20 Years of Heavy Metal

20 Years of Heavy Metal

Heavy Metal Books, February 1997

20 Years of Heavy Metal (266 pp.) was published to celebrate twenty years of the magazine, which by 1997 was owned by Kevin Eastman, of 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' fame. 

This is a well-produced 'coffee table' book, printed on a high grade of paper and with topnotch color separations.

The contents are something of a mixed bag. 

Material from prior to 1980, which I consider the magazine's heyday, is in short supply. Whether this was due to expired printing rights and / or licenses is unclear.

The opening pages are a gallery of T & A pictures. Looking at these, one can see how the magazine changed over time from its early focus on finely crafted, imaginative, sci-fi-flavored content stuff, to become a T & A showcase.

Despite the predominance of material from the late 1980s and the 1990s, there are worthwhile pieces in this book. An undoubted masterpiece is 'The Cathedral' by Jean-Claude Gal, with its intricate black-and-white draftsmanship. Also of value are a 'Mercenary' story from Segrelles, and the post-apocalyptic western 'Children of the Spider' by Segura and Ortiz (the duo behind 'Burton and Cyb'). Also standing out is  'L'Lobo' by Caza.

I was pleased to see a transgressive Ranxerox story, 'Aie, Robot !', from Liberatore. 'Druuna' artist Serpieri is represented by a Western tale, titled 'Women of the West'. This has, as one might expect, female nudity, but no tentacled monsters consumed with lascivious intent. And Enki Bilal contributes 'On the Wing'.

Artist William Stout teams up with Moebius for 'Arzaq', a homage to the franchise.

The remainder of the book is filled with marginal pieces from the late 1980s, and the 1990s. The artwork is makeshift, and the plotting forgettable.

I was able to buy my copy of '20 Years of Heavy Metal' in 2013 from the magazine's website. I think I paid about fifteen dollars for '20 Years', as Heavy Metal was having a sale on their graphic novels and art books. 

So it's alarming to see the bookjackers and speculators advertising copies of the book for $75 on up to $500. At eBay, the prices are just as exorbitant.

The verdict ? If you can find '20 Years of Heavy Metal' available for an affordable price (say, $30 or less), then it can be a worthwhile purchase. But there's no way I can condone spending more for this book.

Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor

Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor

Dark Horse Comics, 1995

From March to August 1995, Dark Horse comics released a five-issue miniseries of comic books, titled 'Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor', that anthologized selected short stories by the renowned author. 

The series featured comics, all-text pieces, and illustrated stories.

Each issue of 'Dream Corridor' led off with a one-page Introduction, rendered in graphical form, in which our hero indulges in raillery designed to remind readers that even though he's a Big Author, Harlan is excited about this, his latest foray into comics.......

Along with the venerable 'I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream', some older tales, and some newer ones, are serialized in the pages of 'Dream Corridor'.

One thing about 'Dream Corridor' that immediately is apparent is its modelling on DC's 'Vertigo' comic book imprint, which by 1995 was receiving lavish praise from the more intellectually inclined members of the comic book readership. The stylized, abstract artwork that was prominent in Vertigo's titles is self-consciously mimicked with 'Dream Corridor':

Most of the stories presented in 'Dream Corridor' are unremarkable. They usually have a twist ending, and are designed to impart some degree of comeuppance to their amoral protagonists. The one exception to this format is the story 'Cold Friend', which is serialized in issues four and five and as a more traditional sci-fi theme, and slicker artwork.

The text pieces featured in 'Dream Corridor' are disappointments, mainly because Dark Horse elected to print them in teeny-tiny, 4 pt font in order to accommodate them within the page count restriction for each issue. I didn't have the energy to pull out magnifying spectacles to read these stories, so I can't tell you if they are any good or not.........

Summing up, I really can't recommend 'Dream Corridor' to anyone other than those diehard Ellison fans who just have to have anything and everything that came from the hand of The Master. Along with the mediocre artwork and unremarkable stories, the imposition of cringey segments featuring Harlan's efforts to be a mensch tend to grate..........

'Dream Corridor' simply doesn't live up to the standards set by Ellison's earlier foray into graphic art packaging, 1978's The Illustrated Harlan Ellison. 

