The Cultural Gutter

From The Archives: Loving the Alien: Superman and Masculinity

The Gutter is in the middle of a transition to a new site and host and Comics Editor Carol is right there with it. She’ll be back next month with a new piece. In the meantime, enjoy her thoughts on Superman.

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I’ve been thinking and rethinking Superman almost as long as I’ve been writing for The Cultural Gutter. I began really thinking about him while watching Justice League and Justice League…

Saving the World with Doom Patrol

This essay has some plot details and some swears in it. Proceed accordingly, my friends.

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“I don’t know what I should have done. I never had to save the world before.” ~ Rita Farr

Somewhere in west central Ohio, Black drag diva Maura Lee Karupt (Alan Mingo, Jr.) confronts a man, maybe the Man. He is there to enforce normalcy. He considers anyone different from him abominable, deviant,…

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Understand this: I love Jennifer’s Body (2009) and I can’t honestly think of a better film to celebrate Women in Horror Month. Written by Diablo Cody (Juno, The United States of Tara) and directed by Karyn Kusama (XX, Girlfight, The Invitation), it’s a brilliant, savage horror-comedy, and even though it appreciates some cult credibility today, it has never really been marketed to its natural, intended audience: women and girls. Forget for a second the succubus angle, Megan Fox eating boys alive while in a state of semi-undress. Yes, there’s passion and sex and fury and Fox’s airbrushed makeup pout juxtaposed with Fox’s practical effects jaws of death, but this isn’t your basic morality play slasher with a side of titillation. This is a movie, first and foremost, about teenage girls and their friendships, and while mordantly funny about the stupidity of hormones, it’s also sweet at times, and always without judgment. Sure, it’s often crude and vicious, but so are teenage girls. Really the only way this film could be more for girls is if you had to send all the boys to the gym to watch something else when it’s on.

The story itself is pretty simple. Cheerleader babe Jennifer (Fox) has been best friends with brainier heroine Anita, or “Needy,” (Amanda Seyfried) since they were little kids. “Sandbox love never dies,” a flat affect Needy narrates from a solitary confinement cell at the beginning of the movie, but from the other end of Jennifer’s tragic fate. Needy’s narration takes us back to the beginning, as Jennifer coaxes Needy into canceling plans with her boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons) so she can go with Jennifer to a rock show in their rural town’s sole, sad excuse for a club, Melody Lane. Jennifer has a crush on lead singer Nikolai (Adam Brody). The band, Low Shoulder, have their own nefarious reasons for playing such an out of the way, small time venue. They want to find a virgin in the audience and sacrifice her to Satan in exchange for Maroon 5-level fame and fortune. They think they have a winner when they meet Jennifer, and Needy, overhearing them speculate whether Jennifer is a virgin, hotly defends her friend’s virtue – despite, of course, knowing Jennifer isn’t a virgin, which turns out to make a big difference in what happens next. During their big number, Melody Lane burns down in a not-so-freak accident. In the confusion, Low Shoulder abduct Jennifer as Needy stands by, powerless to convince her friend not to go with the cool band in their cool van. That night, Jennifer shows up at Needy’s house incoherent and vomiting black sludge, nearly attacking Needy before disappearing back into the night. Over the next several months, as the small town of Devil’s Kettle slowly recovers from the grisly inferno at Melody Lane, Jennifer’s beauty waxes and wanes in time with spectacularly gory murders of local high school boys, and Needy discovers her friend was turned into a succubus by the band’s botched ritual murder. And she’s a succubus with her white-slit eyes fixed on Needy’s boyfriend.

Jennifer’s Body reminds me of a lot of things I’ve forgotten about high school and adolescence, like how one of my teachers mused one day in class – it was German class, so I can’t remember why —  “People who say this is the best time of your lives, they have to have forgotten what it was like. They have to have.” I had never heard an adult say such a thing before, and it’s not like he was a fresh-faced TA. This guy had multiple degrees and substantial facial hair. I suspect he underestimated how difficult life outside high school could be for people who can’t afford multiple degrees, but he was right that the flames that forge you in early adulthood are much more easily romanticized than endured. For most, it does get better. For my part, I had terrible attendance records, was bullied, was molested, often felt ugly and unlovable, struggled with my sexuality, cried between classes, and even with all that, I know I was still considered one of the cool people, floating harmlessly among different cliques. Jennifer’s Body reminds me how all of that is simultaneously possible, with the hormone-charged urgency of every test, crush, expectation, and rejection, and it’s a little daunting to think my experiences – also Jennifer and Needy’s experiences, despite their cell phone use — were so analog compared to the unrelenting connectivity kids live through now.

The intensity of Jennifer and Needy’s friendship rings true in an online or offline world though. This is the volume teenage girls tend to live at. “You’re totally lesbigay,” one girl taunts Needy as she and Jennifer exchange waves at an assembly. Needy scoffs. Chip complains that Needy always does what Jennifer wants and that they don’t truly have anything in common. Needy scoffs again. But Chip’s right. The main thing Needy and Jennifer have in common is loving Jennifer and being jealous of each other. You see that as Jennifer unconsciously takes Needy’s hand while watching Low Shoulder play, and you also see it as Needy suddenly releases Jennifer’s hand, seemingly disturbed that Jennifer is at the moment entranced by the lead singer of Low Shoulder. Teenage friendship isn’t being “lesbigay,” but it is a kind of being in love, and it’s not uncommon for girl friends to talk for hours on the phone, share everything, know each other’s secrets, practice kissing boys by kissing each other. While boyfriends may interrupt their relationship from time to time, boyfriends also may only last a little while, and Jennifer and Needy’s commitment is much closer to forever. And Chip’s right again that Needy does do everything Jennifer says. She puts Jennifer first. After Jennifer has been abducted by Low Shoulder, Needy goes home, traumatized and defeated, and the first thing she does is call Chip, but because she’s terrified about Jennifer. Chip reminds her that people just burned to death. When Jennifer does show up and sprays Needy’s kitchen floor with black goo, instead of running to Chip or calling her mother on swing shift or going straight to the police, Needy spends the night scrubbing the floor of Jennifer’s presence. What is she really doing? Protecting Jennifer. And though she will try to confide in Chip as her suspicions grow that something is really wrong, she will also continue to protect her friend until Jennifer herself comes clean about that night at Melody Lane.

Because Jennifer is the needy one in this relationship. Jennifer doesn’t put Needy first; Jennifer puts Jennifer first. But Needy is essential to Jennifer’s more fragile ego. It’s easy to look at Jennifer’s predation of both Colin, the emo poet kid who has a low-key mutual attraction with Needy, and Chip, and see her being competitive with Needy, taking the boys that are most important to Needy simply because that’s the Mean Girl thing to do. That’s part of it. Needy is smart, beautiful,* and unconditionally loved by Chip. Those are things anyone, much less someone as superficial as Jennifer, might covet. But it’s clear that Jennifer is as jealous about Needy as much as she’s jealous of Needy. She doesn’t want anyone more important than herself in Needy’s life. She wants Needy to cancel her plans with Chip. She wants Needy to ignore other calls. She becomes aggressive and abusive, being sarcastic or shoving Needy just a little too hard for a joke, if Needy doesn’t defer to her demands or accept her lies, and this is consistent whether she’s a demon or not.

