
To prevent the pursuing possessor tracking her, Diana has Becca give her a new look, as you can see on the cover, then sets off to find answers. In the following issue, Diana, the Roman goddess, arrives on Themyscira riding Scylla, the mythological multi-headed sea serpent. Amped up by divine power, it petrifies them. During the War of the Gods crossover event the Roman and Greek pantheons merged but Diana opted to stay free rather than fuse with Artemis. Now she’s on Team Shattered God. Diana arrives on Themyscira, regains her memories and battles Scylla; still only half herself, she does well but ultimately has to flee. Meanwhile, the goddesses of Africa endow Trevor with some mysterious power and direct him to find Diana.
Over the next couple of issues we learn what’s at stake. The Shattered God was a primeval deity; when the God created the universe, it shattered said deity. Who didn’t mind much: the new universe was glorious and he was a part of it all. Except then he realized that countless other gods had sprung up, and he didn’t like it. Now his plan is to reverse creation, restore the primal atom, then start over. His will be the voice that says let there be light, his will be the mind that shapes reality — and he’ll get it right! Diana is a key part of his plan because of her unique makeup: clay and flesh, mortal and divine.
The plan works … almost. That clay image retains the essence of Diana’s god-given powers; without it, she can’t fulfill her role in the Shattered God’s plan. Off to Earth to find the figurine but of course there are surprises waiting and cards the Olympians and other gods have yet to play ….
Simonson’s Thor run is a classic. His Orion is far and away the best Fourth World material not written by Jack Kirby. “Game of the Gods” isn’t in the same league. Like I said, though, it is entertaining, particularly in the early amnesiac period — and amnesia’s enough of a cliche that ain’t easy. It’s less effective as we see more of the divine scheming on both sides of the game; as the final issue points out, some things happened that appear to make no sense (and probably don’t). Still, it’s livelier and more entertaining than the subsequent Greg Rucka run has been so far (I’m in the middle of Year Two).
All rights to images remain with current holders.
Filed under Comics, Reading, Wonder Woman
Which is to say, thrillers and mysteries! First, a cover by Roswell Keller.
Next Verne Tossey.
And an uncredited cover to wrap up.
All rights to images remain with current holders.
Filed under Politics
An NYT Magazine article looks at how casino wealth and online platforms are spreading gambling everywhere. Although I’d disagree with the author’s idea that techbros are into gambling with their own money: as we’ve seen by their outrage over any attempt to regulate AI, they don’t want to gamble. They want a surety they’ll get richer and richer. And despite Marc Andreessen’s description of himself as an apex predator risking everything, even if they lose they’re at no great risk: a billion out of Andreessen’s pockets would hurt emotionally but it won’t leave him struggling to pay the rent.
As this post points out, gambling is much easier today than when I was a kid. No need to travel to a casino or a betting parlor, you can do it on your phone. And for all the talk about responsible betting, the industry, as Paul Campos at LGM has observed (no direct links) makes its money on people willing to bet big. The guy who lost all his money betting on the ponies used to be a staple of thrillers and mystery fiction, and had its template in real life. This will create more of those losers.
Returning to my point about how the techbros hate risk, they’re all in on using the government to make returns on their investments a sure thing. Great for them, not so good for the rest of the economy as data center-construction is crowding out other investments. The techbros have given the Toddler lots of money and he’s paying them back. In more ways than one. The Toddler is happy to let techbros police themselves and touts his big innovation of calling LLMs “super-intelligence.” Which cannot be hacked … until someone does it.
Microsoft says its big data centers will be good neighbors. It’s not willing to put its money where its mouth is.
It’s alarmingly easy to make AI music, then release it to a real band’s Spotify. Three guesses who gets the money. Or how about this: one Michael Smith streamed thousands of AI songs to music services, then had bots listen to them to generate revenue. He gained $8 million, which he’ll have to pay back due to being convicted and spending 18 months in prison.
Irony: people training AI are getting fired for using AI to do their jobs.
“At 8:15 p.m., Greg Pirio heard the generators start. By dawn, the lung pain he described had pushed him out of his Sterling home and sent him 15 miles down the road to his daughter’s house in Vienna,” due to fumes from the data center.
Wired says “according to interviews with more than two dozen workers, all of whom spoke under the condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing their employment, publishers are now using LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT to email literary agents, write publicity and back-cover copy, design cover art, and generate marketing materials, often at the direction of their executives.” One of the quoted employees says it’s infuriating the publishers are going this route instead of paying employees better.
INVISIBLE WOMEN: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Pérez covers similar territory to Defined by Design but it’s a much better book. Even on areas where I have some knowledge — that medical professionals are remarkably clueless and insensitive to women’s pains and health issues — Pérez has fascinating stuff to say. And there’s a lot I didn’t know at all. I will note, though, that she doesn’t deal with cis/trans gender issues and is apparently trans-exclusionary.
Pérez shows in detail how the assumption men — their bodies, their lives — reflect a norm and that we should therefore design the world around them works out badly for women. Transportation planning, for instance, assumes the priority for roads is getting wage-earners to work, not parents taking kids to school; the roads that result are harder to negotiate. Ditto mass transit. Snowplowing roads before sidewalks can lead to more accidents, which usually affect women, who are more likely to be on foot.
For another example, while there are extensive guides on how men should lift heavy weights on construction sites to minimize injury, there’s nothing comparable for women in home-health care, even though they routinely lift hefty human bodies several times a day. Safety equipment designed for the “typical” male body doesn’t fit women, making them unsafe. Voice recognition software often doesn’t recognize women’s voices (one techbro suggested they should take classes on how to adjust their voice).
