Outside-In by Bruce Jones

Outside-In
by Bruce Jones
from The Twisted Tales of Bruce Jones
issue No. 1
Eclipse Comics, February 1986

I can't find out where this story originally appeared before being reprinted in The Twisted Tales of Bruce Jones, a four-issue series of reprints - often colorized - of stories previously printed in black-and-white in Warren magazines.

UPDATE: reader 'hsc' notes:

This Bruce Jones piece was supposed to have been printed in the 4th issue of WEB OF HORROR, but the magazine folded unexpectedly and was never published.

Frank Brunner managed to get a portion of the original art out of the office, and the work wound up in fanzines:

http://enjolrasworld.com/Richard%20Arndt/Web%20Of%20Horror.htm

"Outside-In" wound up in Robert Gerstenhaber's REALITY #2, published in 1971:

http://www.kenmeyerjr.com/uploads/5/5/7/8/55780583/reality2.pdf



'Outside-In' calls to mind the EC Comics of the 50s, with its twist on the theme of the Hollow Earth..............

Book Review: Wizard World

Book Review: 'Wizard World' by Roger Zelazny

4 / 5 Stars

'Wizard World' (411 pp) was published by Baen Books in October 1989. The cover art is by David Mattingly.

This is an omnibus edition, compiling two novels by Zelazny: 1980's Changeling and its sequel, 1981's Madwand. 

These novels are set in an un-named Fantasy World, parallel to our own, where magic (rather than technology) holds sway.

It's difficult to provide a synopsis of a two-volume omnibus such as this, without giving away spoilers. So I'll say that the first volume introduces the reader to one Pol Detson, the Changeling of the novel's title. Pol is the son of Det Morson, one of the most powerful wizards of the un-named fantasy world serving as a counterpart to Earth, a fantasy world where most of the action takes place.

To save him from his father's enemies, Pol is raised by an unwitting family on 'our' Earth. As a young man, Pol takes for granted his unusual, 'magical' abilities, and makes a name for himself as a folk guitarist.

However, the elderly wizard Mor travels between the worlds to meet Pol, and send him back to his place of origin.....there to battle a usurper. A usurper from 'our' Earth, who is using technology to impose his will on a land and people who have no experience of machines.

The winner of the battle will control the fate of the world...........

'Changeling' works well as a straightforward adventure novel that mixes both sci-fi and fantasy elements. 

'Madwand' is that rarity, a sequel that is better than its predecessor. 'Madwand' delves into the rationale and practice of magic, and how an apprentice can gain mastery. There is an underlying drama that, somewhat surprisingly, contains a quasi-Lovecraftian atmosphere, an atmosphere that drives conspiracies and hidden motives among its wizards and warlocks. This gives 'Madwand' a darker tone that 'Changeling'.

Perhaps indicating a desire on Zelazny's part to move away from the prose styles he employed in the New Wave Era to a style more 'commercial' in nature, both volumes of 'Wizard World' have relatively clear language and avoid the overwritten, phantasmagorical passages that were commonplace in the 'Amber' novels.

The verdict ? If you're looking for fantasy novels that are very readable and don't require a Glossary to be understandable, then either 'Changeling', Madwand' or the 'Wizard World' compilation are worth picking up.

Sticking it to the Man

Sticking it to the Man
edited by Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre
PM Press, November 2019

In 2012 Iain McIntyre, an Australian writer and musician, edited an anthology of essays on 'pop, protest, and black fiction of the counterculture, 1964 - 1975' titled Sticking it to the Man. Published in the UK by small press publisher The Ledatape Organisation, the book broke new ground in terms of surveying these fields of popular literature, but at only 82 pages in length, necessarily could not provide an in-depth overview.

Building on the success of their 2017 book Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980, McIntyre and collaborator Andrew Nette, the Australian editor, crime fiction novelist, and author of the Pulp Curry Blog, now have published a greatly expanded version of Sticking, this time with the US publisher PM Press (who specialize in publishing Marxist agitprop ?!).

