'The Origin of Vampirella' 

from the UK first issue of Vampirella magazine, February 1975

While the first issue of Vampirella appeared in 1969 and featured an 'origin' story, for the premiere UK iteration of the magazine, a newer, slightly modified origin story was printed (below). 

The plot by J. R. Cochman remains barely coherent, but the artwork by Jose Gonzalez is distinctive, and possesses great 70s flavor.

'Vampirella' was the brainchild of 'Famous Monsters of Filmland' creator Forest J. Ackerman. 

A little-known, but thoroughly creepy, segment of Ackerman's life revolved around a pubescent girl named Heidi Saha, who came to 70s geek conventions in a Vampirella costume....(!) 

Book Review: Unisave

Book Review: 'Unisave' by Axel Madsen

1 / 5  Stars

‘Unisave’ (264 pp.) was published in February 1980 by Ace Books; the cover illustration is by Davis Meltzer.

‘Unisave’ is one of the worst SF book’s I’ve ever read.

I gave up on it at page 116, and getting that far was a real struggle.......

The premise is interesting, if not particularly novel: in the year 2188, the extension of the human lifespan to ages of 125, or even 150, has led to the growth of Earth’s population to unsustainable numbers. 

People live in enormous domed cities, while all land outside the domes is devoted to agriculture. Space colonies provide some degree of extra room, but the choice facing mankind is stark: the population must be reduced before catastrophic famine overwhelms the planet.

Unisave is a UN agency devoted to addressing the issue of overpopulation. Comprised of a multicultural team of sociologists, agronomists, demographers, and politicians, it will be up to Unisave to determine what, if any, measures can be used to avert a crisis. The number one contingency plan: forced euthanasia of randomly selected adults, based on a mass lottery, with no exemptions or exceptions.

The moral and philosophical dilemmas raised by employing such a measure in a humanistic society would seem to be suitable for some kind of dramatic narrative, but author Madsen simply isn’t up to the task. 

The reader is subjected to a remarkably dull and plodding narrative consisting of conversational exchanges between various UN bureaucrats. These passages of dialogue are eye-glazingly boring. 

There are SF terms and themes regularly popping up into the text, but so many other aspects of the book go awry that these themes simply are window-dressing. 

Madsen can’t even get the names of his characters right; every character sports a first name and surname of no more than two syllables, like in postwar-era, juvenile sci-fi novels: Sal Belem. Viv Bord. Nilo Dor. Flo Hoo. 

One unfortunate woman even bears the appellation Ter Ki ……

Even readers with a fetish for overpopulation novels will find ‘Unisave’ hard going. This novel is best left forgotten.

'Whoodoo the Voodoo ?' by Caza

from the July 1981 issue of Heavy Metal magazine

Quirky humor, and great artwork, by Caza. 

 

Shatter: Issue One

Shatter: Issue One

(First Comics, December 1985)

This marks the first issue of the 'dedicated' Shatter comic book from First Comics.

In the editorial page on the inside front cover, First Comics editor Mike Gold tells us that the  special introductory issue of Shatter from February 1985 sold out, as did the second printing. While there is always an element of hyperbole in these statements, it does appear that the comic-buying public was intrigued with the idea of a title with its artwork composed on a computer.

By the time Shatter No. 1 was ready for preparation, the First Comics team of artist Mike Saenz and writer Gold had an updated piece of software at their disposal: MacDraw, which allowed them to create 'layers' and place them atop one another. As well, a higher-res font was used to create the comic's text. 

And most impressive of all, Apple / Steve Jobs provided First Comics with a FREE newfangled LaserWriter - in 1985 such devices cost $7,000 ! 

The ability of the LaserWriter to generate prints at 300 dpi meant a visible improvement in the artwork of the comic.

The initial pages of this first issue are confusing in terms of plot, mainly because no effort is made to update the reader on events taking place during Shatter's run as a backup feature in the First Comics title 'Jon Sable'. 

But it seems that Jack Scratch has decided to throw his lot in with a team of malcontents known as the 'Artists Underground', which include some geeks, and (naturally) a playboy bunny:

The old tenement building housing the secret base of the Artists Underground happens to contain a swimming pool, and the attractive leader of the Underground, Cyan, likes to swim a lot, which in turn provides a convenient excuse for some Old School MacIntosh cheesecake (keep in mind this is 11 years before 'Tomb Raider' first appeared on the Sega Saturn).