It’s worth noting Jennifer goes to Needy first after she’s killed and resurrected as a succubus. Jennifer clearly is tempted to prey on Needy, and there’s so much more sexual tension between Jennifer and Needy in that scene than in any of Jennifer’s scenes with her male victims. But Jennifer resists and goes to munch on another wandering, traumatized survivor of the fire instead. Several dead boys later, Jennifer surprises Needy in her room, asking to sleep over, and she finally explains what the band did to her. It will be the last time she’s ever seen as vulnerable, and it matters that she never threatens Needy during it, even though she’s revealing herself as a monster, and even though she’s ultimately rejected. Like her first appearance as a succubus, this is a powerfully sexually charged scene, even to the point that Needy and Jennifer make out briefly, but it’s not exploitative in context. It might be Jennifer’s succubus nature driving this moment, but I don’t think so. I think Jennifer needed her friend and wanted to keep her wrapped in the intense intimacy of 13-year-olds telling secrets, but things have changed too much. In a normal world, girl friends eventually outgrow their intense sharing relationships as they become adults. Needy and Jennifer don’t get that chance; to Needy, Jennifer really was killed by the band, and what came back wasn’t her friend, not really. I mean, apart from everything else, friends don’t eat friends’ boyfriends.

I like that there is a weird, inexplicable psychic connection between Jennifer and Needy that doesn’t have anything to do with Jennifer being a succubus. It is almost as though Jennifer and Needy have a preexisting vampiric relationship, and notably, it tends to manifest when Needy is being intimate with her boyfriend. Chip gets sweet on Needy as she’s getting dressed for Melody Lane, to Jennifer’s specifications and over his objections, and Needy immediately pulls away from him, sensing Jennifer’s arrival. Later, while Needy and Chip are having sex, Needy sees blood spreading on the ceiling in a vision of Jennifer murdering Colin, impossibly echoing Jennifer telling Colin she needs him “hopeless.” Chip, poor dope, takes Needy’s anguished sobs as groans of pleasure, as she suffers her friend eviscerating the cute Goth boy. Later, Needy will similarly sense Jennifer closing in on Chip. None of this plays as Needy having some rad precognitive power or a real supernatural tether to Jennifer; it’s presented as just part of being BFFs.

You don’t need to have been a teenage girl to appreciate Jennifer’s Body, and certainly, not every teenage girl has a relationship like Jennifer and Needy’s, though I know all teenage girls at times possess the emotional core to power galaxies of Jennifer’s Bodys. So do teenage boys. There’s a lot else I admire about it, too. I love how deftly Kusama and Cody’s script thread the needle of being wickedly funny and genuinely poignant and scary, all just within beats of each other. The scene where the band murders Jennifer is a perfect example of this, as abrupt and unflinching as watching Leatherface spear a blond on a meathook, yet with the band’s Buffy-esque snark offsetting Jennifer’s hopeless comprehension that she’s about to die. I love the genuine sweetness of Needy and Chip’s relationship. Chip was a really great guy, and when I mentioned him complaining about Jennifer above, that doesn’t do him justice, as he’s a textbook understanding boyfriend. There’s a ton of winking cameos in this, too, including Lance Henriksen giving Needy a lift to what she will make sure is Low Shoulder’s last gig. And that’s something else I love, that even though Needy is forced to forsake and fight Jennifer, she keeps faith with her friend, too, seeking revenge on the ones that killed her. To break out of a mental institution and hunt down an indie band that sacrificed you in exchange for worldly success: now that’s a BFF.

  * It’s possible we’re not supposed to notice Needy’s comparable beauty to Jennifer’s because she’s wearing glasses, but in the grand tradition of so-called brainy girls in cinema throughout the ages, any intended unattractiveness in Needy is purely a matter of styling and subjective taste. But then, about the time she starts fighting Jennifer for real, she stops wearing glasses.

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Of course, Angela’s best friends in high school were always dudes, but that’s a different movie.

On Horizon Zero Dawn and the Heroism of Aloy

Every April is Switcheroo Month at The Cultural Gutter. This month Comics Editor Carol writes about Horizon Zero Dawn.

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Watch out, everyone, I am going to talk a bit about story elements because I enjoyed Horizon Zero Dawn‘s story. Sometime I’d like to discuss it in greater depth, because it is a good story, but I’m trying to maintain some balance. I am not sure how much I should share because…

In We Bare Bears, three bear bros, Grizz, Panda and Ice Bear, live together in a cave in the woods. We Bare Bears is set in the Bay Area.  A lot of cartoons and shows are set supposedly non-specific anywhere or everywhere that only make them seem even more the product a specific place, often, ironically enough, California. But We Bare Bears goes ahead and lets their place be their place and then sees what stories they can tell. You might have suspected from their names that these bears are not biologically related. The bears are a chosen family with Grizz as the oldest brother and Ice Bear as the youngest. And even though Ice Bear is, as he says, “best bear,” all the bears have their own charm. Grizz is an outgoing and enthusiastic brown bear. His wants to be cool and to have a lot of friends. Sometimes he tries too hard or is too caught up in his own enthusiasm. But he tries hard and when the bears befriend Chloe, he learns some Korean to try be a good friend and maybe to reassure her father and grandmother that being friends with bears is alright. Grizz loves 1980s and 1990s action movies and has made a couple of his own “Crowbar Jones” shorts, starring himself as Crowbar Jones and “Pando,” a comic relief sidekick clearly inspired by Panda.

Panda, aka, Pan-Pan, is as his name implies, a panda. He’s also an otaku loves anime, manga, Japanese and Korean pop music and K-dramas, though likely not Vampire Prosecutor, more say, Boys Over Flowers and those body-switching romantic dramas, like Secret Garden (2010). Panda loves the idea of being in a relationship, but it’s probably a good thing he isn’t. He has a waifu body pillow named Miki-chan. Panda is intensely involved online hoping for likes and shares and trying to meet his true love. He’s an otaku who doesn’t read or speak much Japanese or Korean.  He’s allergic to everything and is vegetarian while his brothers love meat. Panda is sweet and sensitive but also capable of becoming resentful to the point of supervillainy.

Ice Bear always refers to himself as “Ice Bear,” except that one time he was conked on his noggin and started wearing a man-bun and hanging out with tech bros. His room is the bears’ refrigerator, where he knits and watches figure skating. Ice Bear was nonverbal as a cub and his affect does not necessarily reflect what he is feeling on the inside. Ice Bear comes across as neurodivergent and probably on the autism spectrum.

Ice Bear is clearly the coolest and arguably as he claims, “best bear.” He has what Grizz and Napoleon Dynamite would call, “skillz.” He speaks Russian, Korean, Pigeon and, I expect, many more languages. He likes axes, throwing stars, martial arts, salsa dancing, cooking, knitting and making robots. Ice Bear also has a secret life his brothers don’t know about. One revealed particularly in two episodes that are We Bare Bears influenced by Drive (2011), general Nicolas Winding Refn-ness and by John Wick, “Icy Nights” and “Icy Nights II.”* The song playing when Ice Bear enters the city in “Icy Nights” recalls “Nightcall” from the Drive soundtrack.

Grizz befriends Wyatt the biker at a gas station in the desert.

The bears make friends, though. They befriend Chloe Park, a 12-year-old Korean-American child protege who comes to study them for a college biology course. Chloe is stressed and lonely being the only tween in university. And they are also friends with Ranger Tabes, who reminds me of Rosie the camp director from Lumberjanes. Tabes out for their part of the forest. And they are friends with Charlie, a bigfoot voiced by Jason Lee, so I always kind of think he’s Earl from My Name Is Earl. Charlie also hosts the Halloween episodes, each a little horror anthology. (One with a fantastic take on Scooby-Doo).

