31 Days of Gothic Romance | The Hound of the Baskervilles

We've talked about the big overlap between gothic romance and horror, but a few years after Dracula was published, Arthur Conan Doyle married gothic romance with a whole new genre: the detective novel. It was the author's big return to Sherlock Holmes stories after killing off the character eight years earlier. The Hound of the Baskervilles was meant to be sort of a lost story from before Holmes' death, but that wasn't a satisfying tactic for fans. They continued to put pressure on Doyle until he officially resurrected Holmes two years after Hound.

Set in the wilds of Dartmoor, the action of Hound is instigated by an extremely gothic event in which the noble, but evil lord of Baskerville Hall chases a young woman into the moor with the intention of raping her. As legend has it, he's killed by a giant, spectral hound and his family is forever cursed. That becomes important in Holmes' day when the current master of the Hall is found dead near the enormous footprint of a dog. Holmes is brought in to investigate and to protect the final heir of the Baskervilles.

It's against this backdrop of gothic characters and supernatural legends that Doyle sets his mystery novel. But the gothic elements don't end with Holmes' introduction. Holmes is too logical and competent for us to be afraid as long as he's around, so Doyle wisely writes Holmes out of large chunks of the story. The detective pretends to be busy on other cases, while he's actually lurking behind the scenes the whole time. And this lets us experience the decaying Baskerville Hall through Watson's impressionable eyes. The moor becomes a haunted place of sinister figures and eerie lights, with Watson trying to figure out if the ghosts are real or just part of someone's cruel, but mundane plan.

Robots Can't Lie: SF Mysteries Before Asimov [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

Isaac Asimov claims that the science fiction story was never truly married with the mystery story before 1953. Some authors tried, while others danced around the problem, like Anthony Boucher who wrote the mystery novel, Rocket to the Morgue in 1942, about science fiction fans, rather than being science fiction itself. It was Asimov who took this challenge most seriously. In his book Asimov's Mysteries (1968) he wrote of his quest:

But talk is cheap, so I put my typewriter where my mouth was, and in 1953 wrote a science fiction mystery novel called The Caves of Steel (published, 1954). It was accepted by the critics as a good science fiction novel and a good mystery and after it appeared I never heard anyone say that science fiction mysteries were impossible to write. I even wrote a sequel called The Naked Sun (published, 1957) just to show that the first book wasn't an accident. Between and after these novels, moreover, I also wrote several short stories intended to prove that science fiction mysteries could be written in all lengths.

The Caves of Steel and its sequels feature murders that involve robots. Was this an original idea? Hardly. Eando Binder had made robots famous as early as 1939 with his stories of Adam Link, a robot that is accused of murder and faces trial. Asimov's interest is not to turn robots into protagonists, but to explore his Three Laws of Robots (and how a clever murderer might get around them.)

So imagine my surprise when I stumbled across "Robots Can't Lie" by Robert Leslie Bellem in a copy of Fantastic Adventures, July 1941. This murder mystery has a man, Tim Kermit, framed for murder by a robot that identifies him as the killer. Because of the way robots record what they see, they are considered infallible witnesses. Tim's only chance of avoiding the Lethal Chamber is to escape and repair another robot that was found broken at the murder scene. In the end the escape and repair are a trick that brings out the real killer.

Bellem tells the tale in his usual loose, noir style with Q-rays replacing .38s and gliders replacing cars. What the author lacks in style he makes up for in pace. Editor Ray Palmer interrupts in Hugo Gernsback fashion (with footnotes) to explain the SF trappings such as the Q-bolt used in the murder weapon, the viso lens of the robot, and the personal radio wave of the autorad, all in pseudo-scientific gooblygook that does nothing to further the story.

Now to go back to Asimov. He never said that no one ever tried to do it, only that it had never succeeded. What strikes me first off, is how similar the mystery ideas are between "Robots Can't Lie" and his Lije Bailey novels. I doubt Bellem was familiar with Adam Link (though he may have been), but Ray Palmer certainly was aware of his competition. Isaac Asimov was also fully aware of the Binders. He had permission to use the title I, Robot from the brother duo who had used it earlier. Was Asimov familiar with "Robots Can't Lie"? He was a bit of an Astounding/John W Campbell snob, so would he have read anything as pulpy as Fantastic Adventures? Unlikely, but his interest in robot stories may have superseded his snobbery.

