Pulp For The Soul.

In the years since Your Humble Narrator stopped collecting comic books graphic novels in earnest and now, a lot of changes have taken place, some good, some bad, some ridiculous, but mostly in the way of infrastructure; the general mechanics of how these individual imaginary universes work has more or less stayed the same. Characters come and go and come back, but not a whole lot of intrinsic change takes place; paper gets glossier, colors and inks graduate from analog to digital, and costumes more closely resemble mufti than disguises, but if not for cosmetic changes, it’s more or less the same as it was left.

That is, completely and insufferably silly.

Which doesn’t preclude foregoing the recent twenty-five-cent sale our local used bookstore had on their overstock:

It was sheer luck to capture the first twelve issues of Alpha Flight’s initial run. Unlike the majority of titles that were available at the time, Alpha Flight distinguished itself with stories that focused on a single character at a time; everyone appears as a team only twice, in the premiere issue and issue #12. This might have weakened any other title, if not for John Byrne’s superb pencilling and evocative storytelling that takes pains to relate the characters to their Canadian homeland.

Issue six, “Snowblind,” is a highlight in the first series with a unique presentation. When Snowbird faces off against the resurrected nature spirit Kolomaq, her foe conjures up a blizzard to place her at a disadvantage. The entire middle half of the issue is all but bereft of art; just panel after panel of white backdrop broken with speech and thought balloons and action phoneticals. Byrne even manages to insert the old joke about a polar bear in a snowstorm.

Another more recent series that only ran for a dozen issues was Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman. By treating Kal-El as a human with a very heavy crown on his head, and less like an alien god, Morrison is able to accomplish what a lot of reboots and retcons have failed at in the past; tell fresh, engaging stories with venerable, established characters and situations. Frank Quitely’s exquisite pencils (reminiscent of work from Enki Bilal and Moebius) emphasize the everyday imperfections possessed by everyone, but especially with the elements normally associated with the Man Of Steel: his drooping forelock, his red underpants, the sheer beefy bulk of his physique.

In order to reconcile a convoluted continuity and consolidate their bloated character roster, DC concocted the Crisis on Infinite Earths (almost always preceded in canon with “so-called”) for their 50th anniversary. While the merging of the multiverse would ultimately be undone in the following years, the Crisis itself spawned a bunch of reboots for almost every major player, effectively ending the Silver Age and ushering in the Modern Age. George Pérez, one of the co-writers for Crisis, dominated the scene for the better part of the 1980s, producing memorable covers for Wonder Woman’s second run, among several hundred others.

Not quite as ornate or lifelike, but equally skilled in distinct and consistent characterizations, is Walt Simonson, who wrote and drew a huge chunk of The Mighty Thor’s initial run. His blocky yet detailed style follows the basic ideals of forced perspective; the larger the picture needed, the more intricate it becomes, and vice versa; the smaller or more far away, the less distinct the features are.

(Fun fact: Walt Simonson is married to Louise Simonson, writer of countless New Mutants and X-Factor strories [Apocalypse was one of her better ideas] and creator of cult favorite Power Pack.)

For Thor #337, 338, and 339, they introduced one of the queerest characters in the Marvel rogues gallery, Beta Ray Bill. Bill (later Beta Ray Thor) was an alien cyborg who apparently had sufficient valor, intestinal fortitude, and upper body strength to hold aloft Thor’s hammer Mjolnir, which transmogrified him into a doppelgänger of the thunder god, with all the rights and powers therewith.

No matter how fervently any demographic slavers after their popular culture of choice, there always comes a statute of limitations when the cool factor runs out, which usually coincides at around the ten-year mark for the convenience of history. For some reason, the events of the 1970s form a middle ground from which more marginally acceptable materials spin away from, both into the past and the future. Therefore, the 1960s and 1980s were both hipper than the 1970s, but the 1950s and 1990s were superior to both, etc.

Why Marvel decided the 1970s was a ripe time for a World War II revival in comicdom remains a mystery, just like the resurgence of classic rock in the 1980s or the dominance of franchise reboots in the 2000s. Invaders #17 not only features Warrior Woman (an obvious homage to grindhouse favorite Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS) but a cameo by Der Fuehrer himself, which highlights one of the basic failings of comic book storytelling: the general unwillingness of writers to fully integrate the actions of their characters into the larger events of history. Superman fought in WWII as well, but closer examination of his actions reveals that his “service” was limited to more symbolic activities designed to boost morale and bolster the American fighting spirit; he never took part in any documented campaigns against Fortress Europe.

When you’ve been writing and drawing stories of radioactive freaks and alien vigilantes for fifty, sixty, seventy years, the make-believe alternate history you create can get a little out of control. Marvel realized that with their Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, but DC did the idea one better with their Who’s Who series. Marvel has always been the more left-brain-oriented of the major comic houses, and DC has always played more fast and loose with logic. Both encyclopedias featured wraparound cover art and CIA-esque dossiers on major and minor denizens, but Who’s Who mixed it up with original masthead title art instead of a standardized font and action shots instead of Michaelangelo-esque full-body poses of each character.

Maybe comic books graphic novels don’t fall into any of the major food groups of literature; novels, short stories, or poetry. Maybe they exist outside the expected territories, like comets or daywalking vampires or late-model sedans with government plates. Maybe also then they provide a different kind of cultural nutrition than their text-only forefathers or their celluloid and video contemporaries.

Or maybe they really are just funnybooks to distract us from the real world, if only for a few minutes at a time.

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In The Future, We Will All Be Assholes.