We Bare Bears has some superficial similarities with Polar Bear Cafe, which also features a polar/ice bear, panda and grizzly bear–as well as a llama, sloth and penguin. Polar Bear Cafe‘s Panda is obsessed with being cute.  Like Ice Bear, Polar Bear is responsible and can drive a car. I enjoy his attempts to teach Penguin to drive.

“Ice Bear is responsible.”

There is a grizzly bear who gets most of his clothes from the Harley-Davidson store. But Polar Bear runs a cafe. There are a lot of puns. And the show skews towards a younger audience. That said, I think We Bare Bears make a little nod to Polar Bear Cafe with the “Coffee Cave” episode, in which the bears turn their cave into a cafe. Ice Bear becomes a barrista to facilitate Grizz hanging with cool people and Panda tries to make time with a woman he thinks is cute.

I enjoy We Bare Bears‘ references to film, tv, games, comics and cartoons and even Walt Whitman. When the bears work “shushing the unshushable” in an Oakland cineplex, there are a slew of film references that would warm the heart of the most cantankerous cinephile. In another episode, the bears recall films like Phase IV (1974) and Empire of the Ants (1977) as they obey the wishes of a queen bee.

The bears listening to the queen.

Ranger Tabes in peril!

Panda is pursued by a virtual reality Doof Warrior from Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). And there’s a bit from the beginning of Quincy Jones’ Ironside theme in “Bear Cleanse” when someone is secretly eating cake. It might’ve been taken from Kill Bill (2003) or from Lo Lieh dangerous fists in King Boxer/ Five Fingers of Death (1972). Grizz knows it from Kill Bill, but Ice Bear definitely recognizes it from King Boxer. I like that the creators are using art that they like. And art that I like, too.

While the structure is episodic, there is no total reset at the end of every episode. “Icy Nights,” for example, uses a number of elements from earlier episodes—Ice Bear’s modified roomba, for example. And human characters who are almost doppelgangers of the bears, Tom, Isaac and Griff, appear first in “Panda’s friend” and then in two more episodes, “Bro Brawl” and “The Mall.”

The show alternates between episodes featuring the bears in their presumably current adult forms with ones about the bears as cubs. If you must have origin stories, the baby bear episodes provide them and do a pretty good job. The baby bear episodes also do a good job of capturing a kids point-of-view. In general, I prefer the adult episodes, but that might be because I am an adult. As always, I don’t begrudge kids’ interests being put before my own in cartoons meant for kids.  I do, however, very much enjoy “Los Escandalosos,” in which the baby bears become a tag team in a kids’ lucha libre league in Mexico. There are some sweet luchador names in that episode and mariachis sing a ballad about los Escandalosos. Incidentally, “Escandalosos” is also the Spanish name for the show. I appreciate the pun making the title, “Scandal Bears.” It only took me two days catch it, but I did.

I also appreciate that We Bare Bears rarely translates the Spanish, Korean or Russian in the show. The writers relies on us to understand generally what is going on and not freak out when we don’t understand specifically what is said. There are times when we don’t understand something and that’s okay. I particularly appreciate that while we learn why Ice Bear knows Russian, we don’t see when Ice Bear went from non-verbal to verbal. Neurodiversity isn’t exactly the same kind of plot point as that time a Russian man in the arctic took in Ice Bear. At the same time, if the writers did decide to show the first time Ice Bear spoke, I trust them to do right by him and neurodivergent folk.

The bears are trying to participate in the human world and figure out how they fit into it. They not like they other animals anymore, but that’s okay. Though it might negatively impact their health as they prefer to eat, say, pizza bagels over bamboo and seals. And they’re not quite like humans cause they’re still bears, and that should be okay, but it’s not always.

Panda being hassled by the Man.

Daniel Chong talked a bit about how one of the things he was thinking of when creating this show was the ways that this experience paralleled being a minority in America and particularly, racism in America. Sometimes people react negatively to the bears and it’s just those people’s thing, not the bears, though it is particularly distressing to Grizz.**

I mentioned before that I appreciate that whatever shenanigans the bears or a single bears cause or are involved in have appropriately calculated stakes and consequences–and not just in the sense that a cartoon meant for all ages should probably not have a lot of gruesome death in it. The person most responsible for shenanigating takes most of the damage and uninvolved people or innocent people caught up in it are not as subject to the shenanigans.*** And that’s a relief to me. It’s not a cartoon that relies on either the pleasure of someone finally getting what they deserve–one day that Roadrunner will get his/her due!–or on the shock of, say, Ren’s cruelty to Stimpy, Jerry’s cruelty to Tom the Cat or Woody Woodpecker’s flat-out sociopathy.

Sweet jean jacket.

When the bears dig a cool jean jacket with a tiger on the back out of a dumpster, they get a run of good luck. The luck is low level, but the bears are ecstatic. Ice Bear says, “This is the best thing to happen to Ice Bear” and they all agree.  Panda finds money in the pocket. Grizz gets three high fives in a row. Ice Bear finds coupons for salsa dancing lessons.

The rain stops. Streetlights go their way. Pizza bagels are on sale. A cash opens up at the grocery store and they are first in line. But when the jacket’s curse is revealed, it operates on the same level. They each want the jacket for themselves and end up fighting. Joss Whedon’s We Bare Bears would straight up have killed one of them, but instead Panda accidentally punches his own face.

They realize, ‘We’re not wearing this jacket. This jacket is wearing us. We have to get rid of it.” The temptations the jacket uses to try to get them to take it back are things like pizza mistakenly delivered to their house. All of which are stakes and consequences appropriate to the situation. We Bare Bears is about critters and people mostly trying their best and screwing up sometimes. It is a pretty gentle cartoon, though there are both shenanigans and hijinx. It seems to me that in its own way going the chill and gentle route can be more avant-garde than another manic cartoon.

*I see a little Tokyo Drifter in the part where Ice Bear is silhouetted in red, too.

**There is a thing here where I talk a bit about the Prime Directive and the ways that it is kind of butts, but we have bears to discuss.

***This is a more complicated calculation when Panda goes bad in “Braces.”

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Carol Borden isn’t going to lie. She kind of covets that jean jacket.

In My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Emil Ferris creates the notebook of 10-year-old Karen Reyes using what appear to be the school supplies that would be available to Karen at the time. Ferris also renders Karen’s recreations of paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago and the covers of horror magazines Karen likes. (I would read any of the magazines). My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is burly book, and I am only on the first volume. Together the two volumes come to something like 800 pages.* And it is a masterpiece. When I first came on to the Gutter, I wrote about how I was interested in the parallels of fine and disreputable art. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters hits their overlap on a Venn diagram just right. Great art inspires art in response. It’s part of how you know it’s great. That and there is always more to say about it. There are a million things that could be written about My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. And when they were written and you picked up the book again and read it one more time, there would probably be a million more.

