'The Bus' by Paul Kirchner

Before there was 'The Far Side', before there was 'The Perry Bible Fellowship', there was...

...The Bus.

‘The Bus’ was a black and white strip by Paul Kirchner that regularly appeared in Heavy Metal magazine in the late 70s and early 80s. Usually within the space of a third of a printed page, with 6 to 8 panels per strip, and featuring Kirchner’s careful draftsmanship and meticulous cross-hatching, ‘The Bus’ was often one of the better entries in a given issue of the magazine.

‘The Bus’ featured a sly, but not altogether benevolent, sense of humor. The hapless protagonist, a balding, middle-aged man in a raincoat, usually encountered all manner of surreal (and often menacing) goings-on. All this was cleverly communicated without employing any speech balloons, and the judicious use of sound effects and overlaid text boxes.

All of the strips that Kirchner produced are compiled in the small trade paperback version of ‘The Bus’ published by Ballantine Books in 1987. At amazon.com a new copy of the book is selling for a price of $ 195.24 (?!) and used copies at a (bargain-priced) $2.99 and up. If you are a fan of The Far Side, The Perry Bible Fellowship, and other comics - based humor of the quirky, more cerebral variety, then you may want to purchase a copy of 'The Bus'.

For those reluctant to spend money for a new or used copy in these Times of Recession, I will be posting excerpts from ‘The Bus’ here at the PorPor Books blog.

'The Bus' by Paul Kirchner

'The Bus' by Paul Kirchner
from the November 1985 issue of Heavy Metal

Realms by Paul Kirchner

'Realms' by Paul Kirchner

During the late 70s and early 80s some of the best comics to appear in the magazines Heavy Metal and Epic Illustrated were done by Paul Kirchner, an artist from Connecticut. 

Kirchner, whose regularly appearing comic ‘The Bus’ was a prominent feature in the early years of Heavy Metal, had a knack for putting together stories with both great art and offbeat, wryly humorous themes. Kirchner was adept at working in illustrative styles from non-Western cultures, as attested to in the strips ‘Shaman’ and ‘The Mirror of Dreams’.

‘Realms’ was published by Catalan Communications in 1986 as a softcover, trade paperback of 80 pages. It reprints Kirchner’s non - 'The Bus' works from Heavy Metal and Epic Illustrated. This is a big (8 ½ x 11”), well-produced book with good color reproductions.

Unfortunately, as is the story with many Catalan publications these days, copies in good condition have exorbitant asking prices from online vendors (at amazon, someone wants $56 for their copy). There are sellers on eBay who are asking only $20 for a copy. I was fortunate to score a copy of 'Realms' some years ago for about ten bucks. What can I say: keep an eye out for an affordable copy, and if you see one, don't hesitate, grab it !

[ Kirchner has his own storefront at eBay, titled stayingamused, where you can purchase newly issued reprint volumes, by European publisher Tanabis, of his past and present works, including his 'Dope Rider' comics from High Times magazine. ]

Back to 'Realms', where the entries include ‘Tarot’

‘Shaman’

‘Hive’

and ‘Mirror of Dreams’

There are b & w entries, including the longer comic ‘A Sprig of Thaxin’, as well as the shorter (i.e., 3 - 4 pp.) strips ‘The Temple of Karvul’, ‘Pillars of P—11507’, ‘Critical Mass of Cool’, ‘Survivors’, ‘My Room’, and the one-pagers ‘Judgement Day’ and ‘They Came from Uranus’.

 

All classic stuff, and well worth having in your personal library.

'The Bus'

'The Bus' by Paul Kirchner

The Bus by Paul Kirchner

'The Bus' by Paul Kirchner

The Bus by Kirchner

'The Bus' by Paul Kirchner

Book Review: 'The Hunters' by Burt Wetanson and Thomas Hoobler
3/5 Stars

‘The Hunters’ was first published in 1978; this Playboy paperback edition (223 pp.) was issued in 1979. The cover painting, evoking the box-office hit ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’, is by V. Segrelles.

