PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Batman: The Doom That Came To Gotham 2023

Batman: The Doom That Came To Gotham 2023 Based on the 2000 comic series of the same name by Mike Mignola, screenplay by Jase Ricci, directed by Christopher Berkeley and Sam Liu.

I'd read the 3 issue series almost 20 years ago and had forgotten all the details. I should dig it out to read sometime. I like Mike Mignola quite a bit, first as an artist and second as a story teller. I wish he had drawn the whole series not just the covers. I have the same complaint about him and Hellboy. Oh, well, huh.

The animated movie is set in 1928 and Bruce Wayne has been traveling since his parents were killed twenty years before. He's led an expedition to find what happened to Oscar Cobblepot. Bruce is joined by his three wards and his man Alfred. On arrival they find the crew dead except one man who's called Grendon. A strange creature is seen in the distance. Unbeknownst to Bruce it's Oscar, mutated by some evil force.

Bruce heads home to Gotham City and the Wayne Manor. He's got a nice wine cellar there. Grendon babbles on and on and Bruce starts to see something in his mutterings. Other strange things happen, many die. Bruce interacts with characters who are similar to characters in the regular comic series, there's a steady stream of them.

Eventually things come to a head when the unknowable evil arrives. Supernatural magic has to happen for Batman to defeat the baddies. There's plenty of fights and running about. The animation is good and the story is busy and entertaining. I picked up the Blu-ray and would watch it again sometime. There's a commentary by the writer and directors. It was about average. There's a nice making of for the movie and a promo featurette on the Superman Red Son movie.

The Sunken City - Paul Murry

I'm a big fan of the Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge stories by Carl Barks but I like plenty of other Disney artists too. I enjoyed the Paul Murry's Mickey Mouse 3 part serials from Walt Disney Comics And Stories when I was a kid and I've been a fan of his since. Between 1953 and 1962 Paul had a story in each monthly issue, from 1963 to 1972 he produced occasional stories, after that he continued to produce single stories through 1984 when he retired. He died 5 years later at age 77.

 The first 21 stories appear in the first three Disney Masters books from Paul Murry. The art is reproduced extremely well, nice solid blacks and crisp clean lines, and coloring that's like the original comics but better reproduced.he nice white pages make the art nearly pop off the page.

 

Here's a copy of the title page from a story in the 3rd volume and a copy of the title page from WDC&S 205 to compare. I've gotten spoiled by the wealth of comic book reprints and the quality of their reproduction that I often prefer reading them over the original comics that I have.

Paul Murry is the only artist to have 4 volumes in the series. So far. Lucky for some of us, there are plenty more stories to reprint. His 4th book in the Disney Masters series is The New Adventures of The Phantom Blot. It reprints all seven issues of the Gold Key comic The Phantom Blot from 1962 to 1964. Plenty more Mickey and Goofy adventures.

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Birds Of Prey 2019 Written by Christina Hodson and directed by Cathy Yan. Plenty of rock'em sock'em action as Harley Quinn sets out to make her own life now that the Joker and her have split. Trouble is, there's a lot of people who want to do HQ in and now that she's got no protection from the clown guy, she's up shit's creek. At least she has that hyena. A missing diamond and a huge fortune hidden inside it bring Harley and the soon to be Birds of Prey together as they team up to protect the teenage girl pickpocket who's swallowed the diamond. There's one fight after another as the various people vie for the diamond. Eventually it's got a fairly happy ending. Well, not for some of the scumbags, they're ending was just an ending. It had a good number of jokes and some of them made me laugh. I'd buy the DVD but someone was nice enough to pass on the DVD out of their Blu-ray. I'll want to watch it again someday. Much more entertaining that the recentish HQ movie Suicide Squad.

Satan's Black Wedding 1976 Nick Millard wrote and directed the film under the name Philip Miller. Nick has 59 directing credits on the IMDb, many of them under another name, none familiar to me. It scores an amazing 4.8 on the IMDb and this time it's not top loaded, it gets a lot of 5s, 27.8% of the 241 votes. I have put it down at a 2 and that might be a bit harsh but if I wanted to see a travelogue I'd have watched one. So much of the 61 minute movie is people walking or driving in cars. It's not nice scenery either, even the 3 min walk on the beach is tedious and dull. A guy comes to some town to go to his sister's funeral and falls victim to a clutch of Satan worshiping vampires. On top of that he's got a weak script and limp direction. What a piss poor movie. Nick needs some tender nut knocking from the fleshless skull of Paul Naschy. That'll take your breath away Nick, let me tell you.

Comic Books!

I don't follow the big companies in comics like DC and Marvel but I'm curious how things are going down in the comic book store world. Other than popping in to see my local curmudgeon I don't even go into other comic book stores but once or twice a year. Sadly, I rarely buy anything, other than a sale item. I'm just not interested in collecting comics in general and specifically on paper. Other than a few Disney titles from IDW, Uncle Scrooge, Duck Tales and Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, I don't buy much else, other than the Hellboy titles. Disney titles like Tangled or Frozen, that sort of movie tie in product, just aren't worth the money to me. Sadly there isn't even a Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck title anymore. IDW and Dark Horse put out occasional reprint collections of Mickey and Donald stories from overseas.