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters reminds me a lot of Lynda Barry’s work. Barry’s art is much looser and she tends not to vary her style depending on the content. Ferris style is generally tighter and more meticulous. Her range goes from very cartoony depictions to recreations of paintings that have caught Karen’s attention–in the style she has created for Karen. But Ferris reminds me of Barry in other respects. As in Barry’s Marlys comics, Ferris focuses on a school-aged girl in the 1960s. And both are willing to show the ugliness and the beauty in their characters’ lives. Though we mostly see Karen’s life outside of school. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters reminds me of Barry in its density of art and text, particularly with Barry’s memoir/creativity teaching guide/graphic novel, What It Is (2008). Ferris is not afraid to fill a page with text if it serves the story. And she is willing to mix in the pain of childhood. She remembers what it’s like to be 10-years-old.

On spiral bound, blue-lined ruled and using ballpoint pen, felt tip marker, what looks like number 2 / HB graphite and hard-leaded colored pencils, Karen Reyes records her story and the stories around her. She loves monsters and drawing and she draws herself as a werewolf girl who is not completely transformed. She lives in a basement apartment with her mom and her older brother, Deeze. Deeze protects her and teaches her about art history. They spend a lot of time at the Art Institute. Her father, “The Invisible Man,” is out of the picture. Karen goes to Catholic school, but is not particularly devout. Karen deliberately tempts monsters by going out at night to give her “the bite” that would fully transform her. At first she wants to be bitten just for herself. Later she wants the bite so she can save her family from the draft, death and “The Invisible Man.”

You tell ‘im, Sphinx!

Karen identifies with monsters not just as something as powerful when she is not, but as the shunned and despised. Karen is not like the other girls in her school or her neighborhood. She has stepped on the cootie step and is ritually polluted forevermore. But Karen was different even before that. Besides being a freak for liking monsters and reading horror comics, Karen likes her best friend Missy as more than a best friend. They watch horror movies together. They have modified their Barbie Dolls making them a werewolf and Countess Alucard. In Karen’s notebook, Countess Alucard tells Karen that she is braver than the countess because, at a sleepover, Karen dared kiss Missy’s hand when Missy was asleep.

There are a lot of problems in Karen’s life. The newest is the death of her upstairs neighbor, Anka Silverberg. Anka might have been murdered. Karen, wearing a trenchcoat and fedora, decides to investigate—looking for clues in paintings, exploring the cemetery and interviewing a specter and recordings of Anka recounting her life. Karen swipes the cassettes from Anka’s husband Joseph. But what starts out as one mystery that seems solvable proliferate into so many more.

Relatable. “I was passing a painting by Goya when it hit me.”

We all live in stories, our own and the stories we tell about ourselves together. Karen uses stories of monsters and private detectives to make sense of her self and everything happening around her. Karen believes receiving “the bite” would solve all her problems. She imagines her friend Franklin as a frankenstein. One filled wih a beautiful light revealed beneath the network of scars covering his face. Her brother Deeze has a dragon self, that is dangerous and possibly self-destructive. Her friend Sandy appears and disappears like a ghost. She sees neighbor Sam “Hotstep”** Silverberg looks much like Boris Karloff as Imhotep in The Mummy (1932). They are both tormented by the loss of their beloved. But Anka Silverberg, the woman who dies in the beginning of the book, is more protean. Sometimes Anka seems like a ghost or a zombie. But other times she is Medusa or an Egyptian queen. Like Karen, Anka used stories to make sense of her own life. Instead of horror movies and comics, Anka used mythology to understand her life in Weimar Berlin, in Nazi Germany and, later, in Chicago.

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I appreciate how compassionate the book is for one that goes into so many dark basements of life and history. It could easily become nihilistic, and Karen is briefly tempted by St. Christopher the Werewolf to give in to an impulse to destroy everything she loves because it could not protect her from the awful parts of being alive. In a dream she kills all the monsters, but realizes it is a terrible mistake. Because the monsters in her life are good. It’s the humans in the story who are “monsters.” And we call them that to try to distance any human capacity to do terrible things from human beings. We do it to feel safer and less implicated.

But if there’s anything the last two hundred years or so of history have taught me, it’s that Dracula has nothing on human beings when we go bad. I think that’s why monsters have become ever more sympathetic, despite the unhappiness of horror fans who want them to stay scary. In My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Karen sees and hears about human beings who are capable of so much worse than Dracula or the Wolf-Man. She lives through the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. She sees the smoke from Chicago’s West Side as it burns down after King’s assassination. And she listens to Anka’s story of growing up in a brothel in Berlin and being shipped to a concentration camp. Karen is afraid her brother will be drafted to fight in Vietnam. And she is angry that no one will talk to her about any of this.

Karen explains good monsters and bad monsters

It is easy to try to separate everything into good or bad and choose a side. But things are complicated and people are complex. And the stories that save us sometimes justify doing terrible things. There are the monsters who can’t help what they are or how they look. They are all hair and teeth or sewn together corpses and galvinism. And there are the monsters who choose to be cruel, to try to control the world and tell us the worst stories about ourselves.  I make this same differentiation between monsters and “monsters” not only because I love monsters and have always hated to call awful human beings with their name. It allows people the space to be more complex than simply good or bad. The same person can do wonderful and terrible things–sometimes at the simultaneously. It is a human conceit that if somehow we can identify the monsters, we can drive them out or slay them and then live happily ever after. But these are usually the most dangerous stories, the ones that lead to genocide. Humans are not as straightforward as monsters. Dracula drinks blood to survive. Werewolves bite because they are cursed. Frankenstein*** was created and then neglected. Frankenstein can’t help what he is, what his mad scientist father made him, but after reading a lot, he can choose what he does. It is his fault that he murders, but it isn’t his fault that he doesn’t have the emotional maturity to make good choice.  Like Karen, I’m with the werewolves.

*I would really like a book stand for books this burly.

**Nice play on “Hotep.”

***You can read some of my thoughts on Frankenstein and his crappy dad Victor here.

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In many a distant village, there exists the Legend of Carol Borden, a legend of a strange person with the hair and fangs of an unearthly beast… her hideous howl, a dirge of death.

The Great Ability of Miles Morales

I’ll try to do this without too many plot elements, but be aware, there will be plot elements in my piece.

Near the beginning of Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse(2018), Miles Morales father says to Miles, while driving him to school, “With great ability comes great accountability.” Sure it’s fun, funny and kind of square, though it arguably has…

But for now, try to stretch the holidays out and battle the darkness with fairy lights, a nice blanket,  hot chocolate and: more and less professional superheroes, detectives of both the canine and human variety, meddling kids, villainous adults, apocalyptic cultists, scooters and motorcycles, a crossover so crazy it works or maybe several team-ups so crazy they work, Los Angeles, struggling with feelings about family, women figuring out their lives, queerness, magic, cats and little dragons, Kelly Thompson and two comics colored by Triona Farrell.

Archie Meets Batman ’66 #1-5 (Archie, 2018) Jeff Parker, writer; Dan Parent, pencils; J. Bone, inks; Kelly Fitzpatrick, colors; Jack Morell, letters.

Archie Meets Batman ’66 fills my heart with comics joy. It is a perfect crossover perfectly done. When Gotham’s villains decide to take over Riverdale creating a whole city as their own headquarters for world domination, only Archie and his friends can stop them. With a little help from transfer students Barbara Cooper and Dick Grayson– and Batman himself! The Bat-chosen family and the Bat-villains are well Bat-integrated into the Archie style by Dan Parent and J. Bone. It’s not all that easy a trick for them to maintain their 1960s Batman tv show identity and still fit in to Riverdale, but they do it. Nearly every page has something I wanted to share here, but it would be wrong (and laborious) to do that.