In the small town of Bear Paw, Montana, a strange couple appear in town one day and give a 'Saucer Cult' presentation to skeptical townspeople: a journey to the stars, true enlightenment, and spiritual fulfillment, are theirs for the taking. Many townspeople are deeply moved by the presentation and the next morning, they gather in the town square in preparation for the Journey. An unusual silver bus arrives, and the couple welcome the earthlings aboard. The bus moves smoothly and silently out into the countryside, ultimately arriving at the ruins of a ghost town from the 19^th century. The passengers debark, climb to the top of a nearby hill, and witness an enormous flying saucer.

The people from Bear Paw are amazed and awed by this display of technology and when the vessel lands, they prepare to board, singing hosanahs to the Star People. But it suddenly becomes unpleasantly clear that the aliens aboard the saucer are not benevolent. In fact, they are looking forward to sport….of the hunting kind. And the townspeople of Bear Paw are their quarry.

‘The Hunters’ is a pulp SF novel that was plainly written to cash in on the marketing excitement of ‘Close Encounters’ and the attendant UFO craze of the late 70s, as well as SF thrillers like ‘Alien’. The movie ‘Predator’ was still 9 years in the future, and it’s unclear if ‘Hunters’ influenced Jim and John Thomas, the screenwriters of Predator. Unlike the alien featured in Predator, in ‘Hunters’ the aliens are more humanoid in appearance and possess unique personalities; they also lack the impressive firepower and cloaking technology of the Predator. But they nonetheless remain formidable adversaries.

The townspeople are the usual motley collection of stereotyped individuals. We have some Commune-derived hippies; a quarreling married couple; an Indian couple fond of giving portentous, ‘Black Elk Speaks’ – style speeches to the unworthy Palefaces; a family of crazed Christian fundamentalists; the town drunk; and BadAzz Mofo Sam Tolliver, who can’t pass up a chance to mess with Whitey whenever there’s a lull in the action.

Authors Wetanson and Hoobler have a tendency to write lame passages of dialogue, much of it dealing with homespun philosophy and psychodrama, for the townspeople to engage in at inopportune times. I often found myself exasperated by the witless nature of some of the characters. But the encounters between human prey and alien hunter come with enough frequency and bloodshed to move the story along at a good clip despite these literary drawbacks. In its last 20 pages the narrative is genuinely engrossing, and the authors refrain from tipping their hands in terms of indicating who will ultimately triumph.

Readers interested in an entertaining, if not particularly original, SF adventure may want to give this book a try.

The Bus

'The Bus' by Paul Kirchner

The Bus

'The Bus' by Paul Kirchner
from the July 1985 issue of Heavy Metal

The Bus

'The Bus' by Paul Kirchner

The Bus by Paul Kirchner

'The Bus' by Paul Kirchner

The Bus

'The Bus' by Paul Kirchner

'The Bus'

'The Bus' by Paul Kirchner

from the August 1985 issue of Heavy Metal

The Bus by Paul Kirchner

'The Bus' by Paul Kirchner

The Bus

'The Bus' by Paul Kirchner

'The Bus' by Paul Kirchner

 

'The Bus' by Paul Kirchner

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

'The Bus' by Paul Kirchner

Book Review: The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series XIV

Book Review: 'The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series XIV', edited by Karl Edward Wagner

2 / 5 Stars

‘The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XIV’ (291 pp) is DAW Book No. UE2156 / 688, published in October, 1986. The cover art is by Michael Whelan.

All of the entries in this edition were first published in 1984 -1985, usually in the pages of other anthologies, or in magazines like The Twilight Zone Magazine, Interzone, and Night Cry.

There is a brief, two-page introduction by editor Karl Edward Wagner.

‘Series XIV’ is a standard-issue ‘Year’s Best’ compilation; in other words, the Usual Suspects are represented and accounted for: Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, Charles L. Grant, Tanith Lee. 

But there also are some newcomers to Series XIV, and they provide the better entries.

My brief summary of the contents:

‘Penny Daye’, Charles L. Grant: mildly threatening British ghosts, ancient monuments, and the anomie of modern life. Another forgettable psychological horror tale from Grant.

