Penthouse December 1981

Penthouse magazine

December, 1981

It's December, 1981, and the top single in the land is Olivia Newton-John's 'Physical'.

Let's all gather around the Christmas tree and open our presents.........including the December issue of Penthouse magazine !

We'll see advertisements for the must-have gift for the year: the Atari 'VCS' model gaming system ! (At my household, we didn't get an Atari, mainly because our TV was a modest little 17-inch black and white affair and, at $130, the Atari system was a little pricey).

Additional consumer electronics included a cutting-edge Sharp 'solar' calculator, and another 1980s must-have item, the Boombox.......especially one endorsed by Earth, Wind, and Fire, who happened to have the No. 3 single on the Billboard Hot 100: 'Let's Groove' !

For those of a more sensual bent, we had 'Denim', a macho men's fragrance, and 'Bodylicks' and the 'Original Mink Whip' ! Rowr, nasty !

One of the pictorials features the spectacular Gabrielle Sagan, who sports a vintage Louise Brooks hairstyle and a bronzed body that gleams in the sun.

Interestingly, Gabrielle since has become a Meme, at least, in the artwork of Linda Adair.........or perhaps it's a case of Synchronicity ?!

Champagne and Sunshine, by Linda Adair, 2022

The December issue has some funny cartoons that take advantage of the holiday theme.........

The subject of the Celebrity Interview is none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger, looking for cinematic success with the forthcoming release in 1982 of the movie Conan the Barbarian.

The articles section has some interesting items. There is a piece on Jerry Falwell, who earlier that year had lost a lawsuit against Penthouse.

UK socialite and writer Anthony Haden-Guest pens an article about crime and passion in New York City. The article is an excerpt from his 1983 book Bad Dreams.

There's an examination of the phenomenon of motocross racing, a sport rising in popularity.

There's an ad / article for Omni magazine, which by the end of '81 was a major outlet for science fiction writers. But Penthouse itself continued to showcase science fiction, as Gardner Dozois got a story in the December issue:

Let's close the pages of the December issue with a look at another pictorial, this one featuring a man-woman couple and imaged with such the 'gauzy filter' look that it's an exemplar of the Penthouse approach to photography.

And so we say goodbye to December, 1981................Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, everybody !

Night and the Enemy

Night and the Enemy

by Harlan Ellison and Ken Steacy

'Night and the Enemy' was a collection of comics, graphics, and illustrated text bundled into an 81-page graphic novel from independent comics publisher Comico, and released in November 1987. 

The stories in 'Night' were adapted from the so-called 'Earth-Kyba' stories Ellison published from 1956 to 1987.

The Comico edition of 'Night and the Enemy' is long out of print, so Ellison enthusiasts were pleased when, in 2015, a trade paperback reprint edition (85 pp.) was issued from Dover. The 2015 edition reprints the entirety of the 1987 volume, and includes some ancillary material in the form of an 'Afterward and Pictures' section.

Canadian artist Ken Steacy (b. 1955) teamed up with Dean Motter to produce the comic, and later graphic novel, of 'The Sacred and the Profane' in the mid-1980s, so he was familiar with the process of composing and rendering science fiction content.

The stories in 'Night and the Enemy' all display Steacy's distinctive art style, both in color, and in black-and-white. Rather than speech balloons, dialogue is presented in a minimalist manner, as typeface with tails to indicate who is speaking.

As I noted in my review of 'The Sacred and the Profane', Steacy is not a traditional comic book artist in the sense of using art that lends itself to dynamic action. The artwork in 'Night and the Enemy' has a static quality, even in scenes of action, and while this works well for some of the stories, it is less effective in others. But the reader is invited to view the book and make their own judgments.

As for Ellison's writing, the Earth-Kyba stories were intended, in that inimitable Harlan Ellison style, to be vigorous repudiations of the sci-fi ideology of the postwar era, where virtuous Terrans battled malevolent alien invaders and won a noble victory. The tales in 'Night and the Enemy' avoid jingoism and remind us all, in a blunt way, that War is Hell.

There are a couple short stories included in 'Night and the Enemy'. 'Trojan Hearse' is a two-pager that gets the job done, while 'The Few, the Proud' takes the theme of the war hero and subverts it with a particularly caustic, 'surprise' ending.

Summing up, 'Night and the Enemy' is one of the better efforts to mingle Ellison's text with graphic art. It's on par with 'The Illustrated Harlan Ellison' from 1978, and superior to the comic book series 'Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor' from 1996. So, if you're an Ellison fan, you'll want to have a copy of 'Night and the Enemy' in your library. 

