Lots of cool guests on this one as Dan Taylor and Ron Ankeny (Starmageddon, N3rd World) and Paxton Holley (Nerd Lunch, Cult Film Club, Hellbent for Letterbox) join Dave, David, and I to talk grunge, guns, and gigawatts.
Showing posts with label time travel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label time travel. Show all posts
Friday, July 28, 2017
Mystery Movie Night | Singles (1992), Young Guns II (1990), and Back to the Future (1985)
Lots of cool guests on this one as Dan Taylor and Ron Ankeny (Starmageddon, N3rd World) and Paxton Holley (Nerd Lunch, Cult Film Club, Hellbent for Letterbox) join Dave, David, and I to talk grunge, guns, and gigawatts.
Wednesday, November 11, 2015
Mastodonia: A Message from the Past [Guest Post]
By GW Thomas
Sometimes writers write messages for their future selves. A great example of one who did this was Clifford D Simak. The March 1955 Galaxy published a Simak story called "Project Mastodon." And it was a worthy time travel tale about creating new countries in time, not space. Three friends invent a primitive time machine that can make 50,000 year leaps, but find it very hard to profit by it when nobody will take them seriously. The US military treats them like a bunch of crackpots. When the men get stranded in the past after a mammoth crashes into their helicopter, they wrack their brains for someway to get back. The problem isn't the time machine, but the height. If they were to go back standing in Mastodonia they would end up under tons of earth. In the end, one man manages to get home but we have to wait to see if he can save his friends, even with the help of the military man who never lost faith that the travelers would return.
As time travel stories go, it is typical of the 1950s. No Morlocks here, only a puzzle story and a little action with sabertooths and mammoths. But buried in that story is a nugget, a time-release seed that will twenty-three years later become the novel Mastodonia. That little, almost unimportant fragment is a character named Pritchard, who is studying Law while the time machine inventors study Engineering. During a bull session on time travel, Pritchard pipes in: "If you guys ever do travel in time, you'll run up against more than you bargain for. I don't mean the climate or the terrain or the fauna, but the economics and the politics." In the scope of "Project Mastodon" this means the stuffy military men who poo-poo their suggestion of recognizing Mastodonia as a country and using it as a sanctuary in the case of a nuclear strike.
Twenty-three years come and go. The Golden Age turns into the New Wave and then into the age of Star Wars. It's 1978 and Simak gets that message from himself and thinks, "I left all the best stuff unwritten!" And so the novel Mastodonia (Catface in the UK) is penned and we see Clifford D Simak at his finest. Instead of a mere puzzle story, we get a tale about living characters. Asa Steele, a professor who has returned to the town where he grew up. Rila Elliot, a woman from Asa's past, come back into his life just as things get weird. Ben Page, the local bank manager, who becomes his business partner along with Rila. Instrumental to the story is Hiram, the simpleton who talks to Asa's dog Bowser, robins, and best of all to Catface, an alien who has been stranded in Asa's backyard for thousands of years. Unlike in "Project Mastodon," it is Catface who creates the time paths. This weird bunch, along with lawyers and publicists, establish Mastodonia and offer time paths for hunters to stalk T-Rex in his own Cretaceous period.
Simak is great for showing how time travel would bring on some big social issues (largely ignored in the earlier story). A religious coalition wants to pay Time Travel Associates to never go to the time of Jesus. The IRS sniffs around for tax income, but having established their own country, the time travelers are safe. Speculators want to go to Gold Rush areas before the big strike and skim off the easy gold. The federal government even gets in on it when they come up with the idea of sending the disadvantaged into the past to create a new, successful life (or simply to get rid of the deadbeats and criminals.) Asa is a simple man and all this is too much for him. All he craves is solitude in his own time period of Mastodonia where he and Rila will build a beautiful home. In their time country, Asa and Rila and Hiram enjoy the company of (the unfortunately named) Stiffy, an elderly mastodon. Unlike the excitement in "Project Mastodon," Stiffy doesn't strand anyone in time, but only trashes their mobile home. In fact, the novel isn't a series of spectacular action sequences involving prehistoric life (though it has a couple of good dinosaur scenes), but a story about how a man makes decisions about what he wants. This is the brilliance of the twenty-three year older novel. Simak writes science fiction, but like his contemporary Theodore Sturgeon, he has learned that good SF isn't puzzles or action scenes, but stories about people and how the SF elements affect them. You come to like these characters and wish the best for them. Simak keeps you guessing to the literal last chapter what will happen to Mastodonia.
Clifford D Simak's career ran for five decades, beginning with "The World of the Red Sun" in Wonder Stories (December 1931) to his final novel, Highway to Eternity in 1986. In those fifty-five years he wrote about time travel many times in novels like Time and Again (1951), Ring Around the Sun (1953), Time is the Simplest Thing (1961) and the short story "Grotto of the Dancing Deer" (1980), but Mastodonia is my favorite of all of his time stories, largely because it best captures this philosophy that Simak stated in one of the introductions to a book of stories:
"Overall, I have written in a quiet manner; there is little violence in my work. My focus has been on people, not on events. More often than not I have struck a hopeful note... I have, on occasions, tried to speak out for decency and compassion, for understanding, not only in the human, but in the cosmic sense. I have tried at times to place humans in perspective against the vastness of universal time and space. I have been concerned where we, as a race, may be going, and what may be our purpose in the universal scheme—if we have a purpose. In general, I believe we do, and perhaps an important one."
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.
As time travel stories go, it is typical of the 1950s. No Morlocks here, only a puzzle story and a little action with sabertooths and mammoths. But buried in that story is a nugget, a time-release seed that will twenty-three years later become the novel Mastodonia. That little, almost unimportant fragment is a character named Pritchard, who is studying Law while the time machine inventors study Engineering. During a bull session on time travel, Pritchard pipes in: "If you guys ever do travel in time, you'll run up against more than you bargain for. I don't mean the climate or the terrain or the fauna, but the economics and the politics." In the scope of "Project Mastodon" this means the stuffy military men who poo-poo their suggestion of recognizing Mastodonia as a country and using it as a sanctuary in the case of a nuclear strike.
