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Author: Thomas Parker

Stan Lee, the World’s Greatest Comic Book Writer: 1922-2018

Stan Lee, the World’s Greatest Comic Book Writer: 1922-2018

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(1) The Elder Statesman-small

I never really thought Stan Lee would die. I’ve been saying for years that as long as there was a single nickel to be squeezed, Stan the Man would be making his cameo and taking his executive producer credit and raking in the long green.

I guess we now live in a nickleless universe, and there will be a blank spot somewhere around the margins of the next Marvel cinematic blockbuster. Stan Lee took a last intrepid leap into the Negative Zone on Monday, November 12. He was 95.

As W.S. Gilbert wrote long ago, “I often think it’s comical/How nature always does contrive/That every boy and every gal/That’s born into the world alive/Is either a little Liberal/Or else a little Conservative!” Gilbert and Sullivan never wrote a comic opera about superheroes (oh that they had!), but the observation applies as much to comic books as it does to politics. It’s certainly possible to appreciate both, but at the end of the day you’re either Marvel or you’re DC.

When I was a kid in the 60’s and 70’s, in the prime of my comic book buying and reading years, I was DC all the way. I had hundreds of comics, but very few were Marvels. There was something about them that I just didn’t trust. The combination of self-mockery and over-the-top rhetoric put me off. The goofy syntax and leather-lunged self-promotion that screamed from a thousand Gil Kane-drawn covers proclaimed that unlike the solid, stolid DC products, these weren’t serious comic books. (You know what I mean — titles like “Whence Comes the Werebeast!!” and banners proclaiming that the story is “Another Mighty Masterpiece in the Munificent Marvel Manner!!” and stuff like that.)

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One Alone: First Man

One Alone: First Man

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(1) First Man Poster-small

I am a child of the Space Age. Growing up in Southern California in the sixties as the son of an aerospace worker, the sound of sonic booms from planes flying from Air Force bases in the High Desert were as ubiquitous during my childhood as Beatles’ tunes. I played with Mattel’s Major Matt Mason space toys (go on eBay and prepare to be shocked and awed), I snacked on “space food sticks” (really nasty) and drank Tang (more fun if you shook up the jar, unscrewed the lid, and inhaled the fumes than it was as a beverage), and, along with millions of other people, on the evening of July 21, 1969, I sprawled (in my footie pajamas) in front of a cabinet television set that weighed more than some of today’s cars, and watched as Neil Armstrong took his first step on the Moon. So, being a child of the Space Age, it only follows that my favorite movies are tearjerkers… tearjerkers like The Right Stuff, Apollo 13, and the 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon.

In fact, there is nothing that gets my waterworks started faster than a scene from “1968”, the episode in From the Earth to the Moon that chronicles Apollo 8, the first manned mission to reach and orbit the Moon. When the moment comes when Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders see what no human beings in the long history of our race had ever seen before — the Earth, still and bright and silent, rising over the surface of another world… well, I need a tissue right now, just thinking about it.

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Proud to Be Ashamed: The Destroyer

Proud to Be Ashamed: The Destroyer

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(1) Destroyer Poster

There are guilty pleasures, and there are guiltier pleasures, and then there are the pleasures that have you wearing an orange jumpsuit and standing in front of a stone-faced judge with your hands and feet shackled together, wretchedly staring at the floor, unable to look anyone in the eye, so tongue-tied with shame and degradation that all you can do is whisper, “I just can’t help myself, Your Honor… I never meant to hurt anyone, and… I know it’s wrong, and… and, there’s no excuse… but… I just can’t help myself.”

That’s reading The Destroyer.

The Destroyer series was part of the wave of “Men’s Adventure” paperbacks that sprang up like mushrooms during the 70’s and drove decent literature like Jane Eyre and Valley of the Dolls off the shelves and into the outer darkness, there to be pulped and perish. The catalyst for the whole seedy genre was the 1969 publication of War Against the Mafia by Don Pendleton, the first entry in his wildly successful Executioner saga, which featured Vietnam veteran Mack Bolan waging a single-handed war against the Mafia, just like it said in the title.

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Burbank Baghdad: Fake Folk Wisdom from the Movies

Burbank Baghdad: Fake Folk Wisdom from the Movies

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(1) The Vikings-small

Many people collect something, whether it’s rocks, stamps, coins, glass animals (especially favored by emotionally fragile Southern girls who find themselves trapped in Tennessee Williams plays), or in this social media era, grievances. A lot of us here at Black Gate collect books. For almost all of my life, this has been my own particular preoccupation, but much as I love my books, I must admit that collecting them has its drawbacks, a fact I’m reminded of every time someone new comes to my house and I again have to answer the question, “How many of these have you read?”

I do have another collection, though, one which costs nothing, never needs to be dusted, doesn’t require a forklift and flatbed truck to transport, and takes up no room. (Except perhaps emotionally.)

