Buckaroo Banzai part one

Buckaroo Banzai
Official Comics Adaptation
Bill Matlo (writer) and Mark Texeira and Armando Gil (art)
Part One
Marvel Super Special No. 33, 1984

I can't call The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension all that great a science fiction film, nor one of the better films of the 80s. When I first watched it when it came out in the late Summer of 1984, I though it was so ardent in its campiness that it would up being incoherent.

Even today when it comes on TV I can't bring myself to sit down and watch it from the opening credits to the ending, although I will make the effort to view selected segments of the film - such as the immortal scene with Penny Priddy at Artie's Artery ('No matter where you go, there you are') and the march by the cast through the Los Angeles storm drains shown in the closing credits. 

The Marvel Super Special that provided a comic-book adaptation of the movie is an easy read, and makes the film's plot coherent, which is no small thing.

I'm going to post the entirety of the comic adaptation as a two-parter; Part One is below. 

If there is interest, I'll also post the 'making of' pictorial essay that was included in the Super Special...............?

Comix: The Underground Revolution

Comix: The Underground Revolution
by Dez Skinn
Thunder's Mouth Press, 2004

Although I pride myself on having a pretty good knowledge of books devoted to underground comix, I only became (belatedly) aware of this history of underground comix a few months ago. 

'Comix' is a rather unusual book in that it uses a 8 x 8 inches landscape format. That said, the print quality is very good.

Dez Skinn (b. 1951) is of course a major figure in the history of UK comics, both as editor and publisher, and thus would seem to be well-qualified to write a history of comix. 

However, if essays published in 2004 and 2005 in the pages of The Comics Journal are any indication, 'Comix' has quite a bit of controversy surrounding it.

Patrick Rosenkranz accused Skinn of plagiarism by lifting text and illustrations from Rosenkranz's 2003 book Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution 1963 - 1975 and placing them in 'Comix' without attribution. Skinn issued an apology and payment to Rosenkranz, and blamed the ghostwriters he hired to contribute content to 'Comix' for the transgression.

In another essay in The Comics Journal, well-known comix artist and writer Trina Robbins also expressed dissatisfaction with not being given what she felt was appropriate credit for contributing a chapter to 'Comix'. Skinn's defended himself by stating that he told Robbins beforehand that the book would not provide co-authorship credit to sub-contractors.

So with 'Comix: The Underground Revolution' we have a book to which a number of contractors contributed, which was assembled under Skinn's direction

'Comix' features 9 chapters, arranged in chronological order, that cover comix from the days of the 'Tijuana Bibles', on up to the early 2000s and the advent of 'indie' titles that can be seen (arguably) as the descendents of the comix of the 60s and 70s.

Skinn also provides a chapter on the underground comix scene in the UK, starting with the 1970 title 'Cyclops'. Most histories of comix are written by Americans and thus don't give much emphasis to the underground movement in Britain. Skinn's overview of the UK scene is informative and enlightening; I didn't realize that so many of the British artists that would become house names for DC and Marvel in the 90s got their start in the comix of the 70s.

The book's format mingles text passages with copious illustrations in a way that makes 'Comix' easy to pick up and difficult to put down. For the most part Skinn's prose (or rather, that of his contributors) is clear and straightforward, and often incorporates some sarcastic editorial comments that give it an opinionated tenor not usually seen in treatments of the topic authored by Americans.

Most of the titles and artists profiled in the book's early chapters will be quite familiar to anyone who follows the comix scene; after all, there are only just so many obscure comix still left to discover and discuss. 

Where 'Comix' breaks a bit of new ground is in Skinn's decision to devote a chapter ('Beyond the Page') to recounting how the San Francisco poster art movement, and its adherents Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin, and Greg Irons, made the transition from advertising rock concerts to doing comix. This then segues into an overview of the contributions of comix artists to album cover art, all the way up to Robert Williams's fatefull decision to let Guns and Roses use his illustration for their debut album, 1987's Appetite for Destruction.

Skinn also earns kudos for providing coverage of the underground comix scene that emerged in the UK in the mid 1970s. Inspired by the American comix that were reprinted for the UK market, many artists began to write and draw their own creations and published them in Cyclops and Near Myths, to name a few UK outlets.

I didn't know that many of the superstars of the UK comics scene, who later would go on to fame and fortune for publishers like Fleetway, IPC, Marvel, and DC, got their start in the British comix of the 1970's.