Book Review: Landis: The Story of a Real Man on 42nd Street

Book Review: 'Landis: The Story of a Real Man on 42nd Street' by Preston Fassel

4 / 5 Stars

'Landis: The Story of a Real Man on 42nd Street' (145 pp.) was published by Encyclopocalypse Publications in 2021. Author Preston Fassel is a writer of fiction and nonfiction works on horror, alternative cinema, and pop culture.

Bill Landis is one of the more interesting figures in the fringes of 1980s pop culture, as well as the Founding Father of the practice of appreciating 'trash cinema', that is, low-budget, transgressive movies. 

Landis began it all in June 1980, with the first issue of a newsletter / magazine called Sleazoid Express, aimed at the patrons of the grindhouse theaters on 42nd Street, and the hipsters attending events at the 'Club 57' art cafe in the East Village.

Before there was Shock Cinema, Psychotronic Video or Deep Red, before there was Quentin Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez, and only a year or two after Josh Alan Friedman began chronicling Times Square, there was.…Sleazoid. 

The wave of reviews and analyses of schlock and sleaze cinema that arrived in the 1980s, and coincided with the rise of VHS tapes, took inspiration from Landis and his newsletter.

Jimmy McDonough (left), unidentified patron (center), and Bill Landis (right) at a theater on 42nd Street, photo by Yara Cluver

Sleazoid quickly became a must-read among hipsters and film fanatics. I remember finding out about it late in 1984, perhaps from some column or article in the magazine Film Comment. I placed my order early in 1985, and got a bunch of issues before Sleazoid ceased publication later that year.

Issue of Sleazoid Express, circa 1985

The success of Sleazoid opened a path for Landis to write pieces for aboveground publications like Fangoria, Variety, Screw, and The Village Voice during the 1980s and 1990s. 

Landis's 1986 Voice piece, 'Using and Losing on Times Square', about down-and-out Times Square hustlers in the era of AIDS, was particularly memorable.

 

Article by Bill Landis for the February 1982 issue of Fangoria

Later in the 1990s, Landis and his wife Michelle Clifford revived Sleazoid, and issued a new magazine called Metasex.

In 2002, Landis and Clifford published a book called 'Sleazoid Express: A Mind-Twisting Tour Through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square', which was a retrospective of Landis's days as a movie fan and critic, as well as a primer on sleaze cinema. Issues of Sleazoid continued to be published, before tailing off as the decade began to close.

In 2008, Landis died of a heart attack; he was only 49, estranged from friends and family, and living in drugged-out squalor in an apartment in Chicago.

Unidentified Sleazoid staffer (left) and 'Gummo', New York City, mid-1980s

In 'Landis: The Story of a Real Man on 42nd Street', Fassel gives a very readable account of Landis's life and times. While Fassel is an unashamed Landis fanboy the book is not a hagiography, recounting Landis's faults (he frequently was not a very nice person to be around) with candor. 

Fassel also doesn't shy from relating his subject's descent into self-abuse and self-degradation in the mid-80s, when Landis became a live sex-show performer and porn actor under the stage name 'Bobby Spector'. 

And Fassel acknowledges that Landis was a bullshitter, and much of Landis's autobiographical writings must be taken with a degree of skepticism.

One area where 'The Story of a Real Man' falls a bit short is in the lack of graphics; save for a black-and-white photo of Landis, there's no other illustrative material in the book. Some scans of Sleazoid, stills from some of Landis's X-rated films, and portraits of Landis taken over the years, all would have helped round out the book. Fassel has indicated that the rights to reproduce Sleazoid are stalemated by a uncommunicative Michelle Clifford, but still, some visual content would have helped lend more perspective to the Landis phenomenon.   

Who will want a copy of 'Landis: The Story of a Real Man on 42nd Street' ? Aside from the obvious answer of Landis fans and trash cinema fans, I believe anyone interested in New York City's seedier side, as it was in the halcyon days of the 1960s through the 1980s, will find the book engaging. 

Fifteen years of the PorPor Books Blog

Fifteen Years of 'The PorPor Books Blog'

When I started this blog fifteen years ago I wasn't anticipating it would be so much fun that I'd do it for fifteen years, but somehow that has turned out to be the case. 

Back when I started things were a little different when it came to acquiring media with nostalgia value. 