Several years ago, I was watching The Vikings, a 1958 bit of pseudo-historical nonsense starring those Nordic icons Ernest Borgnine, Kirk Douglas, and, fresh from the fjords of Brooklyn, Tony Curtis. At one point during the festivities, some horn-hatted character or other turned to one of his fellow Norsemen and declared, “Love and hate are horns on the same goat.” I instantly experienced a celluloid epiphany, and my new collection was born; from that moment on I began to obsessively accumulate Fake Folk Wisdom From the Movies.

You know Fake Folk Wisdom. You’ll find it in any movie set somewhere east of Suez, or in which native Americans appear, or where lederhosen-wearing peasants named Hans and Karl grab pitchforks and head up the hill to storm the castle. You’ll be knee-deep in it in any movie where a Swede portrays a Chinese (Warner Oland as Charlie Chan) or a Hungarian plays a Japanese (Peter Lorre as Mr. Moto). Virtually every line Anthony Quinn ever spoke in his sixty years in Hollywood was Fake Folk Wisdom of one sort or another.

Fake Folk Wisdom didn’t issue from the depths of the Black Forest, nor was it born on the banks of the Nile, the Danube, or the Ganges, but instead flowed freely from the bourbon bottles that graced the desks of writers’ bungalows at Paramount and Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox and RKO.

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Sadistic Vengeance and Grotesque Death — Still Only 20 Cents!

Sadistic Vengeance and Grotesque Death — Still Only 20 Cents!

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(1) Adventure Comics 431-small

Just about anything goes in comics today; in terms of sex, violence, subject matter, and language, there aren’t many restraints remaining. That’s not a curmudgeonly complaint but rather a simple statement of fact, and whether the medium has become a free fire zone because of the general disappearance of boundaries in all areas of our culture, or simply because comic creators know that the overwhelming majority of their readers are adults doesn’t much matter. Whatever the cause, it’s easy to pinpoint when comics began to change (for better and worse) from what they were to what they are; the epicenter of that tectonic shift was the so-called Bronze Age, from 1970 to 1985, a period that began with a still-benign Batman polishing his giant penny and ended with Green Arrow’s kid sidekick, Speedy, shooting smack.

So many comic book barriers have come down since those far off days that it’s hard to remember when there were such barriers, and just as hard to remember the earthquake-like impact that resulted when one of those Comics Code Authority-enforced walls was breached. (One unintended but inevitable consequence of the eradication of limits is the loss of the ability to be shocked, or even to recall what being shocked felt like.)

One of the key temblors of that revolutionary Bronze Age era was DC’s Adventure Comics 431, January-February 1974. It featured a character we had learned not to expect too much from — the Spectre, who had last presided over his own title for ten issues from 1967 to 1969. The twelve cent Silver Age Spectre was a comic book of unsurpassed dullness, but those of us privileged to pluck Adventure 431 off the drug store spinner rack knew very quickly that this time our two dimes had bought us something really different.

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A Perfect Dream of Summer: The Mad Scientists’ Club

A Perfect Dream of Summer: The Mad Scientists’ Club

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The Mad Scientists' Club-small The Mad Scientists' Club-back-small

In 1970, when I was ten, my city (Bell Gardens, California) built a new state-of-the-art library — right across the street from my house. (It was then that I knew that I was the favorite of the gods. The vicissitudes of life have since led me to revise that reckless assumption, but then I no longer live across the street from a library.) Every time I walked through the building’s doors (five or six times a day, probably), I sent up a silent thanks to Richard M. Nixon, whose name was prominently displayed on the dedication plaque by the entrance, even though he really had nothing to do with the project. (He had other things on his mind in those days — boy, did he.)

I practically lived in that library, and I knew every shelf of the large children’s section intimately; I could have drawn a quite accurate map of the layout from memory, with large arrows pointing to the location of my favorite books, many of which I checked out repeatedly and read over and over again. I retain fond memories of those stories, though nothing in the world would persuade me to reread most of them.

This is because few things in life are more hazardous than returning to a beloved children’s book after the passage of many years. It’s doubly dangerous if the work in question is one that’s “just” a children’s book and not one of those — like Alice in Wonderland or Peter Pan or The Wind in the Willows or the Little House books — that depth and brilliance and long endurance have accorded the status of literature.

There are exceptions, though, children’s books that might be less ambitious than the aforementioned classics but which can still engage an adult reader in search of something more than mere nostalgia. Exceptions like The Mad Scientists’ Club.

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Harlan Ellison 1934-2018: Essential and Impossible

Harlan Ellison 1934-2018: Essential and Impossible

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Harlan Ellison-small

Did you feel that? That sudden drop in pressure, that slump, as if the world itself had let out a long-held breath? I’m sure it was registered on every spot on earth, from Cleveland to Calcutta, from Reykjavik to Tierra del Fuego. That was Harlan Ellison leaving the building. No man was ever less likely to die peacefully in his sleep at the ripe old age of eighty four, but that’s exactly what happened on the morning of June 28th, and the effect is tantamount to global nuclear disarmament. The immanent threat is over; finally, we can all relax a bit.

