Prez: Smells Like Teen Spirit

Prez: Smells Like Teen Spirit

Vertigo / DC, September 1995

Prez: Smells Like Teen Spirit is one of six one-shot comics issued by DC's Vertigo imprint from 1993 to 1998. Presumably, these titles were designed to attract 'traditional' comic book readers to Vertigo. They were priced a little higher than 'regular' Vertigo comics, and were lengthier (Prez is 56 pages long).

 

The advertisements will take you back to those early Nineties days:

  

'Prez' first appeared in 1973 in a brief, four-issue series about 'the first teen president.' The 1995 incarnation of the character necessarily involved a postmodern reboot, as the original, 'Archies' sensibility of Prez clearly was unsuitable for the Vertigo aesthetic. 

Ed Brubaker was a sensible choice for scripting the one-shot, but it's Eric Shanower who really makes this comic stand out. Ninety percent of Vertigo titles issued in the 1990s had crude, 'figurative' artwork, the intent being that Vertigo needed to distinguish itself from those puerile 'superhero' comics elsewhere on the shelving. But Shanower was the rare Vertigo artist with impressive draftsmanship skills, and his line art is ideal for a one-shot with lots of conventional scenes and characters (and lots of speech balloons and text boxes.....)

Prez also benefits from great colors from Robbie Bisch. Almost all Vertigo comics had 'dogshit' palettes, so Prez really shines here:

The premise of our tale is that it's 1998, and P.J. (his surname never is disclosed), a slacker in his early twenties, has been told by his mom that he is the progeny of a one-night stand in the early Seventies between his mom........and none other than Prez Rickard, himself !

 

P.J. has been through a bad patch lately, taking up drugs and a dissipated, self-destructive lifestyle. But so does every clinically depressed 1990s latchkey kid, right ?! 

 

Anyways, by chance, P.J. sees a tabloid with a story about Rickard, who is something of a mystery, having gone into seclusion following his term as President back in the Seventies. 

In the hopes that finding and connecting with good ole Dad will bring salvation, P.J. persuades his buds Jason and George to set out on a protracted road trip, from San Francisco to Willowfield, Kansas, where it seems Prez emerged to have a meal in at a local diner.

Of course, the journey proves to be a long one, with lots of revelations along the way. 

For his plot, Brubaker ably taps into the Nineties zeitgeist; P.J., Jason, and George wear Grunge fashion, for example. And in Kansas, our heroes encounter a young woman with a David Lynchian aura about her - very Nineties:

 

There are 'Americana' segments, one of which takes place in Rickard's hometown in Maine. Shanower shows us his illustration skills with a streetscape rendering; few Vertigo artists would go into this much care in their compositions:

As he journeys, Prez learns that his alleged father was, from a very young age, an idealist who labored to learn the ways and means of being a genuine Man of the People:

There is an encounter with an elderly hippy, a man who 'knew' (wink-wink) Prez Rickard. There is an imparting of knowledge to our naive P.J..........

 

This in turn leads to some 'Don Juan Matus' -style phantasmagorical experiences for P.J. 

I won't give any secrets away, but the denouement of Prez: Smells LIke Teen Spirit is something of a letdown; it takes a predictable route. Brubaker gets on a soapbox and pontificates about how humanism can overcome the innate cynicism of politics. In terms of plotting, the chance to do something offbeat is evaded. And, given that P.J. is an unlikable character (he is whiny, consumed with self-pity, and, at times, a real asshole) any personality turn-around seems pat and unconvincing.

In the end, Prez: Smells Like Teen Spirit is best approached as an excursion into Nineties nostalgia, one brought to life through Shanower's great artwork. If remembering the Nineties is your thing, then Prez is a rewarding cultural artifact.  

Zardoz portfolio Playboy March 1974

Zardoz portfolio

from Playboy, March 1974

Directed by John Boorman, Zardoz is one of the weirdest sci-fi movies of the 1970s. My review of the film's novelization is here.

 

To coincide with the film's February, 1974 release, the March issue of Playboy magazine featured a brief portfolio of stills and staged shots from the movie. I have to say that Charlotte Rampling looks amazing, while Sean Connery.....well......he looks rather foolish. But then again, things were different in the 1970s. And in my mind, it's a better portfolio than what you would get in those old issues of Starlog and Famous Monsters and Fangoria..........