You could go on eBay and buy a box of old DAW books for $30, plus $10 shipping. Or you could find a collection of National Lampoon magazines from the 1970s, for $25 plus shipping. At amazon, you could get a copy of Pierce Nace's schlock masterpiece, 'Eat Them Alive', for five bucks. You could get an original mass market paperback edition of Stephen King's 'The Stand' for under $10. You could go to the comic book store, and in a cardboard box out in front of the store, find a heap of old Marvel Vampire Tales black and white magazines from the 1970s on sale for a couple of bucks each. And inside, they'd have some back issues of Heavy Metal magazine on sale for three dollars each. Stuff that the fanboys, coming in for their pulls of 25 issues of X-Men comics, ignored. But nowadays, you're going to pay a little bit more for such things (if you can find them).

I thank all my readers who continue to visit the site ! While Google Analytics 4 is not a very user-friendly application, it says my Page Views for the past month numbered 6,652, or about 220 page views per day. So there are people who find the blog worth visiting.

It's enough of an inducement to continue the blog for another five years. Fingers crossed !

National Lampoon December 1977

National Lampoon 
December 1977

December, 1977, and Andy Gibb's song 'Love is Thicker than Water' is in heavy rotation on FM radio's pop and Top 40 channels.

The latest issue of the National Lampoon is out, and with P. J. O'Rourke as editor, the magazine has a more biting, edgier tenor to its humor. And the December issue is a good issue.

An 'alternate' cover presents the bloodthirsty Ugandan dictator Idi Amin as Santa Claus..........! The picture rewards careful scrutiny. Truly, an exemplar of bad taste.

An advertisement for Heavy Metal magazine tells us all we need to know about that seminal publication.

There is a satirical depiction of the American Legion's membership as constituting thoroughly upright, all-American, upstanding white men who are the pillars of their communities. Although a  little bigoted, perhaps.

A sidebar article derives cruel amusement from the plight of starving Ethiopians.

There are some cartoons about Santa.

'Ming Fu Boogaloo', by Joe Schenkman, is a rather chaotic comic that makes fun of Asian people, punk rock, and the broken English used by Asian people ('grue' = glue, 'dlink' = drink, 'Roritta' = Lolita........you get it). I am ashamed to admit that I laughed out loud while reading 'Ming Fu'.

A feature article on 'Texas' manages to offend both Asians and Mexicans.

 Shary Flenniken's 'Trots and Bonnie' takes aim at a sanctimonious feminist.

'The Appletons' makes fun of gay people.

And the Lampoon doesn't shy from offending black people, with the comic 'Goobers'.

We'll close this 46 year-old cavalcade of transgressions with a batch of advertisements from the end pages of the magazine, where rates were low, camera resolution poor, and the counterculture most in evidence. And.............can you believe, that back in 1977, Haiti was a vacation destination ?!

Merry Christmas 1977, and a happy 1978 !

Book Review: Nukes

Book Review: 'Nukes' edited by John Maclay

 2 / 5 Stars

'Nukes' is a paperback chapbook of 92 pages, printed in 1986 by John Maclay, a Baltimore-based editor, writer, and small-press publisher. 

I usually don't review chapbooks, mainly because they always have small print runs and can be hard to find (and expensive when you do find them). But I decided to obtain 'Nukes', because in the 1980s, nuclear war replaced Global Cooling as the existential threat. The intelligentsia and pop culture, as I explain in this post about the Judge Dredd comic 'Apocalypse War', were quite preoccupied with the nuclear scenario, making 'Nukes' something of an exhibit in how writers from the horror genre approached the topic.

'Nukes' features four short stories, all written for this anthology, by established writers active in the horror and fantasy genres. My capsule summaries of the contents:

The House of Life, by J. N. Williamson: Amidst landscapes of death and destruction, the survivors of World War Three find themselves at a loss. 

I can't say I'm a big fan of Williamson's fiction, and this story did nothing to change my opinion. It's one of the worst stories I've ever read, coming across as a first draft pressed into service by 'deadline-itis'. There is much stilted prose, and awkward efforts at a 'poetic' syntax:

She only spun away in an encore to her vanished grace, manner frivolous and her face, when she turned, openly terror stricken.

Tight Little Stitches in A Dead Man's Back, by Joe R. Lansdale: this is the inaugural appearance of one of Lansdale's most memorable stories. It's about the travails of Paul Marder, a survivor of World War Three and a man who must deal with all manner of strange monsters spawned by the radiation. This easily is the best story in the anthology.

The View from Mount Futaba, by Jessica Amanda Salmonson: this features Tomoe Gozen, a figure of Japanese legend who is the recurring character in several of Salmonson's 'Naipon' novels. While Salmonson's Gozen saga is set in a fantasy version of medieval Japan, in this tale, our heroine finds herself transported to the aftermath of one of the atomic bombings of August 1945. Strong imagery of the dead and dying gives this story valid horror underpinnings.