Simak is great for showing how time travel would bring on some big social issues (largely ignored in the earlier story). A religious coalition wants to pay Time Travel Associates to never go to the time of Jesus. The IRS sniffs around for tax income, but having established their own country, the time travelers are safe. Speculators want to go to Gold Rush areas before the big strike and skim off the easy gold. The federal government even gets in on it when they come up with the idea of sending the disadvantaged into the past to create a new, successful life (or simply to get rid of the deadbeats and criminals.) Asa is a simple man and all this is too much for him. All he craves is solitude in his own time period of Mastodonia where he and Rila will build a beautiful home. In their time country, Asa and Rila and Hiram enjoy the company of (the unfortunately named) Stiffy, an elderly mastodon. Unlike the excitement in "Project Mastodon," Stiffy doesn't strand anyone in time, but only trashes their mobile home. In fact, the novel isn't a series of spectacular action sequences involving prehistoric life (though it has a couple of good dinosaur scenes), but a story about how a man makes decisions about what he wants. This is the brilliance of the twenty-three year older novel. Simak writes science fiction, but like his contemporary Theodore Sturgeon, he has learned that good SF isn't puzzles or action scenes, but stories about people and how the SF elements affect them. You come to like these characters and wish the best for them. Simak keeps you guessing to the literal last chapter what will happen to Mastodonia.
"Overall, I have written in a quiet manner; there is little violence in my work. My focus has been on people, not on events. More often than not I have struck a hopeful note... I have, on occasions, tried to speak out for decency and compassion, for understanding, not only in the human, but in the cosmic sense. I have tried at times to place humans in perspective against the vastness of universal time and space. I have been concerned where we, as a race, may be going, and what may be our purpose in the universal scheme—if we have a purpose. In general, I believe we do, and perhaps an important one."
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.
Monday, July 13, 2015
The Time Travelers [Guest Post]
By GW Thomas
Science fiction comics usually run in anthologies of similar material. Forbidden Worlds, Mystery in Space, even Space Westerns. All their stories are clearly marked as fantastic in nature. This is why "The Time Travelers" (#1 October-November 1950 - #12 August-September 1952) in American Comic Group's Operation Peril was so unusual. The rest of the strips that accompanied the time-slipping tales of Dr. Tom Redfield and his companion Peggy Foster were the sea adventures of Typhoon Tyler and the detective cases of red-headed Danny Danger. All three strips got cover space and none of the three could be said to overshadow the others.
"The Time Travelers" was written by Richard E Hughes, ACG editor and writing mainstay. Hughes was the creator of such characters as The Black Terror, The Fighting Yank, Super Mouse, and Herbie Popnecker in Forbidden Worlds. The artwork for "The Time Travelers" was provided by Ken Bald, best known for his later work on the Dr. Kildare comic strip that ran from 1962 to 1984.
The first installment (October-November 1950) introduces Dr. Tom Redfield, a nuclear physicist who is working on a new type of cyclotron. His girlfriend, the wealthy Peggy Foster, drags him to an auction where she out-bids the Russian Vanov for newly discovered papers by Nostradamus. The papers contains Nostradamus' prediction of a nuclear war in 1956, but also speaks of an antidote to the radiation. Tom uses the ancient priest's design for a "tempus machina" to finish the cyclotron. The Russians capture Tom and Peggy and put the couple in the cyclotron chamber to kill them, but actually send them back in time to 16th century France. Tom and Peggy are arrested as English spies. Speaking with Nostradamus, they learn that the counteragent to radiation can only be found on Venus. The duo flee back to the spot where the time machine dropped them, waiting for the time beam to take them back. They are surrounded by angry pursuers when they return to 1950.
Several time travel clichés are evident already in Hughes' script. The time machine does not take them to 16th century America, but to France, making it a time and space machine. Second, the travelers have no problem understanding the locals, who speak archaic French. These problems have plagued SF adventure writers who have found ways around them like Dr. Who's TARDIS and Star Trek's universal translator. Certainly Hughes is no worse than the writers behind George Pal's The Time Machine (1960) or Irwin Allen's Time Tunnel in 1966. These are annoying difficulties that most writers don't care to deal with.
Issue #2 (December 1950-January 1951) has Tom and Peggy build a rocket that uses the time machine as an engine and go to Venus. A Russian spy sabotages the ship (for the Russians have a ship of their own), sending Tom and Peggy back to the cavemen of the Stone Age. Tom shoots a sabertooth, uses cavemen as laborers to fix the ship and even encounters a Tyrannosaurus Rex (yup, dinosaurs!). The duo fly to Venus only to be captured by Venusian Amazons. Tom is thrown into an arena and must fight first the brutish Skang, then the many-armed Beast of Tarv. Defeating both, he wins the love of the Amazon queen (to Peggy's chagrin) and helps her take out the Russians who have holed up in a temple where the anti-radioactivity metal is kept. Vanov and the other Russians end up being eaten by killer plants and Tom and Peggy return to Earth with the antidote. (The nuclear war of 1956 is never mentioned again.)
Issue#3 (February-March 1951) has Tom and Peggy going back to the time of King Arthur (the 6th century) to get the sword Excalibur for a wealthy college patron named JP Frisbee. When they arrive at Camelot they are captured (always!) and taken before the King. Tom wins Arthur's favor by shooting a torch out of Merlin's hand. The duplicitous Merlin, along with Mordred and Morgan Le Fay, trap Arthur and Tom but they escape. The baddies bring in Teutonic knights to depose Arthur. Tom heads back to the future, takes on a carload of armored motorcycles, and the good guys have a jousting battle with the horse-riding Teutons, killing Mordred. Merlin and Morgan die when Tom tips their cauldron of boiling oil on them. There are enough inaccuracies in this story to spin Malory in his grave. First off, the knights and their armor are from the 12th or later century and secondly, most of the King Arthur story is not historically or even fictionally correct.
Issue #4 (April-May 1951) has Tom building a special rocket to take nuclear waste to the Moon. A Dr. Volka tries to dissuade him from the project, sabotaging the rocket and sending Tom and Peggy past the Moon and on to Saturn. There they discover that the rings of Saturn are made of flying saucers. Landing on Saturn they encounter the Cronians, the slave race of the Saturnians. Tom is placed in an arena (again!) and has to fight a big Saturnian on a platform. The loser falls off to be eaten by the dread Hydrid. Tom wins, but the overlord makes him fight the Hydrid anyway, with its impenetrable skin. The Cronians help Tom and Peggy escape and they take the slaves in the rocket. Going after Volka, Tom is waylaid by the beautiful Sirads, women so beautiful that men can't stop thinking about them. The only cure is a woman even more beautiful, so it's up to Peggy to get dolled up and break the spell. This episode contains the most interesting science Fictional ideas since the first episode, though some of it is just Edgar Rice Burroughs retread.
