A Different West

 Being in sort of a Old West/Frontier mood of late, I got around the checking out a couple of things that had been on my list for a while, but I just kept never getting to.

The Nightingale (2019) is an Australian revisionist Western from the director of The Babadook. In it's basic plot, it's a tale of revenge, not unlike Hannie Caulder (1971), but the resemblance to traditional revenge Westerns, even revenge Westerns based around women, really ends at the plot synopsis. It's more interested (like many revisionist Westerns) in examining the plight of indigenous peoples, but it takes the particular angle of the allowing its oppressed Irish woman protagonist to develop empathy, through recognizes the points of similarity between her experience and that of her Aboriginal guide. While perhaps not as brutal the last Australian Western I watched, The Proposition (2006), it is tough viewing in places, particularly the assault on the protagonist and her family. Still, it's a good film on its own terms, and it's always interesting to see Western film tropes and themes played out in places besides North America.

The Wind Through the Keyhole is the last book (to date) written by Stephen King set in the Dark Tower universe. It's outside the main story of that series proper, but includes those characters in framing device. While sheltering from fantastical storm, part tornado and part polar vortex, Roland relates a tale of his youthful days as a gunslinger to his friends. Embedded in that story is another story, a Mid-World "fairytale," that his mother had read to him as a boy, "The Wind Through the Keyhole." This story within a story tells the tale of a young boy living on the edge of the Endless Wood who must contend with a malign fairy, a swamp (complete with a dragon), and his own encounter with that same sort of storm, in a trek across a dangerous wilderness to get a cure for his mother's blindness from the wizard, Maerlyn. 

King's feel for his fantasy world keeps getting stronger. While there are clear points of intersection with our history, he relies less on characters or incursions from our reality (or realities like ours). The Dark Tower novels that were mostly about Mid-World (Wizard and the Glass, Wolves of Calla) were my favorites of the series, and I think this short novel does what they do even better. I wish King would write a collection of other Mid-World tales.

Wednesday Comics: November, 1980 (wk 2, pt 2)

My goal: read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! This week, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands around August 28, 1980. 

Legion of Super-Heroes #269: This is one of the best Conway/Janes issues so far, which is not to say it's spectacular, but it's better than Space Genies. It's approaching election time for Earth's new President, and Colossal Boy's mother gets drafted to run. There's the relationship stuff LSH is known for, but as Shadow Lass and Mon-El are pitching woo, others are celebrating with Colossal Boy's family, and Timber Wolf is moping, the Fatal Five (in league with the mysterious Dark Man) attack. I'm looking forward to the next issue of Legion for the first time in this experiment, I think.

Mystery in Space #113: This continues to be pretty good. The first story by Kashdan with art by Michael Golden and Bob Wiacek has 3 earthlings answering a want ad for computer specialists on a mysterious world. They find the planet to be a paradise, but something about it seems almost to good to be true--and sure enough it is. The inhabitants all have computer brains so they can be immortal, but for some reason they need old fashion human brains to direct their society. When the computer specialists (now prisoners in a gilded cage) have to get computer brains to keep from dying of old age, they place an ad for new specialists. 

The next story by DeMatteis and Grandenetti, has a 2000 AD sort of vibe. The absurdly violent General Windsinger looks into the eyes of a strange alien on the battlefield and is transported to an alien menagerie and what he takes to be a gladiatorial contest. He slaughters his opponents, but then discovers he was the one that lost. The aliens were offering souls ready to leave violence behind in an eternal paradise, but despite his subconscious yearnings, his actions prove he isn't ready. He's returned to the battlefield where he sheds a single tear. "Gremlins" has great Kubert art and a script by Wein. It involves stranded spacemen mistaking the intentions of creatures that look like small, neotenic versions of xenomorphs. The final story by Kashdan and von Eeden, has mankind discovering a species of four-limbed ape-creatures that are highly trainable. They plan to have these creatures replace robots as domestic servants and menials. You know this is going to end badly, but the how is surprising. When the creatures rebel and start killing their masters, they are regrettable exterminated. It turns out the robots used a poison to make the creatures violent because they didn't want to be replaced!

