Abelmar Jones: 'Bad Day 'Cross 110th Street'

by Bill Dubay and Alex Nino

from Eerie #92, May 1978 

Vintage Ghetto Action, including 'right - on' 70s phrases like:

 "hot 'nuff t' fry chitlin's on the roof"

 "Honkieland"

"Jeezus Lawd !"

and ending the adventure of our two young homeboys (actually, the term 'homeboy' was not in use in 1978....)  with a bottle of Gallo 'Ripple' brand pop wine......

Abelmar Jones was a recurring character in several Eerie issues in the late 70s. His adventures involved supernatural phenomena that happened to take place in the ghetto, as opposed to Transylvania or the desolate heaths of England.

'Bad Day 'Cross 110th Street' was the first of the Abelmar Jones stories.

I'll be posting more of his adventures in the coming weeks.

'Heavy Metal' magazine August 1982

It's August, 1982, and in heavy rotation on the FM stations is 'Eye in the Sky' by the Alan Parsons Project.

The latest issue of Heavy Metal magazine is on the stands, featuring 'Voltomat', by Thomas Warkentin, on the front cover, and "Just A Bit Off the Top, Mac !", by Christopher Mark Brennan, on the back cover.

The Dossier is the usual lively grab-bag of reviews and commentary.

Rok Critic Lou Stathis examines what he calls 'Ear Movies', i.e., soundtrack / instrumental albums by the likes of Vangelis and Georgio Moroder. Back in the early 80s the concept of Chill Music didn't really exist, and there were no internet or satellite radio channels devoted to the genre. So even if groups like The Thievery Corporation had existed in 1982, there was no real broadcasting outlet for them, save perhaps as a Sunday night show on the college radio stations.

The movie reviews cover gems such as John Carpenter's The Thing, as well as E. T., Poltergeist, and Tron.

There is an interview with the British sf author Brian Aldiss, who provides his list of top-ten books 'To Be Stuck In An Indian Urinal With'.

The graphic content of the August issue is underwhelming. Ongoing installments of Corben's 'Den II', Jodorowsky and Moebius's 'Incal Light', 'Zora' by Fernandez, 'Yragael' by Druillet, and 'The Voyage of Those Forgotten', by Bilal, consist of too few pages to maintain much in the way of mental continuity with the reader.

One promising development is a new serial by Berni Wrightson, titled 'Freak Show'; this would become one of Wrightson's more memorable comic art creations.

I've posted the 'Voyage of Those Forgotten' entry below.

Sabre issue 2

'Sabre' issue 2

Eclipse Comics, October 1982

Issue 2 - which reprints, in colored form, the second half of the 1978 original Sabre graphic novel - opens with some skilful artwork from Paul Gulacy depicting our hero in the midst of interrogation. This provokes some flashbacks which reveal more of Sabre's past, such as his growing up in the 'hood under conditions of violence and privation.....

Don McGregor's prose, as usual, encrusts every page, but it can't totally obscure Gulacy's rendering of a fight sequence between Sabre and the psychopathic Overseer. 

So closes the first two issues of Sabre, the color comic book. Issue three would inaugurate all-new content, and will be the topic of a future Sabre posting.

Book Review: 'The Ace Science Fiction Reader' edited by Donald A. Wolheim

2 / 5 Stars

‘The Ace Science Fiction Reader’ (251 pp.) was published in 1971 and features cover artwork by Charles Volpe, John Schoenherr, and Jack Gaughan.

In his introduction, Donald Wolheim (with a self-congratulatory note that may, or may not, be justified, depending on your own opinion) remarks upon the critical and commercial successes of the 'Ace Double' imprint. 

The Science Fiction Reader, he informs us, is an experimental effort at creating a trial ‘Ace Triple’ volume, relying on reprinting novelettes previously appearing in various Doubles.

The leadoff novelette, Clifford Simak’s ‘The Trouble With Tycho’, first appeared in print in 1961. It’s about a young prospector on the colonized Moon; he encounters a swell dame who enlists his aid in an effort to explore the forbidden area around the immense Tycho crater. The story has aged reasonably well, and is the best in the anthology.

Jack Vance’s ‘The Last Castle’ (1966) is typical Vance, and if you are not a Vance fan, you probably won’t like it. Set in the days of the Dying Earth, ‘Castle’ features a tribe of decadent lotus-eaters confronted by a slave rebellion. While the plot eventually gets reasonably engaging,  it is subordinate to Vance’s displays of carefully crafted turns of phrase.