Issue #5 (June-July 1951) has a best selling historical author named Blake force Tom to take him to the age of pirates. The writer wants to give Anne Bonny, the famous woman pirate, modern guns so that she can acquire even more treasure, which Blake will get in the future. (I guess best selling authors don't make as much as they do now.) Tom and Peggy are stuck in the past because Blake has the key to the time machine. Blake and Anne begin a campaign of robbery that ends when a British warship attacks the pirates. Tom slows the pirates down by dropping a sail on them. The British arrest Anne, and Tom kills Blake with a sword. Tom reveals to Peggy that he had a duplicate key all along. Peggy suspects Tom has fallen for Anne Bonny but Tom explains that he knew Anne would be captured in 1720 and he wanted to make sure history was not changed. This is the last issue that hinges on Peggy's jealousy over other beautiful female characters, but she'd turn the tables in a few issues. It is also the only storyline that worries about preserving the timeline.
In Issue #6 (August-September 1951), the villain Emperor Ego has stolen the plans for Tom's spaceship/time machine and plans to recruit armies from the past to attack major cities. Tom uses the time machine to go back and hear Ego's plan, but it is a trap. Ego claims to be headed for Atlantis and Tom and Peggy go back in time. Once in Atlantis, Tom knocks down Kothos, Captain of the Guard, and uses him as a hostage to see the ruler, the beautiful Queen Thera. Kothos challenges Tom to a duel in the arena with chariots. Tom wins, but Kothos is a sore loser. Tom grabs Peggy and they flee. They are surrounded by archers and it looks bad when a great earthquake shakes Atlantis, sinking it beneath the waves. Tom and Peggy make it back to the ship and return to 1951. The spaceship picks up the signals of Ego's new vessel and Tom follows them to Ego's base. Tom kills Ego and his henchmen by burning them to death with the exhaust of the ship. Tom's violence against the villains increases as the comic goes on, but this is 1951 and the Comics Code has yet to be created.
Issue #7 (October-November 1951) has the Time Travelers off to Easter Island in the year 750 AD to discover the secret of the giant stone heads. Disguised as local Rotuma, Tom and Peggy join a war party getting ready for an invasion. Tarako, the war chief, discovers Peggy is a woman and uses a hypnotism drug on her. Peggy betrays Tom and he is strung up between two heads with a fire beneath. Tom saves himself by using his new remote control device. Taking the ship, he follows the invaders to Chile where they plan to capture Cuzco. Tom joins Princess Lanura, the Chilean ruler, and defeats Tarako in battle. Tom gets the antidote and Peggy is returned to her normal self. This time it was Tom's turn to be jealous. This episode introduces the remote control device that allows Tom to start and fly the ship from afar. Tom also supplies the information that the ship allows them to understand any language.
Issue #8 (December 1951-January 1952) tackles another fabled city. Tom leaves the time machine on and a beautiful princess named Amura comes out. She is taken back by some evil soldiers. This leads Tom and Peggy to go back in time to find the fabled city of Mu. When they arrive, they find they are gigantic in size. Tom explains: "It is just an illusion of time! Our bodies are still in the present... and since the relationship of time and space is a matter of distance -- the further back we go into history, the smaller things will seem..." (Of course, it's never happened before this. Hm.) The giant Tom knocks a boulder over and destroys a temple. Makarta, the soldier who took Amura, uses this as an excuse to sacrifice virgins on the altar of fire. What he really wants is to force Amura to marry him. Tom and Peggy shrink down to Mu size and spy around. Some guards catch them and take Tom's remote/size controller . By twisting it, they accidentally start the engines of the time machine and destroy the city. Tom and Peggy grow to normal size and see Mu buried by the sands of the desert. Peggy does almost nothing in this story and those that follow except act as a sounding board to Tom's conversation. This is too bad because she had real energy at the beginning.
Issue #9 (February-March 1952) has Tom and Peggy go back six thousand years in the Arctic. There they find an Aztec-like race in a country called Nawata. They are captured by warriors and their mammoth and taken to see Princess Colima and the War Chief, Kormac. Kormac would depose the princess but he can only do this if death comes from the sky. This happens when two thugs named Mack and Harpoon use the remote control to take the ship. It crushes several warriors in the process. Kormac attacks, but Tom slips Colima away on a mammoth. Harpoon and Mack come to Nawata and strike a deal with Kormac. The ship will help Kormac in his conquests for half the gold in the kingdom. Tom attacks the city on mammoth-back and kills Harpoon by crushing him under the mammoth's huge feet. Mack tries to take over but Tom uses the remote control he took from Harpoon to crush Kormac's army with his ship.
In Issue #10 (April-May 1952) Tom and Peggy are off on a routine flight when two Russians, Zarian and Klubov, hijack the ship. They want to go to Phyrgia, the land of King Midas. Tom manages to turn the tables on the communists when the Phyrgians show up and capture Tom and Peggy. They get to see the city, which is covered in gold. They are taken to King Midas who thinks they are spies. The duo escape when Kyra, a woman archer, saves them. Meanwhile, the Russians have taken the spaceship. Tom has the remote control, but he wants to see what they are up to. The Russians have struck a deal with Midas. They plan to get modern mining equipment and help Midas produce more gold. Midas no longer needs the slaves who currently do the job and plans to kill them all. Tom saves them by destroying the dam above the mine with the remote control. He drowns the Russians and Midas's soldiers. Kyra is free to lead the rebellion against Midas.
Issue #11 (June-July 1952) has a mysterious green planet approaching earth. Professor Romulus asks Tom and Peggy to go to the time of the Romans, when last the green planet came, and find out how the world was saved then. Tom takes the ship to the green planet of the past. There he and Peggy are captured by a dinoraff, a sentinel that looks like a cross between a duck-billed dinosaur and a tree. The same plot again but this time with Kumrack and the real king Roylan. The king does not propose to fight Kumrack's army, but to stop the green planet from destroying the earth. He plans to flood the city by breaking a dam and destroying the machinery that pulls the two planets together. The dinoraff hears the plan and sacrifices itself to accomplish it. Tom and Peggy fly to the green planet of the future and find that Roylan's heirs are not noble, but warmongers. They plan to imprison or destroy the earth. Tom and Peggy escape and use the ship to destroy another dam, flooding the city and its planet-pulling machines again.
In issue #12 (August-September 1952), Tom and Peggy are flying to Italy to see a Professor Bentini about a new mystery. Communists shoot Bentini down but are killed in turn by Tom, crushing them with his ship. The dying Bentini speaks a single clue on his death-bed, "Boadicea!" Tom and Peggy figure out that the Sixth Legion died mysteriously of radiation while fighting the British Queen. They fly to the past and are quickly captured by Boadicea's army and framed for the murder of the priest Iceno. Tom assumes Iceno's identity, luring the Romans to a cliff along the coast. He warns the Britons, so the Romans are routed. The uranium deposit is in the cliff which falls into the sea. Tom and Peggy return home to find and punish the communists who killed Bentini.