Does "Robots Can't Lie" work as an SF-Mystery? Better than Asimov might have liked to admit. The robot-witness idea certainly could not happen in a regular mystery. This is one of Asimov's key criteria: a good SF-Mystery can't work as a regular mystery, nor is it simply SF. I'm not going to say you couldn't rewrite this story without SF trappings or robots. Replace the robots with human witnesses and it would work. (There is even a chance Bellem's story was largely rewritten by Palmer, though I have no proof of this.) Bellem was a high production writer, pumping out millions of words a year, and his ploy of trapping the villain is hardly novel. Asimov's novels by comparison could not be rewritten in this fashion. Even if Asimov wasn't the first, he certainly was the best at creating such SF Mysteries.

The other thing that makes me giggle is the 1980s adoration of how William Gibson brought a Raymond Chandler style to Cyberpunk. You want full-bore noir SF, here it is, the real thing from one of noir's cheesier hacks, back when Gibson's father was still reading Thrilling Wonder Stories.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

The Vincent Price Blogathon | The Bat (1959)

Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of Vincent Price's death, and to celebrate his life and work, The Nitrate Diva is hosting The Vincent Price Blogathon all weekend. Click that link for the portal to reviews of several Price films with more coming today and tomorrow. For mine, I picked:



Who's in it?: Vincent Price (of course) and Agnes Moorehead (Citizen Kane, Bewitched)

What's it about?: A mystery novelist (Moorehead) rents a large mansion in a town plagued by a serial killer.

How is it?: Vincent Price gets top billing for being the bigger star, but Agnes Moorehead's Cornelia van Gorder is the main character in this Murder, She Wrote-like tale. Before the movie even begins, the murderer known only as the Bat (because he may or may not also be responsible for the town's infestation of rabid bats) has been at work for a while. But just as Cornelia moves in, an embezzlement at the bank sends several people looking for the money, the clue to which is possibly hidden in Cornelia's house. Price plays the local doctor who's certainly up to no good and is also a strong suspect for the Bat.

It's a simple mystery and even with lots of attempted misdirection it's not difficult to figure out who the killer is. The dialogue is also extremely clunky with the worst kind of exposition shoved in all over the place. There are a few occasions early on where instead of seeing something cool happen, we just get to hear a couple of people talk about it.

But what the movie lacks in craft it makes up in charm. I naturally hoped for Price to be the eponymous villain, but whether he is or not, he's perfectly sinister and Vincent Pricey. I also spotted a lot of Endora's wicked playfulness in Cornelia, just five years before the debut of Bewitched. It's a treat watching those two, especially in the scenes they have together. And of course there's also the spooky, old house with its secret rooms and the marvelous look of the faceless, fedora-wearing, claw-handed Bat. For those who can forgive its B-movie plot and dialogue, The Bat offers a lot to love.

Rating: Four out of five foreboding physicians.

She-Wolf of London (1946)

Who's in it?: June Lockhart (Lost in Space, Lassie), Don Porter (Night Monster, Gidget), Sara Haden (The Shop Around the Corner, The Bishop's Wife), Jan Wiley (Citizen Kane, The Brute Man), and Eily Malyon (Going My Way, Basil Rathbone's The Hound of the Baskervilles).

What's it about?: A young woman (Lockhart) begins to think she may be the werewolf that's been terrorizing the local park.

How is it?: I'm going to have to spoil the movie to talk about it, but that's for the best. Though marketed as a werewolf movie (the title is a deliberate reference to Werewolf of London, the theatrical trailer plays up the werewolf angle, and my copy came in a DVD set with Universal's other werewolf films), She-Wolf isn't. It's a mystery/psychological thriller in the tradition of Gaslight, a hugely popular play in the late '30s that spawned two film adaptations (one in 1940 and the other in 1944) and lots of mid-'40s imitators like Dangerous Passage and this film. The play's plot, in which a young woman is made to think she's going insane by someone close to her, even gave its name to a clinical term in psychology so that "gaslighting" is "a form of mental abuse in which false information is presented with the intent of making a victim doubt his or her own memory, perception and sanity."

In this sub-genre of psychological thrillers, She-Wolf at least has the advantage of the villain's using a local werewolf legend as a major tool, but sadly there is no actual werewolf, which makes the movie a bait-and-switch. And the mystery of who's persecuting poor June Lockhart isn't that great either, since the key to unlocking it is clumsily revealed early on in the story.