 

Book Review: The Oxygen Barons by Gregory Feeley

Book Review: 'The Oxygen Barons' by Gregory Feeley 

2 / 5 Stars

‘The Oxygen Barons” (264 pp., Ace Books, July 1990; cover art by Dave Archer) is one of the last books in the Ace ‘Science Fiction Specials Series 3,’ which was edited by Terry Carr. Following Carr’s demise in 1987, Damon Knight took over the editing duties. It is unclear whether Carr or Knight was responsible for handling this novel.

‘Barons’ is set several centuries in the future, at which time the bodies of the inner Solar System have been colonized or exploited for raw materials, which are delivered via mass drivers from one outpost to another. 

The Moon has been terraformed and possesses a stable, breathable atmosphere and a network of rivers and large bodies of water. Its government is divided between two feuding factions, the Nearside and the Farside. These polities loosely are confederated with a variety of offworld corporations and trading blocs, who are competing for power among themselves. A particular bone of contention is the extravagant amount of oxygen needed to sustain the operation of the Moon. Some of the offworld corporations are lobbying to divert this oxygen for use in sustaining other colonies elsewhere in the system.

As the novel opens, a Nearside engineer named Galvanix is attempting to prevent an opposing faction from driving an asteroid into the Moon, a decidedly unfriendly action. He finds unexpected assistance in his task from Beryl Taggart, a cybernetically enhanced super-soldier. The first half of the book is one extended chase sequence, as Taggart and Galvanix find themselves stranded on the Farside, fleeing hostile authorities in an effort to retrieve an important database.

The novel then moves to a large space station orbiting the Earth, and from there, to the Earth itself and an entire floating city anchored off the coast of India, as the various entities referred to as the ‘Oxygen Barons’ engage a series of maneuvers designed to bring a hapless Galvanix under their control.

‘Barons’ does have its positives; every few pages another ‘gee whiz’ moment rears its head, and the physics of living and working in low-gravity environments accurately are represented. 

 

But overall the novel is a labored read, and needed better editing. Feeley’s prose is very dense and overly descriptive. For example, in one segment of the narrative, Galvanix has to ascend a narrow shaft embedded belowground in a lunar installation. Most authors would deal with this segment within several paragraphs, perhaps, but Feeley spends nearly two pages on the event, turning it into a sort of prolonged mini-epic. The novel is clogged with too many of these instances of over-writing.

The backstory involving the political and economic conflict surrounding the Moon never is adequately communicated to the reader. Indeed, whatever plot underlies the events in the narrative is so poorly outlined that I finished the book with no real idea of why Galvanix was such a pursued character in the first place. 

Things aren’t helped by the author’s tendency to use some of the more stilted dialogue I’ve encountered in a recent hard SF novel:

Beryl answered these questions with alacrity. “Cognitive modification is negligible, since it cannot be accomplished without jeopardizing sophic integrity. If your memories and expertise were readily separable from your sense of self, they would have been decanted alone.”

A steady diet of such awkward phrasing tends to wear on the reader, and makes ‘Barons’ a too-hard slog. I only can recommend this novel to those readers with a particular affectation for hard science fiction narratives.

Comics from Vertigo

1993-1998

 

I never was one for DC's 'Vertigo' comics imprint. 80% of the titles were pretentious crap and 90% had awful artwork and 'dogshit' quality coloring. But - perhaps in the spirit of nostalgia - recently I got four titles in the 'Vertigo Visions' lineup, all of these one-shots published in the interval from 1993-1998.

 

Dr. Occult, aka 'The Ghost Detective,' was first created in 1935 by Siegel and Shuster, and pops up every now and then in some DC titles.

 

Tomahawk is a colonial-era frontier drama, featuring Native Americans. Tim Truman had considerable success with illustrating the Joe Lansdale-written 'Jonah Hex' Vertigo titles of the 1990s. 

 

DC's long-running Z-list character Phantom Stranger gets the postmodern treatment in his own Vertigo Visions book. The plot has something to do with the residents of a down-at-heels nursing home. I'm not encouraged..........

 

Probably the best of the four titles is Prez: Smells Like Teen Spirit, from the well-regarded team of Ed Brubaker and Eric Shanower. This comic is another postmodern take, this time on the short-lived, 1973 teen comic 'Prez.' 

 

I'll likely do a post about the Prez title, but as for others, well.....I'll see if they are Worthy. But right now it's a warm early Spring day, and it's a good day to sit on the porch and read some comic books.......