With issue #13, Operation Peril became a straight war comic, dropping "The Time Travelers" along with Typhoon Tyler and Danny Danger. The format change couldn't save it, ending with issue #16 (April-May 1953). Though the plots were recycled endlessly, Richard Hughes did show some inventiveness as well as an interest in topics as unusual as Nostradamus, Atlantis, Mu, and Easter Island. These same outré concepts would be big decades later in the 1970s. "The Time Travelers" suffers from many Cold War phobias and biases, but did explore territory made famous later, beginning in 1963 with the Doctor Who TV show in England, especially the early episodes starring William Hartnell. It would be easy to forget "The Time Travelers" since the strip did not appear in an all science fiction comic, but fortunately the run was reprinted by Boardman Books in 2014, using Ogden Whitney's best "Time Travelers" cover from issue #5.
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 Time Travelers" was written by Richard E Hughes, ACG editor and writing mainstay. Hughes was the creator of such characters as The Black Terror, The Fighting Yank, Super Mouse, and Herbie Popnecker in Forbidden Worlds. The artwork for "The Time Travelers" was provided by Ken Bald, best known for his later work on the Dr. Kildare comic strip that ran from 1962 to 1984.
The first installment (October-November 1950) introduces Dr. Tom Redfield, a nuclear physicist who is working on a new type of cyclotron. His girlfriend, the wealthy Peggy Foster, drags him to an auction where she out-bids the Russian Vanov for newly discovered papers by Nostradamus. The papers contains Nostradamus' prediction of a nuclear war in 1956, but also speaks of an antidote to the radiation. Tom uses the ancient priest's design for a "tempus machina" to finish the cyclotron. The Russians capture Tom and Peggy and put the couple in the cyclotron chamber to kill them, but actually send them back in time to 16th century France. Tom and Peggy are arrested as English spies. Speaking with Nostradamus, they learn that the counteragent to radiation can only be found on Venus. The duo flee back to the spot where the time machine dropped them, waiting for the time beam to take them back. They are surrounded by angry pursuers when they return to 1950.
Issue #2 (December 1950-January 1951) has Tom and Peggy build a rocket that uses the time machine as an engine and go to Venus. A Russian spy sabotages the ship (for the Russians have a ship of their own), sending Tom and Peggy back to the cavemen of the Stone Age. Tom shoots a sabertooth, uses cavemen as laborers to fix the ship and even encounters a Tyrannosaurus Rex (yup, dinosaurs!). The duo fly to Venus only to be captured by Venusian Amazons. Tom is thrown into an arena and must fight first the brutish Skang, then the many-armed Beast of Tarv. Defeating both, he wins the love of the Amazon queen (to Peggy's chagrin) and helps her take out the Russians who have holed up in a temple where the anti-radioactivity metal is kept. Vanov and the other Russians end up being eaten by killer plants and Tom and Peggy return to Earth with the antidote. (The nuclear war of 1956 is never mentioned again.)
Issue#3 (February-March 1951) has Tom and Peggy going back to the time of King Arthur (the 6th century) to get the sword Excalibur for a wealthy college patron named JP Frisbee. When they arrive at Camelot they are captured (always!) and taken before the King. Tom wins Arthur's favor by shooting a torch out of Merlin's hand. The duplicitous Merlin, along with Mordred and Morgan Le Fay, trap Arthur and Tom but they escape. The baddies bring in Teutonic knights to depose Arthur. Tom heads back to the future, takes on a carload of armored motorcycles, and the good guys have a jousting battle with the horse-riding Teutons, killing Mordred. Merlin and Morgan die when Tom tips their cauldron of boiling oil on them. There are enough inaccuracies in this story to spin Malory in his grave. First off, the knights and their armor are from the 12th or later century and secondly, most of the King Arthur story is not historically or even fictionally correct.
Issue #5 (June-July 1951) has a best selling historical author named Blake force Tom to take him to the age of pirates. The writer wants to give Anne Bonny, the famous woman pirate, modern guns so that she can acquire even more treasure, which Blake will get in the future. (I guess best selling authors don't make as much as they do now.) Tom and Peggy are stuck in the past because Blake has the key to the time machine. Blake and Anne begin a campaign of robbery that ends when a British warship attacks the pirates. Tom slows the pirates down by dropping a sail on them. The British arrest Anne, and Tom kills Blake with a sword. Tom reveals to Peggy that he had a duplicate key all along. Peggy suspects Tom has fallen for Anne Bonny but Tom explains that he knew Anne would be captured in 1720 and he wanted to make sure history was not changed. This is the last issue that hinges on Peggy's jealousy over other beautiful female characters, but she'd turn the tables in a few issues. It is also the only storyline that worries about preserving the timeline.
Issue #7 (October-November 1951) has the Time Travelers off to Easter Island in the year 750 AD to discover the secret of the giant stone heads. Disguised as local Rotuma, Tom and Peggy join a war party getting ready for an invasion. Tarako, the war chief, discovers Peggy is a woman and uses a hypnotism drug on her. Peggy betrays Tom and he is strung up between two heads with a fire beneath. Tom saves himself by using his new remote control device. Taking the ship, he follows the invaders to Chile where they plan to capture Cuzco. Tom joins Princess Lanura, the Chilean ruler, and defeats Tarako in battle. Tom gets the antidote and Peggy is returned to her normal self. This time it was Tom's turn to be jealous. This episode introduces the remote control device that allows Tom to start and fly the ship from afar. Tom also supplies the information that the ship allows them to understand any language.
Issue #8 (December 1951-January 1952) tackles another fabled city. Tom leaves the time machine on and a beautiful princess named Amura comes out. She is taken back by some evil soldiers. This leads Tom and Peggy to go back in time to find the fabled city of Mu. When they arrive, they find they are gigantic in size. Tom explains: "It is just an illusion of time! Our bodies are still in the present... and since the relationship of time and space is a matter of distance -- the further back we go into history, the smaller things will seem..." (Of course, it's never happened before this. Hm.) The giant Tom knocks a boulder over and destroys a temple. Makarta, the soldier who took Amura, uses this as an excuse to sacrifice virgins on the altar of fire. What he really wants is to force Amura to marry him. Tom and Peggy shrink down to Mu size and spy around. Some guards catch them and take Tom's remote/size controller . By twisting it, they accidentally start the engines of the time machine and destroy the city. Tom and Peggy grow to normal size and see Mu buried by the sands of the desert. Peggy does almost nothing in this story and those that follow except act as a sounding board to Tom's conversation. This is too bad because she had real energy at the beginning.