Samuel R. Delaney contributes ‘Empire Star’ (1966). The plot deals with a callow young man, named ‘Comet Jo’, who is selected by a trio of aliens to carry an important message from his backwater planet to the far-off Empire Star. The story is a sort of sci-fi picaresque, filled with oddball characters, offbeat dialogue, and contrived plot developments. The New Wave movement was gaining ascendancy in the mid-60s and ‘Empire Star’ was the perfect example of the type of story that would come to epitomize the movement. In truth, I thought it trite, cutesy and a chore to finish. Of the three tales in this volume, 'Empire Star' has aged the most poorly.

In sum, ‘The Ace Science Fiction Reader’ is primarily useful as a marker of the shift in editorial attitudes towards sf in the mid-1960s. This was a shift away from standard, technology-based pieces like 'Tycho',  towards the more imaginative approaches to prose style exhibited by 'The Last Castle' and 'Empire Star'. 

Modern readers, however, will find 'The Ace Science Fiction Reader' underwhelming. For Ace Books completists only.   

Hunter episode 2 from Eerie No. 53

'Hunter' from Eerie magazine (Warren)
episode 2
from Eerie No. 53, January 1974
(A bit out of order in my posting....I mistakenly put up Hunter episode 3 on July 5 2012)

 

Book Review: 'Metrophage' by Richard Kadrey

4 / 5 Stars

‘Metrophage’, released in 1988, was one of the 12 ‘New’ Ace Science Fiction Specials published between 1984 and 1990. The cover art is by Earl Keleny.

Metrophage is a ‘first generation’ cyberpunk novel that, stylistically, belongs with members of the Canon such as 'Count Zero', 'Neuromancer', 'Dr Adder', and 'Islands in the Net'.

With its near-future, dystopian Los Angeles setting, 'Metrophage' is a direct descendent of Jeter's  ‘Dr Adder’, which was written in the early 70s (but not published till 1984).

Metrophage is set in a chaotic, partially destroyed LA, early in the 21^st century. The city is divided into small clusters of wealth and affluence, and a larger, impoverished metropolis, peopled by various tribes of techno-enthusiasts, scavengers, self-styled anarchists, and ethnic groups. 

The hero is one Jonny Qabbala, a street punk who supports himself by selling drugs and moving contraband for the Smuggler Lords, the de facto rulers of L.A. 

As the novel opens, Jonny is looking to avenge the death of one of his friends at the hands of Easy Money, another dealer. Impulsive and prone to making bad decisions, Jonny soon runs afoul of Colonel Zamora, the head of the city police force; this is a quasi-facist oganization that periodically sweeps into the city to engage in combat with its less tractable inhabitants. 

On the run from Zamora, Jonny becomes entangled in a vast, but secretive, underground conflict being waged between offworld economic blocs, and the militant, far-right organizations formed in the aftermath of the collapse of the US and Europe. 

Complicating things is the rise of a disturbing new plague, a plague that in fact may be a bioweapon loosed in a deliberate effort to eliminate the lumpen proletariat from LA.

Self-centered and indifferent to the welfare of the common people, Jonny is not inclined to get involved in efforts to arrest the outbreak. But he may have no choice but to become involved, because Jonny may hold the only hope for a cure for the plague….. if he can live long enough to discover where it came from….

Metrophage is a worthy cyberpunk adventure, less so because of its plot, which is often meandering, and heavily reliant on contrivances to provide it with some degree of momentum. 

Rather, the appeal of Metrophage is author Kadrey’s careful imagery of a near-future LA resembling a cross between ‘Blade Runner’ and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome’. The novel is filled with offbeat, imaginative visual vignettes.

 As well, Kadrey’s dialogue is well-written and melds nicely with a cast of quirky characters: the smuggler lord Mister Conover, kept alive into advanced age by regular pharmaceutical infusions; Nimble Virtue, the L5  colony expatriate forced to travel LA in an exoskeleton that moves her atrophied limbs; Man Ray, the anarchist weaponsmith; and Groucho, the idealistic leader of the LA anarchists.  

Metrophage shares the same faults as ‘Neuromancer’: a prose style that at times is too dense and descriptive; a plot that relies overmuch on nick-of-time escapes to get our hero out of his self-inflicted jams; and final, last-chapter revelations that don’t seem to justify all the sub-plots circulating in and out of the main narrative. 

But its imaginative drive outweighs these drawbacks, and  Metrophage rightly stands as one of the best of the first-generation cyberpunk novels.