Letter to Xaviera

Letter to Xaviera Hollander

from the July, 1974 issue of Penthouse magazine

Sometimes I think it would be fun to have been the guy at Penthouse whose job was to write the 'letters' to Xaviera Hollander ('Call Me Madam') in her monthly column. 

This missive from 'Betty' is a classic combo of over-the-top humor and sleaze, 1970s style........

Book Review: Fires of Freedom

Book Review: 'Fires of Freedom' by Jerry Pournelle

4 / 5 Stars

'Fires of Freedom' (616 pp.) was published by Baen Books in July, 2010, and features cover art by Kurt Miller. 

'Fires' is a compilation of two early novels from Pournelle: 'Birth of Fire', and 'King David's Spaceship'.

'Birth of Fire' first was published in March 1976 by Laser Books. As the novel opens, protagonist Garrett Pittson is involved in a gang fight among the decaying cityscape of a 21st century Baltimore, Maryland. Police intervention sees Pittson arrested, and given the choice of 'volunteering' to join the Federation colony on Mars, there to start life over as an indentured servant to the corporate firms conducting mining and other businesses.

Resigned to never seeing Earth again, Pittson decides to make the best of his situation on Mars, where, if nothing else, one's past history is not held against someone. In due course, Pittson makes the acquaintance of some 'Marsmen' and embarks on a hard-working path towards advancement in the bleak, windswept territories outside the city of Hellastown.

But as he works towards a future on Mars, Pittson becomes aware that all is not well between the hardy colonists staking claims in the wilderness, and the corporate entities who levy taxes and direct energy development. When the corporate hand weighs too heavily, the colonists revolt.........and a civil war erupts on Mars.

Compared to the Federation and corporate police, the Marsmen are undergunned. But they have a firsthand knowledge of surviving in a hostile environment, and they plan to use that knowledge to their advantage.........

'Birth of Fire' is a competent action-adventure sci-fi tale. For the first-person narration, Pournelle adopts the clipped diction of a private-eye or suspense novel, an approach to storytelling that was - depending on your point of view - either reactionary, or transgressive, in 1976 during the height of the New Wave era.

'Birth of Fire' is adept at incorporating scientific knowledge of Mars, circa 1976, into its plot. There are no life forms, or 'canals', or ancient ruins on the Mars of 'Birth', just geological formations that are portrayed as attention-worthy entities in their own right. Curiously, in its closing chapters 'Birth' incorporates a plot device that is reminiscent of that deployed in the 1990 film Total Recall. 

'King David's Spaceship' is a revised version of Pournelle's 1973 novel, 'A Spaceship for the King', which I reviewed here. As best as I can tell, the revisions made to 'King David's Spaceship' were designed to incorporate the novel into the CoDominium / Moties franchise, and in particular synchronize the 'Spaceship' narrative with that of Pournelle's 1974 novel 'The Mote in God's Eye'.

I can't say that the expanded text introduced in 'King David's Spaceship' improves on 'A Spaceship for the King' all that much, and I finished 'King David's Spaceship' content with retaining the four-star rating I gave to the original novel.

Summing up, those who like action-oriented, military science fiction with an unashamedly conservative flavoring probably will find 'Fires of Freedom' rewarding.

Motel Bizarre

Motel Bizarre
by Stephanie Crabe
Scapegoat Publishing, 2007

The PorPor Books Blog is devoted to covering sci-fi, fantasy, and horror paperbacks published during the interval from roughly 1968 to 1988, and I rarely deviate from reviewing and promoting media from that era. However, I occasionally make exceptions, when I feel an obligation to promote books that fall outside that range of time and topic.

So it is with 'Motel Bizarre', which probably is too contemporary, and too eccentric, to get coverage from sites like 'Glorious Trash' and 'Paperback Warrior'. And 'Motel Bizarre' is deserving of coverage, because I believe it has appeal to those paperback fanatics who are fans of sleaze and noir content (but then, who isn't a fan of sleaze and noir content ?!).

Anyways, 'Motel Bizarre' is a 10 1/2 x 8 1/4 inch landscape format trade paperback published in 2007 by Scapegoat Publishing, a short-lived, small press publisher founded by Chris X, aka Christopher Neu, aka Christopher Xavier Donovan, the owner of Reptilian Records, a record, comic, and memorabilia shop located on South Broadway Street in Baltimore's Fells Point neighborhood in the 1990s. 