And of Gideon, by Mort Castle: this tale combines two beloved 1980s tropes: the crazed Vietnam veteran, and the Bible-thumping Christian preacher (whose scriptural rhetoric conceals his deep moral failings), and tosses them into the post-nuclear wasteland. There is a splatterpunk sequence that doesn't lend much to the narrative, and some Bible-based blank verse passages (?!) that laboriously try to impart some sort of moral insight into the narrative. Needless to say, this story did not impress me.

The verdict ? While the editor deserves recognition for trying to do something interesting with the nuclear apocalypse theme, of his contributors, only Lansdale and Salmonson really came through with quality material, and thus I can't give 'Nukes' more than a Two-Star Rating.

Book Review: Planet of the Damned

Book Review: 'Planet of the Damned' by Harry Harrison

2 / 5 Stars

'Planet of the Damned' originally was serialized in Analog magazine in 1961. A paperback edition (135 pp.) was published by Bantam Books in January 1962. The cover artist is uncredited.

The opening chapter introduces us to the novel's hero, Brionn Brandd, a resident of the planet Anhvarian, and the exhausted victor of the grueling multi-event competition known as the 'Twenties'. As the victor of the competition, Brandd is looking forward to a life of leisure and planet-wide acclaim when he is visited by a former winner, Ihjel. It seems that Ihjel is an operative in the independent organization known as the 'Cultural Relationships Foundation', or CRF. 

According to Ihjel, a potentially disastrous conflict is looming elsewhere in the Federation, a conflict between the hardscrabble desert planet Dis, and its neighbor, the more affluent planet Nyjord. Tensions between the two polities have reached the point where an exchange of nuclear weapons is imminent.

The CRF has been working to defuse the conflict by discovering, and eliminating, a cache of  missiles secreted somewhere on Dis by the mysterious ruling class known as the magter. Unfortunately for the CRF, their effort has failed to gain much information about the whereabouts of the cache. 

Unless the missiles are discovered within the next five days, the Nyjordians will attack Dis and exterminate all life on the planet. Hoping to save Dis from its imminent fate, Ihjel has a proposition for Brion: join the CRF, travel to Dis, and do what an entire CRF detachment could not do: find the weapons cache.

Intrigued at the thought of traveling to another world and performing a life-and-death mission, Brandd agrees to accompany Ihjel. Joining them is a biologist from Earth, a swell dame, and a patent Love Interest: Doctor Lea Morees.

When the team arrives on Dis, they discover that their well-laid plans are for naught, and they will have to improvise. This will not be easy, for Dis is a Hell world of excessive heat, adversarial natives, and a local CRF office that is dispirited and defeated. Brion Brandd will have to call on all of his considerable physical and mental resources if he is to survive long enough to unravel the true nature of Disian society.........

'Planet of the Damned' is not one of Harrison's better novels, and deserves no more than a two-star Rating. Stylistically it obviously is modeled on Harrison's 'Deathworld' novels, which were quite popular in the 60s. However, compared to 'Deathworld', the action in 'Damned' suffers from slow pacing (Brion Brandd doesn't arrive on Dis until page 30). Harrison also relies on lengthy sections of dialogue for exposition, often using these dialogues as a vehicle through which he can pontificate to the reader about his personal insights into sociological matters. 

It doesn't help that 'Damned' is devoid of the satiric humor that made Jason dinAlt, the protagonist of 'Deathworld', an engaging character and animated the otherwise solemn narrative of that novel. 

Regarding the conclusion of 'Damned', I won't disclose any spoilers, save to say that the denouement gave Harrison the opportunity to provide an offbeat and imaginative ending, but he instead settles for a predictable resolution.

The verdict ? Even diehard Harrison fans are going to find 'Planet of the Damned' to be underwhelming. 

Return to Second Story Books Warehouse

Return to Second Story Books Warehouse

November 2023

It's been a couple years since last I visited the Second Story Books warehouse in Rockville, Maryland. So last week, on a mild Fall day, I decided to check out the warehouse. I prepared by including my portable urinal (below) in my travel gear.

While construction on I-66 has more or less been completed, an accident resulted in the slowing of traffic to stop-and-go levels. And then, when I got on the DC Beltway, construction in the vicinity of the Dulles Access Road meant even more delays. It took me 2 hours and 45 minutes to go from my front door to the Second Story lot.

Once inside I found a good selection of mass-market paperbacks, as always, just a buck or two each, and in conditions ranging from good to very good.

'The Godkeepers' is a 1970 noir novel; the author, E. Richard Johnson (1938 - 1997), was a well-regarded hardboiled crime writer.

'Earthwind' is a 1977 science fiction novel from Robert Holdstock, while 'The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde' is a 1970 compilation of stories from Norman Spinrad.