'Comix: The Underground Revolution' concludes with a chapter devoted to the inheritors of the comix movement: the writers and artists of the 'indie' comics boom of the 1980s and 1990s. Not being much of a fan of the Hernandez Brothers, Peter Bagge, Dan Clowes, or Chris Ware, I wasn't all that captivated by this chapter. But that's not to say others won't be.

The verdict ? While an argument could be made that more than a little bit of the book is content recycled from Rebel Visions, the presence of the chapters on the poster art intersection with comix, the birth of the movement in the UK, and the high quality of the reproductions of the covers and contents of comix gems and obscurities, combine to give the book sufficient redemption to make it a worthy addition to Rebel Visions and Mark James Estren's A History of Underground Comics as accessible overviews of the topic.

Blockbuster by Sweet

Blockbuster
by Sweet
Top of the Pops, 1973

You can't get much more Glammed Up than this lip-synched performance by Sweet from Top of the Pops from 1973. 

The song (which borrowed its major riff more than a little bit from Bowie's Jean Genie, released the previous year) went to number one in the UK. It only reached number 73 in the U.S. 

Bassist Steve Priest was fond of performing dressed as a woman, in true Glam Rock tradition. For this video, the BBC apparently censored his mustache, and the Nazi insignia on his clothing. 

That's how it was, back in the early 70s !

Book Review: The Gorgon Festival

Book Review: 'The Gorgon Festival' by John Boyd

2 / 5 Stars

John Boyd (the pseudonym of Boyd Bradfield Upchurch, 1919 - 2013) authored a number of science fiction novels during the late 60s and early 70s, including The Last Starship from Earth (1968), The Rakehells of Heaven (1969), The Organ Bank Farm (1970), and Barnard's Planet (1975), among others.

'The Gorgon Festival' first was published in hardcover in May 1972. This Bantam Books paperback (184 pp) was published in November 1974 and features a striking cover illustration by Fred Pfeiffer.

The novel is set in California in the early 70s. Alexander Ward is a middle-aged biochemist at Stanford University who discovers a simple formula with radical implications: bathing in the formula can instantaneously reverse the aging process, and return the bather to the physical and mental state of his or her twenties. 

Ward barely has time to ponder the import of this discovery when the elderly Ruth Gordon, his scientific mentor and the object of his boyhood erotic fantasies, steeps herself in the formula and finds herself transformed into a beautiful young woman. 

Gordon promptly goes underground in the Mecca for Youth, Los Angeles. Ward finds himself compelled to follow her.

But as Ward investigates the 'freak' hangouts of downtown L.A., he rapidly discovers that he has all the street smarts of a middle-aged man from a sheltered background.......which is to say, no street smarts at all. And his naivety is going to bring with it a price........

I found 'The Gorgon Festival' to be disappointing. Its sci-fi theme is perfunctory, serving as a plot device by which the author can satirize the swingin' Southern California lifestyles of the burgeoning Sexual Revolution, as well as the desire by so many of the middle-aged men of that era to somehow regain their youth in time to enjoy the lubricious bounty of the Counterculture seething outside their well-maintained suburban homes.

The novel is too overwritten to be a very effective satire (Alexander Ward frequently indulges in monologues containing allusions to Shakespeare, Olde English Poets, and Greek philosophers), and some of its efforts - such as having Ward disguise himself as a 'Negro' for a period of time in order to acquire Soul and Hipness- are quite awkward by modern-day standards.

The novel does slightly redeem the effort I put into reading it with a surprisingly violent segment in its closing chapter, but I finished thinking that 'The Gorgon Festival' tried to do too much at once and wound up doing nothing very well. This is a 70s sci-fi novel that can be skipped.

Futuropolis

Futuropolis
by Robert Sheckley
A & W Visual Library
1978

'Futuropolis' was published in November, 1978. It's a 10 x 10 " trade paperback book.

It's another of those rather obscure 'sf-plus-art' books that emerged during the 70s; it bears resemblance to titles like The Immortals of Science Fiction, Spacecraft in Fact and Fiction, and Planet Stories.

Its four chapters loosely are grouped around the concepts of the city as a dystopia; the city in space; the city as a mobile construct; and the utopian city of the future.

The book provides color and black and white illustrations, many drawn from sci-fi art for UK paperbacks of the 70s. There's also a surprising amount of material taken from issues of Metal Hurlant, which at the time was known primarily to U.S. readers as the French magazine from which Heavy Metal had spawned.

These illustrations are accompanied by text from well-known sf author Sheckley. It's fair to say that Sheckley didn't put much effort into this project; his entries have a facetious quality that makes clear he saw this project as a chance to make a little extra income, nothing more. 