In Issue #10 (April-May 1952) Tom and Peggy are off on a routine flight when two Russians, Zarian and Klubov, hijack the ship. They want to go to Phyrgia, the land of King Midas. Tom manages to turn the tables on the communists when the Phyrgians show up and capture Tom and Peggy. They get to see the city, which is covered in gold. They are taken to King Midas who thinks they are spies. The duo escape when Kyra, a woman archer, saves them. Meanwhile, the Russians have taken the spaceship. Tom has the remote control, but he wants to see what they are up to. The Russians have struck a deal with Midas. They plan to get modern mining equipment and help Midas produce more gold. Midas no longer needs the slaves who currently do the job and plans to kill them all. Tom saves them by destroying the dam above the mine with the remote control. He drowns the Russians and Midas's soldiers. Kyra is free to lead the rebellion against Midas.
In issue #12 (August-September 1952), Tom and Peggy are flying to Italy to see a Professor Bentini about a new mystery. Communists shoot Bentini down but are killed in turn by Tom, crushing them with his ship. The dying Bentini speaks a single clue on his death-bed, "Boadicea!" Tom and Peggy figure out that the Sixth Legion died mysteriously of radiation while fighting the British Queen. They fly to the past and are quickly captured by Boadicea's army and framed for the murder of the priest Iceno. Tom assumes Iceno's identity, luring the Romans to a cliff along the coast. He warns the Britons, so the Romans are routed. The uranium deposit is in the cliff which falls into the sea. Tom and Peggy return home to find and punish the communists who killed Bentini.
With issue #13, Operation Peril became a straight war comic, dropping "The Time Travelers" along with Typhoon Tyler and Danny Danger. The format change couldn't save it, ending with issue #16 (April-May 1953). Though the plots were recycled endlessly, Richard Hughes did show some inventiveness as well as an interest in topics as unusual as Nostradamus, Atlantis, Mu, and Easter Island. These same outré concepts would be big decades later in the 1970s. "The Time Travelers" suffers from many Cold War phobias and biases, but did explore territory made famous later, beginning in 1963 with the Doctor Who TV show in England, especially the early episodes starring William Hartnell. It would be easy to forget "The Time Travelers" since the strip did not appear in an all science fiction comic, but fortunately the run was reprinted by Boardman Books in 2014, using Ogden Whitney's best "Time Travelers" cover from issue #5.
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.
Wednesday, April 08, 2015
Locked in Time: Time Machine Classics [Guest Post]
The fourteenth episode of the popular sit-com The Big Bang Theory, "The Nerdmabelia Scattering," featured a prop from George Pal's 1960 film The Time Machine. The four main characters go in together to buy the original time machine prop, leading to neurotic Sheldon Cooper's dreaming and crying out, "Not flesh-eating Morlocks!" The disk-backed machine is described by Penny as "something Elton John drives through the Everglades!" But my favorite joke was when the guys simulated the sped-up time effect from the movie, pretending to be moving at advanced speed like the people in the street. Besides being hilarious, this cultural reference to the 1960 film is very telling. The show did not feature any references to the 1978 TV movie or the 2002 film. Why? Because no one, despite big budgets and CGI, has surpassed George Pal's film.
Of all the films based on HG Wells' four major SF themes, "The Time Machine" has received the least formal adaptations. This is probably due to the expensive nature of creating a future world. The concept of time travel has become widely familiar though, from comedies to super-hero fare. Anyone from the Three Stooges to the Flash can travel in time. The idea became a mainstream trope while actual adaptations of the story have been sparse."The Time Machine" (1895) catapulted HG Wells into the top tier of science fiction writers. The story (some call it a short novel) follows an anonymous inventor who goes to the future, seeking a time when Science will have solved all of humankind's problems. What he finds instead is a garden world populated by two separate races: the Eloi, with their pleasant bovine simplicity, and the evil Morlocks, dwelling below with their sinister machines. The tale works on so many levels that I've re-read it more times than any other of Wells' stories. The SF extrapolation is wonderful, following a split in the human species, as well as a look at the eventual death of the solar system. This post-Morlock portion of the tale has been as inspirational as the first part, influencing writers like William Hope Hodgson and John W Campbell. Wells also uses fantasy tropes like the dream journey and return, but the story also works as a horror tale, with the Morlocks slowly exposed and their terrible secret revealed. Perhaps most important to Wells is that the story is also a socialist cautionary tale about the division between proletariat and those who exploit them.
Eleven years later, science fiction filmmaker George Pal would bring the story to blazing color with astounding special effects. The classic film starred Rod Taylor as the Time Traveler and Yvette Mimieux as Weena. The film won an Academy Award for its time-lapse photography. It is this film that gave us the chair with the spinning dish that supplied the prop for that episode of Big Bang. Unlike Pal's adaptation of The War of the Worlds (1953), this film did not update the setting but stays in the Victorian age of Wells. Because of this, the time machine does not have a futuristic look, but a quaint Steampunkish one. The only deviation from Wells' vision is the deletion of the scene where he goes beyond the Morlocks to see the end of the Earth.
Pal's film lingered on in TV reruns and re-releases at theaters for decades. It took until 1978 for someone to approach the material again, this time as a television movie, part of Sunn Pictures' Classics Illustrated series. Sadly, the producers updated the background, making the Time Traveler, played by John Beck, a scientist working for the military. The theme of the piece is also updated to being about the military industrial complex and not humanity's overall evolution. The film has numerous strikes against it. First, the almost Western-style music. This, along with jaunts back to a Salem-style witch-burning and the Old West, brand the picture as very American in what was a quintessential British novel. These past episodes take up almost half the movie, leaving only the last 50 minutes for the Eloi. The bad writing is accompanied with much bad acting. Priscilla Barnes, as Weena, is the only convincing performer.