The warden of San Quentin prison provides a memoir of his time at the prison:

I was pleased to get an Alfred Hitchcock anthology from 1966.

'Super-Tanks', from 1987, is an assembly of sci-fi war stories.

I got a copy of the 1968 Ace Books edition of Heith Roberts' novel 'Pavane'.

Finally, I picked up the original 'Sabre' graphic novel from 1978 for $6. Old School goodness, from the Second Story Books Warehouse !

Book Review: Crystal Express

Book Review: 'Crystal Express' by Bruce Sterling

5 / 5 Stars

'Crystal Express' (278 pp.) was issued by Ace Books in December 1990. The cover illustration (fractals were very 'in' as a design theme in the early 1990s) is by Ian Entwistle.

This book is an anthology of short stories Sterling published over the interval from 1982 to 1987, in magazines and books such as Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Interzone, and Universe.

The initial five entries in 'Crystal' are stories set in Sterling's  far-future Shaper / Mechanist universe, in which mankind - split into two adversarial factions - tries to find a place in a galaxy dominated by alien races and their advanced technologies. 'Swarm' (1982), the inaugural story in the Shaper franchise, features an imaginative treatment of an alien hive society, while 'Spider Rose' (1982) pits the eponymous protagonist, who possesses a unique alien artifact, against malevolent Shapers. 

The 1983 novelette 'Cicada Queen' deals with political intrigues between the factions, with a project to terraform Mars hanging in the balance. The terraforming project is the topic of the 1984 story 'Sunken Gardens'. 'Twenty Evocations' (1984) uses a series of vignettes to recount the life and times of a Shaper named Nikolai Leng.

I find the Shaper stories to be interesting, if over-written, science fiction pieces. There are simply too many concepts, wordsmithings, and story beats competing for limited text space. 

That said, these stories are as good as, if not better than, contemporaneous material from more recognized writers like John Varley. The early 1980s were a relentlessly staid period when it came to 'hard' science fiction, with editors and publishers focusing on churning out duds from bankable authors like Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Frederik Pohl, and Asimov. So Sterling's contributions to the field certainly injected a degree of innovation into the scene.

Moving on through 'Crystal', there are three stories, although not labeled as such, that represent what now is regarded as cyberpunk. 

'Green Days in Brunei' (1985) is a very readable novelette, set in a near-future southeast Asia, where engineer and hacker Turner Choi is charged with reviving the national economy of an impoverished Brunei. 'Spook' (1983) is about a political operative sent to destroy an anti-globalist rebellion. It has a cynical edge to it that places the story in the harder-edged realm of cyberpunk, and thus can be said to lie in William Gibson territory. 

'The Beautiful and the Sublime' (1986) resides firmly in Sterling's more genial approach to plotting and characters. There are no casualties, but much drawing-room machinations by social butterflies who like manipulating the wealthy.

The collection closes with stories set in past eras. These tend to have a subdued, ruminative quality. 'Telliamed' (1984) is about an 18th century French 'natural philosopher' who triggers the final conflict between the Age of Myth and Legend, and the Age of Enlightenment. 'The Little Magic Shop' (1987) comes across as a Roald Dahl-ish story in its treatment of an age-defying entrepreneur named James Abernathy.

'Flowers of Edo' (1987) relates the adventures of two Japanese men coping with the disruption to their society caused by the arrival of new technologies and ideas from the West. 'Dinner in Audoghast' (1985) sees a group of dissipated merchants and traders, residing in what at that time was the prosperous city of Aoudaghost in 11th century Mauritania, confronting a prophecy of doom and desolation.

In his zine Cheap Truth, Sterling had this to say about science fiction in the early 1980s: "American sf lies in a reptilian torpor". It was a depressing, but accurate statement.

When comparing the short stories in 'Crystal Express' with those published by the more well-publicized mainstream science fiction authors in the 1980s, it's clear that Sterling and the cyberpunks were updating and improving the genre, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in larger ways. The contents of 'Crystal Express' can be seen as examples of the storytelling the cyberpunks used to revitalize science fiction. 

'Crystal Express' is deserving of a Five Star Rating. 

Why Is It Me by England Dan and John Ford Coley

'Why Is It Me'

by England Dan and John Ford Coley

1979

As Fall gradually turns to Winter, and the mellowness of the season comes fully to fruition, let's sit back and enjoy the smooth sounds of England Dan Seals and John Ford Coley and their song 'Why Is It Me'. Melodic guitar rock that will have you nodding along and subconsciously smiling. Thinking less about the world and its troubles...........for a little while, at least........