Playboy February 1974

Playboy

February 1974

Well, it's February, 1974, and atop the singles charts is Barbara Streisand, with 'The Way We Were.' My main man Barry White and his Love Unlimited Orchestra are in second place, but 'Love's Theme' eventually would reach Number One. That single, with its chucka-whucka sound effects, prefigured the advent of disco. Rrrright-on, baby !

 

Sitting at position number 6 is one of the stranger chart entries in that chilly Winter month of February: 'The Americans,' by Byron MacGregor, a Canadian broadcaster. This single was a spoken-word tribute to - you guessed it - the Americans, to the accompaniment of 'America the Beautiful.' In the era of inflation, the 55 mile-an-hour speed limit on the interstate, the economic damage of the Arab oil embargo, spiritual and psychological anomie, and the increasing mistrust of the Nixon administration, MacGregor's single was a rebuke to 70s fatalism. Not as effective, in my opinion, as the Kink's 1979 LP track 'Catch Me Now I'm Falling,' which was a similar treatment of the U.S. in decline.
 

 

The February issue of Playboy is on the stands, and it's a good issue. Interestingly, while the traditional (dyed-) blonde is on the cover, elsewhere in the issue is a short portfolio of an 'ethnic' woman, a rarity in those days. The eponymous 'Butterfly Girl' is Ratna Assan, from Indonesia.

Looking at the contributors to this issue reveals a lineup of some of the nation's most prominent authors, writers, actresses, and intellectuals: 

 

Richard Rhodes (b. 1937) wrote the celebrated nonfiction books 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb,' 'Farm,' and 'Deadly Feasts.' Susan Sontag (1933 - 2004) was of course one of the major cultural critics of the postwar era, and John Kenneth Galbraith (1908 - 2006), one of the eminent economists of his time. Nat Henthoff (1925 - 2017) was a well-known author and columnist. 

 

Frank M. Robinson (1926 - 2014), who assists with music reviews at Playboy, would become a major author and screenwriter in the 1970s and 1980s with such works as 'The Glass Inferno,' 'The Prometheus Crisis,' and 'Blow Out.' Robinson also authored the nonfiction work 'Science Fiction of the 20th Twentieth Century An Illustrated History.'

 

Top-billing actress Candice Bergen (b. 1946) writes about her trip to China as a member of a motley assemblage of 'artists' and lefty agitators. 

 

And while white, male, urban Jewish men and women are heavily represented, also contributing to the issue are artist Ignacio Gomez and photographer David Chan; diversity is there, if you look for it.....!?

One thing that I always highlight in these vintage issues of Playboy and Penthouse is the high quality of their illustrations. Nowadays magazines and their graphics are dwindling as media enterprises, but 50+ years ago, editors commissioned outstanding pieces to accompany articles. 

For an article by Malcolm Braly about an upstate New York 'fat farm,' where - gasp - the overweight are treated with fasting (no semaglutide in 1974, folks), George Hirsch provides a brilliant painting that calls to mind the subdued, luminous renditions of George Tooker. 

For Sontag's story 'Baby,' designer Gordon Mortensen and photographer Bill Frantz concoct a creepy illustration that complements what is otherwise a too-lengthy, and utterly mediocre, piece by Sontag.

For Bergen's travelogue, Herb Davidson puts together a fine illustration.

The ongoing series, 'Playboy's History of Organized Crime,' sees Peter Palombi channel the sensibility of a pulp magazine cover to craft one of the more striking images in any Playboy of the decade. And there's also a suitably grim depiction, by George Roth ('after Edward Hopper') of a gangster meeting his end in the electric chair.

Sontag may have contributed a dud of a story, but at less than two pages, Henry Slesar's 'Nothing But Bad News' ably delivers black humor. It benefits from a fine illustration by Kinuko Craft.

The cartoons in Playboy could be cruel, especially in those years before the advent of Viagra:

The February interview subject is none other than Clint Eastwood, an actor who rarely gave interviews. He comes across as down-to-earth and unassuming.......carefully calibrated.

But let's not forget the nubile young women ! For February they are the 'Girls of Skiing,' and rather than digitally enhance the coloration of these scans of a five-decade-old magazine, I'll retain their rather faded coloration and provide that nostalgic, Kodachrome-style glow.......

 

And that's how we do Vintage, from those long-ago days of the mid-1970s............

Vintage paperback typefaces

'10 Typefaces we need to bring back for book covers'

 

 

Over at 'The Pulp Librarian' twitter site, an interesting little article on vintage paperback fonts / typefaces. 

 

I found myself wishing some of the profiled typefaces were available for use here at Blogger......