Arthur Suydam's Mudwogs

Arthur Suydam's 'Mudwogs'  

from 'Echo of Futurepast' issue 5

Issue 5 of 'Echo of Futurepast' arrived in April 1985 and it contained the last installment of the 'Mudwogs' saga, a brilliant tale titled 'Fat and Skinny'.

Featuring demented humor, and artwork modeled on the best of the 19th and early 20th century children's illustrators, 'Fat and Skinny' was a memorable finish to the series.

(detail of page 3)

'Shatter' issue 2

Issue 2 of ‘Shatter’ appeared in February 1986.

At the end of issue one, we saw hero Jack Scratch (aka Shatter) and his companions, ‘The Artist's Underground’, at the mercy of a corporate heavy. 

The tables are turned, causing an unpleasant episode of face-exploding (!):

While the Mac-based artistry of this issue seems crude to today's eyes, there are some panels  that demonstrate the potential of PC-based comic and graphic art:

Later on in the issue, Cyan, the leader of the local cell of the Artist's Underground, has a violent confrontation with her ex-husband...........

....while Jack Scratch decides to seek shelter with the 'Alien Nation', a collective headed by an eccentric homeboy named 'E.T.' Unrath:

Will Cyan survive ? Will Jack Scratch be protected by the Alien Nation or find himself an outcast again ? 

We'll find out in issue No. 3......

Book Review: Alternities

Book Review: 'Alternities' by Michael Kube-McDowell

 3 / 5 Stars

It’s August 21, 1966, and in an alternate universe, in an alternate United States, in an alternate Philadelphia, Senator Walter Endicott is sitting in his suite at the Bellevue Stratford hotel, waiting for a visit from a call girl. Suddenly the lights in his suite dim and go out. Endicott opens the door and sees a faint, greenish glow at the end of the darkened hallway. But as he walks towards it, he encounters a maze of some kind, constructed out of the darkness and seething with alien energies.

When Endicott finally reaches a closed door, opens it, and steps through, he finds himself in an abandoned hotel. Emerging into the street outside, he is astonished to discover he is in Boston, outside the Cambridge Hotel. But even though it’s August 22, 1966, it’s not his Boston…..for the copy of the Globe in the corner newspaper vending box has the Cleveland Indians beating the New York Yankees in a game that, in Endicott's Boston, has yet to be played…..

Not one to pass up a chance for personal gain, Endicott decides to take up residence in this ‘alternity’, a parallel world where the people and places may have the same names, but history has taken a slightly different course. Using his knowledge of the existence of the wormhole that leads to at least six other ‘alternities’, Endicott is able to place himself in power in the political structure of what has become the ‘Home Alternity’.

It’s now the Fall of 1976, and President Peter Robinson confronts an aggressive Soviet Union, a Soviet Union with greater military, economic, and political power than his United States can muster. The technological secrets plundered from the other alternities by teams of ‘moles’ and ‘runners’ are helping the US gain on the Soviets, but not fast enough to suit Robinson. But with the closely-held knowledge that he and his aides can escape to another existence in a parallel world, a kind of 'ultimate' fallout shelter, he realizes he may not have to wait decades for ascendancy over the hated enemy. 

Robinson embarks on a campaign of covert military action against the Soviet Bloc, aware that if things lead to a nuclear war, the rest of the country can burn while he and his cronies escape to start over in a different universe……..

I picked up ‘Alternities’ (Ace Books, 383 pp.) back when it first was published in October 1988, but gave up after the first 75 pages, bored by its deliberate pacing. I recently decided to give it another try and did indeed finish it.

The narrative revolves around three major characters: the cunning and amoral Senator Endicott; the megalomaniacal President Peter Robinson; and Rayne Wallace, a ‘runner’ who travels the maze between worlds, retrieving goods and information from teams covertly operating in the unsuspecting host alternities.

This novel is not so much an SF work as it is a political thriller, one with a deliberately darker and more cynical take on Cold War conflicts than the Tom Clancy novels of the 1980s, such as ‘’Red Storm Rising’. The presence of the alternities is used not so much to expound on deep themes of physics or cosmology, but mainly as a plot a device by which author Kube-McDowell can engage in ‘what if’ scenarios about US / Soviet brinksmanship. In this regard, the book works rather well.