New Adventures of Superboy #11: Lex plots revenge against Superboy, but his device malfunctions and just causes Superboy to develop the power of "bio-magnetism," which really just means he attracts objects to himself he wants to attract (so more selective bio-gravity, but anyway). Eventually, the power grows beyond Superboy's control, and he steals Lex's notes to see how to stop it. Flying out into space to a "cosmic whirlwind" or "space vortex," which pretty much a black hole, but it looks like a whirlpool in space. He uses it to siphon off the "bio-magnetic" energy, but then it traps him--just like Lex always intended. Superboy escapes, of course, by going limp and riding waves of swirling gas. Lex is so angry he says he would rip his hair out--if he had any! In the backup written by Rozakis, Lana's father seems to have found a real genie, but it's really only a over-helpful Superbaby making the wishes come true. Pa Kent instructs his son on how to set it right. This is one of those stories where the toddlers (Superbaby and Lana) talk like fictional cavemen not actual children.

Sgt. Rock #346: This lead story is one of those Kanigher yarns that drives home the point over and over. He also engages in some parallelism between the wisdom of Sgt. Rock and the German unit commander, which is another thing Kanigher falls back on a lot. The conceit here is you don't see the enemy, but he's always there, and a few new recruits learn that lesson the hard way.  The other stories are all over the place, uncredited and often not particularly good. We get "The Star-Spangled Banner" as the narration to a battle with aliens, a former "Water Boy" finally getting the chance to man the machine gun in War World II, a Confederate cavalryman and his horse from artillery fire, and finally (best of the bunch) "Detour" by Kelley and Bissette, where a German tank commander takes out a U.S. bomber and tank in North Africa, only to fall prey to carelessness when his cigarette butt ignites the oil on the ground, and immolates both sides in a funeral pyre.

Super Friends #38: The alien Grax is back and he's teaming up with criminals and helping them commit crimes by using a device to make the Super Friends insubstantial. Soon, our heroes are insubstantial enough they risk floating away. Luckily, the Wonder Twins figure out a way to utilize their powers and with Wonder Woman's lasso, come to the rescue. These stories have more to them than the cartoon episodes, but not much more. Fradon's art helps, though.

The backup story by Bridwell and Oskner is actually more interesting. It's a solo story for Seraph, hero of Israel from the Global Guardians. He's visiting a settlement when it's attack by bikers posing as "Arabs." They are actually thieves after a treasure of Solomon, but they figure the PLO will take credit for the attack anyway. Seraph stops them but gets so worked up that he almost kills one of them after the guy surrenders. God takes away his powers and speaks to him in a booming voice (or either Fourth World Source writing, it's not clear). Seraph has to go and pray and repent to get his powers back.

Unexpected #204: The first story by Case and Calnan is an unusual (for DC horror titles) psychological horror piece. A child star is pushed by her overbearing stage mother to appear and stay child-like even as she becomes a teen. Eventually the girl snaps and kills her mother, then retreats into child-like fantasy. The next story by Ms. Seegar, Newton and Blaisdell has a philandering magician casting spells to woo a young woman away from her beau, but the magician's witch girlfriend has other ideas. In "The 13 Hex" by Wessler and Payne a man's date to a carnival is troubled by the continued reappearance of the number 13, convinced it harbingers bad luck. The man is too pre-occupied with his debt to organized crime and the hitman that's after him to worry about that. In the end, the date is the assassin, and the number 13 is unlucky for her, but not for her intended victim!  

Unknown Soldier #245: Kanigher and Ayers have the Unknown Soldier in occupied France trying to protect a blind Allied agent who knows the whereabouts of German missiles armed with a deadly chemical agent. The agent's beauty and kindness has the Unknown Soldier lamenting his own disfigured features. They are captured, but when the Unknown Soldier escapes and goes to rescue the woman, he discovers she's really German agent, and essentially a female version of himself, her face having been scared by Allied incendiary raids. Next comes a chase down snowy mountainside. The Soldier's toboggan jump across a crevasse fortuitously allows him to drop explosives on the German rockets below. The German agent dies in the explosion presumably, and despite her attempt to kill him, the Unknown Soldier feels regret.

