Month: June 2019

Hugo Category: Best Art Book

~ stevejwright ~ 6 Comments

The Dublin WorldCon committee has used its discretion to add a one-off Hugo category this year.  It’s a good idea in principle, but I kind of hope it doesn’t catch on….

Art books do turn up, from time to time, in the “Best Related Work” category, or sometimes as cited qualifying material for Best (X) Artist nominees.  It’s not unreasonable to make them a separate category, I guess, but it does make trouble for those of us who like to read and review – we’re talking about big coffee-table books, here, with high production values, low print runs, and low profit margins.  They’re books which are meant to be seen and appreciated as books; even the best-appointed electronic reader won’t really do them justice.  So if you’re really going to give a thorough appreciation of these things… well, if it became a regular Hugo category, I’d be desperately short of coffee tables after the first couple of years.  (Then, too, if one shares one’s living space, the person or person one shares with… may or may not appreciate the delivery of paving-stone-sized slabs of SF artwork.)

Taking a look at this year’s offerings – well, the Hugo voters’ packet contains partial content (the images, really) from three of the six, and the full text and images from a fourth, which last was something I really didn’t expect.  I bought one of the remaining two myself… but the last one, Julie Dillon’s Daydreamer’s Journey, is a self-published job funded by a Kickstarter project and put together using indie tools, and the ultimate result was, I figured I could just about afford the book, but then I looked at the cost of overseas shipping, and my wallet instinctively snapped shut.  Pity, really.  Julie Dillon is a familiar name from recent Pro Artist final lists, and a book of her artwork (with accompanying descriptions of her creative process for each piece) would be a very nice thing to have.  The Kickstarter makes it look very enticing indeed.

The one I did buy was Spectrum 25: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art, and very nice it is too; a handsomely produced soft-bound book absolutely chock full of recent awards finalists.  Even getting a few representative samples together for a contribution to the voters’ packet would have been a permissions and rights nightmare, so I’m not surprised that didn’t happen.  Anyway, it’s a fine, if somewhat eclectic, collection of modern SFF artwork.  It’s nice to have, I don’t regret it… if this became a regular category, though, and future volumes got nominated, I’d start having shelf space issues no later than Spectrum 30, I fear.

Turning to the voters’ packet… we have one that I’m inclined to discount, not because it’s a bad book or anything… but I’m not quite sure it’s an art book.  The packet contains a lot of illustrations from the Bodleian Library’s Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth, but they rather suggest it’s a book about, well, Tolkien, rather than Tolkien’s art or art inspired by Tolkien.  So, the illustrations include pictures of Tolkien, pictures of people he knew, pictures of places he’d been… facsimiles of letters (including a typewritten fan letter from Terry Pratchett)… doodles by Tolkien on bits of old newspapers…. I do admire Tolkien, I honestly do, but when I look at a picture of a newspaper where he’s drawn some Elvish letters after filling in the crossword, I do honestly wonder how much academic meat is left on his bones to pick.  The infamous Book of Lost Laundry Lists can’t be far away, at this point.  Anyway, based on what I see here, I’m inclined to think that Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth is a lovely coffee-table Tolkien book, rather than a lovely coffee-table art book.  If you see what I mean.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse – The Art of the Movie, though, is pretty clearly what it says it is.  Lots of concept art for characters and settings; designs for the iconic character – and, of course, poses for what must be Marvel’s most acrobatic icon.  The artwork, as delivered in the packet, looks great, and I’m sure the actual book must be a very nice thing  to have.  The movie was a huge amount of fun, and I think making it must also have been fun – it seems to show in the sketches and things, anyway.

The last “incomplete” in the packet is Charles Vess’s illustrations for The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition.  Charles Vess is a name I started noticing when I was reading comics books back in the early Eighties, and even then I noted him down under the heading “comics book artists who can actually draw”.  His rather ethereal style makes him exactly the sort of person I’d choose to illustrate something like Earthsea… and, in fact, the illustrations here are simple and beautiful.  (And his version of Ged is actually, y’know, non-Caucasian.  Doesn’t look like Shawn Ashmore at all.)  Of all the art books I don’t have and can’t find space for, this is probably the one I want the most.