ALL EARTH CREATURES ARE COMPELLED TO DON JUMPSUITS UNDER PAIN OF FACE MELTING

HEM DEELY BOPPER CHARMS AND EMPLOYMENT OF STEPIN FETCHIT BOTS OPTIONAL

IN THE PRESENCE OF DASHING SPACE OFFICERS WOMEN SPONTANEOUSLY LOSE THE ABILITY TO STAND UPRIGHT

GET OFF MY PLANET YOU DAMN KIDS

O RLY

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When Jumpsuits Ruled The World.

Even hot snots like J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer started out as cold boogers like everyone else before they got dumb and lucky enough to get picked up at random by a publishing house willing to take a chance on an untested formula. But in the years before this post-postmodern age of the pulp author as media darling, writers of sci-fi and fantasy had to cut their teeth in the pages of periodicals before even being considered seriously for regular publication. And even once the stars aligned sufficiently to generate such circumstances, the results were often campy, cheesy, and pandering to the lowest common (and most likely to pay) denominator.

Still, it’s refreshing to know that the genre we know now matured so fruitfully from such humble beginnings.

Murray Leinster wrote stories between 1916 and 1969 and, as all decent renaissance men of the time were seemingly able to do, naturally transitioned first from mysteries to westerns, and then from there to science fiction.

Space Platform sports all the hallmarks of post-WWII can-do industrialism, it just gets the physics wrong. Of course we know now that it’s potentially more feasible to build a space station in orbit, so seeing it half-built and earthbound on the cover comes across as a little off. Plus, what are those two stevedores doing in the foreground, fighting or dancing? Why don’t you buy the poor guy a drink at least?

Space Tug is the companion to Space Platform, and the dozen years inbetween publication dates shows in the style of the art. While Space Platform’s Pocket cover could have been copied directly from a Soviet propaganda poster promoting the rewards of labor, Space Tug’s cover is a primary color nightmare. Just the segmented, piecey look of the astrodude’s jetpack and the lunar lander with a paint job that wouldn’t look out of place in the New York subway makes the whole landscape look more like a LEGO diorama than the Moon’s surface.

The stylistic elements used for the cover art for Operation: Outer Space almost look modern with their retro-futuristics. Space suits bulky enough to hold pressure, but not so utilitarian to go without Star Trek-esque ranking colors and pseudo-bondage silver constraints as accents. Glowing pocket fusion reactors (that might look familiar to Stargate SG-1 fans) hooked up to the impractically clunky whosiwhatsit the protagonist in red is fiddling with. The only dead giveaways are the needlenose rocket parked in the crater over yonder and the flying saucers raining hot death down on the poor dopes below.

Andre Norton was an ridiculously prolific writer, equally skilled with fantasy as with science fiction, producing stories and novels for almost 70 straight years. This lifelong achievement is only bettered by the fact that Andre Norton is the pen name of Alice Mary Norton. Not to put too fine a point on it, but as hard as it is for a woman to succeed in what is essentially a man’s world, it’s multiples more difficult in a niche, boy’s-club genre like science fiction.

Most of the covers published for Norton’s work in the 1950s conforms to the romantic, space-opera, function-follow-form look of the day. Plague Ship has dudes in floppy jumpsuits with raygun holsters and a rocket that looks like a tampon, The Last Planet features a cute-but-probably-psychopathic robot and more dudes in jumpsuits with raygun holsters, and even though the dude on the cover of The Stars Are Ours! is armed with a refreshing tonic for his recently-thawed cryo-date instead of a raygun, he is in a jumpsuit.

What did we miss here? Why didn’t the jumpsuit ever catch on as an Earthbound fad in the half-century since they started appearing on every asshole who wanted to ride a hot rod into space? No doubt the hassle of having to disrobe almost completely during visits to the lavatory had something to do with it. It’s only a matter of time before people get over their squickiness and accept the personal catheter as just another modern convenience. Then watch out for the new wave of pret-a-porter as jumpsuits fly off the racks.

Poul Anderson, another grand master who helped to shape the genre, also had the mixed fortune of writing during the golden age of science fiction and rising through the ranks. Problem is, you’d never know from some of the art that (dis)graced his early books that he was one of the greater steerers of the genre.

While the font used for Orbit Unlimited recalls the stencils used for old-timey war time cargo crates, the rest of the action on the cover suggests a more jerry-rigged operation, if you can even call it that. Are the dudes in space suits in trouble, other than the fact that they’re suspended in a vacuum with only thin tethers keeping them from spiraling away into the abyss? It almost looks like they’re recovering from a recent space-skiiing wipeout, or trying to build a pup tent in space, or, I dunno, fishing for space carp?

The annoyance continues with The Trouble Twisters. Not only is the cover tinted a lovely shade of jaundice, it supports the obnoxious faux- abstract style that has wrecked the impetus to read countless of presumably perfectly inoffensive books. There’s a recognizable sliver of a lunar surface at the bottom, the object hurtling along in the upper left is probably an asteroid, and the thing on the right is maybe an alien garbage scow or something. But what the frick is that monstrosity in the middle, some kind of schizophrenic Martian World Trade Center?

The Enemy Stars is the least objectionable of the bunch, with a pleasing combination of niche triggers bound to press a few fanboys’ buttons: a decently populated starfield, a looming cerulean planetoid, and a trio of futurenauts making their way doggedly across a presumably alien wasteland towards the serviceable technology clumped on the horizon.

But why are they nude?

…

Next time: the cheaper the cheese, the fancier the flight.

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Sex Smells Like A Library.

