Comical Books: Capsule Reviews, February 2017

I might do detailed reviews/fun analyses of a few of these in the future, but at the moment- I'm writing/revising four different books, in addition to learning how to make print books of all ten of my currently published books.

So for now, just an overview, with the most highly recommended stuff first. 

LOVED!

Uzumaki, Junki Ito

Dissolving Classroom, Junji Ito

Fragments of Horror, Junji Ito

Gyo, Junji Ito

Dark Night: A True Batman Story, Paul Dini

Vote Loki, Hastings

Punisher Max, v.1-10, Garth Ennis

Harrow County, v.1-3, Cullen Bunn

Paper Girls, v.2, Brian K. Vaughan

Batman: Bloom, Scott Snyder

I'm No Scientist, but I Think Feng Shui is Part of the Answer, Scott Adams

Optimism Sounds Exhausting, Scott Adams

Go Add Value Somewhere Else, Scott Adams

Supergod, Warren Ellis

FINE! (No strong feelings one way or the other)

Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, v.4, Ryan North

Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Beats Up the Marvel Universe!, Ryan North

Power Man and Iron Fist, v.1: The Boys Are Back in Town, Walker

A.B.C. Warriors: The Meknificent Seven, Pat Mills

Hell Baby, Hideshi Hino

Parasyte, v.1, Hitosi Iwaaki

Walking Dead, v.27, Robert Kirkman

The New Frontier: Absolute Edition, Darwyn Cooke

Vision, v.1: Little Worse Than a Man, King

Black Panther, v.1, Christopher Priest

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, v.2, Reeder

Hip-Hop Family Tree v.1-3   

Scarlet Witch, v.1       

Guardians of the Galaxy New Guard: Emperor Quill, Brian Michael Bendis

Guardians of the Galaxy: New Guard, v.2: Wanted, Brian Michael Bendis

Detective Comics, v.9: Gordon at War                 

Munchkin, v.1, Various Authors

Constantine, v.1, Ray Fawkes

Superman: Brainiac

Superman, New Krypton
Pluto, v.1, Naoki Urasawa

The Losers, book 1     

Doctor Doom and Doctor Strange: Into the Dark Dimension, Mike Mignola

Doctor Strange v.3: Last Days of Magic, Jason Aaron

Doctor Strange, Classic, v.3, Various Authors        

Doctor Strange: What is it That Disturbs You, Stephen?, P. Craig Russell
Doctor Strange: Into the Dark Dimension, Roger Stern

Fantastic Four, v.5, Stan Lee

Another fun thing- in addition to the first appearance of Galactus, this 60s comic collection has the first appearance of a character named "Punisher" (no relation to the gentleman with the guns and the skull shirt):

Please note that this version of The Punisher is "a compact, supremely merciless, hard-core mass of mayhem." Yeah. Take that.

Carthago, Christopher Bec

New Suicide Squad, 1,2,3, Sean Ryan

Batman v.8 Superheavy, Scott Snyder

Sweet Tooth, v.1,2, Jeff Lemire (A masterpiece, yes, just not on my wavelength)

Invincible Iron Man v.11, Matt Fraction

ACTIVELY DISLIKED! 

Superman: New Krypton, Geoff Johns

Civil War II: Choosing Sides, Various Authors

Spider-Man: Maximum Carnage, Various Authors 

Ah, the early 90s, when the art/writing/attempts at grittiness were THE WORST:

Rat Queens, Kurtis Wiebe (Yes, it’s great for what it is, but it’s not for me)

Lady Snowblood, v.1  Kazuo Koike

Oldboy, v.1, Garon Tsuchiya

Ghost in the Shell, Shirow Masamune

I’ve been reading a lot of manga lately, which is shocking because that’s a genre I always abhorred. But I loved Uzumaki so much, it opened my mind. Ghost in the Shell has a panel that encompasses everything I hate about the genre. From out of nowhere, for no reason, our strong lead female protagonist appears like this:

And she looks that way quite often for the rest of the book. Whole lotta objectification goin’ on and the tone is very leering. Also the art sucks. After reading this one, I decided I’m just gonna stick to horror manga like Uzumaki.