Then there’s the one complete book in the voters’ packet, and a fine act of generosity it is to give this away: Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana: A Visual History is a fun-packed romp through the history of D&D, as shown in its associated artwork, and it’s more entertaining than it has any right to be.  I suppose I’m biased by the sheer nostalgia of it all (my 1st edition AD&D books, much battered by many years of use and abuse, are about eight feet from me as I sit here typing now), but I read through the whole thing with a smile on my face.  Again, it’s one I’d dearly love to have in physical form, to hold in my hands and leaf through.  But I’m all out of coffee tables, damn it.

Retro Hugo Category: Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)

~ stevejwright ~ 3 Comments

I’ll begin with a bit of an ongoing gripe: once again, the actual home of short-form dramas in the 1940s – the ubiquitous and very popular radio shows – has been ignored in favour of cartoon shorts and movies which aren’t quite long enough to reach the Long Form cut-off point.  Harrumph, say I, harrumph.

It doesn’t help that the two cartoon shorts here are, well, not ones I would have chosen…. My earlier post about the Retro BDP (Long Form) category drew this well-reasoned response from Cora Buhlert; I can certainly appreciate her point of view.  Münchhausen, although made with German government support (to boost the morale of the German people in wartime) is explicitly not a propaganda film – and it stands in stark contrast to a lot of very crude Allied propaganda that we’ve had to wade through, and one of the worst is in our current category.  It’s possible, of course, for something to be a work of art even if it is also propaganda… I don’t think this applies to “Der Fuehrer’s Face”, which is one of the most cringe-inducingly crude and obvious propaganda pieces I’ve ever had to sit through.  The companion, “Super-Rabbit” (Bugs Bunny gets superpowers, but what really makes him a Super-Rabbit is when he enlists in the Marines), is only marginally more tolerable…. I don’t think these cartoon shorts are really SFF anyway (I always feel they’re in a genre of their own, with its own logic and its own rules), and I certainly can’t see any other merit in these ones.  (Clearly I am wrong, as “Der Fuehrer’s Face” won an Academy Award… except I think that just cheapens the Academy Awards, which I’ve never thought were a wholly reliable indicator of quality anyway.)

Moving on, to the four short film features…. I’m a bit dubious about The Seventh Victim, a dreamy Val Lewton-produced horror movie involving a young woman searching for her sister, who’s vanished into the clutches of a satanic cult.  It’s a horror movie, yes, but I’m not sure there’s any SF or fantastical content – the horror seems to be strictly psychological, although it’s hard to tell, sometimes, because the film is notoriously badly edited, to the point of near incoherence.  Atmospheric, I’ll grant you; atmosphere is a virtue.  Poor structure, on the other hand, isn’t.

Another Val Lewton offering, I Walked with a Zombie is, at least, borderline supernatural, and popularizes a lot of future zombie lore – that is, your actual Caribbean folklore zombies, rather than the swarming forces of mass destruction more popular these days.  Directed by Jacques Tourneur, it’s memorably spooky and steeped in local mythology (including the destructive legacy of the slave trade).

The Ape-Man stars Bela Lugosi as a scientist who’s turned himself into a half-ape and must drain people’s spinal fluid to keep his animalistic side under control.  I’m irresistibly reminded of that bit in P.G. Wodehouse, about the mad scientist who turns women into lobsters because that’s what mad scientists do….  Anyway, this is a quintessential B-movie, filmed in fifteen days from a script of notable… simplicity.  There’s a minor fourth-wall-breaking gimmick in that the author of the story turns up and meddles in it occasionally… not enough, I’m afraid, to make this one anything particularly striking.

Bela Lugosi turns up again, partnered with Lon Chaney Jr. in the fifth “Frankenstein” movie and second “Wolf Man” movie, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.  The result… failed to impress me, I’m afraid.  Universal Studios had already flogged the Frankenstein setup to death, and the addition of Chaney’s constantly moaning Larry Talbot didn’t help; the combination of the moribund monster and the lugubrious lycanthrope doesn’t exactly set the screen on fire.  It really feels as though everyone is just going through the motions, here.

Really, apart from I Walked with a Zombie, I don’t think anything here is particularly impressive.  Radio, folks.  Listen to the radio.  Seriously, now.