Despite the depressing fact that the audience for science fiction is predominantly male, there’s only so many readers you can capture with artwork featuring rockets, hulking aliens, and Martian palaces. While some more progressive publishers were using nudity to sell more books even as the 50s faded. most of the bigger houses didn’t jump on the bandwagon until after the Summer of Love, and even then it was overwhelmingly female, to appeal to the fringes of the genre’s fanboy base. Obscenity laws vary from community to community, so one cover’s peek-a-boo may have been tantamount to full frontal depending on which bookstore stocked them. In any case, the amount of flesh exposed and the eroticism exhibited was toyed with in countless different iterations, primarily to appeal to the differing turn-on thresholds of the audience, but also in a lesser sense to push the boundaries of modern art.

The Dreaming Earth has a lot of the sci-fi prerequisites; the pre-dusk blue of the backdrop, alien green highlights, lens-flare-sized circles-stars, a rouge planetoid, and spaceships that look like circumcised swizzle sticks. The only thing that’s out of place is the topless mannequin lording over the whole scene, and even that makes sense once you get a load of the teaser copy on the back cover: “A new breed of men and women – twenty-first century lotus eaters caught up in a mysterious euphoria which will ultimately threaten all life on this planet: the drug-induced world of ‘happy dreams.’”

Robert Heinlein managed to cover everything from colonization to existentialism and keep it all in the scope of legit science fiction. The odd segmented woman on the cover of Methuselah’s Children is already halfway to resembling a robot, but she’s still organic enough to take place in an Ouroboros triad of mother, daughter, and granddaughter, all complete with matching sets of hippie beads. Don’t overlook the silhouette of another huge bosom behind them all, the vagina-pink background, and the scattering of posies that mirror the shirt-buttom breasts of the family.

While One Million Tomorrows written about a immortal, virile man in an immortal, sterile future society, the cover art is about as erotic as a Mondrian painting. Even though it’s more abstract than the Heinlein cover, it still manages to portray a similar three-member family. (Squint and you can make out the superimposed image of an alien-looking fetus) We assume the figure on the left is female from the crude breasts, but what are we to make of the combined imagery of a heart (or maybe a breastplate) and a cross? (no coincidence that it’s over her crotch; a not-so-subtle insinuation of a chastity belt)

The piecemeal painting style for the cover of Tiltangle is nicely reminiscent of NASA’s conceptual art of the time, and the nudity of the frozen women is tastefully occluded, but it still does little to hide the fact that the dude in the pressure suit is still strolling through a museum of women in bondage. They may not be restrained by straps or ropes or chains, but they can’t move all the same, and they’re still on display for any wandering fanboy to come along and ogle them. Objectification’s the same almost everywhere you go.

A good example of “Satanic nudity,” the woman on the cover of The Curse Of Rathlaw, while striking the archetypal nude model pose still used today to accentuate all the “important” parts; legs spread, back arched, chest thrust out; she hovers over the seemingly oblivious ram-horned daemon, wields a cruel-looking blade, and even appears to be standing ankle-deep in the background’s dark territory. Despite her voguing, the nudity comes across as less exploitative than other covers and more alluring; additional care was taken to delineate surrounding body areas; her six-pack abs, the Todd McFarlane-like swoop of her hair, even her tan lines.

The cover for The Far-Out People is the kind of art that tries to use a level of way-out abstraction sufficient to muddle the delineation between clothed and nude, while at the same time exuding enough rough-hewn eroticism to generate some allure. The pinks and segments from the Heinlein cover are repurposed, used here to suggest a more human-like tone of the skin and softer muscle lines. And while the central female figure is clearly naked, the artist gets around the idea of full frontal nudity by giving her the modesty of a stringless necklace of luminescent baubles, a ploy used time and again to project the naughtiness of an unclothed body while strategically covering the naughtiest bits.

The art for Witch Queen Of Lochlann uses both color and shadow to suggest body lines; the female figure sports the usual pink skin, which darkens into red to define the downswing of her breasts. Even further south, the dark shadow cast onto her left thigh decays upwards into tiny little tendrils, giving the illusion of pubic hair peeking out into the murky light. Why she’s wielding a truncheon in the nude while the requisite buffed blonde dude has both a sword and pants might just be more subtle female suppression imagery; on the other hand, there are sharks flying around as well…

The Sleep Eaters is an oddity in science fiction book covers primarily because it eschews the usual blues and greens for shades of violet against a white void. A single red planet loiters in the corner, tiny eyeball-shaped flying saucers flit about, and the clouds form an evil-looking face in the upper left-hand corner. The nudity itself is rare and unique in that not only is the nude figure male instead of female, but he’s positioned so that his junk is facing the audience. Still, in adherence to unwritten rules about exposed genitalia, John’s left leg is bent just so to create enough shadow to obscure…a crotch smoother than a Ken doll’s?

Of this current bunch of thrift store scores, The Reassembled Man is the most misogynistic in both content and cover art. The back cover boasts a protagonist who is “stronger, healthier, and with a sexual appetite and promised lifespan greater than anyone else on earth.” The art shows fully nude women scrabbling up the length of an old man’s tree-trunk hand and fighting each other, presumably for dibs on the main character’s privates, in a weird, fetishistic twist on King of the Mountain. The art isn’t bad, but it does have the look of the kind of porn a Mad magazine staff artist might make in his spare time.

…

In all its vague and schizophrenic definitions and subgenres, science fiction often takes advantage of its reputation as substandard literature to explore avenues of creativity that aren’t always practical for mainstream novels. If writers can explore beyond universally accepted norms for technology, human societies, and the meadows of the mind, certainly sexuality in all its conceived and imagined forms is also fair game. The problem is recognizing that sex is not always connected with the exploitation of the human form, and that one porny book cover does not necessarily a sexy story make.

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Judge A Book.

Judge A Book.

There’s an unwritten rule when it comes to reggae records; the quality of the music is inversely proportional to the quality of the art on the dust jacket. The crappier the cover, the better the album is going to sound.