The chapter about cities in space devotes considerable attention to a topic that was quite trendy in the late 70s and early 80s: Gerald K. O'Neill's The High Frontier and its wishful  imaginings of space stations designed to accommodate Earth's surplus population, as well as 'beaming' solar energy to the mother planet in order to solve the Energy Crisis. 

Predictably, Sheckley pays homage to James Blish's Cities in Flight sf series.

I usually look to books of this type to provide some insights into 70s sc-fi novels, comics, or even films, that I have not previously noticed. But, with the exception of some excerpts that remind us how well-written and illustrated European sci-fi comics of the postwar era were, 'Futuropolis' never really fulfills its promise to provide a detailed overview of science fiction's treatment of the city. 

Too much space is devoted to filling out the page count with tangential material; for example, attention is paid to concepts coming from an obscure, London-based, avant-garde association of architects, called 'Archigram'. During the 60s, Archigram released designs for 'futuristic' constructs such as the 'cushicle':

Other designs from Archigram get coverage, such as a city constructed to be movable in the manner of a giant insect. These 'whimsical' topics really belong more in the pop-art realm rather than the sci-fi realm. 

Elsewhere in the pages of 'Futuropolis', Sheckley discusses Disney World's idealized version of the future city, as well as Disney World in Orlando and the Epcot center, which in the late 70s was being hyped as the 9th wonder of the world. If you're like me and you'd rather vacation in Newark or Detroit than any Disney theme park, then you're obviously not going to be too impressed.

The verdict ? 'Futuropolis' is something of a dud. Unless you're a particularly ardent collector of 70s sci-fi picture books, you are going to want to pass this one by.  

Sticking it pre-order

Sticking it to the Man
now available for pre-order

Via a February 11 post at the Pulp Curry blog, I've learned that the latest illustrated overview of pulp fiction and pop culture from Australian writer and critic Andrew Nette, Sticking it to the Man, is now available for pre-order at amazon.

The book is scheduled for an August 1, 2019 sales date.

It's a 'massively expanded' version of a book Nette first published in Australia in 2012 (which was, of course, next to impossible to get here in the States - a sad reality for just about any book published in Australia).

Given how much I enjoyed Nette's 2017 volume Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats, Sticking it to the Man definitely will be on my Summer of 2019 acquisitions list......

Book Review: Maynard's House

Book Review: 'Maynard's House' by Herman Raucher

2 / 5 Stars

‘Maynard’s House’ ( 262 pp) was published by Berkley Books in September 1981. The cover artist is uncredited.

As the novel opens, it’s the Winter of 1972/1973, and a young Vietnam War veteran named Austin Fletcher is travelling to Belden, Maine, where he has inherited the home of a deceased fellow soldier: Maynard Whittier.

Fletcher is a callow and self-centered individual who is completely unprepared for life in the snows and cold of the Maine wilderness, but trapped in a kind of existential anomie, he nonetheless proceeds to take occupancy of Maynard’s House. Fletcher gradually arrives at a kind of stumbling familiarity with living a 19th century existence, one requiring the use of an outhouse, a dependence on a stockpile of canned goods, and the absence of both telephone and electricity.

The locals believe the house to be haunted, and there are rumors of long-ago atrocities linked to witchcraft. Fletcher gradually becomes aware that some of the bumps and creaks he hears in the house in the still depths of the Winter nights may have a supernatural origin.

As the season wears on, strange things begin to happen…………things that will culminate in a confrontation that Austin Fletcher is poorly equipped to survive………..

At the time ‘Maynard’s House’ was published, author Herman Raucher was a well-known and successful novelist (The Summer of '42). However, basing a 262 page novel on a plot involving a man and his haunted house is a formidable task for even a skilled author, and the book suffers from a surplus of padding in the form of internal monologues, the reading of Maynard's personal diary, encounters with Maine eccentrics, etc.

It’s also clear that Raucher took the easy path to lending momentum to the narrative, via the expedient of inserting plot developments that may be ‘real’ scares, or, just as likely, phantasms derived from the increasingly poor mental state of Austin Fletcher.

Having labored to create an atmosphere of growing tension and menace through the first 20 of the novel’s 24 chapters, Raucher necessarily was obliged to craft a denouement that justified this elaborate narrative scaffolding. But in my opinion, the final chapters of ‘House’ are the weakest. Raucher piles on one horror cliché after another, leaving the reader with a mess of possible interpretations (none of which I found very convincing) for the spooky goings-on.

The verdict ? Only the most avid collectors of Paperbacks from Hell are going to want a copy of ‘Maynard’s House’. All others can leave this one on the shelf.