Hugo Category: Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)

~ stevejwright ~ 1 Comment

Moving on to the short form stuff, or “what’s your favourite TV episode?”  Top of the list is “Abaddon’s Gate”, which shows that The Expanse at least knows how to use alphabetical order to advantage…. It’s the season finale (and might have been the series finale), and it’s all very dramatic and wraps up plot lines and doesn’t entirely make sense if, like me, you haven’t been watching The Expanse.  I persist in thinking of the show (and, for that matter, the book series it’s based on) as just about the best bog-standard space opera you’ll find today… and there’s nothing wrong with that, it just sort of fails to hold my attention, and we all know how unreliable my attention is at the best of times.  “Abaddon’s Gate” seems to measure up to the overall mission statement of “delivering quality space-opera-style entertainment”, and I’m not going to complain about that.

We have two episodes of The Good Place, and I won’t complain about that either, because this is a popular vote and the show clearly has its fans…. I’m still not among them.  It seems to me that The Good Place is still trying to be several things at once, and is failing at all of them, and since the things it’s trying to be include “funny” and “though-provoking”, the result isn’t good.  It’s frustrating, because there is the germ of a good idea in the central concept.  But “Jeremy Bearimy” (which seems to be how the show spells sub specie aeternitatis, if you were wondering) descends very quickly into simplistic philosophy, and “Janet(s)” descends equally quickly into hoary old sitcom clichés, and I really don’t have any time for this show, myself.  If it had the courage of its convictions and put some faith in the viewers’ intelligence now and then, maybe it would be better.

Then there’s two episodes of Doctor Who.… The production team have taken a massive risk with the show, by introducing Jodie Whittaker as the first female Doctor, and seem to have gone through her first season taking absolutely no further risks of any kind.  So, we’ve got “Rosa”, where the Doctor and her team get involved in the US civil rights movement.  It’s all very worthy, and there is an interestingly limited (and, consequently, interestingly ingenious) villain at work, but it all seemed a bit constrained to me – the white Southerners, especially, stood out as being peculiarly determined to be racist; it’s almost as if they knew they were in a 45-minute BBC drama and only had a short time to get the message across.  “Demons of the Punjab” struck me as the better episode, to be honest – the (quite impressive) alien monsters turning out to be only witnesses to the real demons: the tensions and hatreds unleashed as Partition slashed across the landscape of India and the human relationships inside it.

Finally, we’ve got a wild card in this category, with Janelle Monáe’s concept album and associated film Dirty Computer, exploring the conceptual struggles of a bisexual android in an oppressive dystopia.  How unlike the home life of our own dear Queen.  Still… it’s interestingly different, and it takes risks, where the rest of this category rather doesn’t.  It might not be my sort of music – I don’t think I’ve heard any of it on Radio Three, at least – but it’s an adventurous interloper in a category which is very prone to sameiness.  I’m inclined to respect that.

Retro Hugo Category: Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)

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It’s an interesting selection of these that 1943 brings us.  First off, there are three instances of a peculiar little subgenre, the afterlife story – people who are newly dead or on the verge of death, who are given a last chance to face up to the realities of heaven and hell, and try to make the right choice….

Three films with the same underlying idea, but the treatment of it is very different.  Heaven Can Wait is a straight-up comedy, with the recently departed Don Ameche, counter-intuitively, trying to get into Hell on the basis of his dissolute lifestyle, only to find that his “adulteries” rather reinforce traditional family values and qualify him for another place entirely – a feel-good movie of its day, comforting and reassuring in its dedication to traditional lifestyles and values.

A Guy Named Joe, on the other hand, takes the whole thing in a more serious direction, with Spencer Tracy as a reckless pilot who, after death, is sent back to, essentially, train up a replacement.  Serious character development ensues as our protagonist faces up to loss and finally learns to let go – a sort of 1940s version of Truly, Madly, Deeply, if you will.

Then there’s Cabin in the Sky, a musical comedy with an African-American cast (which made it controversial from the start in some quarters.)  Petty gambler Little Joe is given a six-month extension to his life, in which to reform himself under the stern angelic eye of The General; however, Lucifer Junior is determined to win Little Joe over to Hell, and sets out to tempt him (using Lena Horne among other things, which – let’s face it – is enough to tempt anyone.)  Based on a successful 1940 stage musical, Cabin in the Sky gets a lot out of an immensely talented cast; it’s another fundamentally feel-good movie, but with evident roots in the black subculture of 1940s America.  Oh, and some great songs, too.