At 319 pp, this U.S. version of Sticking is a well-made, thick chunk of a trade paperback adhering to the same formatting as Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats. The book features essays from McIntyre and 25 other contributors, all copiously illustrated with photographs / scans of book covers and author portraits.

This photo of one of the Contents pages should provide you with an idea of how the book goes about furnishing an overview of such a variety of popular literature.

One thing to note is that Sticking is much more Scholarly - even pedantic - as compared to the essays provided in Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats. Some of the contributors to Sticking are academics, and their essays would be more at home in journals devoted to literature, sociology, Black History, and other fields in the Humanities. It goes without saying that these essays are overloaded with jargon, and negotiating them requires perseverance.

An example of one of the essays in Sticking, by Andrew Nette himself, is available here.

 

That said, there are plenty of other essays and interviews in the pages of Sticking that readers will find readable, engaging, and informative. Essays on black-authored paperbacks of the 60s and 70s, (spotlighting authors such as Iceberg Slim, Donald Goines, Chester Himes, and Joseph Perkins Greene), as well as a 1993 interview with Nathan Heard (Howard Street, To Reach A Dream) are among the better entries in the book.

Also well worth reading are essays on Death Wish and other vigilante novels of the 70s (I didn't know that sci-fi author Barry M. Malzberg wrote an entire series of 'Lone Wolfe novels under the pseudonym 'Mike Barry' ?!); pulp fiction about the aftermath of the Viet Nam war; novels featuring 'liberated' women, who brought an Amazonian attitude to their interactions with the male gender; men's adventure novels that riffed on the Quebec Separatist movement in Canada in the 1970s; and even Looking for Mr Goodbar, Judith Rossner's 1975 novel about a schoolteacher looking for love in the alienating cityscape of mid-70s New York.

As with Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats, readers will come away from Sticking with a desire to obtain many of the profiled Old School paperbacks, only to come to the disappointing realization that copies of these books are rare, and sell for very high prices. 

In this regard, I can't say that Sticking will bring many new revelations to those dedicated collectors (such as readers of The Paperback Fanatic) of old paperbacks, who already know that any book from Holloway House is a treasure. But, perhaps one day, we will see the paperbacks in Girl Gangs and Sticking reissued in trade editions, much like Grady Hendrix has arranged to have selected 'Paperbacks from Hell' reissued by Valancourt Press.

Summing up, if you're a fan of old paperbacks, pulp literature, Black American fiction, and other 'alternative' genres, then picking up a copy of Sticking it to the Man is recommended. You can find it at your usual online book retailer for about $30.

Great Masters of Fantasy Art

Great Masters of Fantasy Art
by Eckart Sackmann
Taco (Germany) 1986

'Great Masters of Fantasy Art' (96 pp) was published by Taco in 1986; it's an English-language version of the book Meisterwerke Der Fantasy-Kunst originally published in German that same year.

The explanatory text is provided by Eckart Sackmann (b. 1951) a German writer who has authored a number of articles about comics and comic art, with an emphasis on German representations.

The book is intended to present fantasy art, as it stood in 1986, in a manner akin to that of Fine Art or Studio Art. The 16 profiled artists represent the major illustrators in the field at that time, and should be familiar to anyone who read paperbacks or Heavy Metal magazine: Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo, Rowena Morrill, Michael Whelan, and Don Maitz, are among the featured painters.

For me, the main value of 'Great Masters of Fantasy Art' is the way that paintings originally intended for paperback covers, record album art, or magazine covers are reproduced in larger dimensions (the book is 9 x 12 inches). This permits the viewer to see the brushwork and the texture of the underlying canvas, and gain an understand as to how commercial art was crafted in the era before computers, scanners, and Adobe came to dominate the process.