In the backup story "The Vanishing American" by Kanigher and Yeates, a cavalry patrol, eager to wipe out an Indian tribe whose warriors they have already killed in reprisal for Custer's Last Stand, is led into an ambush by the tribe's women. In the Dateline: Frontline story by Burkett and Estrada, the reporter, Wayne, makes the decision to take an assignment in Bataan, while the woman he's been dating decides she has to volunteer to become a nurse in the European Theater.

Warlord #38: Read more about it here. The OMAC installment continues the battle between the IC&C and Verner Bros. I don't know if my supposition last month regarding these being Marvel and DC stand-ins is right, but it's amusing in the light of our era where AT&T owns Warner Bros. Anyway, Starlin definitely delivers the action in this installment.

Weird Revisited: Comics' First Barbarian

I've revisited Crom several times over the years. Jason Sholtis and I talked about doing a revival oneshot at one time...

Before Claw, Wulf, and Ironjaw--even before Conan--there was a barbarian Sword & Sorcery hero in comics. Though there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of this particularly mighty-thewed sword-slinger, he’s got a famous name: Crom the Barbarian!

Crom was the creation of Gardner Fox and first appeared in Out of this World #1 (1950) from Avon. Fox tells us that Crom’s adventures come to us courtesy of “long-lost parchments recovered in an underwater upheaval, translated by a lingual expert,” but I suspect he made it all up.  He also took a lot of inspiration from Howard's Conan yarns.

Anyway, Crom’s a yellow-haired Aesir living in an age forgotten by history, and he’s got a problem. His sister Lalla have been kidnapped by ape-men called Cymri (which may or may not tell us how Fox felt about the Welsh). Crom makes short work of the ape-men, but he and Lalla wind up adrift.

They end up on an island. Good news: It’s full of lovely women. Bad news:

The wizard is named Dwelf, and he’s got a job for Crom. Dwelf wants him to bring back water from the fountain of youth which was built by “people from the stars" and will one day be lost “under what men will call the Sahara desert.” Dwelf threatens Lalla if Crom doesn’t get the stuff for him--and then hypnotizes him to make double sure.

Crom sails to fabled Ophir. He sneaks into the city and while he’s casing the tower that houses the fountain, he meets a girl who doesn’t really get the concept of sword & sorcery tavern-dancing:

Crom takes the girl (Gwenna) dancing and formulates a plan to get into the tower by first being thrown in jail. It works, but once at the tower, he’s got to fight panthers and some guards. He dispatches them all with his sword “Skull-cracker.”

When he gets to the fountain he finds he guarded by a giant snake! He kills it, too, but is almost done in by the queen of Ophir, herself, Tanit. He takes her hostage so he can get out of the city:

By the time they’ve escaped though, Tanit has warmed to Crom and is asking him to come back and be her king! She and Crom deliver the water to Dwelf, who suffers the ironic fate of being turned into an infant.

Not really into childcare, apparently, Crom leaves the wizardling and decides he and Tanit should head back to that kingdom she’s promised him--with his sister Lalla, too, of course. They don’t make it back without adventure, but that ends this particular issue.

Crom goes on to have two more improbable adventures in the pages of Strange Worlds.

Beneath the Crooked Hills

A week ago, we had another session of our Land of Azurth 5e campaign. The party had become much more interested in the trinkets and where they might come from. The townsfolk really didn't know, but mentioned a mage who had been looking into the mystery. Unfortunately, she had disappeared.

The party searched her old residence and found some cryptic notes they couldn't make much of. There was also some sort of design or pattern imprinted on a rectangle of an unknown, transparent material. They did discover she had gone into the Hills and never came back.