Moving on, we have The Batman – the Caped Crusader makes his first visit to the silver screen!  This isn’t a film, though, but a fifteen-episode serial (made by Columbia Pictures… I’m afraid I always think of the Columbia serials as the poor relations of the more ambitious, or at least more SFnal, Republic ones.)  Batman is a government agent, here, rather than a lone vigilante, and he is pitted against the insidious Japanese plotting of Dr. Daka, a character with all the taste and sensitivity we’ve come to see in portrayals of the Japanese in wartime.  Dr. Daka has a plot, or possibly several plots, involving the theft of radium to power his atomic gun; it seems, to be honest, a weary long time before the Batman foils him for good and all and he falls into his own crocodile pit.  It’s an interesting historical piece, I suppose, but I don’t think it’s got any great merits apart from that.

The remake of The Phantom of the Opera takes further liberties with the original text, but otherwise goes through most of the same tropes (and was even partly made on the same sound stage) as the 1925 version.  Claude Rains replaces Lon Chaney as the disfigured undercover careers adviser, and the whole thing has colour and sound and generally updated film technology, but somehow lacks the impact of the 1925 black and white silent version.  The first instance in movie history of a pointless remake?  Possibly not.  Entertaining, I guess, in its way, but not outstanding.

Finally, there’s Munchhausen.  The remarkable (and unlikely) adventures of the infamous Baron, shot in glorious not-Technicolor (Agfacolor, in fact) – a glorious piece of feel-good escapist whimsy, with positively sumptuous production values: genuine location shooting in Venice, and banquet scenes with real gold and silver tableware.  Guarded by real SS troopers, too.  Oh dear.  Yes, this is a German film of 1943, produced with the full backing of the Nazi propaganda machine.  It’s weird, after all the crude caricatures of Nazis and Japanese that we’ve seen, to see a Nazi-backed film that really doesn’t have a crude propagandist edge to it… but that was all part of Goebbels’s theory of the Volksfilm cinema; he wanted an apolitical movie, a piece of honest escapism that people could just watch and enjoy… because that was how to boost the people’s morale in wartime.  And, let’s be honest, it worked.  Munchhausen is a genuinely delightful movie, with a fine cast and a cheerfully zany script – it’s a huge amount of fun, if you don’t think about its origins.  Can we or should we consider the movie just on its merits as a movie, or must we bear in mind the circumstances behind its creation?  A knotty question, to which I don’t, personally, have a satisfactory answer.

So there’s the 1943 entries for Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form).  And an interestingly mixed bag they are, too.  I have no idea how I’m going to sort them out, myself.

Hugo Category: Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)

~ stevejwright ~ 1 Comment

(Apologies for the hiatus in updates – circumstances beyond my control.)

Anyway.  Time for me to don my World’s Worst Film Critic hat and look at the films this year.  They’re all good, you see.  They get shown on a screen that’s bigger than my bedroom!  Nobody would do that if the films weren’t any good, right?

I suppose it’s worth starting off with Black Panther, which has had a generally positive reception from critics much more acute than me – so much so, people were even talking about it seriously as an Oscars contender.  In the event, it did pick up a couple of statuettes, for Best Score and Best Production Design – which, given the spectacular realization of the Afro-Futurist utopia of Wakanda, seems fair enough really.  Black Panther is, at least, good enough to be thought of as a good film, not just a good entry in the MCU continuity.

However, there was another entry in the MCU continuity last year, though it would probably be tactless to call “snap”…. Avengers: Infinity War delivered everything that could be expected of it in terms of spectacle and fan service, and I suppose the studio deserves some credit for going with what looks like a downer ending, even though we all know it’ll get fixed up in the next one.

And then there’s another Marvel-related entry, which clocked up an Oscar for Best Animated Feature, and is, frankly, probably the most fun of the three: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is not deep, nor dramatically challenging, but it is entertaining to the highest degree – if you’ve got any affection for the character at all, you’ll almost certainly enjoy it, and if you haven’t any affection for the character, this could be the movie to convert you.

Meanwhile, outside the Marvel universe, Sorry to Bother You is much more the sort of thing you used to find in BDP(LF) before the rise of the big special-effects blockbusters; a quirky, satirical, offbeat comedy about a black call centre worker who learns to talk with a white man’s voice… events unfold from this with a surreal logic of their own.  It’s the sort of independent and eccentric vision that SF has often celebrated, and, frankly, it feels good to me to see something like this on the list.