Looking at the several paintings of Frank Frazetta in this manner is instructive. When enlarged, you can see that the paintings are not particularly polished or finely drafted (Frazetta didn't use an airbrush) but their composition and use of color is cannily executed, and when reduced to the dimensions of the paperback book, the paintings 'work' in the sense of selling the book. In this way it's easier to see how Frazetta could regularly produce such a large number of paintings to satisfy the commercial markets.

One drawback to the book is that the author doesn't always provide the titles of the books and magazines that the artwork was commissioned for, but I suspect that Baby Boomers who were fans of sci-fi and fantasy content back in the 80s will intuit the final products from these paintings.

Summing up, while its short length prevents it from being a must-have acquisition, for those with a fondness for this style of art, or with nostalgic feelings for this era of genre literature, 'Great Masters of Fantasy Art' may be worth picking up, particularly when copies in good condition can be had for around $10.

Book Review: The Iron Dragon's Daughter

Book Review: 'The Iron Dragon's Daughter' by Michael Swanwick

3 / 5 Stars

'The Iron Dragon's Daughter' first was published in hardcover in the UK in 1993; this mass market paperback edition (424 pp) was released in April 1995 by Avon / Nova. The cover illustration is by Dorian Vallejo.

I remember reading this book back upon its release in 1995 and thinking that despite its flaws it was something new in the field of sci-fi publishing: a novel that took the tropes of traditional fantasy literature and gave them a cyberpunk sensibility. 

In fact, Swanwick's book can arguably be regarded as the progenitor of the genre of 'steam fantasy'. Before there was China Mieville and Perdido Street Station (2000), before there was Alan Campbell and Scar Night (2006), or Tim Lebbon and Dusk (2006), or most of the current catalog of publisher Angry Robot books, there was Swanwick opening the way with 'The Iron Dragon's Daughter'.

The novel doesn't provide much in the way of a preamble, leaving it to the reader to infer from the narrative that our heroine, Jane Atterbury, is a changeling; that is, a mortal child who, as an infant, was secretly exchanged with a fairy or goblin duplicate, and thus is doomed to grow up in the Fairy World.

Jane labors with other orphans in an arms factory where life is nasty, brutal, and short. These opening passages are among the best in the book at creating a convincing world where the creatures of fantasy, such as elves, goblins, ghosts, dwarves, and dragons, all exist within a modernized, 'industrial' version of Fairyland. 

Jane learns that as a human, she has powers otherwise absent in the other denizens of this world; these powers attract the attention of Melanchthon, the dragon of the book's title. 

The dragons of this world serve much as do the ultra-sophisticated fighter jets of 'our' world. Formerly a cutting-edge combat model designed for stealth operations, Melanchthon has managed to secrete himself on the grounds of the factory and thus avoid being dismantled and melted down for scrap. But time is running out for Melanchthon, and his one chance at escape is to persuade the changeling child to be his pilot.

With nothing to lose, Jane agrees to cooperate with the dragon. But little does she know that the world outside the confines of the factory has its own dangers and temptations......but also the path by which she can find her way back to the world in which she was born........

While 'The Iron Dragon's Daughter' certainly deserves kudos for bringing something new and imaginative to the fantasy / sci-fi genres, as a novel, it suffers too much from a meandering, indolent approach to plotting. After the first few chapters, the dragon of the title is consigned to an off-stage role, only returning in the closing chapter. In between, author Swanwick spends a great deal of time recounting the various melodramas and social intrigues within which Jane is obliged to operate, en route to discovering a way to transport herself back to her own world.

After patiently working through these ancillary plot developments, I found the novel's denouement - which rushes to tie things together via the introduction of a flurry of 'cosmic' events - to have a contrived quality. 

Summing up, 'The Iron Dragon's Daughter' deserves notice more for how it expanded the fantasy genre, than its intrinsic value as an entertaining novel. 