'The Final Tap' by Caza

from the August 1982 issue of Heavy Metal

Mudwogs from March 2006

'Mudwogs' by Arthur Suydam

from Heavy Metal magazine, March 2006

In 2005 Kevin Eastman, creator of the comic strip 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' and owner and publisher of Heavy Metal magazine, decided to reprint the classic 'Mudwogs' tales that Arthur Suydam had provided for HM in the early 80s.

Eastman also commissioned new Mudwogs strips from Suydam, with the first of these appearing in the March, 2006 issue.

For 'Old School' HM readers such as I, seeing the Mudwogs again was great, despite finding Suydam's distinctive artwork nestled within pages and pages of cheeseball T & A 'portfolios', advertisements for Japanese cartoon porn DVDs, and something called 'The Erotic Library of Priapism'.

Here is 'Mudwogs # 8'. Continuing installments will be posted here at the blog in the coming weeks.

Book Review: Monitor Found in Orbit

Book Review: 'Monitor Found In Orbit' by Michael G. Coney

3 / 5 Stars 

 

Michael G. Coney (1932 – 2005) was a British author who wrote a number of sf novels and short stories during the 1970s and 1980s, although his work in the latter decade was primarily published in the UK and Canada.

Coney’s work was a prominent part of the DAW catalogue in the early 1970s, with short story collections, like ‘Monitor In Orbit’, seeing print alongside novels such as ‘Mirror Image’ (1972), ‘The Hero of Downways’ (1973), ‘Friends Come In Boxes’ (1973), and ‘The Jaws That Bite, the Claws That Catch’ (1975).

‘Monitor Found In Orbit’ (DAW Book No. 120, September 1974, 172 pp) is a collection of short stories that first saw print in various sf digests and magazines in the period from 1970 – 1973. The attractive cover illustration is by Kelly Freas.

The first story in the collection, ‘The True Worth of Ruth Villiers’, is a sardonic look at a near-future UK in which health care is rationed on a steadfastly economic basis. Those suspicious of ‘socialized medicine’, so to speak, may find it disturbing.

‘The Manya’ sees a dissipated slacker volunteer for time-travel to the far future; he arrives in a tribal society and is welcomed as a God. Things take a complicated turn when neighboring tribes show aggressive intentions.

‘Hold My Hand, My Love’ deals with an interplanetary explorer who develops a complicated relationship with a crewmate in the course of investigating a planet with an unusual ecology; there is a surprise ending.

‘Beneath Still Waters’ uses a sailing race, and an unscrupulous competitor, as vehicles to explore an alien’s empathy for The Human Condition.

‘The Unsavory Episode of Mrs. Hector Powell’ is about a young boy who makes a vacation visit to an eccentric, elderly aunt. The story’s setting and subject matter evoke Roald Dahl.

‘Monitor Found In Orbit’ is Coney’s effort at writing a tale with a determinedly New Wave prose style, although Coney takes pains in his Introduction to this story to state that he did not see himself as a New Wave author per se. ‘Monitor’ employs a Joycean stream-of-consciousness narrative. The plot involves a scientist who engages in confused, even paranoid reminiscences en route to a meeting with his estranged son. This story is something of a chore to read, although it does offer an interesting plot twist at its end.

‘The Mind Prison’ is a competent, if unremarkable take on the traditional sf trope of a closed, post-apocalyptic society and the advent of rebellion on the part of its younger members.

‘R26/5/PSY and I’ is about a dystopian, near-future society in which most of the people are without work and purpose. The narrator becomes enrolled in a novel therapy designed to combat the injurious psychological consequences wrought by such a society. As with ‘The Unsavory Episode’, this tale borrows the sly, satirical tenor of a Roald Dahl piece.

The final entry, ‘Esmeralda’, deals with elderly sisters living in a bleak, polluted landscape in a future England. A downbeat, disturbing ending makes this the best story in the anthology.

All the stories in this collection display Coney’s strengths as a writer; clear, well-written prose, carefully crafted dialogue, and a restrained, very ‘British’ approach to plotting and denouement.

Coney’s work belongs in the New Wave catalog, primarily because its sf content is usually a simple, expedient framework within which Coney devotes careful attention to sociological and psychological themes.

I suspect that ‘Monitor’, like most of Coney’s work, is too understated, and too devoid of excitement, to offer much appeal to modern sf fans. But readers with a fondness for the mannered type of literature that Coney exemplifies may want to investigate ‘Monitor Found in Orbit’.