Sci-fi horror A Quiet Place is… well, it’s appropriately scary and well-made, and the central situation (scary monsters will Get You if you make any noise) creates its own innate tension.  It seems there’s something of a fad for this sort of thing, though – much the same set-up arises in Tim Lebbon’s novel The Silence (the film version of which came out this April), and then there’s an inevitable comparison with Bird Box (where the scary monsters Get You if you see them – different sense, but same level of tension).  There’s a common theme of disability aids becoming necessary for survival (ASL in A Quiet Place, adaptive methods for the blind in Bird Box)… it’s an interesting trend, anyway.  Perhaps the next one will feature scary monsters that Get You if you touch them, with the cast stumbling around bundled up in layer upon layer of bubble wrap.  It’s an idea.  (Hollywood, get in touch if you want me to flesh this out a bit.)

Finally, Annihilation is visually beautiful and spooky and generally weird, but nowhere near as weird as the Jeff VanderMeer novel it’s based on.  I think this one might fall between two stools, as it were – it’s got too much high-concept high-weirdness for an average non-genre audience to enjoy, but not enough to make it a fully successful adaptation of the book.  Still, it looks good (though I’m sure one scene in particular owes more to Gene Wolfe than Jeff VanderMeer), and the cast are clearly doing the best they can with some rather opaquely-motivated roles.  A praiseworthy effort, I think.

Retro Hugo Nominee Review: “Buck Rogers: Martians Invade Jupiter” by Philip Nowlan and Dick Calkins (Best Graphic Story)

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Dr. Huer has invented a new atom projector which can send war materiel to hard-pressed Jupiter in seconds.  Buck Rogers and Wilma Deering volunteer to help out with its initial runs.  However, once they’re displaced to the giant planet, they discover some difficulties.  Firstly, the process has rendered Wilma invisible; secondly, a reconnaissance team of evil Martian invaders is already close at hand….

Jupiter is receiving “Lease-Lend” equipment (I’m sure they’ll be just thrilled to spend sixty years paying for it all after the war’s over), and the Martian Axis powers are led by one “Madwolf Hetlah”.  Subtle, it ain’t.  Unfortunately, I can’t find much else to commend this one on – it’s a substantial piece (over 400 daily strips), but it’s not so much a sustained epic as a series of loosely connected escapades, as Buck and his friends infiltrate Martian HQs, fight the deadly Martian “Hari Kari” squadron in the skies, and generally blunder from one implausible situation into another.  The ongoing war against the Martians is the one unifying factor…. It bothers me, somehow, that Buck is so good at impersonating Martians when they have small pointy heads and floppy spaniel ears and he doesn’t.  (Not to mention the whole “eye-searingly racist Oriental caricature” thing that the Martians have going on, which can’t have come across as overly subtle even back in 1943.)  Then there’s the sub-plot about Wilma – she becomes invisible due to the projector thing; Huer attempts to fix this using some gizmo on Jupiter, but it doesn’t work properly and she meets a terrible fate: it makes her visible, yes, but it also turns her into a fat girl.  (The really sad thing?  Two unnamed women, wearing the lingerie that seems to be uniform for women on the good guys’ side here, talk about how terrible it is that Wilma has “lost her figure”… and this, technically, means “Martians Invade Jupiter” passes the Bechdel Test.  Shows you just how low a bar that is to clear, doesn’t it?)  To add insult to injury, fat-Wilma (a “hag”, now) only appears bundled up in a flying suit, and the artwork is so clunky I can’t honestly tell how far the change has gone.  By the end of the story, essential war work (repairing a spaceship) has restored her to her normal self, and, well, it’s still hard to tell the difference.

To some people, Buck Rogers was the gateway drug to SF, and it opens up entrancing visions of exotic faraway worlds… I got hold of a huge volume of reprints with an introduction by Ray Bradbury, no less, and it seems to have had that effect on him.  Well, fine.  Perhaps it’s unlucky that I came to it later in life, and – jaundiced and cynical as I am – can see its various deficiencies with heartless clarity.  I mean, I’m sorry – I know some people like it – but, well, it just isn’t very good, I’m afraid.