Tomie  Junji Ito 

HOWEVER, this is the first horror manga by Uzumaki author Junji Ito that I didn’t like. It’s just about a young girl who can’t be killed and makes people go crazy. A few cool scenes, but no solid characters to latch on to and it’s just kind of bland and WAY too long. It’s just as long as Uzumaki, but the story is wafer-thin, it doesn’t build the same way, it fails to escalate the stakes and end with a satisfying epic wrap-up that pays off everything.

-Phony McFakename

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Earworm Analysis: Celtic Frost

To get you ready for my upcoming novel- Heavy Metal Scientology Aliens- let's take a fun and educational trip through the music of Celtic Frost, since they're prominently featured on the book's soundtrack. 

Think of this as a totally subjective, much-more-fun Wikipedia page on the band. Once you've read this, you'll fully appreciate how I used them in my book.

These Swiss troublemakers started as the band Hellhammer in 1981 and were widely credited with inventing the black metal genre. ROAR!

Innovative and zippy, but they sucked and they knew it. So they disbanded and learned how to play their instruments.

A year or so later, they re-emerged from their cocoon as Celtic Frost. Avant-garde, proto-death/black metal, also a legit thrash/speed metal band, with some doom metal and operatic flavoring. And they looked like this:

Much calmer, looks like. And they sounded like this. (Just listen to the first few minutes if you like, you'll get the idea.)

After two albums of that, they got bored and did a really off-the-wall experimental metal album that had some traditional-sounding Frost tunes...along with a cover of "Mexican Radio" and stuff like this.

Frost's GAF quotient: zero. They took great delight in confusing and alienating metalhead fans.

Which led to the band admittedly losing their bearings and selling out HARD by dropping a glam metal turd in 1988: Cold Lake. It had song titles like "Dance Sleazy" and "Seduce Me Tonight" aaaaand "CHERRY ORCHARDS"! 

Also they looked like this:

Sheesh. And ouch.

Irony: most of that album was fairly solid mainstream heavy metal, just with an awful production job and pathetic lyrics.

Frost took some time off and then dropped a fairly legit thrash album which was kinda my favorite album of theirs- Vanity/Nemesis. No one else liked it, though. Fans were still too offended over Frost's previous sellout album to give it a fair chance. It had stuff like this.

Celtic Frost disappeared after that and then dropped a new album 15 years later from out of nowhere, hitting us with some full-on nightmarish doom metal. (Bonus: the singer sounds like Danzig at the start there.) And they looked "normal" again:

So they've been all over the map. The lead singer has another band now, Triptykon. I've heard some of their stuff and it's decent doom/thrash.

And as a footnote, here's a bonus bit of madness for you.

Yes, that is real. Apparently Celtic Frost made a 2002 demo album called Prototype that never got released. And you can guess why after hearing that there song. The Internet dredges up all the sludge. There is nothing you can hide from it.

So now you’re fully informed on the fascinating career of this innovative, amazing, all-over-the-place band.

And now in closing I’ll admit that I just use them as a joke in my book. My main character in there only likes Celtic Frost's cheesy glam sellout album. But YOU are now in on that joke, since you know how complex and nuanced the band really is! Go, you! 


-Phony McFakename

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Legal disclaimer: I am on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. And my books are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

Favorite Quotes: February 2017

"Recently I saw a film by a 21-year-old, Steven Spielberg. It was 24 minutes of film called Amblin, produced for around $17,000. It rocked me back. He displayed an amazing knowledge of film-making as well as creative talent.”

Jerry Lewis, The Total Film-Maker (1971)

“Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?”

-XXX: The Return of Xander Cage

 “If camping is so great, why are the bugs always trying to get in your house?”