Where ‘Alternities’ loses steam is in the chapters dealing with the adventures of Rayne Wallace, who uses his access to a given alternity - where he never existed - to befriend the doppelganger of a former girlfriend. These sections of the novel, as well as those dealing with Wallace’s strained marriage and family life in his Home alternity, tend to be steeped in emotionally burdened prose and can grow tiresome.

Overall, however, ‘Alternities’ remains a good alternate world novel, superior in many ways to the rote entries in this genre churned out by Harry Turtledove. While the plot at times tends to lose momentum over the span of the book’s 383 pages, the resolution of the crisis of the Alternities is ably handled by author Kube-McDowell. Readers interested in an alt-history tale that explores Cold War themes may want to give this novel a try.

Fever by Halmos

'Fever' by Halmos

from the August 1977 issue of Heavy Metal

Featuring outstanding pen-and-ink artistry, a moldering corpse, a vomiting girl, and a gruesome sword stroke, this wordless six-page comic from the August 1977 issue of HM is one of the better strips to appear in the first year of the magazine's publication. 

Unfortunately, a Google search for 'Halmos' turns up very little information about this artist and whether his or her collected graphic art is available in single volume compilation(s).

Book Review: Weird Heroes No. 1

Book Review: 'Weird Heroes' No. 1, edited by Byron Preiss

1 / 5 Stars

By 1975 the Nostalgia Craze that had been started by the release of the film Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 had come to be a dominant component of American popular culture. 

The time was right for editor and author Byron Preiss to pitch an idea to Pyramid Books: create a lineage of paperbacks designed to mimic the format and content of the old-style pulp magazines of the 30s and 40s.

‘Weird Heroes’ (1975, 256 pp.) was the first of eight volumes that saw print between 1975 and 1977; numbers 1-2, 5 and 8 were anthologies, while the remaining numbers contained a single novel. 

The ‘Weird Heroes’ format provided numerous black and white or halftone illustrations with each volume, in keeping with the concept of the pulp magazine layout.

In his Introduction to the first volume, Preiss makes some decidedly pious remarks about avoiding the inclusion of tales featuring overly violent or sexual content, having in mind the men’s action paperbacks that were bestselling outlets for fiction in the 70s: The Executioner, The Destroyer, The Penetrator, etc. ‘Weird Heroes’, he tells us, is designed to showcase tales that evoke the clean, wholesome fun of the pulps. 

Unfortunately, Preiss winds up being too contrived in his selection of stories, and the end result is an anthology concept that, in my opinion, misses the mark.

‘Weird Heroes’ starts with a short story by the omnipresent Ron Goulart (Goulart contributes the novel that occupies Weird Heroes #3, as well as a story to Weird Heroes #6). Gypsy, the lead character, is a hip time traveler who arrives in a dystopian London of 2033. It’s not as bad as Goulart’s other efforts at humorous sci-fi, but that’s not really saying much.

Comics writer Archie Goodwin contributes ‘Stalker: the Darkstar File’, featuring a ‘half-breed’ Indian counterculture hero, modeled to a large extent on ‘Billy Jack’ (albeit with longer hair). 

With its plotting and prose style adhering pretty closely to the traditional detective story template, ‘Stalker’ is the best entry in the anthology. It provides an interesting look at a portion of the Sun Belt (Oklahoma) at a time when that region of the US was starting to ascend to a more prominent role in the nation's economic and political arenas.

Editor Preiss provides ‘Guts’, the worst story in the collection. Preiss decides to take The Fonz, makes him not an American Jew (i.e., Henry Winkler) but an Israeli Jew (named Mark Gutstein), and sends him back in time to 1976 to prevent Manhattan from being immolated by ‘radiofrenetic material’. 

It’s bad enough to base a story on a greaser spouting 50s hipster patter, but Preiss compounds the awfulness by using every Burroughsian, New Wave SF prose contrivance he can think of: chunks of text written in ALL CAPS, pages of dialogue that shift without context from the first- to the third-person POV, scattered epigrams in Hebrew, outrageously arty metaphors (‘Cocoa krispies scream under the pressure of Barrie’s spoon…’) etc., etc.

‘Rose in the Sunshine State’, by JoAnn Kobin, first saw print in 1974 in a feminist literary magazine (?!) titled Aphra. Including ‘Rose’ in ‘Weird Heroes’, editor Preiss solemnly tells us in his Introduction to the story, fits in with the offbeat theme of the anthology and allows for depiction of a hero over 50 years of age. 