If the 1978 film was a disappointment, the 2002 film by Wells' grandson, Simon Wells, was an intriguing failure. Guy Pierce plays the Time Traveler, appropriately set before the turn-of-the-century, but in America. He is Dr. Alexander Hartdegen, a professor of Engineering at Columbia. The film supplies a romantic back-story in which Hartdegen's fiancée is killed. Using the time machine he tries to change the past, but finds doing so only causes her death in other ways. Disconsolate, he goes into the future to find Earth being ravaged by the destruction of the Moon. In this future time he encounters Vox, the computer library, played wonderfully by Orlando Jones. Later in the film he would encounter him again, in the dilapidated library of the Eloi. Jones is funny, singing an imaginary Andrew Lloyd Weber musical based on Wells' book, but he even manages to make us a little sad for the AI personality that can forget nothing. He also supplies the background info that is usually done at this point in the story. In many ways the film is an homage to the 1960 and even the 1978 films. Hartdegen's design has the same levers and spinning disk (though two) that we all know. The time lapse sequences use the same growing plants and passing suns that the other films did. And like the other two, the sequence after the Morlocks is ignored.
The legacy of Wells' "The Time Machine" is too wide to clearly outline. His idea of traveling in time has been part of so many science fiction novels, TV shows, comic books and films. Without the Time Traveler's adventures there is no Captain Kirk going back to 1968 in "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" or saving whales in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. No Red Dwarf. No Doctor Who or Back to the Future. No crappy ending of Superman II. Mainstreamed SF like The Lake House by James Patterson or better yet, Somewhere In Time by Richard Matheson. Classics like The Door Into Summer by Robert A Heinlein, "The Sound of Thunder" by Ray Bradbury, "Behold the Man" by Michael Moorcock, and on and on and on... Time travel is one of the major SF themes and like so many others, the man who gave it to us went by the name of Wells.
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.
Monday, February 03, 2014
Dawn of Time
I've had Michael Stearns' webcomic Dawn of Time bookmarked to read for a while now and have finally had a chance to finish it. This post isn't a full review, but it's definitely a recommendation.
The strip is about a prehistoric girl named Dawn who hangs out with a triceratops named Blue. It's not just a bunch of cute adventures (though it has those, too), but Stearns builds an actual, epic story featuring Victorian time travelers, alien gods, and the relatively more civilized people of Dawn's world. It's fantasy, not science-based (as if her living side by side with dinosaurs isn't clue enough), but that's a big part of what keeps it fun. Since Stearns' imagination trumps everything else, anything can happen and usually does.
It's a complete strip - Stearns wrapped it up in 2011 - and there's enough to it to make it worth investing time in, but there's not so much material to make it daunting to start from the beginning. It's a really great read, so do yourself a favor and check it out.
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Top 10 Movies of 2012
10. Pitch Perfect
Movies get bonus points for coming out of nowhere and surprising me, which is exactly what Pitch Perfect did. I like Anna Kendrick and a capella singing just fine, but neither would typically be enough to get me to the theater by themselves. What I do love are movies about contests that We've Just Gotta Win and this one is hilarious (especially - but not only - thanks to Rebel Wilson).
9. The Dark Knight Rises
Not as great as The Dark Knight, but it's a good finale to Christopher Nolan's trilogy. It proved once and for all that Nolan's Batman is not the comic-book Batman, but I'm okay with that. I not only like the way Nolan finishes the series, I wish the comics would wrap up the same way.
The thing I was most excited about for this film though was seeing Catwoman and it didn't disappoint me on that level. Anne Hathaway narrowly edges out Julie Newmar as my favorite Catwoman (only because Newmar's version had a touch of crazy that I don't think the character needs).
8. The Cabin in the Woods
Embraces most of what I love about horror movies while making fun of everything I hate. The ending isn't perfect, but the rest of it sure is.
7. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
I'm a sucker for elderly British people and stories about second chances. This was right in my wheelhouse on so many levels.
6. Skyfall
I haven't actually talked to anyone who's called Skyfall the best Bond movie ever, but I've heard that such people exist. If I were to meet someone with that point of view, my response would be, "Really?" Because I don't think they're thinking that through very well.
Skyfall is a lot of fun, it's gorgeous, and it works both as the 50th anniversary of the Bond series and as the finale of the trilogy started in Casino Royale. I especially love it from that last perspective. Say what you want about Quantum of Solace's dumb story and boring villain, but one thing that film did right was continue the story of Bond's relationship with his country as personified by M. Skyfall pays that story off in a beautiful way while also reintroducing elements from the pre-Casino Royale films that I didn't realize how much I'd missed. It's also got a great villain and covers its themes in interesting ways. It's a great Bond film.
But the best ever? No way. It owes too much to the early Connery films to seriously consider letting it surpass them. I'm not even sure I like it as much as The Living Daylights or Casino Royale.
5. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
My including The Hobbit this high on the list is all the evidence anyone needs to verify that this Top 10 is my personal one and not an attempt at the 10 Objectively Greatest Movies of the year. If I were being objective about it, I'd agree with the critics who point out that Peter Jackson is indulging his every whim at the expense of telling a tight story. There's a reason that he released a Theatrical Cut of the Lord of the Rings films and then an Extended Edition for DVD. A lot of people simply don't have the patience to sit through scenes that legitimately could have been deleted to improve the pacing.
That said, I'm solidly in the camp of people who will only ever watch the Extended Editions of Lord of the Rings. I love all that extra stuff. I love seeing Middle Earth that fleshed out. I absolutely don't mind seeing Jackson do the same thing with The Hobbit. But I also can't be too harsh on those who do mind it. Jackson risked alienating those folks when he chose not to release a shorter, theatrical version, so it's fair for them to say it didn't work for them.
Even for me, it's not perfect. With Lord of the Rings, I love pretty much every change Jackson made to Tolkien's novels, but I miss the Bilbo that was blustered out his front door and into adventure by Gandalf in the book. Jackson's Bilbo begins his journey too eagerly for my taste. He's too heroic too early. It felt right as I watching it, so maybe I'll re-evaluate after I've seen all three films, but it feels like Jackson needed to speed up Bilbo's character development in order to make him more likable in this installment of the trilogy.
That - and the fact that it is the first installment in a trilogy instead of a complete story - keeps The Hobbit from being higher on my list.
4. Mirror Mirror
I've already written about Mirror Mirror a couple of times, so I'll spare us all another review. I really, really love this movie though.
3. Les Misérables
I knew I was going to have problems with this movie from the first time I saw the trailer and teared up listening to "I Dreamed a Dream." And I was right. Through the whole film, if I wasn't crying over the human misery, I was crying from the joy of hearing those songs again.
I've seen Les Misérables on stage a few times. It's my favorite musical and the reason I think Phantom of the Opera is over-rated. So I'm very familiar with the songs, but I don't own a cast recording and can't listen to them any time I want. I've never cared about hearing the songs outside of the context of the story as presented by actors.