[ I used to be a regular patron of Reptilian, back in the day, and I could write a blog post alone on that store and the hipster scene in Baltimore in the early 1990s.......... ]

But on to 'Motel Bizarre', which features an introduction by Christopher Mealie, whose photos of dilapidated motels are sprinkled throughout the pages of the book. The introduction starts off with some interesting observations about the origin and heyday of the motel in American culture and commerce, but then Mealie inexplicably veers off into an adjective- and adverb-littered parody of  hardboiled crime fiction, and becomes just another example of a hipster trying too hard to be hip............

The staged photographs, all taken in color and featuring friends and models of Ms. Crabe, appear to have been taken in genuine motel settings and depict all manner of patently sleazy acts that are in keeping with the theme of retro-influenced American noir, as inspired by David Lynch and John Waters.

There are elements of provocation, and also of humor, in the tableaus presented in 'Motel Bizarre'. The decor, lighting (no soft focus or flesh-toned makeup operating here, folks), and framing of the pictures gives them the authenticity necessary to shock (wink-wink) bourgeoisie sensibilities.

The few reviews of 'Motel Bizarre' that I have found online go overboard with quasi-academic jargon, and in that spirit I might declare that:

'........the Transgressive Iconography of Stephanie Crabe's pictorial narratives ushers us into a world that, however repugnant it may seem at first glance, is nonetheless as fully realized as any translational zeitgeist of postwar American popular culture.'

How do you get a copy of 'Motel Bizarre' ? Well, Stephanie Crabe - now with the surname Petersen (perhaps her married name ?) is alive and well and running a photography studio in Bayonne, New Jersey.  Her website has a link to order the book directly from her, or you can go to amazon and do the same thing for the very reasonable price of $9.99, plus $4 for shipping and handling.

This is one book I'm going to prominently leave lying around my house when friends, family, vegans, recovering alcoholics, hipsters, and Womyn's Rights activists come to call.....................

Olivia Newton-John
from the movie Toomorrow (1970) 

Magnificent Obsession

'Magnificent Obsession'

by Fehlfarben

1983

Fehlfarben ('full colors') was a (West) German New Wave band that formed in 1979 in Dusseldorf. During the interval from 1980 to 1981 they released three albums. Unfortunately, the band never got the exposure in the Anglophone radio and record networks that bands like 'Nina' or 'Kraftwerk' enjoyed. The band briefly split up after 1983, but regularly re-formed over the ensuing decades to record and release new music. A new album, titled '??0?', is scheduled for release in October, 2022.

The group's 1983 album Glut und Asche ('Embers and Ash') featured a little gem of New Wave music, the track 'Magnificent Obsession'.  

I think that, had Heavy Metal magazine 'rok' critic Lou Stathis heard 'Magnificent Obsession', he breathlessly would have promoted it. I guess we never will know...............anyways, suck in your cheeks, assume a brooding expression, wait for a drizzly, gloomy day, and rock out to 'Magnificent Obsession' !

Book Review: The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 10

Book Review: 'The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 10'

 3 / 5 Stars

'The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 10' (254 pp.) was published by DAW Books in October 1984, and is Book No. 597. The cover art is by Jim Burns.

In addition to editing the Year's Best Fantasy series, Arthur W. Saha (1923 - 1999) is perhaps best known as the originator of the term 'Trekkie', and as the father of Heidi Saha, who in 1973, at the age of 14, appeared as Vampirella at various comic book and sci-fi conventions and ignited an erotic frenzy among the elderly, dirty old men attending those conventions.......

All the stories in 'Series 10' first were published in 1982 - 1983 in various anthologies and magazines such as Shadows, Whispers, and The Twilight Zone.

One thing that is quite apparent from reading Series 10: many of its authors are conscious of a need to lard their tales with verbiage. Lots of florid prose, and metaphors, and similes, and adjectives. It was as if the contributors felt that to use unadorned, colloquial language in a 'fantasy' piece was a disservice to the genre. 

I was regularly looking up obscure words......

leopardine: rabbit fur processed to simulate leopard-skin

monitory: giving warning

damson: relating to plums.

mulberry: purplish-black color.

incarnadine: pinkish-red in color. 

lacertian: relating to lizards.

subculum: I think Tanith Lee made up this word. It apparently refers to a room or structure in a wizard's dwelling ?  