An authoritative assessment of Ellison’s tumultuous sixty year career can now begin and is far beyond the scope of this piece, even if I had the ability to do it — which I don’t. All that I can say is that the world has instantly become a less interesting, less vital place than it was when the human bomb that was Harlan Ellison was still ticking away. He was one of those rare people who can actually alter the atmosphere; in his presence, the air was sharper, the light brighter, the temperature higher, and everything seems a little dulled and diminished now that he’s gone.

The couple of times that I met him in person — in the mid 70’s, at the legendary Change of Hobbit bookstore in Los Angeles — the intensity and excitement radiated from him in waves. It was actually a bit frightening, like being too close to an enormous bonfire. It was immediately evident that this was a dangerous person; he would break boundaries in ways good and bad, because that was life to him, and he didn’t know any other way to exist. It’s amazing that he lived to be eighty four — by all rights he should have succumbed to stroke or homicide long ago.

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Burton in a Skirt, or What Are You Going to Do with Your Life when Game of Thrones Is Over?

Burton in a Skirt, or What Are You Going to Do with Your Life when Game of Thrones Is Over?

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(1) Game of Thrones-small

Are you still trying to pull yourself out of the depression death-spiral you entered when you heard that the next season of Game of Thrones won’t appear until 2019? And do you find yourself going through every day in an ostrich-like endeavor to evade the knowledge that the next season of Game of Thrones will be the final season?

What will you do? What will you do?

Well, you could surrender to despair and binge-watch whatever the current iteration of CSI is (CSI Fresno? Arkadelphia? Mu?) until the foul odor of your sweaty, unwashed body drives away everyone you love and cherish.

Or you could do as your fathers’ fathers’… er… fathers (just old are you, kid?) did, yea, even as they wandered in the barren wilderness of the pre-internet, pre-fanboy, pre-CGI age: you could return to the source, the ancient fount from which Game of Thrones derives much of its overheated, multi-hued, melodramatic substance: the historical epics and biblical blockbusters and costume dramas that were Hollywood’s bread and butter from the silent era through the sixties, when the whole madcap caravan broke down by the side of the road, a victim of cultural change and economic vapor lock.

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A Classic Without the Quotation Marks: Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys

A Classic Without the Quotation Marks: Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys

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Rogue Moon Gold Medal-small Rogue Moon Gold Medal-back-small

Fawcett Gold Medal paperback original, November 1960. Art by Richard Powers

There are just too many books out there to read, too many still to get to, (too many that you’ll never get to!) and sometimes when you finally do read one of those older “classics,” the inevitable allowances you have to make for the style, the ideas, and the attitudes of an earlier era can make you come away feeling dissatisfied. You feel guilty even asking the question, but really, what was all the fuss about? What the hell was so “classic” about The Moon Pool anyway? So many vintage books seem to require the qualifying quotation marks.

There’s probably no genre as vulnerable to this sort of thing as science fiction. SF was always supposed to be the cutting edge, but let’s be honest; some of its most famous books — through no fault of anyone but Father Time — feel old. When the “door to tomorrow” starts to creak so loudly that you can hear the sound all the way across the parking lot, it can be pretty embarrassing. This is why it’s such a great pleasure to come across a “classic” (especially a neglected one) that lives up to and even exceeds its reputation, an older book that still has a dangerous edge that time has yet to dull.

Algis Budrys’ 1960 story of exploration, mortality, and the mystery of identity, Rogue Moon, is, I think, one of the most brilliant science fiction novels ever written, employing as it does some dusty old “gosh-wow!” pulp science fiction props with a new ambition and a deeper, more serious purpose.

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To Roam the Unreadable Tome: The Night Land Straight Up

To Roam the Unreadable Tome: The Night Land Straight Up

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The Night Land Sphere

Anytime that you read a Black Gate article, you do so at your peril. We all know this. How much time and money have you spent tracking down obscure books that you’ve read about here, and how many irreplaceable hours have you spent reading them? Yeah. Me too.

My most recent bout of this fever I blame squarely on Nick Ozment, who recently blew a loud horn on behalf of William Hope Hodgson’s 1912 weird classic The Night Land. Now I’ve had a copy of this book on my shelf for thirty five years and never once come close to reading it. (Wife and kids, working for a living, eating and sleeping, reading a zillion other books, watching Lost and Breaking Bad — you know how it goes, Hodgson, old boy; it was nothing personal.) I never felt any guilt over neglecting this masterpiece; after all, in his article, Nick alluded to the book’s virtual unreadability in its original form (Mr. O was using his piece to boost James Stoddard’s 2010 “translation” of the book into a more modern, accessible idiom.)

Well, to tell me that a book is “difficult” or “impenetrable” or “practically unreadable” (all words that featured prominently in Nick’s article) is like waving a red flag at a bull. My reading fate for the next three weeks was decided at that moment.

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