Grey Morrow's Orion

'Grey Morrow's Orion' by Grey Morrow

Grey Morrow (March 7, 1934 – November 6, 2001) had a long and productive career (spanning from the mid-50s to the late 90s) as an artist for comic books, newspaper strips, television cartoons, magazines, paperback book covers, and illustrated books.

Starting with the March, 1978 issue and appearing monthly through to the December, 1978 issue, Heavy Metal magazine published Morrow’s sword-and-sorcery strip ‘Orion’. This large –size (12 ½ x 9 1/8 inches) trade paperback compiles all the ‘Orion’ episodes, as well as all three issues of ‘Edge of Chaos’, a comic book the Morrow did for indie publisher Pacific Comics from July, 1983 to January, 1984.

The book features a Foreword by Morrow's wife Pocho Morrow, and an Introduction by Daniel Herman that covers Morrow's career.

With 'Orion', Morrow was able to do a creator-controlled comic that enabled him to avoid the restrictions of the Comics Code and the editorial oversight that came with working for companies like Marvel and DC. Needless to say, Morrow took full advantage of the opportunity, filling the pages of Orion with sword fights, monsters, evil wizards, and exposed bosoms, in the best sword-and-sorcery style.....

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With Orion, Morrow took pains to avoid mimicking the hero conventions established by mainstream publications like 'Conan', in favor of a hero who was often fallible and fatigued, but not averse to spending time in hedonistic pursuits.

 

 

There was also an undercurrent of humor, as well as some degree of pathos, to the adventures of Orion, his homeboy Mamba, the cat-lady Felina, and her orge manservant Urza. 

Morrow not only pencilled and inked his artwork for Orion, but hand-colored it as well, a considerable undertaking back in the days before PC-based scanning and coloring of comic book artwork was feasible. While I suspect modern readers used to computer-generated coloration will find this aspect of the artwork to be underwhelming, by the standards of the time, it was quite effective.

For 'Edge of Chaos', apparently the original artwork for the first issue was not available, so scans had to be made of the printed comic; this explains the low-res appearance of that artwork.

The remaining issues 2 and 3 feature much better reproductions.

'Edge' features as lead character Eric Cleese, a hero modeled on Steve Reeves, the actor who portrayed 'Hercules' and other heroes in films in the 50s and 60s. 

Cleese is transported from his sloop to Olympus, a futuristic city floating in space, ruled by the fabled Gods of Greek mythology. Cleese is tasked by them to defeat the deranged wizard Moloch, who threatens to destroy their world.

 

Eric Cleese is in the same mold as Orion, but with a greater sense of self-deprecating humor. His encounters with monsters and demons are marked by a wise-cracking disbelief.

 

As with Heavy Metal, Pacific Comics eschewed the Comics Code, allowing Morrow to provide his readers with yet another bevy of beautiful, lightly-clad women.

One thing that makes Orion and Edge of Chaos stand out compared to contemporary comics is their realistic displays of anatomy. The grotesquely over-muscled bodies of modern superheroes are absent here, as are the hypersexualized depiction of female bodies that governs their depiction in many superhero titles.

I have mixed feelings about 'Grey Morrow's Orion'. On the one hand it's gratifying to have all of the episodes from Heavy Metal assembled into one volume, in large-scale book with quality stock paper and the best possible reproduction, as deserves a memorable piece of comic art. 

However, the decision to have the book published by a small, specialty press means that its cover price of $40 makes it overly expensive, particularly by the standards of the graphic novel market. (I was fortunate to procure a used copy of 'Grey Morrow's Orion' for around $23.)

While it would have required some degree of compromise in size and perhaps paper quality, a smaller-sized edition of 'Orion', akin to the volumes released by the New Comic Company for its 'Creepy Presents' and 'Eerie Presents' hardbound volumes would have been more affordable and expanded the opportunities for Morrow's artwork to reach a wider audience.