Anyways, my capsule summaries of the contents:

Blue Vase of Ghosts, by Tanith Lee: a melodrama involving Subyrus the Mage, who is afflicted with world-weariness, and his sometime paramour, the courtesan Lumaria. Underneath Lee's baroque prose, there isn't much of a plot..........

She Sells Sea Shells, by Paul Darcy Boles: a resident of the New England seacoast makes the acquaintance of an exotic young woman. One of the better stories in the anthology.

Green Roses, by Larry Tritten: a demon, and a game of Monopoly.

Wong's Lost and Found Emporium, by William F. Wu: the eponymous emporium is a mysterious place that can grant your heart's desire.........but not without risk. An unremarkable treatment of humanistic themes.

Huggins' World, by Ennis Duling: what if the characters of an Olde Tyme comic strip existed in the 'real world' ?

The Curse of the Smalls and the Stars, by Fritz Leiber: a Fafhrd and Gray Mouser tale. Annoyed godlings visit curses on our heroes. Making things worse, Fafhrd and the Mouser are the targets of an assassination plot........

I've read some dire stories from Lieber, but this novella is among the most dire. The prose is so stilted, and self-consciously ornate, that reading it was painful. And yet, because Leiber was a 'name' writer at the time this anthology was compiled, Saha included 'Curse' as one of the 'Year's Best Fantasy Stories'.......?!  

The Silent Cradle, by Leigh Kennedy: a suburban family finds themselves in possession of a 'ghost' child. It's competently written, but bland.

Into Whose Hands, by Karl Edward Wagner: this story originally appeared in Whispers and it's more horror than fantasy. It utilizes Wagner's past experience as a psychiatrist. 'Into Whose Hands' is set in a depressing state mental hospital, located in the rural American South, and follows the protagonist, staff psychiatrist Dr. Marlowe, on his night shift. There is lots of sardonic humor, and an ending that is both ambiguous, and disquieting. One of Wagner's better short stories, and one of the better entries in the anthology.

Like a Black Dandelion, by John Alfred Taylor: a slight tale about mysterious goings-on in the Aleutian Islands.

The Hills Behind Hollywood High, by Avram Davidson and Grania Davis: Hollywood High teen Dorothy discovers an unusual route to being an actress. This story tries hard for humor and too quickly becomes boring. It lacks the compactness, and sharp denouement, that mark the best of Davidson's short fiction.

Beyond the Dead Reef, by James Tiptree, Jr.: a horror story, rather than fantasy. This is another of the entries in Tiptree, Jr. 's 'Tales of the Quintana Roo' canon. Dealing with the hazards of scuba diving, it avoids the oblique qualities of the other Quintana stories I've read, and thus is effective.

The verdict ? 'The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 10' has more than its share of duds, but merits a three-star rating due to the inclusion of the entries from Tiptree, Wagner, and Boles. It demonstrates the limitations imposed by Arthur W. Saha's editorial stance: determined to curtail the appearance of 'traditional' fantasy stories (limited here in this anthology to those of Lee and Leiber) he winds up including too many marginal pieces, and the anthology suffers as a result. 

National Lampoon August 1973

National Lampoon 

August 1973

Let's go back in time 49 years to August, 1973. On the yellow plastic AM transistor radio we listen to in our house, 'Yesterday Once More', by the Carpenters, is in heavy rotation. The nostalgia craze sparked by American Graffiti was well underway back then.........

The latest issue of National Lampoon is on the newstands, featuring a cover by Frank Frazetta. 

There are advertisements for new and established rock and roll artists. 'Edward Bear', a trio of Canadians, had a hit in 1973 with the single 'Last Song'; but their album 'Close Your Eyes' was to be their last.

There is a 'Cheech Wizard' comic from Vaughan Bode. I can't say I've ever been a big fan of Bode's stuff, but this comic has a kind of imaginative perversity that makes it stand out.

Gahan Wilson contributes a funny look at kids with 'Strange Beliefs of Children'. 

In her half-page comic 'Trots and Bonnie', comix artist Sherry Flenniken takes aim at the hippie / vegan lifestyle.  

And let's not overlook some obligatory 'tits' stuff with a Photo Funny:

And, only in 1973 could you buy a short-sleeve shirt that allowed you to masquerade as a priest ?!

Yes, that's how it was, in those warm days of August 1973........