Turning that axiom sideways can be used as X-ray glasses on science fiction book covers. Although the returns are unlikely to be as black-and-white as the pencil and ink art for a piece of Peter Tosh vinyl, and certainly the subject of a sci-fi paperback’s front cover is just as certain to be at most incidentally related to the content of the book itself, there are some generalizations that can be gleaned from recurring themes and motifs that appear the most frequently in cover art.

Here are just a few that will pop out at you at the bookstore, presented in a completely subjective and arbitrary ascending order of quality:

• Circles/spheres: inter- and extraplanetary exploration, first contact, etc.

• Rockets/skylines: technology, progress, outer space manifest destiny, etc.
• Naked/half-naked people: subjugation of women, witchcraft, chemical sexual revolutions, etc.; (female) out-of-body experiences, telepresence, post-atomic savagery, etc.; (male) body possession, mass population uprising, etc. (both)
• Dudes with guns: zombie apocalypse, Allan Quatermain-esque buccaneering, underground resistance against alien overlords, etc.
• Abstract/avant-garde: telepathy, mind control, other psionic crap, etc.

And so on. Let’s take a look at some examples:

If you ignore the dumpy-looking assholenaut in his saggy-diaper pressure suit and bucket helmet, the backdrop for The Tomorrow People is pretty stunning. The oversized Venn diagram of intersecting planet boundaries, set against the foreboding mystery of an angry-volcano-colored starfield. Pity the synopsis sounds like the source material for Species 2: “Johnny didn’t know what it was that made Mars a death-trap…and he didn’t know that he’d brought it back with him!”

The stylized starburst of The Stars Are Too High almost immediately bring to mind the classic solar symbol, or perhaps an airborne explosion. Looking at the startled figure in the foreground, one can almost imagine the circle’s rays forming its own limbs and shambling Frankenstein’s-monster-style towards the Earth representative with alien menace. But, this one isn’t about an invasion or a supernova; the antagonists are apparently rogue scientists who build their own UFO from spare parts.

Despite being crowded with extraneous text and abstract leanings, the colors used for Fifth Planet are refreshing, a nice break from the dour earth tones of some sci-fi covers, especially those that deal with alien worlds. The starfield in the background is especially striking, if you can even call it a starfield; a closer look reveals a clever use of broad brushstrokes and Jackson Pollack twirlings. However, as the abstract motif suggests, the story is less about celestial exploration than it is about body snatching aliens.

These next three are all from collections, which are always a good resource for homogenized, blanket-themed art:

There’s a lot happening on the cover of Three Times Infinity: craggy black wasteland in the forefront, an intrepid silver-suited vanguard of cosmonauts bearing retro-futuristic standards, (or maybe golf clubs? “It’s a long par four to Olympus Mons…”) sleek rocket patrols darting overhead, a spooky orange haze occluding weird lights in the distance, and a domed alien metropolis, looking for all the world like a Martian Crystal Cathedral.

New Tales of Space and Time is no less dramatic, if somewhat fanciful: Skirting the broken edge of a dead moon, a Wernher von Braun-influenced rocket, firing on all cylinders, makes for a Gordian knot of a solar system, complete with conveniently delineated orbital lines.

The diorama laid out for Star Science Fiction Stories #3 is a little staid in comparison, but it still manages to feature some key icons in the realm of idealistic futurism: naked human, (or possibly Gort?) modern art stolen from The Martian Chronicles, some weird alien line drawings, (or maybe a Burning Man for ants?) the engorged black length of a squatting rocket, and glaring over it all, the baleful, bloodshot, boogity-boogity eye of Mars, complete with canals tracing its surface.

The phallus of the classical rocket ship is a strong indicator of quality in pulp science fiction; at least from a forward-thinking, progressive, final frontier state of mind, even if the science conjured up by the writers never really jived with reality. All three of these collections were published in the 1950s, which was a red-hot decade of burgeoning rocket technology for both the United States and the Soviet Union. The image of the rocket naturally became a point of national pride for both sides, representing innovation, tenacity, and fearlessness in the face of the greatest unknown, the borders beyond our atmosphere.

Barring the fact that they were essentially giant steel erections, they were also equivalent to the pioneers, cowboys, and horsemen of the previous generation’s Zane Grey and other beloved western writers; boldly going into undiscovered country.

Finally, a few comparisons of style within reprints:

The 1970 printing of 1932’s When Worlds Collide features an excellent juxtaposing of three hallmarks of science fiction cover art: circles, rockets, and naked bodies. The threatening fuschia of the encroaching rouge planets is also reflected in the flames below, presumably those of a ruined Earth. The rocket is colored gold, to represent salvation, the means of escape for the chosen few; while the nude masses of those left behind claw desperately for an aperture in the steel skin. Two out of three isn’t bad; it’s doubtful there’s any human sacrifice or crazy alien sex in the pages of this early classic.

The redesigned 1973 cover (also for the 1933 sequel) by Stan Zagorski recalls a period of time during that unfortunately stigmatized decade where science fiction art, which was never really taken seriously until Star Wars, became downright childlike and goofy, reminiscent of similar reworkings of Mark Twain and other American folk authors, their tales transposed into freaky, jerky animations.

Still, the imagery remains powerful. The planet is cleaved in two by cosmic chain lightning, gushing bodily fluids and emanating death-knell gases, while the hapless survivors careen away under impulse power. The same images are recycled to an eerie effect for After Worlds Collide: bulbous rockets scout the surface of the Earthlings new home, the alien city is silhouetted in a ruby mist, and the Earth’s corpse is seen tumbling through the sky.

Maybe you can’t judge a book by its cover, but if the art convinces you into reading, it’s obviously done its job.