Book Review: Code Three

Book Review: 'Code Three' by Rick Raphael

3 / 5 Stars

‘Code Three’ (176 pp) was published by Berkeley Books in April, 1967. This book is a fixup of two stories originally published in Analog magazine in the interval from 1963 – 1964. One of those two stories, ‘Once a Cop’, won the 1965 Hugo for short fiction.

If you grew up at all in the 70s, then you may remember watching at one time or another a TV show titled Emergency. It ran on NBC from 1972 – 1977, and chronicled the adventures of two paramedics in the LA County Fire Department: John Gage (played by Randolph Mantooth) and Roy DeSoto (Kevin Tighe). Each episode saw our heroes deal with, naturally enough, an Emergency – car crashes, building and brush fires, plane crashes, earthquakes, etc. 

Gage and DeSoto and the crew of Station 51 responded to these events with professional detachment and, sometimes, a bit of humor. 

‘Code Three’ is basically a sci-fi version of Emergency. The novel is set in the future, when the North American continent is crossed horizontally and vertically by a series of enormous throughways, one mile in width. Each highway is divided into half-mile portions for east-west or north-south traffic, and these half-mile portions are in turn divided in multiple lanes – green, white, red, yellow, etc. for traffic traveling at different speeds.

And these are very high speeds. Auto technology has progressed to the point where vehicles use a sort of hover-drive to reach speeds in excess of 600 mph (!) although most vehicles make do with speeds of ‘only’ 100 – 300 mph.

The highway system is administered by the North American Continental Thruway System (NorCon), with whom lies responsible for law enforcement.

The novel follows the exploits of a team of two police and one paramedic aboard the patrol vehicle car 56 – nicknamed ‘Beulah’. This is a 250 ton, 60-feet long, 12 feet wide, 12 feet tall behemoth capable of reaching speeds of 600 mph.

In charge of Beulah is Patrol Sergeant Ben Martin, a veteran traffic cop who is starting to contemplate advancement to a desk job. Second in command is Patrol Trooper Clay Ferguson, and Kelly Lightfoot, an attractive, spunky redhead, serves as Medical-Surgical Officer.

As ‘Code Three’ opens, Beulah and her crew embark on a two week-long patrol of North American Thruway 26-West, the major highway connecting the USA’s east and west coasts. During their tour they will deal with accidents large and small, homicidal felons, and bad weather. Hit the sirens, turn on the red lights, and woo-woo-woo nee-ner nee-ner nee-ner prepare for action……

I can’t say that ‘Code Three’ is gripping entertainment or great, genre-transcending sf, but it is a reasonably entertaining read. Author Raphael writes with a clipped, declarative style that serves this sort of procedural narrative well. 

The ongoing repartee between the two cops and nurse Kelly, if it were to take place in contemporary times, would undoubtedly lead to sexual harassment charges at the very least, but during the Mad Men era when this novel was written, societal attitudes about workplace conversations were less …….evolved.

If you are interested in the sub-sub genre of sf devoted to Emergency Response, then ‘Code Three’ may be worth picking up.

Heavy Metal February 1984

'Heavy Metal' magazine February 1984

 

February, 1984……in rotation on MTV is ‘New Moon on Monday’ by Duran Duran, ‘Here Comes the Rain Again’ by Eurythmics, 'Jump' by Van Halen, and Rockwell’s ‘Somebody’s Watching Me’.

The latest issue of Heavy Metal magazine features a front cover by Enrich and a back cover by Ballestar. This is one of the better issues of 1984, with strips by Corben, Caza, Jose Font, and ‘Salammbo II: Carthage’ by Druillet. There are also the ongoing installments of ‘Tex Arcana’, ‘The Third Incal’, and ‘Ranxerox in New York’, as well as the usual crap: ‘I’m Age’ by Jeff Jones (by now, seriously unhinged in regards to his Gender Identity), ‘Valentina the Pirate’ by Crepax, and ‘Rock Opera’ by Kierkegaard, Jr.

Having acknowledged the existence of MTV, the hipsters in charge of contributing columns to the Dossier section of the magazine reinforce their capitulation with a lead-off article about  music video producer Brian Grant, and a worshipful overview of rising star Paul Young.

