Gatchaman
A couple weeks ago, I discussed one of the movies I saw at this year’s Fantasia film festival, OXV: The Manual (which has since won the festival award for Most Innovative Feature Film). The last film I saw at the festival this year was one of the ones I was most looking forward to: the international premiere of Gatchaman, an adaptation of the Japanese cartoon series Science Ninja Team Gatchaman (which you might know as Battle of the Planets or G-Force, depending on your age and place of residence in the 70s and 80s). My reaction to it was a bit complicated. As an adaptation, it’s mediocre at best; as a film it has serious issues. But I enjoyed it quite a bit. A hell of a lot, in fact. And yet … I can’t help but be aware it could have been better.
Some basic information first: the film was directed by Tôya Satô from a screenplay by Yûsuke Watanabe. It’s scheduled to go into wide release on August 24 in Japan. The original cartoon show ran for 105 episodes from late 1972 to late 1974, and in 1978 was repackaged for North American audiences (with significant edits and some new bits of animation) as Battle of the Planets. It got a second translation in the 80s as G-Force. In Japan, the series has spawned a number of sequel series, with a new series set to begin airing later this year.
There’s been much discussion lately on Black Gate about Kickstarter: about projects 
The 2013 edition of Montreal’s Fantasia film festival is well underway and I’ve been able to see three films so far, with more planned. A few days ago, I watched The Garden of Words, a visually spectacular 45-minute slice-of-life anime, and at noon yesterday took in After School Midnighters, a kid-oriented 3D animated movie that nicely balances plot and wackiness. Then, later that afternoon, I attended a showing of OXV: The Manual, a science-fiction film premiering at the festival. I was impressed enough to want to write about it here.
Normally, I write here about fantasy (which to me includes science fiction and horror). But some mimetic novels have a lot to say about the fantastic. Or a lot to say about related themes; wonder, for example, or the numinous. Those books are sometimes worth discussing at Black Gate, I think. Which is why I want to write now about Robertson Davies’s Deptford Trilogy — classics of Canadian literature, novels deeply concerned with wonder — and consider whether they should have been even more open to the fantastic than they in fact are.
One of the distinct pleasures of book fairs and used book sales is finding an intriguing book you’ve never heard of. A greater and related pleasure comes when that book turns out to be quite good. Then, in reaction to that, there’s a melancholy that sets in from the fact that a worthwhile book is largely unknown. I’d like to think I can take the edge off that last sense by writing about some of these books here. So, given all that, a few words about Virgil Burnett’s Towers at the Edge of a World:
A couple Wednesdays ago, I did something I haven’t done in ages. I went down to my local comic store on new-comic day (which is Wednesdays) and bought a new super-hero comic off the rack. Not a Marvel or DC book, though — not really, though it was published by DC’s Vertigo imprint. This was the return of a series first published in 1995, under the Image Comics banner. The title’s moved around a fair bit since, and frequently been on hiatus from regular publication. But it’s back now, and hopefully for a long time to come. It’s Kurt Busiek’s Astro City, and I want to talk about what it is and why I’m going to be buying it going forward.
‘Magic’ is an elastic metaphor. Among its many possible uses is that of a descriptor for something that happens in performance, especially live performance: the magic of an actor possessed by a character, the magic of a given moment invested with wonder and remaining in the memory, though inevitably passing away. The magic of stage magicians isn’t in the sleight-of-hand; it’s in the effect on the audience. The related magic of the carnival — the amusement park, the theme park — is a kind of second-person secondary-world magic. You are there. You are in a conjured fantasyland. A circus, in this reading, isn’t about the stink of animals or the scutwork of putting up tents and preparing performance spaces; it’s about the feeling the show tries to inspire. It is, potentially, for some, a venue for magic — transient, susceptible to thinning, but capable of generating wonder.
I picked up Helen Oyeyemi’s third novel, 2009’s White is for Witching, knowing very little about it. I’d read that Oyeyemi was a highly-regarded young writer in ‘mainstream’ literary circles, whose work contained some speculative elements (born in 1984, her first book had been 2005’s The Icarus Girl, followed by The Opposite House in 2007; a fourth book, Mr Fox, came out in 2011). What I found in White is for Witching was an excellent horror story whose intricacy demanded careful attention. It’s sharply-written and tightly-constructed, and if its plot is not immediately clear, the book’s strong enough to encourage careful attention.
There’s a distinctive kind of surprise some science fiction books can generate: surprise that a book which seems to be speaking to the beliefs, fears, or world-view of a given time was in fact written well beforehand. I remember being taken aback, for example, that A Clockwork Orange was first published in 1962, before hippies and punks and the coining of ‘generation gap’ (first recorded 1967). And it’s interesting to me that Maureen F. McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang, published in 1992, calmly and thoroughly imagines a future dominated by China — something much discussed today, but a less common idea before the turn of the millennium. McHugh’s book is a twentieth century novel, lacking a world wide web or smartphones, that speaks to the twenty-first.
Growing up reading superhero comic books, it was almost inevitable that I’d hear about Philip Wylie’s 1930 novel Gladiator. It was said to be the inspiration behind Superman, the original story about an ultra-powerful strong man who set about trying to right wrongs. Growing older, I heard more: that Jerry Siegel, Superman’s co-creator, had reviewed the book for a fanzine; that he’d swiped dialogue from the book for use in his comics; that Wylie had threatened to sue.