Next time: primary colors, dudes with guns, and more nekkidness.

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Pulp Addiction.

Last week’s thrift store scores:

The synopsis for Station In Space reads more like the mission statement of a Web 2.0 company: “”Outer space used to be a place for dreams – now it is a place for plans. It vitally concerns human beings.” The cover art is nifty, though; especially how the timeline of mankind is laid out aircraft-recognition-card-style, from caveman to Renaissance astronomer to spaceman.

The cover for Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! (infamously adapted into Soylent Green) looks more like a child’s interpretation of the Galactic Senate from the Star Wars prequels, with a couple of dudes from the Carousel scene from Logan’s Run getting vaporized in the forefront.

Not only does the cover of The Flying Saucer Gambit practice good truth in advertising by placing a big-ass flying saucer in the middle of the cover, but it attempts to transplant the spirit of old-timey sci-fi serials on other fronts. The series name gets a number and headlines above the title; the protagonist, Hannibal Fortune, suffers from both an unlikely name and the two-fisted reputation that goes along with it; and best (or perhaps worst) of all, it’s a time travel story that takes place mostly in 1966.

H.G. Wells lived in a time when hot-air balloons were high tech, so it makes sense that he replicated it as the primary mode of travel in 1901’s First Men In The Moon. The green tint of the cover is both appropriate and typical; when the sun rises on Wells’ lunar surface, the atmosphere melts and all manner of alien greenery grow wild. On the other hand, the most common color used for science fiction novels is green, anyway.

With the haphazardly masculine typeface of the title, along with the hero’s bomber jacket and M1 Garand rifle, loping away from cake-batter-like flames, Doomsday, 1999 pushes a lot of blood n’ guts buttons. Unfortunately, we’re also treated to this on the frontispiece:

Oh, great. More women under forcefields with their hands nailed to their foreheads, pining for their rescuing atomic-age commandos. Some things never change.

Despite its vague description, (“the story of a tremendous race for supremacy above the earth”) the cover art for Dark Dominion is both dark and daunting, reminiscent of scenes from George Pal’s Destination Moon; the rocket’s huge footpads, the glowing community of engineers busying themselves with the undercarriage, and the come-hither purple and black starfield in the background.

Plus:

These two I actually intend to read. Burroughs’ Mars cycle has always been bubbling on the back burner of my brain, but it took this recent spree into collecting compounded with an article in an old issue of Outré magazine to actually metabolize the thought into an action. The original plan was to ferret out some kind of omnibus collection of all eleven books in an effort to save time, but this notion turned out to be ill-thought. Burroughs apparently was fairly progressive with the series, buttoning up John Carter’s adventures in the first three volumes, then dedicating later stories to supporting characters and innovative storytelling. So, unless you source your paperbacks from a discount warehouse or used bookshop, it may not be financially prudent to invest in the entire series of individual volumes if they constituted a contiguous narrative. But, since the core stories are housed in the initial trilogy, the configuration makes for a nice “try before you buy-in” setup.

My brother, who is a bigger sci-fi and fantasy phile than Your Humble Narrator, was a big fan of the Horseclans books back in the day.* At the time, I confused author and creator Robert Adams with Robert E. Howard, who created Conan the Barbarian in 1932, and for a while I assumed the Horseclans stories to be in the same pulpy vein. Adams’ books are apparently nothing of the sort, being more of a sci-fi-fantasy hybrid set in a post-apocalyptic Road Warrior world, with horses replacing cars and the body-stealing Witchmen instead of Lord Humungus’ mohawked marauders.

A day on the cowch with a book is time well wasted.

*”The day” being the mid-to-late 1980s, or thereabouts.

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The Spice Must Flow.

In light of yesterday’s post, and also because no one demanded it, a transcription from 1998 or so on a related subject:

Despite having the most exclusive girls club in the planet, you can give the Spice Girls props for being moderately egalitarian as well. Condensed into five slightly chubby Cockneys, you get a telescoped gamut of individuals: Posh, the poor little rich girl; Ginger, the fierce feminist and 60s throwback; Baby, the I-don’t-wanna-grow-up pre-rebellion teenager and jailbait fetish; Sporty, the tomboy who played rugby and never wears a dress; and Scary, the paramilitary, quasi-lesbian, cross-pollinated “token black” who stands out more by making the other four look even whiter than British standards.

But this interpretation only crosses class lines. Ethnically, the Whitebread Girls seem pretty homogenized. No Asians, (Posh is passable in a pinch) no Latinas, (Scary is a mulatto) etc. But, seeing that world history is written in milk, this is hardly surprising and barely merits discussion. You might as well ask where Down’s Syndrome Spice is, or White Trash Spice, or Compton Spice, or Quadriplegic Spice, or Y Chromosome Spice.

Maybe it’s preferable (or just less offensive) to associate the individual Spice Girls with less obvious attributes, things that transcend such fleeting issues as race or social status. I’m reminded of an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine where Dr. Bashir falls into a coma and retreats deep into his own mind. There he finds different aspects of his personality represented by other members of the station crew: Major Kira was his aggression, Odo his paranoia, Chief O’Brien is doubt, etc. This template could also be used for the Spice Girls: for example, Scary is the outspoken loudmouth, our aggression, our need to fight and be defensive. You could compare Scary to the id, the unconscious source of instinctual needs, of primal urges. She incorporates some elements from the reptilian brain concept of instant gratification; being so outspoken, as if she has to immediately say whatever is on her mind, lest it be lost in the ether. We become Scary when we release our inhibitions, when we drink too much and get belligerent. Scary is who makes you honk your car horn in gridlock.