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Just look at that and let your heart fill with comic joy!

Beasts of Burden: Wise Dogs and Eldritch Men (Dark Horse, 2018) Evan Dorkin, writer; Benjamin Dewey, art; Nate Piekos, lettering.

Beasts of Burden consistently offers a different kind of comic joy. A more gruesome one that is definitely not all ages. That said–Do you like dogs? Do you like horror and occult mysteries? Beasts of Burden has dogs–and a couple cats–investigating occult mysteries and the results are often gory. Jill Thompson has done the art for most of the series. She has left for now. I assume she is off doing something awesome. But Benjamin Dewey does a nice job of continuing the series’ picture book quality the series has while bringing in his own style featuring heavier outlines and highlighting. He draws an amazing freaked out salamander.

And even though Evan Dorkin continues as writer, Wise Dogs and Eldritch Men feels like a bit a of a shift from previous storylines. Where before we had seen human cultists’ handiwork in deeply wrong creatures and mysterious symbols, we see them and their many dangerous weapons and bad idea. Also more of their deeply wrong creatures. The cult is attempting to raise an ancient, sleeping god, ’cause that’s what cultists do in New England.* I can’t say that this is my favorite Beasts of Burden storyline, but Beasts of Burden is always worthwhile. Also, there are goblins and a horror straight out of Fletcher Hanks, though it’s a raccoon with a human face rather than a rat with a human face. But still, it’s creepy as hell and Fletcher Hanks would approve.

My Brother’s Husband, Vol. 2 (Pantheon, 2018) Gengoroh Tagami

I’ve written about the first volume, but you don’t need to read it to appreciate this one. Single father Yaichi is grieving the death of his estranged brother Ryо̄ji. Ryо̄ji had left his family and Japan, looking for a life where he could be himself and be an out gay man. He moved to Canada and married Mike Flanagan. In volume 1, Mike arrives on Yaichi’s doorstep to meet Yaichi and Yaichi’s daughter Kana. He wants to see the places Ryо̄ji had always mentioned. While Kana is overjoyed at the prospect of having an uncle, Yaichi struggles with his ideas of what love and family are and what people around him think of his brother’s marriage. Volume 2 concludes the story, for now, as Yaichi grows closer to his brother, his brother-in-law and they all become family, even as it causes trouble for Kana with her friends’ parents and her school. Tagami’s background in gay erotica comes through in his rendering of the men here and there, but My Brother’s Husband is a sweet book and family friendly in all senses of the word “family.”

My Solo Exchange Diary, Vol. 1:  The Sequel to My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness (Seven Seas, 2018) Kabi Nagata

I wrote about Nagata’s My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness last summer. In My Solo Exchange Diary, Nagata continues to try to understand her feelings and work toward loving herself. Having come out to the world–and her parents in My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness–Nagata struggles with her newfound success, relative fame and understanding her depression. She fears that nothing she’ll do will ever be as good as that book. And she moves out of her parents’ house, despite her father’s complete non-helpfulness, and starts to understand independence not as not needing anyone else at all, but recognizing her own limits and asking for help when she needs it. Which is a great way of understanding it. This all makes it sound very serious, and that subject matter is, but Nagata illustrates her experience so well and with an engaging style.

Nancy Drew: The Case of the Cold Case (Dynamite, 2018) Kelly Thompson, writer; Jenn St-Onge, art; Triona Farrell, colors; Ariana Maher, letters.

That’s right, more meddling kids. And that’s right, there is a Nancy Drew comic and Kelly Thompson is writing it. Nancy is a full time high school student and a full time professional detective, which I don’t know how she even does it but that doesn’t matter because she is goddamn Nancy Drew. Though I doubt she’d ever say that in this all-ages comic. Nancy has moved away from her old pals, Bess and George, to River Heights. But, as so often happens to detectives, something from her past pulls her back in. Mamcu receives a threatening letter in the mail. And it is written using letters from cut up magazine, keeping with the theme of rad and also sweet typography art in the comic itself. Did I mention I love the typographic art? Because I do. It makes my zine / book art heart sing. Jenn St-Onge’s art in the comic is nice and clean and fits well with the story–from Nancy hanging from a fraying rope while holding a hungry goat to just showing the gang figuring out directions to the cave.** She does a lot with a few lines. And Triona Farrell’s colors are just plain dreamy. (She also does the colors for West Coast Avengers).

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The Case of the Cold Case is action packed when it needs to be and expressively sassy when the dialog calls for it. Kelly Thompson writes sass and friendship so well. And the sass and friendship in Nancy Drew is outstanding so far. Plus, she’s writing another detective, including her run on Hawkeye with Kate Bishop’s Hawkeye Investigations though Kate’s not doing as well as Nancy in the gumshoe biz.  And Nancy Drew celebrates the power of the library.

By the way, do you like the Hardy Boys, too? Why? No reason…

Yes, this is from volume 1. Go read it!

Princess Jellyfish, Vol. 9 (Kodansha USA, 2018) Akiko Higashimura

I’m including this because I really appreciated how the whole story ended. I’m not recommending readers start from volume 9, but at the beginning with the knowledge that Princess Jellyfish ends well. Tsukimi, a nerdy girl / fujoshi obsessed with jellyfish, a talent for fashion design, happy living with her fellow geeky women and unsure about love figure out how she wants to live her life. I’m still annoyed that this series is presented as a good “manga for beginners.” What that really means is that it’s excellent and accessible in its own right and that effortlessness, openness and accessibility is not easy to accomplish. All nine volumes are now available in English.

Runaways, Vol. 1: Find Your Way Home (Marvel, 2018) Rainbow Rowell, writer; Kris Anka, art.

The Runaways thought they had escaped their past, but the past is never past–especially for the children of supervillains. Someone–maybe even several someones–think Nico, Katarina, Chase and even Molly have a debt to pay. And just when they might have all started to find a sense of home. When REDACTED is back and they might all start to feel whole again–once REDACTED gets a body. It’s hard to write about without spoilers, but Runaways has relied on twists and surprises since it’s first run back in the Aughts. It’s how Rowell and Anka handle these surprises that got me back into the series. Well, really, what I enjoy is the interactions between the characters, as always, and she gets their voices just right. It’s nice to see Nico and Katarina sit in a diner together. Plus, Old Lace the dinosaur!

The Tea Dragon Society (Oni Press , 2017) Katie O’Neill

The Tea Dragon Society is a lovely fairy tale told in four seasons. Greta, a girl learning to be a blacksmith, encounters a tiny dragon one day. Her mother recognizes the dragon and sends her to take the dragon to Hesekiel, the owner of a fancy tea shop. It turns out that the dragon is a tea dragon, one of several species. She learns to care for tea dragons and appreciate the ethically harvested tea brewed. It is light, magical and charming.

Vampirella, Vol. 1: Forbidden Fruit and Vampirella: The God You Know (Dynamite, 2017) Paul Cornell and Jeremy Whitley, writers; Jimmy Broxton, Andy Belanger, Creees Lee, Paulo Barrios, Matt Gaudio, Alex Sanchez, and Rapha Lobosco, art; Jimmy Broxton and Lee Loughridge, colors; Travis Lanham, Jimmy Broxton letters.

