I’d rather not fill two days in a row with cover posts but it’s been hectic lately. Here, covers that aren’t as sexy as yesterday, but still make me want to read the book.
I’m not sure why this John Schoenherr cover works but it does.
Josh Kirby’s cover is a classic approach — lonely wanderer facing signs of civilization. I’ve read the book years ago but don’t remember it.
Allen Anderson’s cover makes me think the story is sexist as hell, but I wouldn’t mind reading it in hopes it’s better than that.
Robert Maguire’s cover is PG in what’s actually shown but I think it’s R in its execution.
Seabury Quinn supposedly wrote nude scenes into his Weird Tales stories because he knew they’d get the cover spot. In this case, illustrated by Margaret Brundage.
Another Earl Bergey lingerie cover (see also here).
And finally this one. Like Nikki, nothing obvious but the pose, the breasts pushing through the shirt, the reference to “pure lust” — they make me think this is much sexier than it probably was.
MONEY, LIES AND GOD: Behind the Movement to Destroy American Democracy by Katharine Stewart is a look at the interlocking relationship between the big-money men who underwrtie groups such as Moms of Liberty and the Claremont Institute and the various flavors of extremists determined to give us theocracy, misogyny or white supremacy; while they may not agree on what the future looks like, they know it will exclude anyone who doesn’t accept that hierarchy is good. Well, okay, they agree on one thing, men should be in charge.
This isn’t new material to me but Stewart does an excellent job connecting the dots and looking at the grey eminences who shell out plenty but without the attention David Ellison or Charles Koch get. She also looks at why there’s no similar effort on the left and concludes most rich liberals either give to the Democrats or to specific causes (while I’m not rich, that’s certainly how I roll) whereas right-wingers are building a mass movement. She concludes the odds of not becoming fascist are not great, but not yet hopeless — there’s more people on the liberal side, the right wing is divided and so on.
I loved Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionists so discovering his CROOK MANIFESTO was set in the 1970s I figured it would be a fun read — and I was curious how he’d handle the setting (I do write quite a bit set in that era). The story — part two of a trilogy, which I hadn’t known — focuses on three episodes in the life of Harlem storeowner and part-time fence Ray Carney. In one, a crooked cop drags him into a scheme; in another Carney’s buddy Pepper becomes security man on a blacksploitation film; in the third, Carney gets an unwelcome involvement in arson and crooked politics.
Not for the first time, I notice other authors are more willing to throw in “I’ll have to google that” details about the past, like a line that a group of women “look like some of those Laugh-In girls” (Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In had been a satirical sketch comedy hit a few years earlier). And Whitehead definitely did something right, as I kept reading to the finish. At the same time, I can’t say I was deeply engaged — there were whole chunks of the crime drama that I found boring and skipped. I doubt I’ll look for the other trilogy parts.
As I’ve blogged about a couple of times, the Victorian stage scripts adapting Jekyll and Hyde had a huge influence on subsequent adaptations. The two scripts I read this week are noteworthy in that they don’t stick as closely to that template as the Richard Abbott script reviewed at the link does.
As H. Leonard Cuddy’s JEKYLL AND HYDE has a large role for a maid (an unhappy one, raped in one scene, murdered later) I’d assumed Cuddy was influenced by Mary Reilly but no, this came out in 1981.
Jekyll here has the radical belief that intelligence and character aren’t something born into us: all our brains as bodily organs are equal in ability but education and social status leads to us burying a lot of it. This annoys both Dr. Lanyon and his niece Celestine — is Jekyll seriously suggesting that his uncouth new maid isn’t innately and obviously inferior to Celestine? Despite which Jekyll and Celestine become engaged in the “well, I guess you’ll do” matter of fact way some people apparently did back then. Unfortunately Jekyll’s experiments in unearthing what’s buried go in unanticipated directions … interesting.
In the introduction to his DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE script, playwright David Edgar admits he wanted to get back to Stevenson but instead found himself borrowing from later adaptations, including a maid inspired by Mary Reilly. Edgar’s script does restore Jekyll to bachelorhood but gives him a sister who represents the “new woman” of the late 19th century, the kind of independent, quasi-feminist woman he believes Stevenson’s sausage-fest of a novel was responding to. The story that results didn’t do much for me but like Cuddy’s, it’s an interesting variation on its theme (I’ve no idea how I’d respond to either of them were I not knee deep in Jekyll and Hyde thoughts). And I did find Edgar’s discussion of casting interesting: originally he’d chosen two men to play Jekyll and Hyde but he concluded the audience wants the tour-de-force of seeing one man assay both roles.
As chronicled in Jekyll and Hyde Dramatized, when Richard Mansfield brought his stage adaptation of Stevenson’s novel to England, one David Bandmann whipped up a mockbuster version starring himself. It violated copyright and Stevenson’s people got it shut down fast.
One of the things I’ve picked up on that most books haven’t is that an 1897 adaptation by Luella Forepaugh and George Fish is a direct knockoff of Bandmann’s script, whether authorized or plagiarized. It was more successful though, cutting out some of the worst parts of Bandmann (the choir of adorable moppets singing) and would be the basis for multiple silent films. It’s influence is substantial.
