Moebius' Airtight Garage issue 3

The Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius
by Moebius
Issue 3, September 1993
Epic Comics

issue 1 is here

issue 2 is here

Book Review: The Black Death

September is Outbreak Month.......at the PorPor Books Blog !

Book Review: 'The Black Death' by Gwyneth Cravens and John S. Marr

4 / 5 Stars

‘The Black Death’ (354 pp) first was published in 1977 in hardcover; this paperback version from Ballantine Books was issued in March, 1978. The artist who provided the effective cover illustration is uncredited.

The novel is set in New York City in the late 70s. It’s Labor Day weekend, and the city is in the grip of a major heat wave. A strike by the Sanitation Worker’s Union means that garbage has gone uncollected for weeks. The city’s financial crisis means that many agencies and offices are underfunded and understaffed.

Sarah Dobbs, a sixteen year-old girl from an affluent family, has just gotten off a bus at the Port Authority terminal. She is returning to the city from a vacation spent in California. Sarah isn’t feeling well, and she just wants to get home and get some rest. When a pimp named Flash tries to recruit her, Sarah can’t help coughing right into his face……….

Within the next 48 hours, Sarah Dobbs is deathly ill, and in the intensive care ward of Metropolitan Hospital. The attending physicians have diagnosed her with a particularly virulent case of pneumonia. They think the scratches on the girl’s forearm are from injecting drugs. Little do they know that Sarah is not a drug user. But she did take an up-close photograph of ground squirrel while vacationing in California…..and the squirrel had fleas. Fleas that have infected Sarah Dobbs with plague……..

‘The Black Death’ is a medical thriller that deals with an outbreak of plague in New York City. It’s an effective book, probably due in part to the fact that author John S. Marr (b. 1940) is a physician, and the book reflects his knowledge of the intricacies of autopsies, hospitalization, public health, and epidemiology. Indeed, during the mid-70s Marr served as New York’s primary epidemiologist, and directed the city’s response to the Swine Flu outbreak of 1976.

A number of features make ‘The Black Death’ an effective novel. One is the use of a documentary-based prose style similar to that showcased by Michael Crichton in his medical thrillers. Another is its excellent re-creation of the state of New York in the late 70s, and its unique atmosphere of squalor, decay, and chaos:

Whatever had been bothering him in Chelsea was gone, or at least set aside, by the time he passed Sheridan Square in the Village. Two drag queens dozed on a bench in the dusty little park. From the smashed wine bottle, squeezed-out tubes of K-Y jelly, and the clumps of Kleenex, Hart concluded that the night there had been a busy one.

***

They walked to 118 East 104th Street, a decaying five-story walkup that was about 80 years old, built for the middle-income Irish and Italians moving up from the Lower East Side to escape the Jews……After some bloody skirmishes in the early sixties, the Irish and Italians left, mainly for the suburbs. The few who remained were locked into the area by poverty. “Boy, what a dump”. Maldonado looked at the explosion of garbage on the steps – banana peels, orange rinds, a rotting papaya, smashed bottles, an empty Pampers box, a broken doll. Several bulging plastic sacks ballooned with the foul gas of fermenting garbage.

***

The night was hot in the streets and even hotter in the small basement apartment.

“Your son is very sick,” Rodriguez told the old woman in Spanish. “He must go to the hospital.”

The woman pursed her mouth and shook her head. She looked at the man stretched out on the bare mattress on the floor. He wore only a pair of trousers. He was breathing very rapidly and his chest gleamed with sweat. His chin was smeared with dried blood.Two small children in diapers played on the dirty, cracked linoleum floor nearby. Three men and two women sat on a sagging sofa drinking beer and watching television.

The only weak note in the novel is the inclusion of the 70s thriller novel staple of the Megalomaniacal Military Officer; in this case, it's a General Daniel Cosgrove, who sees the situation in New York City through the dual lenses of paranoia, and opportunism. A sub-plot involving Cosgrove runs throughout most of the book, and contributes to its rather contrived ending.

Summing up, however, 'The Black Death' manages to be a very entertaining medical thriller and a great evocation of the era in which the Rolling Stones song 'Shattered' summed up the state of New York City:

Don't you know the crime rate is going up, up, up, up, up
To live in this town you must be tough, tough, tough, tough, tough!
You got rats on the west side
Bed bugs uptown
What a mess this town's in tatters I've been shattered
My brain's been battered, splattered all over Manhattan
Uh-huh, this town's full of money grabbers
Go ahead, bite the Big Apple, don't mind the maggots, huh

September is Outbreak Month

September is Outbreak Month........

.....at the PorPor Books Blog !

Every now and then, here at the PorPor Books Blog I like to take a break from reading sf and fantasy books and devote some attention to fiction in another genre.