There are some great sets and Lost in Space fans may find it fun to watch young Maureen Robinson, but there's not much else to recommend it.

Grade: D+

Doomed to Die (1940)

Who's in it?: Boris Karloff; those other people from the Inspector Wong series.

What's it about?: Wong, Street, and Logan investigate the murder of a shipping magnate.

How is it?: It's a forgettable mystery, but has the same advantages of the other one I watched. That is, Police Captain William Street and reporter Bobbie Logan have some fun chemistry and I enjoy watching them argue and try to beat each other to the mystery's solution. Of course, Wong's always going to outdo both of them.

I wouldn't mind watching all six of the Wong films some day (this was the fifth, and the last one for Karloff; Keye Luke took over for the final movie), but I'm frustrated by 50 Horror Classics' including two of them in the set. One was a novelty; two feels like a rip-off. As much as I can be ripped off when I only paid 50 cents per movie, I guess. I really don't have room to gripe.

Anyway, under other circumstances I'd enjoy these more, but right now they just make me want to watch an actual horror movie. Or Charlie Chan.

Rating: Bad.

The Fatal Hour (1940)

Who's in it?: Boris Karloff; Marjorie Reynolds (Holiday Inn); Grant Withers (Fort Apache, Rio Grande)

What's it about?: An undercover cop's death leads to more murder for Inspector Wong to solve.

How is it?: The only reason it's in the 50 Horror Classics collection is because it stars Boris Karloff. It's not a horror movie though; just a straight up murder mystery, the third in the series with Karloff as Chinese detective James Lee Wong.

Though obviously trying to capitalize on the popularity of Charlie Chan, the Wong series can't compete. It's always fun to watch Karloff - and I'm glad the movie's included in the collection, even if doesn't belong - but Wong doesn't have half the charm of his more famous predecessor. He's pleasant and dignified, but Karloff never exactly disappears into any role he plays and that doesn't change just because he's in yellowface. It's hard not to be cynical about Inspector Wong when it's really just about Karloff as a detective and - Hey! Charlie Chan is popular; let's make him Asian!

One cool thing about the Wong series is that he has a pretty good supporting cast in reporter Bobbie Logan (Reynolds) and Police Captain Bill Street (Withers). Wong stays one step ahead of them, but I like the romantic tension between the couple as they fight and try to out-sleuth each other. It's a refreshingly different approach from Charlie Chan's bumbling son as sidekick.

Rating: Okay.

One Body Too Many (1944)

Who's in it?: Jack Haley (the Tin Woodsman in Wizard of Oz); Jean Parker (The Gunfighter); Bela Lugosi

What's it about?: A dead millionaire leaves a complicated will, forcing his potential heirs to spend time in a dark mansion. Naturally, someone starts to kill them off.

How is it?: Haley gives this comedy a lot of heart as a timid insurance salesman who shows up for an appointment he booked a month before the millionaire died. Parker plays the millionaire's favorite niece and she and Haley fall for each other and try to keep each other alive.

The humor is farcical rather than joke-based, so while there aren't many laugh out loud moments, it's a lot of fun. Haley strikes a nice balance in his performance. He's comically frightened without being slapsticky about it. The funniest stuff has to do with Lugosi and Blanche Yurka as the millionaire's butler and maid. They're as suspicious as anyone and are constantly offering (possibly poisoned) coffee to the rest of the characters. Lugosi's disappointment each time he's refused is pricelessly hilarious.

Rating: Good. It's worth watching especially if you like movies about old, dark houses with lots of secret passages, but Haley is also charming. If you're a fan of Lugosi at all though, it's a must see.

10 movies I liked a lot in 2010

Now we're getting into the good stuff. These ten films were almost perfect, but for some minor detail that kept me from loving them forever.

Number 20



The dialogue, the setting, the acting, and the mood are all as great as everyone says they are. I loved it right up until the "25 Years Later" jump, which is where it lost me. I know people who appreciated that closure, but I would've preferred it another way.

Number 19



A powerful and moving love story, but I couldn't get behind the couple, as I've said before. And even though I suspect that was exactly the reaction I was supposed to have, it kept me from fully embracing this movie.

Twin Cities Adventure: Steampunk Mystery Event

The Scarlet Ribbon Society is hosting a Steam Century Mystery Event on Saturday, November 20th at the Le Blanc House Bed & Breakfast (302 University Avenue NE, Minneapolis, MN 55413).