The Tower King episodes 19 - 24

The Tower King
episodes 19 - 24 (finale)
Alan Hebden (writer)
Jose Ortiz (artist)
Eagle (UK) 1982

These are the final chapters of the series, which ended with Chapter 24, in issue 24, of the new Eagle, September 4, 1982.

episodes 1 - 3 are here.
episodes 4 - 6 are here.
episodes 7 - 9 are here.
episodes 10 - 14 are here.
episodes 15 - 18 are here.

Book Review: A Matter for Men

Book Review: 'A Matter for Men', by David Gerrold
Book One of 'The War Against the Chtorr'

0 / 5 Stars

‘A Matter for Men’ first was published in paperback in 1983 under the Timescape imprint; this version (368 pp) was issued by Pocket Books in July 1984. Boris Vallejo provided the cover art.

[The word ‘Chtorr’ is pronounced Kuh-TORR]

‘Matter’ is the first volume in ‘The War Against the Chtorr’ series, which, as of the end of 2019, consisted of ‘A Day for Damnation’ (1984), ‘A Rage for Revenge’ (1989), and ‘A Season for Slaughter’ (1993).

I remember seeing ‘Matter’ on the bookstore shelves in the early 80s and passing on it with the awareness that David Gerrold’s novels could be good……….or bad.

And ‘Matter’ is bad. 

The premise is worthy enough: the novel is set in the early 21st century, after a series of plagues has decimated the Earth’s population and left the U.S. with very little of its former status as a world power. Barely has civilization had a chance to restart when a new threat arises: a slow-motion invasion of alien species, one of which is a race of bug-eyed monsters known as the Chtorr. 

Jim McCarthy is a young soldier in the United States Armed Services, Special Forces Operation, Exobiologist. As the novel opens he is a member of a team assigned to destroy a Chtorran nest in the wilderness of Colorado. There he learns firsthand of the danger the aliens pose to mankind.

Subsequent events lead McCarthy to the High Command center in Denver, where he finds himself – against his will – drawn into an unfolding series of intrigues and conspiracies, directed by agents unknown. And unless Jim McCarthy can figure out who his real allies are, he’s going to find that he is just another expendable grunt…….. in a war that the U.S. is coming ominously close to losing…………

Why is ‘Matter’ a dud ?

Well, for one thing, actual combat with the Chtorr takes up only about 30 of the book’s 368 pages. The remaining text is laboriously devoted to all manner of exposition, with the life-or-death struggle against the aliens reduced to the backstory.

The reader is going to find himself or herself plodding through successive segments of empty dialogue……….internal monologues designed to reveal lead character McCarthy’s self-doubts and torments……cryptic visits from a cast of operatives who watch from the shadows…flashbacks to role-playing in a Poly Sci class (?!) taught by a grizzled veteran named Whitlaw…….and even, in a particularly turgid chapter, a session of psychoanalysis ?!

To give you a sense of what ‘Matter’ is all about, here’s an excerpt:

Hm.

Did I think like a duck ? Was that it ? Did I keep on doing ducklike things because I didn’t know how to do anything else ? Was it that obvious to the people around me ?

Maybe I should stop being me for a while and start being someone else – someone who didn’t have so much trouble being me.

I wasn’t hungry anymore. I got up, took my tray to the bus window and left the commissary.

I wondered if I walked funny. I mean, I was short and a little pudgy around the bottom. Did I look like a duck ? Maybe I could learn to walk differently – if I stood a little taller and carried my weight in my chest instead of in my gut – “Oof ! I’m sorry.” I had been so busy walking, I hadn’t been looking and had plowed straight into a young woman. Quack. Old synapses never die, they just fire away. “I’m really sorry  - oh!”

Yep, Earth is in deadly danger, and our hero is preoccupied with the psychological impact of a past taunt that he is a duck………?!

I finished ‘Matter’ confident that I am not going to spend any time with the remaining volumes in the series. Take my advice and avoid ‘The War Against the Chtorr’.