 

Elsewhere, there is an article devoted to a documentary about strippers....

The sf books section provides a photo of Norman Spinrad wearing a very bad hairpiece.....

The Dossier Hipsters are most excited by a film director named Martha Coolidge, whose 80s films nowadays are entirely forgotten......

Below, I've posted Corben's 'Roda and the Wolf'.

Book Review: Black Snow Days

Book Review: 'Black Snow Days' by Claudia O'Keefe

1 / 5 Stars

‘Black Snow Days’ (344 pp) was published in 1990, with cover artwork by Kevin Jankauski. It is one of the 12 novels, all first novels for their authors, making up the Third Series of Ace Science Fiction Specials.

‘Black Snow Days’ is one of the worst sf novels I’ve ever read. I struggled mightily to get as far as page 192 before giving up in despair.............

The novel does have an interesting premise: in 2046, snotty young punk Eric Pope is engaged in an illegal landspeeder race through the futuristic metropolis of Deerhorn, North Dakota. Pope crashes his speeder into a grain silo and suffers mortal injuries, blacking out as his rescuers struggle to remove him from the crumpled metal of his cockpit.

When next Eric Pope awakes, it’s 2058, and he is in the underground fallout shelter constructed by his late mother’s biotechnology company. World War Three has come and gone; outside the shelter, Nuclear Winter covers the radiation-drenched landscape. There are constant storms in which gritty snow – the ‘black snow’ of the book’s title – sweeps down to cover the earth with yet more fallout.

Eric discovers that he has been subjected to a protracted, but effective, healing process. His missing limbs have been replaced by newly grown ones, his maimed face repaired by implants and vat-grown tissue. His mother arranged to have his new body augmented with auto- detoxifying and auto- healing modules, and his brain has been enhanced by the addition of vat-grown neurons.

His late mother, it seems, had a mission in mind for her son: Eric Pope is custom-designed to survive on the surface of a post-nuclear earth, unprotected, unshielded. For purposes unknown to him, but probably vital for the survival of the human race.

There’s one problem: Jolie Pope also gave Eric schizophrenia. For his ‘female self’ exists as a mental avatar called Vivian. And however much Vivian interrupts Eric’s thoughts and actions, she can’t be wished away…..

Why is ‘Black Snow’ so bad ?

Well, most of the narrative is submerged under what can only be called gibberish. Gibberish in the sense of a continuous use of inane, empty prose. Combine the gibberish with segments  of dialogue in which crazed shelter dwellers argue among themselves and with Eric Pope; or badlands refugees argue among themselves and with Eric; or the AI that runs Eric’s futuristic supercar (called…..’Car’…..) argues with Eric; or Vivian argues with Eric; or the Car’s AI and Vivian argue with Eric, or Eric simply argues with….himself….. and things become so clotted and tedious that whatever momentum the thin narrative has gained is rapidly overwhelmed and dwindles to an afterthought.

Terry Carr died in 1987, so it’s unclear who (if anyone) provided pre-publication editorial oversight to Claudia O’Keefe, the author of ‘Black Snow’. Underneath the pretentiousness there is a good novel, unfortunately, the editorship necessary to help it emerge was not forthcoming.

‘Black Snow Days’ is a dud, and stands alongside Scholtz and Harcourt’s ‘Palimpsests’ as the most disappointing entries in the Third Series of the Ace Science Fiction Specials.

Heads by Arthur Suydam

'Heads' by Arthur Suydam
(from 'Arthur Suydam's Demon Dreams' issue # 2, May 1984) 

‘Heads’originaly appeared in the Spring 1980 issue of Epic Illustrated. While I don’t have that original issue in my collection, the Pacific Comics reprint of ‘Heads’, in the second issue of 'Demon Dreams', a collection of Suydam reprints, serves quite well. 

This tale has a truly bizarre air of genius that is absent from most mainstream and ‘alternative’ comics these days….