Knowing there's nothing for it but to explore their selves, they look around until they stumble upon some fissures with foot prints around it. It's a tight squeeze, but they are sure that's where the strange sleepwalkers came from. The party goes in, but it takes a bit of time because Dagmar gets stuck. With they seem a weird glass wall and hear ethereal music. In the next room, they fight a nest of oversized snakes from a pile of debris, before figuring out how to open a door into an octagonal room. There, each wall is adorned with a symbol, and there's a wooden ball in the middle of the room. 

With some investigation, they find a hidden panel that seems to provide some sort of control over what the room does. They eventually decide to put the ball under a symbol matching what the "control panel" shows, and a another, secret door opens.

Into the Wilderness

I have the rudiments of an idea for a setting. A wilderness not unlike Middle-earth's Wilderlands, but also not unlike America's early frontier between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River--and at a 1820s level of technology. A place of dark forests, mighty rivers, skin-changers, and dragons, but also rivermen in keelboats, ancient mounds, and perhaps the skeletons of ancient giants. 

Not really the American Frontier any more than Middle-earth is Europe (and no need to tell me Tolkien intended it to be Eurasia in the distant past, please). No colonialism as we know it, though likely some clash of cultures and plenty of room for man's inhumanity to man, of course. Probably no demi-humans as usually constituted but maybe something with more Biblical resonance. After all, the Garden of Eden could be in Missouri.

Wednesday Comics: DC, November 1980 (wk 2, pt 1)

My goal: read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! This week, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands around August 28, 1980.

Action Comics #513: It feels like the late 90s idea of riffing off the Silver Age for a "Neo-Silver" approach, wasn't actually original to the 90s. This Wolfman/Swan story features the return of Superman Island, which was an island shaped like Superman that Superman had thrown into space for reasons he doesn't want publicly known. At the opening of the story, it's heading back to Earth! Two hoods know the secret, so Lois is trying to track them down to keep them from talking, but H.I.V.E. wants to know what they know. Turns out Superman Island has a core of Kryptonite. Luckily, a group of friendly aliens have made the island their home and use Kryptonite as an energy source, so they are eager not to let any of it get away. The aliens help Superman defeat H.I.V.E., then Superman gives the island a super-push toward a planet the aliens can settle on. In the Airwave backup, our young hero teams up with the Atom and his inexperience and lack of caution get them both in trouble.

Adventure Comics #477: DeMatteis and Orlando have a really desperate Aquaman going to the mayor of New Venice to get his help (how?) to find Mera. This seems particularly pointless since Aquaman had previously said he would help the Mayor find his brother and didn't, and the people of the city are upset due to his recent attacks on them while controlled by Poseidon. A little girl asks for Aquaman to help her cousin. Cal Durham whose a former henchman of Black Manta and now can only breath water. He tells him Manta is again up to no good. They go to check it out, but are captured. Manta and his crew of dissaffected and marginalized surface folk plan to attack Atlantis. Starman wasn't dead, but also his series wasn't ending (yet), just changing direction. Levitz and Ditko have him going through a number of almost Starlin Cosmic trials to rescue Mn'Torr. This is the best installment of this in a while. The Plastic Man story manages to work in roller-skating and disco, and swipes at 70s pop songs Pasko must have found annoying. Staton's art is up to the semi-comedic challenge as always.   

Brave & the Bold #168: Burkett and Aparo bring us a Team-Up with Batman and Green Arrow. This could be tricky, because Green Arrow can be seen as a low rent Batman with a more limited schtick, but by 1980, they have distinctive personalities. Green Arrow volunteers Batman to appear a charity benefit performance of escape artist Samson Citadel, a reformed criminal who Green Arrow took set on the straight and narrow. When crimes are committed requiring the skills of an escape artist, Citadel falls under suspicion. Batman investigates and discovers a hypnotist who has been mesmerizing folks to commit his crimes for him. Green Arrow confronts Citadel who he saw leaving the scene of a crime and realizes he's hypnotized. Ultimately, his appeal to his friend breaks the spell, while Batman escapes from a deathtrap in full Houdini style. In fact, the last page is Batman describing step by step how he made the escape. 