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE by Richard Abbott is a 1941 adaptation that appears to owe a lot to the Bandmann/Forepaugh-Fish version, including a comic-relief Irish cook, Hyde declaring that he enjoys attacking helpless women and children and a similar arrangement for changing Jekyll to Hyde. That said, Abbott does chart his own path on some things, such as an emphasis on the age gap between Jekyll and his lady love. It’s still being performed in the 21st century, but I find it slow, tedious and talky. One element that didn’t transfer from stage to film is Sir Danvers Carew’s daughter demanding Jekyll help capture Hyde (the movies shifted Carew’s death to the end of the story so there’s less time for that).
AMERICANS AGAINST THE CITY: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century by Steven Conn looks at how Americans a little over a century ago began grappling with the idea that the majority of the population was now urban, an unsettling thought for a country that defined Real Americans as living in small towns and on farms, not wage slaves and drones living in the big city. Plus cities were dysfunctional in a lot of ways — slums, corrupt political machines, immigrants, how could they possibly be the heart of America?
The initial response from early 20th century progressives was to fix the cities: better government, slum clearance, parks, education (the swimming pool controversies of Contested Waters fit right in). This proved a tougher task than expected, leading to counter-arguments that the solution was to support authentic rural lifestyles as the real America, or to build new towns that could be perfectly, efficiently run from the first. Neither solution worked: support for traditional Appalachian crafts, for instance, mostly turned them into a cottage industry providing kitsch for urbanites with money.
What ultimately changed the game was the federal government building the interstate highways. Not only did this destroy many settled city neighborhoods, it made it possible to leave the city to live and commute there for work. City populations stopped growing and often shrunk, as did their revenue base. The Reagan era further intensified the problems by insisting government is the problem so government doing anything to fix things was pointless.
The focus on urban planning rather than the pop culture perception of cities wasn’t quite what I wanted. However I’d still rate it as an interesting book.
THE MAGIC OF ATLANTIS was an anthology edited by Lin Carter collecting various Atlantis-set fantasy stories from the pulp era. On the low end we have Carter’s own contribution (okay, nothing special) and a Robert E. Howard King Kull story (I don’t find Kull brooding about the nature of reality terribly interesting). On the high end we have one of Clark Ashton Smith’s Poseidonis stories and an Edmond Hamilton fantasy, “The Avenger from Atlantis,” in which a bodysnatching Atlantean scientist spends centuries hunting down the bodsnatching schemer who caused the sinking.
Overall the collection is fun but the sexism annoyed me. Not that I’m unfamiliar with the sexism of that era’s specfic, but having the women be either sex objects with no personality or bad girl sex bombs got old fast. The only exception was Nictzin Dyalhis’ “The Heart of Atlantis,” which has a female protagonist (it’s one of the middle-ground stories in the book).
I’m a sucker for the old Julius Schwartz SF comics Mystery in Space and Strange Adventures so it was inevitable I pick up the collection DC FINEST: Gorilla World from the early 1950s (it also includes the space adventures of Tommy Tomorrow, a backup in Action Comics). This includes a number of series characters (superhero Captain Comet, scientist Darwin Jones, the Space Cabbie and Interplanetary Insurance agent Bert Gordon) and a lot of standalone stories. Not the best of the series but still fun for me despite the frequent absurdities (a road crew accidentally turns a road into a moebius strip, for instance).
Sometimes they’re quite clever. In “The Counterfeit Earthmen,” the inhabitants of Saturn’s moon Titan refuse to believe Earth astronauts are from Earth — if there’s intelligent life that close to the sun’s light it would have to be blind and navigate by sonar! In “Gorilla World” (shown by Murphy Anderson above) a couple get sucked into a parallel timeline where gorillas have evolved to the equivalent of humans. The couple go on display in a freak show but it turns out they’re very happy — the husband was a sideshow act on our Earth and the gorillas treat him a lot better. Definitely not for everyone’s taste but it is mine.
The first SUPERMAN SILVER AGE OMNIBUS isn’t as much to my taste — Mort Weisinger’s stable of creators always aimed their stories slightly younger than Schwartz seemed to. That said, this covers a wildly creative period including the debut of Brainiac (captured by Curt Swan above), the first appearance of the Arctic Fortress of Solitude, the introduction of Bizarro, Supergirl, Metallo, the first Earth-One Mxyzptlk appearance — well, it’s a creative time for the mythos, as I blogged about here. Balanced against that we have the sexist treatment of Lois Lane and a lot of Wayne Boring art (once considered the definitive Super-artist, I’ve never been able to get into his work). As always with old comics, you pays your money and you takes your choice. I certainly don’t regret spending the cash.
As I have to work downstairs with the TV to watch a lot of the films for Jekyll and Hyde, a number of research books and DVDs end up stored on one of my bookshelves. Behold!
As some of you may notice this includes research books (in the bottom corner) for Savage Adventures, books I’ve read for fun and haven’t put up yet, and library books that need to be returned (The Zuni Cafe, which wasn’t as useful for the way I cook as I’d hoped).
By the end of the year Jekyll and Hyde will be done and everything will go back to its proper place. I look forward to that day.