Vampirella: Forbidden Fruit has a 2000 AD feel to it. It’s set a thousand years from now in a Los Angeles patrolled with clown police, a population with no sense of history, and people who refuse to have “fun” sent to  secret concentration camps. It’s an earth where Vampirella decides that wearing something relatively modest is a good way to disrupt the Huxleyan dystopia. Broxton’s art particularly appealed to me. I love his layering and his brief medieval stained glass window section. There is also excellent kitty art.

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  Rebels attempting to disrupt a very janky social system wake Vampirella from a thousand year slumber. Unfortunately, it takes all their blood to do it and they don’t have time to explain what they need from her before they die. They leave her with a book of prophecy that they hope will explain what they want her to do. Fortunately for them, Vampirella doesn’t take direction well, but she whole-heartedly agrees that something has got to be done about the weird, perhaps hellish, incursion into the earth. In the meantime, she buys a new outfit from a store and ends up teaming up with the salesclerk, Vicki Vincent, and Vicki’s cat, Grit.

The God You Know starts with some metafictional shenanigans, enjoyment of which varies, but it really gets going when Vicki and “Ellie” ride the post-apocalyptic wasteland on a stolen motorcycle. Where Forbidden Fruit feels like a very British 2000 AD dystopia, The God You Know goes full throttle George Miller post-apocalypse, with some added infernal elements. And Vampirella starts to have some strange feelings about Vicki. Especially strange feelings for an immortal, possibly alien, vampire queen. It’s possibly the the Catwoman that Vampirella has ever been, but on a post-apocalyptic earth and she might have kind of caused the apocalypse. So what’s not to love? This part reminds me a bit of Hex, the comic where Western antihero Jonah Hex is in a post-apocalyptic future and biker gangs have parties where they barbecue giant fuschia grasshoppers. Except this kinda 1980s post-apocalypse is appropriately roller derby.

West Coast Avengers (Marvel, 2018) Kelly Thompson, writer; Stefano Caselli art; Triona Farrell, colors; Joe Caramagna, letters.

Did I mention that Kelly Thompson is one of my favorite writers? Did I mention that she does friendship and sass and sassy friendship so well? Well, she is and she does. West Coast Avengers is my current go-to superhero comic because there is so much room from friendship, sassy and sassy friendship as Hawkeye Kate Bishop becomes the leader of a superhero team. I was sad that Thompson’s run on Hawkeye was ending just as Kate was teaming up with Jessica Jones, but now so many people have teamed up with Kate to both help her and make her life hard.

Land Sharks! Star Punches!

Los Angeles is swarming with land-sharks and supervillains with pretty much only Kate to foil their schemes. Until Kate calls up a Hawkeye Clint Barton, her best friend America Chavez and holds auditions for her new West Coast Avengers, only she doesn’t call them that. (Please don’t tell Captain America she calls them that. It was probably Jimmy Kimmel who came up with it). Anyway, gear up for fun, sassery, land-sharks, giant monsters, and B.R.O.D.O.K.–Bio-Robotic Organism Designed Overwhelmingly for Kissing.

~~~Additional business~~~

Jason Aaron and Russell Dauterman’s The Mighty Thor #705, aka, “The Death of the Mighty Thor” (2018), was an intense and perfect single issue. Heroic, heartbreaking, sensitive and beautiful as a terminally ill Jane Foster sacrifices her life to save all of us.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Black Panther made me feel good about superhero movies again in different ways, but one thing they shared was that I cared about the stakes and I ended up on the good guys’ side, which hasn’t always been the case. I appreciated Into the Spider-Verse‘s use of the conventions of superhero comics. The use of text boxes and halftone shading were nice touches.

My two favorite Christmas specials this year were The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: A Midwinter’s Tale (2018) and Aggretsuko; We Wish You A Metal Christmas (2018). I really enjoyed Netflix’ adaptation of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. While I am very fond of the comic and respect its faithfulness to its influences in 1970s Eurohorror, I really appreciate the tweaks the series makes–especially the ones giving Sabrina more agency and making Madame Satan’s character more complex. Aggretsuko isn’t as intense as the regular series, but it’s longer and give Retsuko a break, it’s Christmas. And share We Bare Bears’ “Christmas Movies” with the old movie weirdos in your life.

Also, I saw Holiday In Handcuffs (2007) and it was possibly the most insane movie I’ve seen this year. And, yes, I have seen Mandy (2018).

*And you’d think the gods would get so tired of us pestering them that they’d have gone somewhere else by now to get some uninterrupted eternal slumber.

**Does this make you think of the Buddha’s story about a man hanging from a cliff with a tiger menacing him from below? And there’s a bunch of berries right in front of them? So he eats them because that’s the zen thing to do? No? It’s just me?

~~~

Some people have suggested that Carol Borden is an immortal, possibly alien, vampire queen. She is, however, a perfectly normal human being.

On Hating Love Actually

Stephen Marche writes about Love Actually, class, English public school and being a colonized person. “I am obsessed with English culture while hating Englishness itself: That’s what it means to be a colonized person. I am Canadian, but I also spent part of my childhood as a schoolboy in England. In the mid-1980s, my father was studying for a PhD in semantics at the London School of Economics and…

Holiday Cooking with the Stars!

Friend of the Gutter Kimberly Lindbergs shares some holiday recipes from Hollywood’s stars, including Marilyn Monroe’s stuffin’ and Ben Johnson’s biscuits! “In celebration of Thanksgiving, I thought I’d share a few holiday recipes from some of Hollywood’s most loved and admired stars. The recipes are variants of traditional dishes and desserts often served in American homes…

Nagabe’s The Girl From The Other Side starts as many fairy tales do, with a girl caught between worlds. Shiva appears to be a little girl about 6 years old. She was left in the woods by a woman she calls, “Auntie.” She is found by an adult she calls Teacher and they live, as many in fairy tales do, in a cozy house in the woods. One might even call their home a “cottage.” They have tea parties, take walks in the woods, try to bake things–Teacher is terrible at baking–and engage in other such idyllic cozy cottage in the woods pastimes. Shiva was abandoned in the forest, probably when humans fled her town or possibly after everyone else died. She lives with Teacher while she waits for her Auntie to come back for her. Teacher does not believe Auntie ever will, but he can’t bring himself to tell Shiva.

Shiva and Teacher at their cottage.

And because this is like a fairy tale, there are, of course, people who consider themselves heroes and things the heroes consider monsters. Their respective worlds are called the Inside and the Outside. Inside is the human world that must be protected and Outside is the world of monsters that Insiders believe must be destroyed. On the Inside are humans are protected by soldiers who serve the Holy Father, who himself serves God. On the Outside, are the cursed ones. The Outsiders have black fur, often with skulls for faces and horns. Some seem to have been transformed from animals like foxes and crows. They are apparently immortal. One has even been decapitated and his body carries his head around carefully protected with a sheet. What the Outsiders believe is more mysterious than what the people on the Inside do. Like most people, the Outsiders assume what must be done is obvious. And when they try to explain, they do not necessarily do so in easy to comprehend terms.

Shiva is on the wrong side of the world. She is a small human child on the Outside, living among the cursed. And the gentle, reserved Teacher–with his black fur, twisting tall horns and caprine ears–is an Outsider. Like all Outsiders, Teacher carries a curse that could transform Shiva into something like him with just a touch–even an accidental brushing of hands, even a hug. Teacher tells Shiva how to bandage her own cuts and check herself for signs of the curse–a creeping dulling of the sense of touch, smell and taste.  He would love to comfort her or treat her minor injuries, but he restrains himself.