Unfortunately for Jack Scratch, a potential romantic encounter is interrupted by the appearance of some high-tech ninjas:

Has Cyan sold out the Underground to Corporate Interests ?! We'll have to see in 'Shatter' issue 2.....

Book Review: Death Hunt on a Dying Planet

Book Review: 'Death Hunt On A Dying Planet' by Gary Alan Ruse

 

2 / 5 Stars

‘Death Hunt On A Dying Planet’ (Signet, 396 pp.) was released in October 1988; the cover illustration is signed by Rakeland.

Coreworld is not a pleasant planet. It has been ravaged by plague, its cities are crumbling beds of unrest and violence, and its politics are controlled by the Corporation, an immoral outfit that seeks to bring all economic and social activity under its purview. Orbiting Coreworld is the derelict starship Glory, from whence the planet’s colonists came 700 years ago.

Elsewhere in the solar system containing Coreworld, a group of intellectuals have fled Corporation hegemony to establish a city, called Avalon, on a moon of the planet Logres. 

Avalon shelters the University, a bastion of freedom, and the spiritual and technological center of resistance to the Corporation.

When a distress signal suddenly emanates from the Glory, the University sends Vandal, a cyborg soldier of fortune, and his robot assistant Roddi, to investigate. It turns out there is a secret chamber aboard the Glory, and within the chamber, deep in cryosleep, is a member of the ship’s original crew: a young woman named Marinda Donelson. Donelson is a gifted biologist, and someone who may be able to devise a cure for the plague ravaging Coreworld. 

The Corporation wants Doctor Donelson for its own reasons, and launches an intense effort to wrest her from Vandal and Roddi, who, along with Marinda, find themselves stranded in the desert regions of Coreworld. As Corporation forces close in on them, Vandal, Roddi, and Marinda must struggle to stay one step ahead of their pursuers as they flee across the dangerous landscape of Coreworld, a landscape occupied by lethal robots, crazed mutants, and bloodthirsty nomads. 

Can Vandal, Roddi, and Marinda succeed in finding away off Coreworld and to Avalon ? Or will the Corporation mercenaries and assassins find them first ?

‘Death Hunt’ is definitely not a major work of science fiction. The plot is not particularly original, sharing elements with any number of 80s low-budget sci-fi films, like Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, The Ice Pirates, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, and Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn. 

Author Gary Alan Ruse is not a particularly accomplished prose stylist. Practically all of his verbs are accompanied by an adverb; characters don’t just speak words, they say them grimly, jokingly, drily, softly, playfully, wanly, weakly, and sometimes with….'inward sighs’. 

Cliched metaphors and similes pop up regularly (Brows are Knitted, etc.) and there are more than a few passages suffering from awkward syntax, or dialogue that is too cheesy for its own good.

But the narrative moves along at a good clip, fueled by goofy energy and plenty of plot contrivances, including the participation of a team of ‘Transformers’ – style robots.

‘Death Hunt’ will appeal to those readers comfortable with a story that sacrifices literary ambitions for B-movie thrills.

Heavy Metal July 1981

'Heavy Metal' magazine July 1981

 

The July 1981 issue of 'Heavy Metal' features a wraparound cover by Chris Moore titled 'Exhausted !'.

This is a pretty good issue, with the second installment of an interview with Richard Corben; the finale of Corben's 'Bloodstar'; another segment of Findlay's 'Texarcana'; an illustrated short story by Stephen King titled 'The Blue Air Compressor'; 'Whoodoo the Voodoo' by Caza; and the first installment of the 'Outland' graphic novel by Jim Steranko, which I've posted below:

Book Review: The Jaguar Hunter

Book Review: 'The Jaguar Hunter' by Lucius Shepard

3 / 5 Stars

The best way to describe Lucius Shepard is to say that he writes the way other authors – and Gene Wolfe comes most readily to mind – have been struggling to write for all their professional lives. Lucius Shepard writes the way many New Wave SF writers desperately wanted to write, but couldn’t.

What do I mean by these remarks ? I mean that with Shepard, metaphors and similes are used with deliberation and care. By and large his stretches of figurative prose – and these are prevalent in these stories - are reined in before the reader becomes exasperated (‘Black Coral’ is the only real exception). His narrative style is clear and direct, devoid of the studied opacity that (for example) mars so much of Wolfe’s output. 