Retro Hugo Nominee Review: “Le Secret de la Licorne (The Secret of the Unicorn)” by Hergé (Best Graphic Story)

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Tintin buys a model ship for his friend Captain Haddock – but other people are strangely interested in the model, and willing to go to any lengths to possess it.  The model is one of three, it turns out – all based on the Unicorn, the ship commanded by Haddock’s ancestor Sir Francis Haddock.  And each model contains a scrap of parchment, which points the way to an ancient pirate treasure.

Hergé was living in Nazi-occupied Belgium when this one came out, and he was being very careful not to step on any toes by writing even faintly political content.  It seems that this constraint had a positive effect, because this tautly-plotted little thriller (enlivened by the odd flashback to Sir Francis Haddock’s nautical days) is Tintin at his best – threat, excitement, devious plotting, lucky coincidences and Thomson and Thompson, what’s not to love?  If anything, it gains by association with its immediate follow-up, Red Rackham’s Treasure, which contrasts all the ducking and diving in Brussels back alleys with the open waters of the ocean (not to mention Professor Calculus and his shark-shaped submersible).  But The Secret of the Unicorn is a fine story in its own right – peak Tintin, with a fast-moving plot beautifully depicted in Hergé’s ligne claire style.  (As with Alex Raymond, Hergé demonstrates that, even within the constraints of reproduction for newspaper serialization, it is still possible to draw with genuine artistry.)  This one’s a classic – a top of the line selection from a series that’s become a genuine cultural landmark.

Retro Hugo Nominee Review: “Flash Gordon: Fiery Desert of Mongo” by Alex Raymond (Best Graphic Story)

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Pursued by the forces of the usurping King Brazor, Flash, Dr. Zarkov, Dale Arden and Queen Desira (the rightful queen of Tropica, deposed by Brazor) have no choice but to enter the unforgiving fiery desert of Mongo.  Suffering from heat, lack of water, attack by fire dragon and the other hazards of the desert, they are in a sorry state when they are found by desert raiders under the chieftainship of the jovial and genial Gundar.  They soon discover they’re no better off, as Gundar plans, jovially and genially no doubt, to hand Desira over to Brazor and sell the others into slavery….

How delighted I am to see a Flash Gordon story reach the ballot at last – if nothing else, it’s an oasis of competent draughtsmanship; Alex Raymond could draw a damn sight better than most of the other comics nominees, let me tell you.  Admittedly, this is kind of minor Flash Gordon, a single episode in the long tale that involves shuffling the fugitive Queen Desira up and down the map (somewhere along the line, old Flash must surely have thought about all his woes with Mongonian royalty, and considered giving representative democracy a try), and it’s kind of sparse in the artwork – the fiery desert is a bleak and largely featureless expanse, and Gundar’s hideout tends towards an elegant minimalism in its décor, too – but, what the heck, it’s still Flash Gordon, and the story and characterization hang together well enough.  Gundar is a jovial and genial bandit leader with a heart of gold underneath it all – the sort who might yell out “Gordon’s alive!” at a crucial moment, you know the type – and when Brazor tries some minor treachery involving phosphorescent horseshoes to find Gundar’s lair, that’s enough to convert the red-bearded desert raider to the side of the angels. Particularly as there’s a bit of sexual tension between him and Desira – which leads to further tension between Gundar and his current girlfriend Pequit.  Yes, folks, this golden age story has three female characters!  They even talk to each other! – about men, so there’s no danger of it passing the Bechdel Test or anything radical like that, but, still, it’s something.

In short, it’s a good solid piece of Flash Gordon and contains 100% of your RDA of peril, excitement, peculiar alien creatures, implausible escapes and hissable villains.  And it’s made by someone who can actually ****ing draw, which puts it well up on most of the competition right from the start.  I like it.

Retro Hugo Nominee Review: “Garth” by Steve Dowling (Best Graphic Story)

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Gala is a young girl living in a remote and oppressed community – but all that changes when she finds a raft washed ashore.  On it is the huge figure of Garth – a man with no memories, and seemingly no past.  But he knows a pretty girl, and a petty tyrant, and how to deal with each one appropriately….