  Neither Shiva nor Teacher is wholly part of either world. They live in-between, on the bleeding margin of the Inside and the Outside.Their cottage in the woods already mixes the human and the natural. And they live not far from a town, but one that has been abandoned by humans and it is still too human for the Outsiders to inhabit. Teacher avoids contact with both Outsiders and humans as best he can. Both sides want Shiva for different reasons.

  Shiva’s difference is obvious. She seems immune to the curse. She is the little girl in the woods living with a monster. Though she still appears human and can feel pain, be injured or become sick, Shiva’s own people on the Inside already consider her cursed. She is not human to them any longer. But she is not an Outsider either. Teacher does not consider her an Outsider. The Outsiders do not consider her one of them. They focus on her soul. But Teacher is unusual, too. He does not know the things the other Outsiders know. He still wears clothing as humans do, though his is very formal with striped trousers and a long, black coat. And the Outsiders mark him as different.

The Outsiders are more obviously frightening than the people on the Inside. They live in the woods, with their motley physiognomy. Their touch can transform bodies. They look like Western demons. The Outsiders are hard to understand, even when they bother to explain what they are doing. They want to collect souls and they say that souls consumed first by the curse.  They talk to their Mother who lives at the bottom of a lake. And the Outsiders want Shiva.

The Inside seems very much like a European fairy tale world. But as in so many modern fairy tales, humans are ultimately much more frightening to me than the monsters. Soldiers destroy whole towns to save them from the curse. Soldiers kill people who haven’t even been touched because Insiders believe the worst part of becoming an Outsider is not the physical transformation, but the inability to die. And so the soldiers do their holy work of massacre.

Nagabe’s art is beautiful with deft fine lines and careful contrasts of black and white. I appreciate how much of the story is told with very little text.

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Nagabe’s use of black and white subverts their traditional use in fairy tales–and far beyond fairy tales. Shiva is as white a as a character can be while still elegantly depicting a person with hair, facial features and clothing. Similarly, Teacher is rendered almost as a shadow, with as much black as can be used while still elegantly depicting a person with black fur, horns, coat, and white pinstriped black trousers. He is a very refined devilish-looking person.