The many prose contrivances used by SF writers hoping to generate ‘speculative fiction’ are rarely present in Shepard's stories.

This isn’t to say that Shepard’s work is for everyone. The SF element is scant in these stories, and many of them are an Americanized approach to the ‘magic realism’ genre so beloved by South American writers. Most of the momentum in a given narrative is generated from psychological or moral conflicts among the characters, as opposed to the external forces (space aliens, technology, pollution, Dark Lords, spells gone wrong) acting in traditional SF and fantasy fiction. 

And, set as they are in locales in Central and South America, East Asia, and the Caribbean, the stories in ‘The Jaguar Hunter’ often hinge on a confrontation between the American protagonists and the older cultures and mysteries attendant to the Foreign Place.
 
 ‘The Jaguar Hunter’ is a 1987 Bantam Trade paperback (356 pp.) with cover art by Barry Phillips. All of the stories first appeared in SF magazines in 1984 – 1985. The lineup:

‘The Jaguar Hunter’: in an unnamed Central American country, Esteban Caax agrees to hunt a notorious man-killing jaguar in order to settle a debt. After encountering a mysterious woman he begins to question his purpose, but it may be too late to turn back….

‘The Night of White Bhairab’ : in Kathmandu, dissipated hippie Eliot Blackford takes a job as a caretaker for Mr. Chatterji. When a malevolent ghost from Europe takes up residence in Chatterji’s house, Eliot must cooperate with the local spirits to prevent ectoplasmic mayhem from descending on the neighborhood.

‘Salvador’: in a near-future conflict in El Salvador, a drugged-out US soldier engaged in a brutal pacification campaign has a fateful encounter with the spirits inhabiting the remote countryside.

‘How the Wind Spoke At Madaket’: in a small village on Nantucket Island the wind suddenly seems possessed of malevolent intent. This novelette has affinities with something Stephen King would write. Featuring the wind as the monster in a horror story seems dubious, but Shepard does succeed to some degree in making it a legitimate 'monster'. However, the frequent intervals in which the author explores the psychological states of his characters tended to impede the narrative and prolong the story too much for its own good.

‘Black Coral’: on the island of Guanoja Menor (a fictional counterpart of the island of Guanaja, located off the coast of Honduras), Prince, a thuggish American expatriate and Vietnam War veteran, makes a fateful decision to smoke a local blend called ‘black coral’. He winds up on a very, very bad trip. The story suffers from belaboring the psychedelic imagery plaguing the hapless Prince, although it delivers a quirky, but satisfactory, ending.

‘The End of Life As We Know It’: an American couple, their marriage crumbling, visit a town in Guatemala and encounter a Don Juan character with mystical revelations about the fate of the Universe. One of weaker entries in the anthology.

‘A Traveler’s Tale’: Also set on the island of Guanoja Menor, drifter Ray Milliken decides to establish a Saucer Cult based on an entry in the 18th century journal of pirate Henry Meachem. Is Ray insane, or is an alien entity actually stranded on a snake-infested plot of swampland called the Burial Ground ?

‘Mengele’: a pilot in distress is forced to make an emergency landing in the jungles of western Paraguay. The nearest place of civilization turns out to be a village governed by a man with a past best left ignored. An offbeat, effective horror story.

‘The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule’: A fantasy story dealing with the comatose body of a dragon over a mile long. A young artist named Meric Cattany proposes to kill the dragon by covering it in a coating of paint, in a sort of Christo project gone amok. The story has a quirky premise but never really does much with it, as the narrative devolves into a soap opera involving romantic rivalries.

‘The Spanish Lesson’: it’s 1964 and a callow Young American named Lucius is bumming around the Mediterranean coast of Spain, seeking enhanced status in the expat community. He befriends a thoroughly creepy brother-and-sister pair who claim to be from Canada. But their notebooks tell of a more unbelievable point of origin....

’Lesson’ is the best story in the anthology. It takes a tried and true SF cliché and breaks new ground by propelling the trope  into far-out realms flavored with quasi- Lovecraftian elements. 