 

 

 

 

Book Review: Fantasy Annual V

Book Review: 'Fantasy Annual V' edited  by Terry Carr

2 / 5 Stars

When DAW’s ‘The Year’s Best Fantasy’ series launched in 1975, and proved successful, the market was established for yearly ‘Best Of’ anthologies for fantasy literature, although the output of so-called ‘adult’ fantasy literature arguably was very limited back in those days.

Pocket Books decided to launch their own anthology series, titled ‘The Year’s Finest Fantasy’ in 1978; starting in 1981, the title was shortened to simply ‘Fantasy Annual’. A total of five volumes were released before the series was discontinued.

“Fantasy Annual V’ (264 pp), the last volume in the series, was released in November, 1982. The cover artist is unknown. The contents all were previously published in 1981, in sf and fantasy magazines and digests.

Editor Terry Carr brought a different attitude to the Pocket Books series, as compared to that of Lin Carter, the editor of 'The Years Best Fantasy' at DAW Books. 

Carr avoided ‘classic’ or ‘traditional’ fantasy tales featuring, for example, barbarians, evil magicians, Dark Lords, enchanted castles, dragons, dwarves, and goblins. Instead, Carr preferred to showcase stories with a supernatural or mild horror content, particularly 'urban' ghost stories.

My capsule reviews of the entrants in ‘Fantasy Annual V’ :

In Parke Godwin’s ‘The Fire When It Comes’, a young couple share their NYC apartment with the ghost of an embittered actress. Insipid and trite, this is the worst story in the anthology.
 
George R. R. Martin's ‘Remembering Melody’ explores what happens when that crazy hippie chick from your misspent youth won’t take 'no' for an answer. An effective horror story.

Thomas M. Disch’s ‘The Grown Up’ is a sardonic look at a man who goes to sleep as a 25 year-old, and awakens with the mind of a 10 year-old boy. 

C. J. Cherryh’s ‘The Haunted Tower’ puts a mayor’s mistress into the Tower of London, there to be educated in the Meaning of Life by a succession of historical ghosts. Plodding and unrewarding.

Roger Zelazny’s “And I Only Am Escaped to Tell Thee’, despite its three- page length, is one of the best of his short stories, and the best entry in this anthology.

In Tony Sarowitz’s ‘Dinosaurs on Broadway’, a young women adjusts poorly to life in NYC; her angst is manifested in hallucinations of dinosaurs. The fantasy elements are muted, if barely present.  This is one of the least impressive tales in the anthology.

J. Michael Reaves’s ‘Werewind’ mixes ghosts, the Santa Ana winds, LA's film studio culture, and tosses in a serial killer to boot. Another of the better entrants in the anthology.

Robert Silverberg’s ‘The Regulars’ is a slight tale about patrons of a homely bar....... that never closes.

James Tiptree, Jr (Alice Sheldon) contributes ‘Lirios: A Tale of the Quintana Roo’, about an apparition appearing on the coast of Mexico. Well-written, if not particularly memorable.

Jessica Amanda Salmonson’s ‘Lincoy’s Journey’ deals with a young girl’s adventures in an Asian afterlife.

In Michael Bishop’s ‘The Quickening’, everyone wakes up to discover they have been teleported to a foreign country; the protagonist struggles to deal with this strange turn of events.

Curiously, although Lisa Tuttle’s ‘A Friend in Need’ is advertised on the back cover of Fantasy Annual V, it doesn’t appear in the book (!?). I am familiar with this short story, as it appeared in ‘The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories Series 8’ (DAW, 1982). It’s an unremarkable ‘urban’ fantasy tale, and its failure to appear here in Fantasy Annual V is no calamity. 

Summing up, ‘Fantasy Annual V’ suffers from two weaknesses. One is that, back in 1981, there simply weren’t enough outlets available to accommodate those quality fantasy short stories being produced, and secondly, inflexibility on the part of editor Carr meant that marginal tales made it into the anthology. 

Unless you are adamant about obtaining every volume in the series, this one can be passed by.