‘Dwindling’, David B. Silva: Quiet Horror story about a boy whose family life is subject to unusual circumstances.

“Dead Men’s Fingers’, Philip C. Heath: in the South Pacific, the American whaler Reaper is found adrift, her crew vanished. One of the best stories in the anthology.

‘Dead Week’, Leonard Carpenter: a coed has unusual visions. Predictable, if competently written.

‘The Sneering’, Ramsey Campbell: British pensioners find life in a neighborhood undergoing urban renewal has its drawbacks. I wasn’t hoping for much from Campbell with this story, and he didn’t disappoint me........ Although it’s the first time I’ve ever read the sentence: ‘A car snarled raggedly past the gate.’ Cars …….snarling…..? Raggedly ? But then, who am I to say what is Art ?

‘Bunny Didn’t Tell Us’, David J. Schow: a burgeoning splatterpunk practitioner makes it into a DAW ‘Year’s Best’ anthology ! Hurrah ! Clever tale of grave-robbing gone bad…..because the grave belongs to a deceased pimp……!

‘Pinewood’, Tanith Lee: predictable tale about a grieving widow.

‘The Night People’, Michael Reaves: a hipster seeks solace for his angst by walking the city streets at night. I suspect most readers will guess the ending well in advance.

‘Ceremony’, William F. Nolen: a late-night bus ride leads to a creepy small town. Atmospheric, with a good ending; another of the better entries in this collection.

‘The Woman in Black’, Dennis Etchison: while employing his usual oblique, overly wordy prose in this story about a boy navigating a troubled neighborhood, Etchison makes this tale work by virtue of a bizarre ending.

‘Beside the Seaside, Beside the Sea’, Simon Clark: more a fragment rather than a genuine short story. Supernatural events at night, in a British seaside resort.

‘Mother’s Day’, Stephen F. Wilcox: a man attends to his nagging mother. Not really a horror story, but in fact a psychological drama.

‘Lava Tears’, Vincent McHardy: confused tale of a psycho killer.

‘Rapid Transit’, Wayne Allen Sallee: an aimless young man witnesses a murder in a train yard. Essentially plot-less, and badly overwritten by Sallee, who at the time was a poet trying his hand at short fiction.

‘The Weight of Zero’, John Alfred Taylor: not a short story per se, but actually the first chapter of a never-published novel…?! It’s never a good indicator of editorial competence when the editor has to use a first chapter of an unpublished novel in order to meet his obligation for a requisite number of entries….anyways, this is the vague tale of a Euro-hipster pursuing occult rituals.

‘John’s Return to Liverpool’, Christopher Burns: as you can guess, Dead Lennon is resurrected and visits his hometown. Relying on New Testament tropes, the story comes is too mawkish and insipid to be effective.

‘In Late December, Before the Storm’, Paul J. Sammon: unimaginative tale of a dissipated young man fated to relive a traumatic event. Sammon would go on to edit the seminal Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror anthology of 1990.

‘Red Christmas’, David Garnett: a murderer is on the loose, just before Christmas. I started this story thinking it was yet another clichéd ‘serial killer’ tale, but it provides a genuinely imaginative, offbeat ending. The best story in the anthology !

‘Too Far Behind Gradina’, Steve Sneyd: it’s not a good sign when a story in a horror anthology starts off with a really awful poem in blank verse….this despite the fact that the author is a published poet…..’Gradina’ is about a bored British housewife on vacation in Croatia; she follows a pair of German tourists, brother and sister, to a forbidding destination in the hills above the coast. This novelette was a true chore to finish, as it consisted of the type of run-on sentences, heavily overloaded with stilted, figurative prose, that typified SF writing of the New Wave era. It closes the anthology on a very unimpressive note. 

The verdict ? ‘The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series XIV’ is no better, and probably a little worse, then the other volumes in this series that were edited by Karl Edward Wagner. But hardcore horror short story aficionados may want it for the virtues of the tales by Heath, Schow, Nolen, and Garnett.