Lack of data makes things worse: there’s simply no research (at least as of 2019 when this book came out) about how women lifting invalids might hurt or how to do it safely. Even medicine has gotten by for years ignoring women’s different reactions to medicine, disease and drugs. Sometimes that makes doctors blind to adverse effects, sometimes they miss out on treatments that would help women more than men. There’s some evidence Viagra massively reduces menstrual pain but nobody’s interested in funding further studies.
It’s a good but infuriating book. However it also makes me optimistic by showing how small changes can generate big results. A bus ticket that allow women two trips within an hour is beneficial as women often multi-task on trips (first to the doctor, then to their kid’s school, say) and that reduces costs. Sweden discovered that it could encourage men to take paid paternity leave by replacing “this block of leave can go to either parent” with “the husband has up to three months — use it or lose it.” Even with that knowledge, the book is still infuriating.
Like The Exorcist, ROSEMARY’S BABY by Ira Levin spends a lot of time on the mundane lives of our protagonist, Rosemary Woodhouse and her actor husband Guy. Landing a fabulous apartment and wriggling out of their lease. Rosemary decorating and knowing the somewhat obnoxious neighbors. Even after she’s impregnated by Satan, there’s still none of the overt horror we get in The Exorcist. Nevertheless it works where the other book did not. Part of that is that Levin is a slicker, better writer than William Peter Blatty but there’s more to it. I don’t quite have the time but I might reread it and try to figure out why.
There is a horror to the book but it’s very much a woman’s horror, fitting in with the Pérez book above. When Rosemary’s demonic pregnancy starts to hurt her, her doctor (part of the Satanic conspiracy) assures her it’s nothing to worry about, just push through. Her regular doctor writes her off as hysterical when she tells him there’s something monstrous going on. Guy sells out to the Satanists for a better career, helps dope Rosemary, then lets Satan rape her in her sleep. When she wonders about the damage, Guy claims he was horny so he didn’t let her passing out stop him (I was pleasantly surprised that a 1967 novel shows Rosemary completely grossed out by this). It deserves it’s status as a modern horror classic.
All rights to images remain with current holders. Top cover by Rachel Willey.
Filed under Reading, Undead sexist cliches
I’d never heard of film blanc as a genre before catching THE NIGHT MY NUMBER CAME UP (1955) on DVD but the term goes back to the 1970s. Film noir emphasizes corruption, cynicism (you can clean up some corruption, but not all of it) and bad things happening for no reason — “fate or god or something like that can put the finger on me or you for no reason at all” in the words of Detour. Film blanc has god or supernatural forces putting their finger on the scale to make things better: It’s a Wonderful Life, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Cabin the Sky, The Bishop’s Wife, etc. Unlike noir, there is a moral order to the blanc universe.
This film shouldn’t work as well as it does. It’s the kind of thing Twilight Zone would have tossed off in 30 minutes: Lindsay (Michael Horden) opens the movie by telling an American officer in the Far East where to find a recently vanished plane. How does he know? He won’t say. Then we flash back to Lindsay at a party, telling his friends about a dream in which the plane they’re taking to Tokyo crashes on the coast. They’re not worried: Lindsay’s dream has eight passengers (they have six), there’s no loudmouth businessman, no problem! Except as the movie progresses, things change and it’s looking more and more similar to the dream …
Yet it does work, very well. It’s tense, absorbing drama, helped by having a solid cast including Michael Redgrave and a young Denholm Elliott. I recommend it highly. In case you’re wondering, the movie that I confuse this with is the David Niven drama A Matter of Life and Death. “Is this your idea of leadership? To lead these people to certain death!”
I tend to think AN INSPECTOR CALLS (1954) is connected to Green for Danger, which also stars Alistair Sim as an inspector; it isn’t, nor is it as good. Based on JB Priestley’s stage play, it’s a “message” drama, and as the phrase goes, they should have sent the message Western Union. Spoilers follow.
We open in 1912 as a rich family — industrialist father, socialite mother, drunken son, spoiled daughter — celebrate the daughter’s marriage to a handsome, wealthy man. Suddenly Inspector Poole stalks into the dining room, at which point I knew he was some kind of phony: no British investigator would do that without being announced. Poole reveals a young woman just committed suicide by drinking bleach and he’s wondering, do any of them know her?
Boy, do they. The father fired Eva (Jane Wenham) for requesting his factory pay higher wages; the daughter got her fired from a salesclerk job because she snickered at an awkward moment; the fiancee had a brief romance with her; the wastrel son had a romance that ended with her pregnant; the mother, sitting on a charity committee decided Eve was a trollop and refused to offer her any aid (the committee wanted her to name the father; for obvious reasons she didn’t think “it’s your son!” would fly). OMG, the entire family is guilty!!! The entire class system is guilty!!!!
But wait, there’s another twist! First a call to the morgue establishes no girl has been brought in as Poole claims — he’s a fraud! Having left the inspector in his windowless study the father goes to confront him — he’s gone! Vanished! And suddenly they get a call from the hospital that now a girl had died in the fashion described … which is a pointless added twist as it doesn’t change anything (if they’d had a chance to save her and refused to act …). A flop, though the play was revived quite successfully in the 1990s. “You and I aren’t the same persons who sat down to dinner.”
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Filed under Movies