The backup story continues Nemesis quest for justice. Spiegle's art works well for the pulpier fair.

Detective Comics #496: The "dollar" days of this title are over, and it returns to being a normal-sized comic, meaning we only get a Batman lead story and a Batgirl backup. Fleisher and Newton bring back the Golden Age Clayface who has appeared since 1968 (in his single, previous "Earth-One" appearance). Batman drops in a Horror Film Exposition held aboard a luxury yacht belonging to actor/director John Carlinger. Batman seems familiar with and enthusiastic about Carlinger's films, which is a surprising bit of characterization. Anyway, when this event is televised in the psych hospital of Basil Karlo, the original Clayface, he's offended he wasn't invited. So offended he kills a nurse and two other people to sneak onboard and attempt to kill Carlinger. Meanwhile, we learn that Carlinger is in a dispute over money with his production partners. Then, Clayface show's up and starts trying to murder people--specifically those partners. After a tussle with Clayface, Batman realizes the truth and uses that knowledge to trick Clayface, who isn't Basil Karlo, after all. Fleisher delivers a nice (if simple) little mystery here worthy of the title "detective comics" and it's good to see Basil Karlo back.

The Batgirl story by Burkett and Delbo has her facing off with a Dr. Voodoo (no relation to Brother Voodoo, who is also a doctor) who is using music to put people into a trance state to do his biding. Batgirl does some good observation to figure this out, and use some sound equipment to break Voodoo's hold.

Green Lantern #134: Wolfman and Staton have Dr. Polaris thoroughly defeat Green Lantern. He takes the power ring and leaves Jordan in the Arctic. Jordan plans to make his way to a national geographic research station--on foot. This section portrays Hal Jordan as a badass, walking across the ice, battling a bear and a wolf, and going snowblind before reaching his destination in his torn uniform. (Wolfman supplies the idea that the Green Lantern costume, made for space, is protection against the cold to a degree to make this work.) When he's back in California, he seeks out his friend Tom Kalmaku for help, who seems to contemplating suicide due to work setbacks. Jordan slaps him around, and the two set out to somehow defeat Polaris. 

In the backup story by Sutton and Rodriquez, Adam Strange is being tortured by Kaskor and his men. Strange tricks them to make his escape, but the base is going to explode for some reason, and he only gets out via zeta beam. A beam that returns him to earth! 

House of Mystery #286: This issue is rougher than the last--and the last was not top shelf DC horror. Jameson and artists Hasen and Bulnandi take us to the distant future of 2023 where a cop gets a cybernetic arm following a vicious attack by a criminal, then gets obsessed with seeking revenge and makes himself judge, jury, and executioner--because he's got a mechanical arm, and he can! The punchline is he programs the arm to seek out evil and--wait for it--the hand strangles him! The next story is a perfunctory "mummies curse" yarn by Kelley and Patricio. One savvy archeologist figures out the mummy is degrading its ability to move with every attack, so he figures he'll let it get his colleagues first, then he'll be in the clear. He's almost right, but the mummy catches him on a pier. It isn't strong enough to finish him, but in their struggles, they tumble from the pier and the archeologist is hung on the bandages. 

The last story is kind of a Twilight Zone thing. A aging man in the 1890s, regretting he is in tough financial straits and never able to provide for his wife in high-style, crosses a bridge into a peculiar purple smoke and is transported back in time three decades. As a young man, he resolves to become rich, even if that means selling to both sides in the Civil War. The Confederates pay him off after a deal, but he has to flee the union forces and is shot crossing a bridge into that same magical fog. He collapses dead back in the 1899, and drops his much fought for sack of loot--which turns out to be Confederate money.

Talislanta Returns

The word on the Talislanta facebook page is that the setting will be returning (via Kickstarter) in a 5e compatible form. While I don't know that 5e is the optimal system for Talislanta, I'm glad to see it back and will definitely kickstart it. 

This announcement puts me in a mind to get back to the series I started in 2020 but never finished where I did an in-depth look at setting. Those posts can be found here.