Tickets are $10 in advance; $12 at the door. Space is limited, so they're encouraging people to order early.

The doors will open at 5:30 pm with the mystery beginnig at 6:00. Casual Attire is welcome, but Fancy Dress is applauded.

I'm not going to be able to attend this one, but Diane and I love mystery parties. If they do another, hopefully I'll learn about it sooner and we can make plans to go.

Elsewhere... All-Ages Comics and a Sweet Mystery

More on all-ages comics



I looked at this topic a few weeks ago through the lens of a Robert Kirkman comment. In this week's Gorillas Riding Dinosaurs, I look at it again via Skottie Young and Darwyn Cooke.

Sweets



In last week's What Are You Reading?, I talked briefly about Kody Chamberlain's awesome mystery comic, Sweets.

VI Warshawski in Indemnity Only

Sometimes, the 100-Page Rule lets me down. Just goes to show that hard and fast rules are never a good idea. Except when they are.

Anyway, I got to page 150 of Indemnity Only before I gave up. The first book in Sara Paretsky’s popular and award-winning VI Warshawski series begins interestingly enough with Warshawski’s being hired by a man who claims to be an prominent Chicago businessman. He says he wants her to locate his missing son, but she soon figures out that her client isn’t who he said he was at all. And then she finds the boy’s murdered body. Nice hook.

The problem is with Warshawski herself. I don’t like her. I can see how she’s revolutionary and important as a strong, female detective when that wasn’t cool (Indemnity Only was originally published in the early ‘80s), but Paretsky tries hard to imitate the sarcastic, wise-cracking attitude of Philip Marlowe and unfortunately, she’s no Raymond Chandler. Or at least she wasn’t when she wrote this book. I imagine that she’s improved, but I doubt I'll keep reading to find out.

Take for instance this exchange between a police officer and Warshawski about the apartment where Warshawski found the dead boy:

“It looks like he was sharing a room with a girl, but the whole setup is so unisex you can’t tell who was with who.”

“Whom,” I said absently. McGonnigal looked blank. “You can’t tell who was with whom, Seargant,” I explained.

That’s not witty. That’s annoying. And the rest of Warshawski’s dialogue isn’t much better. Add to that a lot of useless details about driving routes through Chicago and how the Cubs are doing on the radio and the mystery quickly becomes cluttered with “color.”

Still, I picked this up because I was curious about Paretsky’s character. I cut Ian Rankin some slack with his first Inspector Rebus novel, so I wanted to do the same here. But while I'll be reading the second Rebus book, I can't make myself go on with Warshawski.

The difference is that – while flawed – Rankin’s first book was never boring. Paretsky’s frequently is. And peeking ahead at the plots to future volumes, I don’t see a lot of reward for sticking with the series. According to detnovel.com, Paretsky’s known for “adapting her detective as a vehicle of social and political comment.” I’ve already had a taste of her preaching about grammar; I don’t know if I can handle her preaching about the homeless and free clinics too. Like proper grammar, I suspect that I’d agree with her on these issues, which is exactly why I don’t think I need or care to hear the sermon. Not when I’m just looking for an engaging mystery.

Pass the Comics: Eisner Edition

Robot 6 has links to the five webcomics nominated for Eisners this year. The Abominable Charles Christopher is one of them (and also one of my favorite comics - digital or otherwise), but the others I've never read before now.

I still haven't gone through each one completely, but I've read far enough into them to get a feel for the story and whether or not I'll like it. The only one that didn't grab me right away was Power Out, but maybe I didn't give it enough time. Someone let me know if I need to go back and check it out again.

Here are the three new comics I'll be following:

Bayou



Bayou is the story of a young, Black girl growing up in the South when all it took to ruin your life was looking at a White person the wrong way. Though that period of history is important to wrestle with, the reason I'm talking about Bayou on the Adventureblog is that there's also a fantasy angle with wonderful - and horrifying - creatures living in the swamp. I haven't seen yet how they tie in with the social injustice aspects of the story, but I'm anxious to.

Sin Titulo



Sin Titulo doesn't immediately jump into the action, but it gets going very quickly. It's about a young man who learns that his grandfather has passed away in his care facility. While going through his grandfather's things, he finds a picture of a mysterious girl and becomes obsessed with finding out who she is. Things are complicated though when it becomes apparent that some of the facility's staff know more than what they're telling and are actively trying to prevent the grandson from learning more. It's a captivating mystery.

