An uncredited cover for a mashup of horror and detective story. Could a man’s wife really be a reincarnation of a malevolent witch? Is it all just coincidence?
This Don Maitz cover isn’t for a horror book but it does look damn eerie, so I’m posting it.
A typically offbeat Richard Powers cover
And a Powers mystery cover — not horror but it’s ominous enough I’ll put it here.
An uncredited but creepy cover.
Here’s a movie tie-in for Bell, Book and Candle, a stage play-based film comedy that helped inspire Bewitched on TV. I don’t know if this is Van Druten’s script for the play or if he novelized the film.
Last but not least, Victor Valla’s cover for this HP Lovecraft collection. I had this one back in the day, before complete collections were easy to find.
Just back from travel to Fort Walton Beach for my 50th high school reunion (details and photos to follow eventually ) so only a quick post today. I saw this meme and I love it (though I don’t know who to credit as the source).
Back in 2011 I wrote the following at the top of a post: “This will be the first of three posts tackling sexist cliches that have been around for years.”
15 years later I’m still blogging about the cliches because they’re still around. Even writing a book pointing out that they’re all bullshit somehow didn’t cause patriarchy to collapse. Given I was right about everything (and obviously so were countless feminists who came before me) I can’t figure out why.
Sarcasm aside, I’m really rushed for time. I figured reposting the original wouldn’t hurt as most of y’all haven’t been reading this blog 15 years. And of course, it’s still relevant, so—
One cliche that’s been around at least since the early seventies is the idea that men’s success depends on women’s submission. The first version I read was that men attempt to build/create/make money to compensate for their lack of the ability to bear children. If women do all those things, plus bearing children, men will feel so emasculated they’ll just curl up and die. Then there was George Gilder, in the 1980s, with his view that men can’t amount to anything unless they’re married. Women therefore have a moral duty to put their personal goals on hold, marry men and shape them up—preferably marry the meek loser-types who need inspiration rather than going for good-looking, successful men (as other writers have observed, it’s hard not to see a degree of self interest in this). And now we have Mark Regnerus, who asserts that since men are driven to achieve by the drive for sex, if women don’t hold out sex until marriage, men will no longer achieve anything (“their sexual success may, ironically, be hindering their drive to achieve in life”). There’s more premarital sex available than there used to be; men are financially less well off than they used to be; therefore, male failure is women’s fault for giving it away! As Echidne points out at the link, there’s little evidence of cause and effect in this. And I can think of plenty of counter-examples. Did John Adams, who was already happily married and a successful Massachusetts lawyer, feel the need to risk his future challenging the British Empire because he wanted to get laid? What about Cecil Rhodes, the 19th century multimillionaire, who built his empire while showing very little interest in women (I don’t mean he was gay—going off and doing Manly Stuff without women wasn’t terribly remarkable back then)? And more to the point, why is this women’s problem, even if it were true? If men decide they’d rather party and sleep around than do anything with their life (and Regnerus doens’t make that point), shouldn’t he be yelling at them to get their act in gear? Regnerus’ argument is that he’s really, really concerned for women: They’re giving the cow away and not getting the True Love they really want in return. Which is nominally the point of his article, with the Terrible, Terrible Consequences for society thrown in. So I’m sure he’s recycling old sexist cliches with only the best of intentions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Vampirewhich 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).