  Nagabe uses but doesn’t reinforce the associations of these colors—white with purity, innocence, good. Black with corruption, wickedness and corruption. As the story progresses, Nagabe subverts these associations more and more. Shiva never becomes evil, but the humans in their white world become more and more frightening and genocidal. And the Outsiders become more comprehensible and less frightening. Though the story is very much told in black and white, The Girl From The Outside stays in-between, where the worlds bleed together, where we can meet people different from us, who might not be people as we understand “people” and to whom we might not be “people” at first, and where we can even love them.

~~~

Carol Borden thinks Teacher is exceptionally dapper. She read Nagabe’s The Girl From The Other Side: Siúil A Rún, vols. 1-5 (Seven Seas Entertainment) for this piece.

Betty Boop’s Halloween Party

You are cordially invited to Betty Boop’s Halloween Party!

The Strange Loves of Dracula”

At Syfy, friend of the Gutter Sara Century writes of the creepy loves of Count Dracula in comics, film and animation.

There’s a killer watching the house lit up against the trees. And he hates the noise, the music, the light. He hates the drinking and the bragging. He hates “the sounds of joy.” And he’s waiting for his chance to put an end to it. He hates everyone inside. And he waits for his chance to slip in and kill everyone while they sleep. He cannot be stopped. Weapons do nothing. No one can hide. He kills…

Interview with Rebecca Sugar

Steven Universe creator Rebecca Sugar talks about the critical need for LGBTQIA characters in children’s programming. “By including LGBTQIA content and characters in G-rated entertainment for kids, you tell kids when they’re young that they belong in this world. You can’t not tell them that. There can’t be only a certain group of kids that gets told someone will love you by all the entertainment…

Wong Jing’s Kung Fu Cult Master (1993) is the first time I know that I watched something adapted from a Louis Cha story. It is based on the third novel in Cha’s Condor Trilogy, Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre. I probably saw it at the old Golden Classics Cinema in Toronto. It was when I was watching all the Jet Li movies. This one was memorable and, having no familiarity with the source material, I found it difficult to follow. That didn’t stop me from pretending later I had been struck by a Jinx Palm. (What do you expect me to do when you give me charcoal powder toothpaste, people?). I was filled with wonder.

Since then I have made sense of what I saw through translated comics adaptations, in particular Ma Wing-Shing’s Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre (Comic One, 2002), the novel Kung Fu Cult Master adapts. It seems fitting that I would first read Louis Cha via the comics of Ma Shing-Wing and Tony Wong’s The Legendary Couple (ComicOne, 2002), an adaptation of Cha’s Return of the Condor Heroes. It parallels how I first encountered him in a way that I remember in Kung Fu Cult Master, rather than Chor Yuen’s elegant Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre (1978) or Wong Kar-Wai’s deconstruction and sorta prequel, Ashes of Time (Redux or not) (1993; 2008).

Behold this wonder! Gold Lion and Green Bat in Kung Fu Cult Master

Slightly more elegant Green Bat in Chor Yuen’s 1978 Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre

The comics and the 1983 television adaptations allowed me to become familiar with Cha and these stories. They allowed me start to understand stories that assumed familiarity with the story, whether Kung Fu Cult Master, Ashes of Time, or  Jeffrey Lau’s Lunar New Year parody of The Legend of Condor Heroes, The Eagle Shooting Heroes (1993), shot with the same cast and at the same time as Ashes of Time. Please note Tony Leung Chiu-Wai in each film.

As the Blind Swordsmani in Ashes of Time

Suffering from a painful allergic reaction as Duan Zhixing in Eagle Shooting Heroes

In the early 1990s, Louis Cha was what Ip Man movies are now.

I watched some of the 2000s and 2010s tv adaptations in non-subtitled form, but by then I could understand who and what I was seeing. In fact, I was pleased when I could actually get the joke that the landlord and landlady in Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle (2006) were the ill-fated lovers of Return of the Condor Heroes, Yang Guo and Xiaolongnü played by Andy Lau and Idy Chan in the 1983 tv adaptation I borrowed from a good friend and have since gotten for myself.

Andy Lau as Yang Guo and Idy Chan as Xiaolongnu in 1983

Carman Lee as Xiaolongnu, Lois Koo as Yang Guo and giant condor friend in 1995.

Yuen Qiu as Xiaolongnu and Yuen Wah as Yang Guo in Kung Fu Hustle. Ha, I get the joke now! I can laugh!

And it helped a lot watching those shows when I read Tony Wong’s Legendary Couple, because the translations of the names were so different, but I recognized a disreputable Taoist when I saw him.* Sometimes the Wudang Clan is something to mess with.

Cha’s most adapted–and possibly referenced–books are the Condor Trilogy:  Legend of Condor Heroes; Return of the Condor Heroes; and, Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre. They are sequels, but follow family and kung fu school lines more than the adventures of any one protagonist through three novels. And luckily for us, McLehose Press is planning on translated the whole trilogy into English. The first volume, Legends of the Condor Heroes: A Hero Born, translanted by Anna Holmwood, is now available. No English speakers will ever need to struggle like I did again. The kung fu fantasy works of Louis Cha will be available to us all–or at least some of them.

Dr. Louis Cha Leung-yung was born in 1924 in Haining, Jiaxing, China and lives in Hong Kong. That’s right, Cha is still going at 94. He has worked as an editor editor and journalist, but it was his wuxia novels, written between 1955 and 1972 under the pseudonym “Jin Yong,” (Kam Yung in Cantonese) that brought him a tremendous success. According to Holmwood, “sales of his books worldwide stand at 300 million, and if bootleg copies are taken into consideration, that figure rises to a staggering one billion.”

Cha got his start as a copy editor in 1947 at Shanghai’s Ta Kung Po newspaper. He became deputy editor of Hong Kong’s Hsin Wan Po. He left journalism briefly to work as as screenwriter for Great Wall Movie Enterprises, Ltd. In 1959, Cha co-founded Hong Kong’s Ming Pao newspaper. And it was primarily Ming Pao that serialized his fifteen wuxia stories. His first was The Romance Of The Book And The Sword (1955). His last was Sword of the Yue Maiden. He retired from writing fiction in 1972 and he’s been updating and revising the work ever since. There was a time in the 1970s when his books were simultaneously banned in both the Mainland–because it was seen as satirizing and criticizing the Chinese government–and in Taiwan–because it was seen as somehow pro-Communist, anti-Kuomintang and critical of Taiwan’s one-party rule.In 1995, he retired from his position as editor-in-chief of Ming Pao. Cha has been active in Hong Kong politics, helping draft the Hong Kong Basic Law and then working on the Preparatory Committee in advance of the handover of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to China in 1997. And he’s spent much of the new millennium pursuing higher education. He studied at St. John’s College in Cambridge, receiving a doctorate in Chinese history in 2010. And the South China Morning Post reports that Cha (might have) received another doctorate, this one in Chinese literature from Peking University in 2013. Of course, this doesn’t even begin to cover his probable knowledge of martial arts like the Nine Yin Manual and 18 Dragon Palm. One assumes Dr. Cha is cultured in all things.

Dr. Louis Cha via the South China Morning Post

Whenever I think of Louis Cha, I think of Tony Leung Chiu-wai in Wong Kar-Wai’s In The Mood For Love (2000). Sure, there is lovely music and melancholy love with the sartorially unstoppable Maggie Cheung, but it is easy to overlook that not only is Tony Leung a writer, he is a writer of wuxia novels. I’m not saying that Wong made a movie about Louis Cha’s love life, which I hope is less depressing, but I think Cha and writers like Gu Long  and Wang Dulu were in the background. Especially after Ashes Of Time. And Ashes of Time is a lot easier to follow if you realize it is a deconstruction of the Condor Trilogy. It relies on the same kind of familiarity that Peter Greenaway relies on people having with The Tempest in watching Prospero’s Books (1991). I love that the touchstones for both extremely artsy-fartsy directors are different. I love that Wong works with a serialized wuxia writer. It would be like Greenaway deconstructing Tolkien or Robert E. Howard**—but all wrapped up together. The high and low brow have a common enemy. God save us from the middle brow.

And Cha is being compared to Tolkien and George R. R. Martin in many of the reviews of A Hero Born. In fact, right on the cover a blurb from the Irish Times reads, “A Chinese Lord of the Rings.” And I get it. It’s short hand. People need some kind of reference before they’ll pick up the book. That’s fine. There will be plenty of time for pedantry later. Once people have read the book and become Cha fans, they can start arguing on the internet, “Hey, Louis Cha is a much more prolific author than Tolkien ever was with a more profound influence on Chinese language literature and readers.”

I would probably make those comparisons myself if my first encounter with Cha’s characters and stories hadn’t been Kung Fu Cult Master. Then again, Kung Fu Cult Master is the first half of a projected two-art adaptation but, like Ralph Bakshi’s animated Lord of the Rings, there was never a part two. So. Yeah. It’s just that I don’t know what other comparison to make.

In an interview with South China Morning Post, Anna Holmwood describes Legends of the Condor Heroes: A Hero Born as “China’s Walter Scott mixed with The Lord of the Rings fantasy things. That’s exactly what it is.” For their part, the SCMP copy editor chose a title comparing the trilogy with George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice And Fire. A Hero Born is wuxia at its best. It’s 1205 CE and the Jin are encroaching on the Song Empire. The emperor is unworthy and the people are oppressed. Itinerant heroes try to make things right. Two of them, Skyfury Guo and Ironheart Yang encounter a grumpy Taoist priest Chu Qiuji*** who, while heroic, is a jerk. He avidly demonstrates why the Wu Tang Clan is nothing to mess with. Guo and Yang become involved in a fight with soldiers and must flee. Their children, Guo Jing and Yang Kang grow up on different sides of the conflict. Plus, there’s Genghis Khan! And a secret beggar sect! And one of my favorite characters keeps his wife’s body in a frozen cave! I wish I could do better, but I’ll just suggest you read the book, read the comics, watch the tv shows and movies.

Oh, yeah, and there’s plenty of fantastic kung fu move and school names and action. Comics, while also working in a static medium, don’t face the same kinds of challenges a novel does in depicting action. Comics creator Ma Wing-Shing in particular captures the force of the martial arts masters moves. I am particularly fond of his chi lines. But Holmwood has some interesting thoughts on translating the names of the various stances, fists and swords as well as conveying the choreography of a fight sans images.

“The name [of these moves] is very evocative and it’s part of the creating of the world, but what really matters to readers is can they follow who is doing what, what the actions are, who is hitting whom, and how they are hitting them,” she said. “When you are translating, you have to read on such a careful and deep level. You are constantly asking yourself: is the hand going there? Is it going up or down? How is this move working? That’s the most challenging part – is to be able to express what the actions are in a way that is going to be vivid on the page and people can clearly understand and follow what’s happening.”

“You can shorten sentences to make the action move, and use some short punchy verbs that make the actions very fast,” she said. “When you want to draw attention to the moment for dramatic effect, you add more details, slow it down, and make the sentence a big longer.”

And I have to say it works. Right from the start of A Hero Born, I easily imagine Chu Qiuji’s unnecessarily brutal fights with the heroes he mistakes for scoundrels. Does it help that I’ve read Ma Wing-Shing, Tony Wong and seen film and television adaptations of Cha’s stories? Maybe. But Holmwood does a good job of taking readers into the martial world. I can’t wait for the next translated volume of Legend of Condor Heroes finally presented if not in its original serial format, something close. McLehose is planning three more volumes of Legend of Condor Heroes before starting on Return of the Condor Heroes–making this a burly “trilogy.”

Ma Wing-Shing demonstrates how to draw punching.

  I wrote more about Ma Wing-Shing and his adaptation of Hero here.

*This Taoist is no Chang San-Fung / Zhang Sanfang.

***Or finally making my long hoped for film, Peter Greenaway’s Batman and Robin.

*There is one disreputable Taoist and then there is Chu Qiuji, who is extremely reputable, but incredibly judgmental and harsh. I am afraid to think of what Chu Qiuji might be without Taoism.

 ~~~

Cured of the Jinx Palm, Carol Borden has retired to Peach Blossom Island to study Nine Yin White Bone Claw.

“You don’t know how a family can surround you at all times.”

Some fine writing about Max Öphuls’ The Reckless Moment by Sovay: “There’s the heart of the story, Lucia and Martin and Lucia’s family. Their relationship is unlike anything I have seen in a film noir. Luciais unlike anyone I have seen in a film noir. A conventional housewife blackmailed with the exposure of her daughter’s sexual entanglement in a murder case—though the blackmailer doesn’t know…