The Guns of Shadow Valley



The Guns of Shadow Valley is a horror western. That - and that it's nicely drawn - is all I really needed to understand about it to know I wanted to keep going, so I haven't dug too deeply. I plan to though, because it does a nice job of pulling you in.

Movie News: Blackbeard's daughter and Frankenstein's hottie

Blackbeard's Daughter



Penelope Cruz's role in Pirates of the Caribbean 4 has been announced as Blackbeard's daughter. Since she's also a potential love interest for Captain Jack Sparrow and this man is her dad, this should be a blast. [MTV]

A Film with Me in It



I love the premise of this comedy about an unlucky man whose friends and acquaintances keep dying from unbelievable accidents that clearly look like he murdered them. Check out the trailer and see if you don't too.

Don McKay



I'm not sure what it is about the trailer for Don McKay that makes me so interested. I like Thomas Haden Church, but he carries the same, stunned facial expression throughout the entire trailer. I also like Elisabeth Shue, but that's largely out of nostalgia for Adventures in Babysitting. Maybe I'm just in the mood for a steamy thriller about a woman manipulating her former lover into murdering someone in the deep South.

Frankenstein, Captain America, and more Johnny Depp (as a spy this time) after the break.

100-Page Check-In: Barnaby Rudge

After reading too many mediocre novels, I took a break from fiction for a few months to check out some other stuff (I highly recommend Craig Ferguson’s American on Purpose, by the way. Wow.), but I’m finally jumping back into it again. Starting with Charles Dickens was a risky move, but though essays like American Notes failed to grab me, I generally like his fiction. He rambles, but his wandering is always funny, descriptive, and entertaining, so I have a lot of patience with him. Rather than begin with something that I’ve read before – or even seen adapted for the screen – I picked Barnaby Rudge, which I knew nothing about.

My edition is from The Oxford Illustrated Dickens and I think I’ve now learned my lesson about reading the introductions to these volumes. Rather than tease you about what’s coming up, the Oxford intros tend to be full critiques with lots of spoilers. They’d make a lot better afterwords, so from now on I’ll put off reading them until I’ve finished the rest of the book. But in spite of my sort of knowing where the story is headed, I’m still very interested in getting there after reading the hundredth page.

There are a lot of characters to keep straight, but Dickens makes it pretty easy and he’s built a nice mystery to get us through the introductions. There’s a fabulous old mansion that’s been converted into a roadside inn and the book opens there with a couple of mysterious strangers who hurry away into the night. One is a handsome, well-dressed, young man; the other is a rough, dangerous scoundrel who prefers to keep his face hidden. As the young man rushes off to some romantic rendezvous, the inn’s patrons tell the other stranger a tale about another mansion nearby and the horrible murders that occurred there long ago. For some reason, this spurs the second stranger to action and he rushes off.

Love, violence, and mystery after the break.

Edge of Darkness

Although there are some cool fights and action sequences in it, Edge of Darkness wasn’t an action film like I’d hoped for. It was however a really nice little Film Noir mystery. By the time you get to the end of it, you realize that the mystery isn’t all that complicated and you’ve already seen the plot in a bunch of other thrillers, but that didn’t matter that much to me. What mattered was that as Mel Gibson was running around trying to figure out who killed his daughter, I cared about what happened to him.

I cared that Gibson’s relationship with his daughter hadn’t been all that great lately. I cared about his grief and his memories of her. I wanted him to find out who killed her and wasn’t sure how he was going to. I was pretty sure he was never going to find peace, but I sure wanted to see him find justice. I got totally sucked up into his character and didn’t even care that much that the trailer had given me all the clues I needed to solve the mystery. I just wanted to see him solve it.

That’s mostly due to the acting, I suppose, and not only Gibson’s. Unlike a lot of mysteries and thrillers, when characters in The Edge of Darkness talk about being scared, I believed them. Just about everyone in the movie looks frightened out of his or her mind and that made the threat to Gibson’s character that much more menacing. Most of all though, Gibson does a great job. I already tend to like his performances, but I didn’t even mind his Boston accent. He could have really overdone it, but he lets you believe he’s from Boston without being annoying.