Contrary to Scary Spice is Baby Spice. Immature and sweet, innocent and doe-eyed, Baby is our introspection, our suppressed infantism, our need to turn away and run, our ability for flight in the face of a fight. Baby is our inner desire to be vulnerable, to be taken care of.

Balancing Baby’s prepubescent eroticism is Ginger Spice’s blatant sexualization. Carrot-topped and vinyl-frocked, top heavy and long leggy, Ginger’s alternate nickname is Sexy Spice, logically because she’s the typical living embodiment of your sex drive, whether you’re male or female. She presents the female form in its extreme: shocking tresses, puffy lips, stems that go on for miles, a bubble-butt, and a barely restrained balcony you could do Shakespeare off of. This uninhibited form also reflects Carl Jung’s “anima” archetype, an individual’s true inner self, as compared to the self we project externally. Ginger is the “real me” we all brag about being: a pure, undiluted feminine character. But despite all her physical characteristics, Ginger is probably the most abstract of the personality analogues.

Trying to fully personify sex and everything associated with it is a task that poets and pornographers alike have attempted in the past, with varying degrees of success and failure. Because along with sex, you have lust and jealously and infidelity and The Romeo And Juliet Effect wherein love destroys all parties involved, (“See what a scourge is laid upon your hate, that Heaven finds means to kill your joys with love.”) and thousands of other elements that make up this feeling, this urge, this itch we cannot help but scratch, this feral and spiritual activity that opens our pores and orifices, that turns our skin to water and makes our brains bloom like tulips. Ginger, being the eldest Spice Girl, also represents our maturity, our adulthood, and the completion of sexual transformation, from girl to woman. Ginger is the antithesis of Baby; Baby is all touchy-feely, Ginger is spiritual and attuned.

Of the two remaining wild cards, Sporty Spice is the most understood, standing out from the rest by her sheer ordinariness. She is the outward personality appearance, the mind’s center of gravity, a default factory setting. She is also your psyche’s ego, the mediator between instinct and reality. Where Scary (the id) and Baby (the superego) join to clash, Sporty intervenes and tempers the inner conflict with logic and reason. By being so plain in appearance, Sporty sets herself as a tabula rasa, the “blank slate” upon which the basest of emotions and behavior patterns are inscribed during our formative years. As a tomboy, she doesn’t fall into any “girly” archetype, and her sweatsuit wardrobe exudes a somewhat dykey air. This is the masculinity mixed in with every dose of femininity, her yang to Posh’s yin. And as yang, the masculine active principle exhibited in strength, is it any wonder than Sporty sports the most powerful voice in the group?

Yin to Sporty’s yang is Posh: dark-haired, dark-eyed, almost always clad in black, she is the Spice Girl who never smiles, (“Gives me dimples,” she claims) whose voice is barely heard or recognized on the records, who just seems to melt in and out of sight on stage and on video. To call Posh “evil” may be presumptuous, but the concept is not unjust. Post more closely resembles Jung’s “shadow” archetype, the part of our personality still rooted in bestiality, the aspects of the mind that remain closed and unexplored, the realm where our darkest and most primal feelings originate. No, Posh is not evil in the standard sense, she’s more like a fallen angel, landed on Earth to redeem herself, haunted by forgotten past deeds.

So, to recap:

• Scary Spice = id

• Baby Spice = superego
• Ginger Spice = anima
• Sporty Spice = ego/yang
• Posh Spice = shadow/yin

IT MAKES SENSE SIR INDEED OMG CHEVRON SEVEN WILL NOT LOCK WTF

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Dork Territory.

If the internet, the world communications net, and other burgeoning new technologies are supposedly all part a great leveling system where everyone’s voice is more or less equally heard and valid, how does one explain the war of elitism between the nerd, geek, and dork elite and the otherwise everyday civilians who would supplant the assumptive culture of the former groups?

Let’s try to clear something up first; or rather, three things: the so-called “geek hierarchy” mentioned above.

A geek has been defined variously as “a person intensely interested in a particular field or hobby,” “a peculiar or otherwise odd person perceived to be overly obsessed with one or more things,” and “a person who is interested in things that others are not interested in,” among other dissimilar descriptions. While the wording and the meaning changes from one person’s perspective to another, the underlying theme is that of a focus on a certain field, whether it be computer science, role-playing games, and anime, or global weather patterns, UFO conspiracies, and single malt whiskies.

A nerd can be known as “a person who passionately pursues intellectual activities, esoteric knowledge, or other obscure interests,” A person who, although having good technical or scientific skills, is introspective and generally introverted,” and “a person who gains pleasure from amassing large quantities of knowledge.” Overall, a nerd is an intellectual, collecting knowledge for the sake of knowledge.

The problem with these first two is that because their markers are so similar and shared, their use as labels can be maddeningly interchangeable. Geeks can be studiously obsessive, while nerds can be obsessively studious; both classes pursue their interests doggedly and passionately. Because of this overlap, it’s possible for someone who claims to be a geek to also qualify for nerd status, and vice versa.

All this is fine and good, but once we get to the third leg of the triumvirate, a disparity is revealed. A majority of dork characteristics are overwhelmingly negative: “a quirky, silly and/or stupid, socially inept person,” “a person who lacks friends and the social skills to properly communicate with others,” “a person who is noted for their quirky personality and behavior rather than their interests or IQ,” etc. The distinction for a dork is primarily that of behavior, not necessarily the intellect of the nerd or the obsessiveness of the geek.

Can we apply these roles to the traditional psychic apparatus? Let’s try it!

• The id makes up the mind’s basic drives, focusing on selfishness, instant self-gratification, and the pleasure principle. The id is also the blood enemy of the superego.

• The ego is the center of realistic ideals, seeking to mitigate the id’s wants with practical, non-destructive results.
• The superego makes up the conscience concerned with order, structure, and ideals, which makes it naturally opposed to the id.