This is another one that’s older than I thought; I always assumed Garth was sort of early Sixties, but it turns out he’s been displaying his physique at the same time as Jane, albeit to markedly different aesthetic effect.  Of course, I know Garth – so much as I know him at all – from the rather longer run of Frank Bellamy stories (which are the ones most often reprinted, too); Steve Dowling’s technique is rather different, with lots of rather coarse cross-hatching instead of Bellamy’s fine lines and pools of black.  But Garth is the same as ever….  This first Garth story introduced the character as a blank template, a massive blond amnesiac on whom pretty much anything could be projected; it wasn’t until later that he gained his sidekick Doc Lumière and a whole pile of implausible backstory.  But, in a sense, Garth is always a blank template – the structure of the stories means that you can put him anywhere in time or space; teleport him to a distant galaxy, send him into one of his past lives (or someone else’s past life, he won’t mind), or leave him in the modern world for some James Bond-style caper, it’s all one to Garth, he will just get on with the job, whatever it happens to be.

I suppose this flexibility is a boon to the writer, but it makes for a curiously unmemorable sort of character.  Despite his freakishly huge physique (a bad day for the artist can leave him looking like a cross between a man and a mattress), Garth isn’t stupid, and he has a definite moral code… but he’s largely expressionless (of course, when each of your facial muscles weighs as much as a small child, even a slight smile is an exertion not to be lightly undertaken), and, wherever you put him, he’s just sort of there; a big blond Nietzschean Übermensch type who swans in, sorts things out, and swans out again.  In a way, this first story is typical, even if it doesn’t have many of the usual Garth trappings; he wanders into the situation, fixes it, and wanders away again.  It was the start of a long and successful career, so I suppose I shouldn’t knock it, really.  But I’ve never warmed to Garth, myself.

Retro Hugo Nominee Review: “Wonder Woman #5: Battle for Womanhood”, by William Moulton Marsden and Harry G. Peter (Best Graphic Story)

~ stevejwright ~ 3 Comments

Prompted by the servitors of Mars, and by his own hatred of women, Dr. Psycho sets out to take women out of America’s war effort.  His wife’s talent as a medium enables Psycho to create an ectoplasmic double of George Washington, who warns of disaster if women continue to work in munitions plants – and Psycho’s own talent for mind control and sabotage make sure “Washington”‘s warnings come true.  Conventional measures are clearly useless against such a man – this is a job for Wonder Woman!

Err.  Yes.  Quite.  I got a whole Golden Age collection of Wonder Woman to review this one, so I’ve been immersing myself in it for a bit, and an interesting swim it’s been, to be sure.  I was aware of Wonder Woman’s plus-sized sidekick Etta Candy, but didn’t know she brought her own team of sidekicks with her, in the form of a curiously acquiescent all-girl marching band.  And of course I knew about William Moulton Marsden’s personal beliefs… I suppose I should set everyone’s minds at rest by saying there is no BDSM subtext in early Wonder Woman.  None at all.  It’s just plain text.  (I was going to say “straight text”, but, given the amount of lesbianism on display, that wouldn’t have been the right word to choose.)

Anyway.  This is one of the more outrageous Wonder Woman stories of the time, and in fact Dr. Psycho makes for a pretty strong adversary.  You have to feel for the guy, a bit – not only is he physically grotesque even by the standards of Wonder Woman‘s bad guys*, he has another strike against him, in the socializing-normally stakes, in that his name apparently is Psycho – it’s not a nom de guerre or a secret identity, it’s just his name: a feat of nominative determinism that would not be equalled until Boris and Griselda Space Spy took up interstellar espionage in Fireball XL5.  However, he is cunning and talented, with minor-league superpowers that complement Wonder Woman’s own, and it takes some time and effort for our Amazon to take him down.  (And he would be back again, making him perhaps the best of the recurring villains until Priscilla Rich slipped into her fursuit and became the Cheetah.)

It’s crudely produced and frequently ridiculous – between Marsden’s bondage propaganda and the standard wartime stuff, there really wasn’t a lot of room for naturalistic dialogue – but, daft as it is, it’s also lively and a lot of fun.  Just suspend your disbelief, in chains, at the door, and you’ll be fine.  (And your disbelief will enjoy it.)

 

*Or its good guys.  Am I allowed to say the artwork of the Golden Age was mostly rotten, or is that heresy or something?  I don’t expect subtlety or sensitivity in the depiction, in 1943, of German “Nastis” or the devious Japs, but even the supposedly handsome Steve Trevor looks like a species of mole rat in some panels, and as for Wonder Woman herself, I think she looks better in her Diana Prince secret identity, as the glasses give her features some kind of definition….