“I don't know what's more exhausting about parenting: the getting up early, or acting like you know what you're doing.”

“Raising kids may be a thankless job with ridiculous hours, but at least the pay sucks.”

“Failing and laughing at your own shortcomings are the hallmarks of a sane parent.”

-Jim Gaffigan, Dad is Fat

“You work for the devil, you better be ready to die for him.”

-Garth Ennis, The Punisher

“A future of automation and total surveillance are the longer term ideas people should be thinking about. In Neal Stephenson's book "The Diamond Age" billions of nanobots fly around and, among other things, film everything. It's one thing to imagine God watching you--consider your entire life recorded for later viewing without any context or empathy. Mankind will grind to a halt, we're not wired for that kind of scrutiny.”

-Phil Alterman

“Getting to Hell is easy. The rest is where it gets hard.”

-Westworld

“I want to live. I want to love. But it’s a long hard road out of Hell.”

-Marilyn Manson

“Mormons are totally punk.”

-Carlton Mellick III, Punk Land 


-Compiled by Phony McFakename

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Legal disclaimer: I am on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. And my books are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

Literateur: "The Skin Trade"

This is a neat book.

I think I'll write about it!

The Skin Trade is a 1988 anthology of original stories by Stephen King, Dan Simmons, and George R.R. Martin. I hear those guys wrote some other stuff, too.

This was book five in the Night Visions series, where each entry had three writers drop about 100 pages each. Some would do a long novella, some would do a whole bunch of stories.

I read this in the early 90's and re-visited it because I heard George R.R. Martin's story in here is getting adapted for TV. Makes sense, it's a very cinematic werewolf noir tale.

Verdict: it's mostly good! Not as mind-blowing as when I read it at age 12, but nothing is.

Here, have some fun facts about this book and this series:

-George R.R. Martin not only wrote a story for this series, he also edited an earlier book in this series that had the first publication of Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart, which was adapted as the film Hellraiser. So the Game of Thrones guy was responsible for Pinhead!

I didn't even make this myself, just Googled "Game of Thrones Hellraiser"- go Internet!

-This contains a Stephen King story that was never published anywhere else- "The Reploids." This joins the ranks of "The Crate" and "Weeds"- which were both adapted for the Creepshow script- great King stories that were never officially collected.

-Dan Simmons reveals that Hell as we know it was invented by Dante in The Inferno and still exists only because we believe that tale's descriptions. Also cancer is caused by invisible cancer vampires.

-I made it to book six in this series- The Bone Yard- then lost track. Just Googled it- there's 12 of 'em. The authors were getting kind of iffy on the later entries. I'm pretty horror-savvy, but I've never even heard of Mark Morris, Lucius Shephard, Thomas Tessier, James Kisner, P.D. Cacek, or David B. Silva.

-George R.R. Martin is well-known for his blatantly objectifying descriptions of women. Page 238 of this one reveals that he was doing this long before his ice-and-fire singing: "The white robe opened just enough to give him a quick peek at her small breasts. Her chest was lightly freckled, her nipples wide and brown." I assure you, every word of that introduction to her character was essential to the plot and essential to understanding her as a human being.

-Stephen King's other two stories in here- "Dedication" and "Sneakers" were collected in Nightmares and Dreamscapes. "Dedication" contains no violence or gore, but manages to be the grossest and most offensive thing King ever wrote.

-The other Night Visions books contain stories by Dean R. Koontz, F. Paul Wilson, Charles L. Grant, Karl Edward Wagner, Joe R. Lansdale,  Jack Ketchum, Richard Laymon, and Robert R. McCammon. No slouches, those Night Visions story pickers!

If any of this sounds interesting to you, then this book will be well worth the two bucks you pay for it in any given used bookstore or on eBay.

-Phony McFakename

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Legal disclaimer: Me am on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and even Pinterest if that's your thing. And me books am on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.