So if the id is all “wantwantwant,” who in the geek hierarchy would that be? The nerd, always hungry for knowledge? The two wouldn’t seem to dovetail, what with the id’s carnal desires and the nerd’s measured gathering of facts. Archaically speaking, the geek is closer in relation to the id, if one uses the reference of a geek as a carnival performer who bites the heads off small animals. Realistically speaking, the focus and obsessiveness of the geek does indeed parallel the id’s need for satisfaction, even if the geek’s concentration is on niche subjects.

It makes sense then, and at the same time no sense, for the superego to be the nerd’s analogue. Forgetting the feud between the id and superego for a moment, we can recall the similarities between the nerd and the geek, both pursuing their own fields of knowledge; except we can call the nerd’s passion a “thirst” while the geek is more likely to “lust” after a subject.

That leaves the dork. A dork is a whale penis. No help there. But if the ego is the Concordant Opposition of the subconscious, the true neutral in the party, the go-between for transforming the harebrained idea into a business plan, then that more or less fits the dork as well.

Anyway, the point is that these terms – geek, nerd, dork – are simultaneously badges of honor and scarlet letters. And beyond their dictionary definitions, can be applied according to an arbitrary and universally disputed set of variables. If someone is smart enough to fix a computer, does that make them a geek or a nerd? If someone spends their time playing D&D solo adventures, are they a dork or a geek? If someone has both the mental capacity to memorize a large portion of Edgar Allen Poe’s poetry and the willingness to do so for no other reason other than to do so, are they a nerd or a dork?

It’s a tangle. But on the other hand, five fingers: it doesn’t have to be a tangle. There doesn’t have to be any inherent value placed upon geek culture or nerd society or the dork underground because the strata of content that comprises these lifestyles still belong to the rest of the world, just in markedly diminished markets. The moment a subculture’s value reaches a level of mass that requires it to take on the elements of a possession, it becomes less of a grouping of cultural items and more of a commodity.

That is to say, if you can sell water in a bottle, you can sell a lifestyle that is, by definition, ostracizing.

And there’s enough insular behavior in the world already.

Related: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

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The Cranky Gourmand’s Round.

An article from the Wall Street Journal’s drink columnist appeared yesterday, heralding the apparent meteoric fall of vodka from the approving regard of the bar-slumming. pinky-flapping, hipster-lush community of the twenty-first century. The first thing that went through Your Humble Narrator’s ample, heaving, and not entirely unattractive gray matter upon glossing over this tawdry piece of yellow, reactionary, muckracking journalism was, “The Wall Street Journal has a drink columnist!?”

The second airborne notion to wing its way into Your Humble Narrator’s excruciatingly clean ear canal and skim across the shimmering lakes of the superior sagittal sinus to light upon the brain’s bloody CPU was, “A vodka gimlet sounds really good right about now.”

I’m not a serious drinker. Which is not to say I don’t take drinking seriously, because I really don’t, at least not in the sense that I’m a cocktail Nazi, i.e. martinis should be made with gin and not vodka, margaritas should be made with lime juice and not sweet-and-sour mix, cuba libres should be made with Mexican Coke, etc. That is to say, I’m not a serious, fussy, foodie-style drinker, but I’m also not a flighty, idiot-toungued, I’ll-have-what-she’s-having kind of drinker. Truth be told, I’m not much of a drinker at all.

For the most part this is because I spend the majority of my waking hours alone, (as well as the unconscious ones) and I adhere to a strict principle that drinking alone is lame. It’s one of the few tenets of solitude that’s kept things on the straight and narrow for a while now, and it’s also bled over into a learned appreciation of infrequent, pleasurable things. This is why I rarely drink, and even then in mixed company, and even then, it’s usually not just a beer, because even the most rustic of microbrews still tastes like pee waiting to happen.

My brother introduced me to the vodka gimlet a while ago, and it soon endeared itself to me as a stealthy alternative to Pine-Sol-flavored gin & tonics and grody martinis. However, like all mixed drinks with three or fewer notes, it can be a little fussy to make, and that’s where inferior iterations start to creep in.

A vodka gimlet at its simplest is vodka shaken with lime juice, but the weird twist is that, like the martini, the gimlet’s earliest incarnations were made with gin, which is not surprising, seeing as vodka didn’t become readily available outside of Europe until the 1950s. Whatever the top note spirit is is as unimportant as which to use in a martini, or whether the vodka should be Polish or Russian, or whether the whole mess should be stirred and not shaken out of fear of “bruising” the gin, at least in Your Humble Narrator’s eyes, because Your Humble Narrator doesn’t think much of martinis anyway and maybe the world would be a different wasteland of pop culture if Ian Fleming had instructed his soon-to-be-infamous protagonist to order a sidecar or a daiquirí or an Irish coffee or something instead of three ounces of watery rotgut that’s spent the better part of half a century riding the coattails of an imaginary reputation.

Then again, maybe I just haven’t met the right kind of gin.

Anyway, the point of contention for me with the gimlet is not the spirit, but where the lime comes from:

One of these has lime juice; the other contains nitroglycerine. Choose carefully.

Like all classic cocktails, the original recipe for the gimlet is lost to history, but it come about recently enough to require barkeeps to stock lime cordial as a middle note, and the most notable of lime cordials is Rose’s. The trouble is that while Rose’s may have originally been preserved and sweetened with sugar syrup, these days it’s fortified with our old nemesis high fructose corn syrup.