But because I love those songs - and the story - so much, I've longed for a version with actors that I could own and watch whenever I want. In other words, I've been wanting this movie for about twenty years. And it was everything I hoped it would be. (Even Russell Crowe, who isn't an especially strong Javert, but has a perfectly lovely singing voice outside of that.)
The only reason Les Misérables isn't higher on my list is because I can't separate it from my feelings about the stage production. I don't know how I would've felt about it if I wasn't already in love with it from the moment it was announced.
2. The Avengers
Oh, wait... I mean the other Avengers movie about a red-headed spy in a black catsuit.
I seriously reconfigured my Top 3 movies I don't know how many times right up to the point of writing this post. There was a long time this year that I couldn't imagine any movie bumping The Avengers from first place.
A lot of my love for the movie is because it never should have worked. If I've learned anything from a lifetime of movie watching, it's that movies are never as awesome as we hope they'll be. From the moment Samuel L. Jackson appeared at the end of Iron Man, we were all thrilled by the notion of an integrated universe of Marvel superhero films all leading to an all-star Avengers movie. But admit it, you didn't think it would deliver, did you? I certainly didn't. It couldn't possibly live up to the awesomeness of its premise.
Except it did. It totally did.
And, in the process, it gave us the Hulk movie we'd all been waiting for.
1. Looper
Outside of its being really stinking good, the reason Looper is number one on my list is because it's not based on something I already loved. I had to give it bonus points for being a completely original story about characters I'd never heard of before. And what a story.
I dig a good, tightly plotted time-travel story as much as the next person, but what I really love are stories that make me think and re-evaluate my opinions about people. I can't talk about how Looper does that without going into spoilers, but it's so much more than just a fun, scifi movie and deserves to be Number One.
Movies get bonus points for coming out of nowhere and surprising me, which is exactly what Pitch Perfect did. I like Anna Kendrick and a capella singing just fine, but neither would typically be enough to get me to the theater by themselves. What I do love are movies about contests that We've Just Gotta Win and this one is hilarious (especially - but not only - thanks to Rebel Wilson).
9. The Dark Knight Rises
Not as great as The Dark Knight, but it's a good finale to Christopher Nolan's trilogy. It proved once and for all that Nolan's Batman is not the comic-book Batman, but I'm okay with that. I not only like the way Nolan finishes the series, I wish the comics would wrap up the same way.
The thing I was most excited about for this film though was seeing Catwoman and it didn't disappoint me on that level. Anne Hathaway narrowly edges out Julie Newmar as my favorite Catwoman (only because Newmar's version had a touch of crazy that I don't think the character needs).
8. The Cabin in the Woods
Embraces most of what I love about horror movies while making fun of everything I hate. The ending isn't perfect, but the rest of it sure is.
7. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
I'm a sucker for elderly British people and stories about second chances. This was right in my wheelhouse on so many levels.
6. Skyfall
I haven't actually talked to anyone who's called Skyfall the best Bond movie ever, but I've heard that such people exist. If I were to meet someone with that point of view, my response would be, "Really?" Because I don't think they're thinking that through very well.
Skyfall is a lot of fun, it's gorgeous, and it works both as the 50th anniversary of the Bond series and as the finale of the trilogy started in Casino Royale. I especially love it from that last perspective. Say what you want about Quantum of Solace's dumb story and boring villain, but one thing that film did right was continue the story of Bond's relationship with his country as personified by M. Skyfall pays that story off in a beautiful way while also reintroducing elements from the pre-Casino Royale films that I didn't realize how much I'd missed. It's also got a great villain and covers its themes in interesting ways. It's a great Bond film.
But the best ever? No way. It owes too much to the early Connery films to seriously consider letting it surpass them. I'm not even sure I like it as much as The Living Daylights or Casino Royale.
5. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
My including The Hobbit this high on the list is all the evidence anyone needs to verify that this Top 10 is my personal one and not an attempt at the 10 Objectively Greatest Movies of the year. If I were being objective about it, I'd agree with the critics who point out that Peter Jackson is indulging his every whim at the expense of telling a tight story. There's a reason that he released a Theatrical Cut of the Lord of the Rings films and then an Extended Edition for DVD. A lot of people simply don't have the patience to sit through scenes that legitimately could have been deleted to improve the pacing.
That said, I'm solidly in the camp of people who will only ever watch the Extended Editions of Lord of the Rings. I love all that extra stuff. I love seeing Middle Earth that fleshed out. I absolutely don't mind seeing Jackson do the same thing with The Hobbit. But I also can't be too harsh on those who do mind it. Jackson risked alienating those folks when he chose not to release a shorter, theatrical version, so it's fair for them to say it didn't work for them.
Even for me, it's not perfect. With Lord of the Rings, I love pretty much every change Jackson made to Tolkien's novels, but I miss the Bilbo that was blustered out his front door and into adventure by Gandalf in the book. Jackson's Bilbo begins his journey too eagerly for my taste. He's too heroic too early. It felt right as I watching it, so maybe I'll re-evaluate after I've seen all three films, but it feels like Jackson needed to speed up Bilbo's character development in order to make him more likable in this installment of the trilogy.
That - and the fact that it is the first installment in a trilogy instead of a complete story - keeps The Hobbit from being higher on my list.
4. Mirror Mirror
I've already written about Mirror Mirror a couple of times, so I'll spare us all another review. I really, really love this movie though.
3. Les Misérables
I knew I was going to have problems with this movie from the first time I saw the trailer and teared up listening to "I Dreamed a Dream." And I was right. Through the whole film, if I wasn't crying over the human misery, I was crying from the joy of hearing those songs again.
I've seen Les Misérables on stage a few times. It's my favorite musical and the reason I think Phantom of the Opera is over-rated. So I'm very familiar with the songs, but I don't own a cast recording and can't listen to them any time I want. I've never cared about hearing the songs outside of the context of the story as presented by actors.
But because I love those songs - and the story - so much, I've longed for a version with actors that I could own and watch whenever I want. In other words, I've been wanting this movie for about twenty years. And it was everything I hoped it would be. (Even Russell Crowe, who isn't an especially strong Javert, but has a perfectly lovely singing voice outside of that.)
The only reason Les Misérables isn't higher on my list is because I can't separate it from my feelings about the stage production. I don't know how I would've felt about it if I wasn't already in love with it from the moment it was announced.
2. The Avengers
Oh, wait... I mean the other Avengers movie about a red-headed spy in a black catsuit.
I seriously reconfigured my Top 3 movies I don't know how many times right up to the point of writing this post. There was a long time this year that I couldn't imagine any movie bumping The Avengers from first place.