‘Rose’ is the depressing tale of a 68 year-old woman who lives with her husband, and other Jewish retirees, in a ‘active seniors community’ in Miami. The narrative focuses on the psychology of pending mortality among the aged and infirm. The story is well-written, and I imagine fans of Old Jewish Lady Fiction (think Tille Olsen and ‘Tell Me A Riddle’) will like it, but having ‘Rose’ in ‘Weird Heroes’ is so contrived as to torpedo the whole concept of a pulp-hero inspired anthology.

The next entry in the lineup (and an interlude from fiction pieces), is an interview with Fritz Leiber, conducted by editor Preiss, and focusing on the old pulps. Leiber is less than overwhelmed with nostalgia over the whole pulp era, something that appears to leave Preiss a bit nonplussed.

The final story in the book is Philip Jose Farmer’s ‘Greatheart Silver in: Showdown at Shootout’, an overwhelmingly camped-up story about a former airship pilot who becomes a private detective after being shot down by ‘The Mad Fokker’ (titter). 

Greatheart Silver teams up with an elderly incarnation of 'The Shadow' and journeys to Tombstone, Arizona, for the final battle between armies of elderly pulp heroes and villains, all identified with cutesy pseudonyms (e.g., ‘Doc Ravage’, ‘Chimp’, and ‘Porkchop’). Farmer so overdoes his approach to ‘Greatheart’ that the story winds up sinking under the weight of its own smarminess.

‘Weird Heroes’ has very nice illustrations by Alex Nino, Sternako, Dan Sheridan, and Tom  Sutton.

The verdict ? ‘Weird Heroes’ has an interesting concept, but Preiss fails to do much with his editorial status, choosing to go with a mostly bland and unremarkable collection of stories. I’ll have to see if ‘Heroes’ # 2 improves on things, but I'm not holding my breath…..

Epic Illustrated Summer 1980

'Epic Illustrated', Summer 1980

The second issue of Marvel’s ‘Epic Illustrated’ is the Summer 1980 issue and features a cover illustration by Richard Corben. 

This issue provides a Letters column; not surprisingly, many writers reference ‘Heavy Metal’ magazine, and Archie Goodwin exhibits some testiness in his responses to these letters, arguing that he and Stan Lee “…have our own distinct editorial tastes and points of view”, and that “I don’t believe the two magazines will ever be so similar that one will cancel the other out….If you want to feel that Epic is better (than Heavy Metal), we’re not about to talk you out of it.” 

This issue features a lengthy first installment of R.E. Howard’s ‘Almuric’, written by Roy Thomas and illustrated by Tim Conrad. It’s not a bad strip. ‘Monkey See’, by Steve Bisette and Rick Veitch, deals with trigger-happy teens on an otherworldy fishing trip. 

Mimicking Heavy Metal’s use of topical columns during the Ted White editorial years, there is an interesting text feature on ‘Fantasy and the fantastic in European comics’ by Maurice Horn.

Jim Starlin’s self-indulgent ‘Metamorphosis Odyssey’ continues. ‘Killraven’ artist P. Craig Russell provides ‘Siegfried and the Dragon’, with some distinctive colors and skillfull penciling.

There is an interview with TV producer Glan A. Larson about the ‘Buck Rogers’ show, and a black and white strip titled ‘Tarn’s World’ by Robert Wakelin; good artwork, but an underwhelming script by Archie Goodwin.

One of the better pieces in this issue is the low-key ‘Seven Moon’s Light (Casts Complex Shadows)’, an adaptation of the Samuel Delany story by Howard Chaykin. I’ve posted it below.

'Gamma Point 3' by Sergio Macedo

from the compilation 'Psychorock'

During the  first few years of Heavy Metal magazine's existence (1977 - 1979), some of the best artwork was that done by the Brazilian artist Sergio Macedo (b. 1951). His initial pieces were primarily black and white strips, but in 1979 he produced the serial feature 'Telefield' (aka 'Telechamp').

Whether in black and white or color, Macedo's meticulous artwork has a distinctive style that incorporates the visual imagery associated with Buddhism and TM, along with that of bikers and punk culture. It's an offbeat mix, but when you throw in lots of nudity, it becomes something the stoner readership of HM eagerly embraced.

The large-format paperback 'Psychorock' was released by Heavy Metal Books in 1977; this is a compilation of  5 of Macedo's b & w Metal Hurlant strips from the late 70s.

Posted below is 'Gamma Point 3'