What to do? Get off your bum and make your own lime cordial, that’s what; or at least disassemble it into its individual components. Some barkeeps maintain the adage that Rose’s is the ingredient responsible for creating the drink in the first place, and stick to it out of tradition. The problem with that, other than dealing with a freaky liquid GMO, is that Rose’s, being a conglomerate product, locks the home barkeep into using everything it offers. I enjoy sweet drinks just as much as the next barfly, but I also like to have a bit of flexibility and an option to explore drinks with similar ingredients but different flavors, like a gimlet that maintains its citrus snap but isn’t so sweet it coats the tongue:

Yummy. Prevents scurvy, too.

Fill an old-fashioned glass with ice. If you have a shaker, fill that too, then add two ounces of vodka and the juice of one lime. Shake gently, strain into the glass, and then…wait. This is the secret to enjoying a gimlet; letting it sit for a few minutes to allow the ice to melt a bit and dilute the mixture to mellow it out. Vodka is a pretty neutral-tasting spirit, (the word itself is a Russian diminutive of “water”) but the lime juice and water do something to wake up its more secret notes, almost in the same way a gin & tonic that’s been sitting around for a while starts to taste like Fresca.

When I drink, it’s usually at a special time and/or place, so the drink I imbibe needs to be equally special, if only to help the whole vibe of the event sync up properly; a mint julep at a summer party, a shot of whiskey to toast an absent friend, a decent Gewürztraminer over a candle. Drinking is more than just a byproduct of socializing, it’s a ritual of bonding and unification; when we toast each other, our glasses touch and we are briefly sharing the same vessel, something the ancient Greeks would practice at their symposium, from which would sprout all manner of participatory conversation.

So there is an end product to drinking other than calling Fred on the big white phone.

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We Read With Our Eyes.

[i.]

A few more examples of interestingly-designed pulp fiction cover art:

In addition to an absurdly excellent title, This World Is Taboo features the classic juxtaposition of a moonlike planetoid’s gently curving hip set against the idealistically dense starfield that was prevalent in the 50s and 60s. (You can see carryover influences everywhere, from Universal’s pre-conglomerate television logo to Disney’s hackneyed but stylized The Black Hole) The image is graded, as most sci-fi is, pulp or otherwise, by the number of spaceships it manages to cram into the frame, like a zero-gravity used car lot.

Burroughs’ Land Of Terror has cover art by fantasy master Frank Frazetta, and while the colors aren’t very dynamic, the composition of the picture’s individual elements is. From the forefront where the impossibly-chiseled young savage couple stand, there exist clearly delineated layers, each moving a little farther into the distance, past the grinning dinos and bored mammoths and horny sabretooths, until we hit the brick wall of the impassible mountain range choked in underground mist. The effect is decidedly three-dimensional.

The Long Loud Silence presents a dichotomy; the ragged, burned, desperate survivors of an atomic blast decked out in their Sunday rags, and the ramrod stiff, silver-skeined, advance guard of futuristic recovery efforts. The protagonist in the book is a hapless sap who sleeps through the holocaust, and the rad-suit jacketed heavy with the sloth-like mitts and crowd-pleasing rifle with fine walnut grain finish is no doubt a representative of the reactionary government’s attempt to clean up their own mess. Notice how the goliath is shrouded in fire, amplifying his menace.

If it wasn’t for the ridiculous chauvinism of the back cover’s blurb, (“One man, Zachary Whaleman, a blond giant of incredible strength and intelligence, holds the balance of power!”) the sheer cool beauty of The Guns Of Terra 10’s blues would make it a complete package. Even as recently as 1970, flying saucers still loomed overhead, robots were still just Vegematics on stilts, and female characters still wore embarrassingly impractical environmental gear. But above our action-poised heroes and behind the pie pan-UFO is spread out the classic starfield, streaked with cerulean and speckled with paint-splatter clusters of light.

Speaking of robots, the scene portrayed on the cover of It Was The Day Of The Robot brings to mind past artists’ impressions of H. G. Wells’ Martian tripods from War Of The Worlds as they rolled over New Jersey, ignoring the efforts of army and militia alike. And even though over six decade separate Wells and the paperback on the far right, one would like to think that in that time, 20th century creative minds would have been able to come up with something at least as equally elegant and original as Wells’ insectoid invaders, instead of just the de rigeur coffee can on legs.

Oh well.

[ii.]

A few divergent covers for Jack Vance books:

Vance is one of my favorite sci-fi and fantasy authors, if only because we was able to write both seemingly disparate genres equally well, and apparently with both hands, he was so copious in his output. Despite this, he never really emerged out from the shadow of sleepy cultism, never achieved the standard-bearer reputatation of Bradbury or Heinlein, the genre-smashing notoriety of Vonnegut or Dick, or the gravitas of elder statesmen like Tolkien or Herbert.

The Dying Earth is Vance’s magnum opus, but the Australian edition at the far left looks like it belongs on the cover of the novelization of Honey, I Shrunk The Kids; “In a world ruled by man-eating dandelions…” The Eyes Of The Overworld, in contrast, pretty much sums up Vance’s style in a tight visual: reasonably fanciful architecture set against a bleak wasteland. Just enough dystopian fantasy to keep the image from bleeding over into La Planète Sauvage territory.

Not quite sure what to make of Trullion: Alastor 2262 on the far right; the representatives from an alien flowerbed seem legit enough from a sci-fi point of view, but it’s hard to focus when all you want to do is blurt, “HEY LADY YOU FORGOT YOUR PANTS”

Oh well.

[iii.]

And finally, a bonus:

Frontispiece art from the 1981 printing of the Dungeons & Dragons Expert rulebook, drawn by Bill Willingham, who did countless pieces for TSR before creating the Elementals comic in the 80s, the Fables series, and numerous one-off stories inbetween. (not to mention the odd bit of porn.)

Oh well.

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