There are some things I don’t like about the movie, the biggest of which I can’t talk about without spoiling the end, but if you like Mel Gibson’s work at all – especially the vulnerability he brings to otherwise hard-case heroes – this is a welcome, emotional return for him.


Four out of five Blofeldian headquarters.

Movie News: Cold Warrior, Mother, and Atomic Robo

Cold Warrior



I'm going to see Edge of Darkness tomorrow night and I'm really looking forward to seeing Mel Gibson in front of the camera and kicking butt again. There's more coming too. He's just signed on to play a Cold War spy who comes out of retirement to help a young agent fight a Russian terrorist in Shane Black's (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) next movie.

Mother



The trailer for this looks really good. The lead actress looks so harmless until her obsession over proving her son's innocence in a murder case leads her to... well, just watch the trailer. Scary.

Atomic Robo: The Cartoon



The world's not ready for this much awesome, but it's coming anyway.

Elsewhere on the Internets...

Here's what else I've been up to online lately...

Amazon Princess



Wonder Woman slots, the art of Greg Horn, and panties.

What Are You Reading?



A few words about the great start to Greg Rucka and Matthew Southworth's new detective series.

Gorillas Riding Dinosaurs



January's pile of adventure comics will include Bigfoot vs. cowboy cannibals, a talking cat detective, funny animal Frankenstein, an Elvis impersonator, vampire reporters, Victorian escape artists, robots vs. dinosaurs, a WWII pilot in medieval armor, a haunted house, a kid in a cow costume, a burnt and half-mechanical Pinocchio, and a samurai rodent. Gonna be a good month.

September Theatrical Releases: What Looks Good

September 4

Gamer: I can't say that I'm super excited about this, but I do like that Gerard Butler guy and I'm always up for seeing him kick some booty. The being-controlled-by-a-kid bit will either be interesting or corny, but there's only one way to find out which.

Extract: I didn't like Office Space as much as most people I know, but I did like it and Jason Bateman's always funny and JK Simmons is always freaking hilarious and - hey! Mila Kunis!

September 9

9: I know some perfectly sane, otherwise intelligent people who not only aren't looking forward to this movie, but actually are kind of ticked off that it even exists. They claim that it's some sort of dislike for Tim Burton. My theory is that they've been replaced by aliens who loathe all things awesome.

September 18

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs: I don't remember having ever read the book that this is based on, but the trailer looks cute enough. The real reason I want to see it though is to imagine myself in a world where school-sized pancakes exist.

September 23

Astro Boy: I understand some die-hard fans are upset over changes that the movie's making. I've never seen an episode of the original cartoon, so I don't know anything about that. All I know is that it's a good-looking movie about a boy robot fighting a cool-looking, giant robot. Assuming it doesn't suck on it's own merits, I can't imagine not following it up by checking out the original on Netflix.

September 25

Surrogates: I loved the comics mini-series this is based on. Just a smart, thrilling sci-fi story and it looks like they're doing it justice in the film.

Whiteout: The other movie coming out this week based on a favorite comic of mine. Know what's better than a murder mystery set in Antarctica? Kate Beckinsale's solving a murder mystery set in Antarctica.

Pandorum: Nothing about the trailer looks very original, but I like all the stuff they seem to be borrowing from. And Antje Traue looks pretty cool in a Ripley-esque/Alice from Resident Evil sort of way. I'm up for it.

Dishonorable Mention: How can a movie with Sandra Bullock, Bradley Cooper, and Thomas Haden Church - three people whom I love - look so horrifyingly unfunny? You don't have to answer that. The answer is that it turns Bullock into a creepy stalker and Cooper into a lying jerk who's too passive-aggressive to tell her she's getting on his nerves.

October's adventure comics

This week's Gorillas Riding Dinosaurs is up at Robot 6. It's about all the great adventure comics coming out in October. We got treasure hunters, Viking demon-hunters, giant Nazi robots, ray guns, pirates, monsters, private eyes, a haunted house, and more Apocalipstix! October's going to be a great, great month.

Robot 6 with Plums

It's been a while since I wrote a Robot Review that wasn't also a Gorillas Riding Dinosaurs column, but I did this week. GRD is a column about adventure comics and Marjane (Persepolis) Satrapi's Chicken with Plums isn't that. I call it a murder mystery in the review, but it's not a thriller. It's deeper than that. And far more touching.

It does have Azrael in it though and he doesn't whine once about not having Batman's respect.