I thought the last few pages had the unfortunate effect of blunting the impact of the story’s climax, but overall, ‘Lesson’ stands as one of the more accomplished SF short stories of the 80s.

Richard Corben interview from Heavy Metal, June 1981

Interview with Richard Corben

Part One

from Heavy Metal June 1981

Richard Corben remains one of my favorite artists, particularly his work on various projects for Mignola's Hellboy. His obsession with rendering D-cups on any and all of his female characters seems to alleviated a bit with age, The sometimes puerile aspects of his work in the 70s and 80s are less pronounced nowadays, but even at his worst, Corben was still quite a bit better than many other graphic / comic artists of the 70s and 80s.

By the early 80s Corben's continuous work in Heavy Metal had given him a degree of status and a profile that had not been awarded to him by the underground comix scene, the members of which tended to regard him as a warped Midwestern 'square'. Thus, the June 1981 issue of HM saw Corben as the star of a multi-part interview by contributing editor Brad Balfour.

Unfortunately, Balfour comes to the interview more than a little disappointed to see that Corben is your ordinary, average guy who happens to draw comics for a living (albeit comics that often feature large doses of violence and female nudity). Balfour obviously is nonplussed by Corben's ordinariness.

Balfour seems determined to discover some sort of profound psychosexual flaw in his subject, and the interview adopts a testier tone as Corben plainly gets exasperated with Balfour's line of questioning...

Steranko's 'Outland'

from the June 1981 issue of Heavy Metal

Released in May 1981, Outland is described as an outer space version of the Western classic 'High Noon'. It's been a while since I last saw it, but I do remember it being a decent film , if not particularly inspired or imaginative. 

Warner Bros. was hoping the film would be a box-office, multi-marketing juggernaut, like Fox's 'Alien' had been two years previously, and they adopted much the same marketing approach.  

Heavy Metal magazine was happy to oblige,  serializing a graphic novel, ably illustrated by Jim Steranko, in several issues (July through October 1981, and January 1982). 

Outland was also available as a novelization in paperback, by Alan Dean Foster, and a 'movie novel' paperback authored by Richard Anobile.

Unfortunately, 'Outland' never became the marketing phenomenon that Warner was anticipating, but Steranko certainly did a good job on the graphic novel. Here's the Preview of the graphic novel; I'll scan and present its serial sections in forthcoming posts here at the PorPor Books Blog.

Book Review: Starshine

Book Review: 'Starshine' by Theodore Sturgeon

1 / 5 Stars

‘Starshine’ was published by Pyramid Books in December 1966; the cover artist is Jack Gaughan.

The book (and the many other paperback iterations in which it has seen print by other publishers) carefully avoids disclosing the original appearance information for the assembled stories, hiding the fact that they span the interval 1940 – 1961.

Needless to say these stories are not going to be very interesting to modern SF readers. They all suffer from excessive wordiness, clumsy sentence structure, and inane dialogue. Of course, most of the SF that also saw print in this era suffered from the same defects. But it was Sturgeon who said: "90 percent of SF is crud", and whether he was referring to his own works or not, well….. if the shoe fits, wear it.

The anthology opens with ‘Derm Fool’ (1940) about a regular joe caught in a quirky situation involving skin that won't stay on; there is a swell dame he needs to impress.

‘The Haunt’ (1941) is also about a regular joe who is trying to impress a swell dame; the plan involves a putative haunted house.

‘Artnan Process’ (1941) deals with two capable Earthmen sent to a remote planet to discover the secret of an energy conversion process. There is an emphasis on humor.

‘The World Well Lost’ (1953): two alien lovebirds /refugees come to Earth; placating their planet of origin requires deporting them back home, an act that troubles a crew member aboard the deportation ship. Although this story has received praise in the decades following its first appearance, the 'message' seems contrived rather than revelatory.

‘The Pod and the Barrier’ (1957): a starship crew must venture to breach a deadly force field. Much angst and drama among the crew. Even by 1950s standards the writing is very, very poor.

‘How to Kill Aunty’ (1961): a bedridden old lady is engaged in a nasty war of wits with her homicidal nephew / estate inheritor. Roald Dahl did so much more with this type of setup.

So, if you are thinking of getting ‘Starshine’ in the hopes that it represents a mid-60s, early New Wave collection by Sturgeon, that is precisely what it is not. You are better off staying away from this paperback.