For the month of September, I'm going to be focusing on four novels dealing with outbreaks of plague. And I'm not reviewing books that everyone knows, like The Andromeda Strain or The White Plague. Rather, I'll be looking at four lesser-known works that deserve attention, and I'll be posting reviews all throughout the month of September.

Vermillion issue 8

'Vermillion' issue 8
Written by Lucius Shepard, art by John Totleben
DC / Helix, May 1997

Lucius Shepard (1943 - 2014) was one of the 'first generation' cyberpunk authors. His first novel, Green Eyes, debuted in 1984 as one of the inaugural Ace Science Fiction Specials. In 1986 his novella R & R won a Nebula Award, and the novel derived from it, Life in Wartime, received much critical praise.

Shepard's prose then turned increasingly towards magic realism and fantasy topics, as showcased in the 1988 anthology The Jaguar Hunter.

In 1996 DC comics launched its 'Helix' line of sci-fi comics, and Shepard contributed the twelve-issue series Vermillion, which ran from October 1996 to September 1997.

'Vermillion' is set in the far future, when the eponymous city occupies the entire Universe. The lead character is a man named Jonathan Cave, who, even while stricken with deep anomie, bouts of self-loathing, and existential despair, acts to preserve the city and its culture from the machinations of a race of malevolent aliens, the Ilumi' nati, who disguise themselves as humans while roaming about the world.

I'll post an overview of the 'Vermillion' series in the near future. But issue 8 was a standalone title, meant as an interlude between the series' two major story arcs. It gives a good sense of Shepard's approach to writing for a comic book. In this issue Jonathan Cave, drunk and consumed with self-pity, takes a tour of the city, in the company of his mute girlfriend Sylvia.

While Shepard's writing does at times become pretentious and a bit overwrought, what saves issue eight is the exceptional artwork by John Totleben, who gained fame in the 80s as an artist on Swamp Thing. 

Totleben's rendering of the streets and landscapes of Vermillion, with a somber, autumnal color scheme contributed by Angus McKie (himself a noted artist) gives the creepy, phantasmagorical adventures of Jonathan Cave an atmospheric quality that is rarely seen in most comic books nowadays..........    

The Luck in the Head

The Luck in the Head
by M. John Harrison (story) and Ian Miller (art)
Dark Horse comics, 1993

The early 90s were the peak years of the Great Comics Boom, and companies like Dark Horse were - for better or worse - devoting considerable effort to expanding the boundaries of the comic book format, and trying to attract readers who might not otherwise be interested in reading a 'comic book'.

One of their more ambitious efforts was issuing a series of four large-size, original graphic novels that were designed to showcase a more avant-garde, 'artistic' sensibility. These novels originally were commissioned in the UK by sf publisher Victor Gollancz Ltd.

One of these graphic novels was a collaboration between the UK writer M. John Harrison and the UK artist and illustrator Ian Miller. Harrison's short story, 'The Luck in the Head', from his 1985 compilation Viriconium Nights, was the subject of the graphic novel, which was published in the US in 1993.

I readily admit to not being a real fan of Ian Miller's artwork, but I do recognize that Harrison is one of the more genuine talents to emerge from the New Wave Era, so I was willing to pick up a copy of 'The Luck in the Head' and see if it met - or failed to meet- my expectations.

Unfortunately, the truth is that 'The Luck in the Head' is pretty awful.

The story itself was perhaps not the best choice to adapt to a graphic novel / comic format. It's one of the more diffuse stories in the 'Viriconium' series, and deals with the adventures of an ennervated poet / artiste named Ardwick Crome. 

I won't divulge any spoilers, save to say that Crome, who spends most of his time in a state of depression and lassitude in an apartment in the warrens of Viriconium, dreams a dream of becoming an observer, and then a participant, in a strange pagan ceremony on the city's seashore.

In the aftermath of the dream, he enters into a trying relationship with an elderly woman / witch named Manny Vooley, 'The Queen of the City'.

   

Miller's artwork, which reflects his affinity for expressionism, isn't very good. There is too much of a hasty quality in too many of the pages, and the use of a relentlessly murky color scheme means that often it's difficult to make out what, exactly, is taking place.

Contributing to the ad hoc, improvised nature of 'The Luck in the Head' is the inept decision to use a cursive script font, that is deliberately misaligned on the pages in order to complement the artwork's intent of imparting a sense of chaos, confusion, and existential anomie to the reader. 

This affectation, when paired with the fact that in many panels and pages the text is almost completely obscured by the art, makes much of the text indecipherable, and 'The Luck in the Head' very frustrating to read.

Summing up, 'The Luck in the Head' represents a failed effort at making a graphic novel with a overtly 'artistic' sensibility. 

Had the production team a better understanding of what makes comics and graphic novels 'work', and had they recruited a superior artist, 'The Luck in the Head' might have been successful. But I can't recommend this effort to even the most ardent M. John Harrison fans.