A lot of my love for the movie is because it never should have worked. If I've learned anything from a lifetime of movie watching, it's that movies are never as awesome as we hope they'll be. From the moment Samuel L. Jackson appeared at the end of Iron Man, we were all thrilled by the notion of an integrated universe of Marvel superhero films all leading to an all-star Avengers movie. But admit it, you didn't think it would deliver, did you? I certainly didn't. It couldn't possibly live up to the awesomeness of its premise.
Except it did. It totally did.
And, in the process, it gave us the Hulk movie we'd all been waiting for.
1. Looper
Outside of its being really stinking good, the reason Looper is number one on my list is because it's not based on something I already loved. I had to give it bonus points for being a completely original story about characters I'd never heard of before. And what a story.
I dig a good, tightly plotted time-travel story as much as the next person, but what I really love are stories that make me think and re-evaluate my opinions about people. I can't talk about how Looper does that without going into spoilers, but it's so much more than just a fun, scifi movie and deserves to be Number One.
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
The LXB adds to my list of favorite films
I'm going to take the week off from the LXB (I'm unqualified to talk about reality TV treasure hunters), but won't let that keep me from pointing out that last week's Top Ten Movies assignment was super popular and successful.
I especially love the themed lists that three of the members came up with, so I'll list those first.
- Top Ten Monkey Movies [Cool and Collected]
- Top Ten Time Travel Movies [Cavalcade of Awesome]
- Top Ten Vincent Price Movies [AEIOU and Sometimes Why]
But, as predicted, there were lots of movies that could easily have gone on my own list.
- Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Summer School, Back to the Future, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off [Flashlights Are Something to Eat]
- Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and Monty Python and the Holy Grail [Life With Fandom]
- Can't Buy Me Love and The Avengers (I debated including The Avengers on my list, but decided I needed some distance from it to give it an objective ranking. I'm glad to see not everyone was that shy, because my feeling is that it deserves to be there.) [Random Toy Reviews]
- Terminator, Die Hard, and First Blood [Movie Hodge Podge]
- This is Spinal Tap [That Figures, who gets bonus points for also picking Night of the Demon.]
- Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, Aliens, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and Batman (1966) [My pal Erik Johnson]
- The Crow [Jason Vorhees]
- Lean On Me [Team Hellions]
Some of those were picked by multiple bloggers, so I linked to the one I saw first. Seriously, the LXB roll call on this one is full of great films, so if you're looking to kill some time, you should check them all out.
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
Land of the Lost: Season Three (Episode Ten: Timestop)
Season One: Part One, Two, and Three.
Season Two: Part One and Two.
Season Three: Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, and Nine.
Episode 10: “Timestop”
The earthquakes are continuing in the Land of the Lost and this time they’ve opened a new door in the Marshalls’ temple. Will and Holly are the only ones home when it happens, so they go inside to investigate and find a series of caves. Eventually, they discover a mysterious room containing a small crystal that's set into a metal plaque.
Getting out with it involves some complications, but the short version is that they escape and show the device to Jack and Cha-Ka who've returned home. Jack agrees that the object is worth investigating. Anything so elaborate had to have been created by intelligent life and therefore could be a device for escaping the Valley. They also agree that it looks Altrusian in design, so they decide to take it to Enik to see what he might know about it.
Enik does indeed know what it is: the Key to the Temporal Regulator. With it, he says, the operator can run time backwards and forwards as he chooses. Naturally, he and the Marshalls both want it. The Marshalls hope to rewind time to the moment they entered the Land of the Lost and then step back through the portal before it closes. This is an awful theory and doesn’t take into account that Jack came through separately from Will and Holly or that they all fell – not stepped – through the portal. Still, the Marshalls never have been ones to overthink things whenever a possible escape route presents itself.
After the break: the trouble with time travel.
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Awesome List: Spooky comics, Hellboy 3, nightmare playgrounds, the B-52s, and more
"The Haunted Forest"I'm linking to some short comics stories today. The first one is "The Haunted Forest" from Web of Evil #15. I've always loved spooky, bare trees with faces and finger-like branches. And giant spiders.
I really need to pay more attention to music
When the B-52s have a new album out and I don't know it... that's just very, very sad.
"The Headless Monster of Bloodrock Castle"It's cool enough that there was a '40s pulp comic about about a war correspondent who fought crime and enemy spies in a rubber Halloween mask.
It's even cooler that he occasionally tussled with headless suits of armor.
Hellboy 3, but that's it
Guillermo del Toro has an idea for Hellboy 3, but he doesn't want to push the franchise past that point.
If there was ever a third one, I would really make sure that we at least sign a contract that there is no more. No prequels and no sequels: nothing. If that happens, then there is a third one we have planned, and the seeds are planted in this film...
The idea for me is to bring back the Nazis characters, but bring them back in a way they would operate now. Meaning, what public face would the Nazis have in 2009/2010? How rich would they be? How in charge could they be? It's not this group of freakies that hide in the sewers, but people that are incredibly rich.
"Gorilla Man"I'm a huge fan of Jeff Parker's Agents of Atlas. (Okay, I know it's really Marvel's Agents of Atlas, but I still think of it as Parker's.) Where else are you going to find a talking gorilla, a killer robot, a spaceman, an undersea queen, and the goddess of Love fighting evil spy organizations? Nowhere, that's where.
And having fallen in love with the team, I'm pleased as punch that Karswell has posted the Golden Age origin of said talking gorilla: Gorilla Man.
Pirate Freedom
SF Signal really liked Gene Wolf's time traveling pirate story, Pirate Freedom. I've already got it on my Amazon Wish List, but this review makes me want to add it again.
"She's just CGIed that way"
Those real-life versions of Homer Simpson and Mario were just creepy, but... okay, this one's creepy too, but in a sort of hot way.
Wolverine: First Class
As much as I'm enjoying Jeff Parker's (there's that name again) X-Men: First Class, my Wolverine ennui runs deep enough that I wasn't even tempted to try Wolverine: First Class. I figured I'd buy the Alpha Flight issue when it came out, but that would be it.
That is until I read that another upcoming issue will feature Shang Chi: Master of Kung Fu. If Fred Van Lente's cool enough to want to include both Alpha Flight and Shang Chi in his comic, I'm not going to be able to ignore him. If he announces he's got an upcoming Rocket Raccoon issue, my head will explode.
Nightmare Playgrounds
I wouldn't want to send my son to any of these scary playgrounds, but man they look cool to go to as an adult. (Via.)
Truth Serum
One of my new favorite web comics. Really funny, low key superhero stuff. (I'll tell you about my other new favorite later this week. If you're reading the Newsarama blog, you already know about it.)
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