 

Fantagraphics has license to reprint collections of older material, their Carl barks Library and Don Rosa Library collect some of the best comic stories out there. Those titles and their Disney Master series come in nice attractive hardcovers with well printed artwork. I have the original comics of some of that stuff and these are better printings. I have some digital comics from Amazon or Comixology and they also have a nice image. You can resize it and read a page at a time or double click on the first panel and read it a panel at a time. Nice technology. I have a lot of scanned comics off of public domain websites and while they have good images they aren't all jazzed up like the pro-product.

 

Back to the present day and the death knell of the comic shop. There are a number of comic YouTubers, some are more interesting than others, some are nightmares to watch. The guy at Nerdrotic, Gary Buechler, used to have a comic shop, now he talks about what's going on in the industry. He's less hyperbolic than some of these guys and he aggregates material from all sorts of comic blogs I'm never going to read.

At the best of times things can be tough for an Indy comic shop. Many live hand to mouth on small margins. On top of the forced shut down, Diamond, the big comic distributor, just announced that they aren't going to accept new books from anyone. They also aren't paying their vendors what they owe, citing cash flow problems. The comic companies all send their books to the comic shops through one distributor. That company has no money and is closed. Comic shops have no income and there isn't much by way of help from the big companies. It doesn't look good for them. Part of the pressures of having a small business in the modern world. Glad not to have much invested in the new comics every Wednesday, though I still like getting the few Disney and Hellboy titles that come out.

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First up, the 1999 short film Cool Air. It's based on the Lovecraft story of the same name. Bryan Moore is the director and he stars as Randolph Carter. Carter moves into a room in a boarding house only to have some ammonia tainted water dripping through the ceiling. It comes from the border in the room above whom the land lady says is a doctor. Randolph meets him when he has a light heart attack. Doctor Muñoz helps Randolph out and fills the writer in on his condition. He needs cold to survive. Of course the chiller dies one day and though the doc has had this problem for twenty years he's unprepared to deal with the breakdown. He sends Randolph out for ice and an electrician. Failure brings Randolph and the electrician back too late, they find Muñoz turned into a puddle of gel and bones lying on the floor. It was a well enough made bit of film making. The actors were good to poor, the doc was OK, Bryan not quite that good, and the left over cast members skewing to the poor with bouts of over acting. I listen to the long dialog speeches of the doctor and eventually my mind wanders off in some personal reverie. I wouldn't need to see it again. The Night Gallery version was better.

Black Panther is last year's Marvel Films hit. I wasn't that keen on it and after watching it I might want to see it again but probably won't bother. It was big, noisy and flashy but it was so long I failed to get to the end without my mind wandering off. I wasn't the only one complaining, there was a lot of conversation going on. It's long and in need of paring down. 

Prisoners Of Gravity 1989 - 1994

I had never heard of Prisoners Of Gravity until I saw it mentioned on Facebook. Finding it helps justify time on Facebook somewhat. It's a 1989 Canadian show that aired on TVOntario for 5 seasons. From season 2 on it also appeared on PBS in the US. I checked on YouTube and sure enough someone has about 50 episodes of the 139 that they made. It was co-created by Mark Askwith and Daniel Richler.

It's hosted by Rick Green, he was in The Frantics comedy group, they had a great sketch comedy show called Four On The Floor. Rick played Bill Smith on The Red Green Show, a series he co-created and wrote for the 11 seasons.

Prisoners Of Gravity has Rick escape the Earth and go live in a space station. Each week he talks about SF, in pretty much any format you can find, and some about comic books. He's got interviews with all sorts of creators that were conducted by a team that went to SF conventions. In the few that I sampled I saw Will Eisner, William Gibson, Stan Lee, Neil Gaiman, Bob Kane and Harlan Ellison. I downloaded the lot and will take a look at them in the future.

Carl Barks And The Perversity Of Beasts, Machines, And Nature.

Carl Barks And The Perversity Of Beasts, Machines, And Nature.

Garth Danielson

I have been a fan of Carl Barks for over 40 years. I was a fan even before I knew who he was. Back in the golden, olden days Disney comic artists weren’t allowed to sign their work. In 1942, when Carl Barks and Jack Hannah drew the first original Donald Duck comic book story for Dell Four Color 9, the readers just thought he was Walt Disney. If they were savvy they knew Walt didn’t draw everything, let alone anything.

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First up was the Blu-ray of Deadpool. Lot's of violence and swearing, laced with some Rap and constant chatter. Director Tim Miller is mostly been a special effects guy, this is his first film. He does a pretty good job on the stuff that isn't effects and he does a great job on those. The screenplay is by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. The two of them previously wrote a bit of TV and the screenplay for Zombieland. Rhett wrote the script for GI Joe: Retaliation. The two of them have written scripts for Zombieland 2 and Deadpool 2. Ryan Reynolds is the guy who becomes Deadpool. Except for TJ Miller I didn't really recognize anyone else in the cast from other movies and TV. Leslie Uggams plays an old blind lady. I only learned that from the credits on the IMDb. There's plenty of action and huge set pieces that fill in the origin story. I liked it and would want to see it again someday. I'd buy a copy if I saw it really cheap.

I'd definitely want to watch our second feature over again. Shorts: The Adventure Of The Wishing Rock is a 2009 comedy family film written and directed by Robert Rodriguez. He also wrote some music, did the cinematography, supervised the special effects, was co-editor and co-producer.  A kid finds a rainbow wishing rock and chaos ensues. The story jumps back and forth as our hero, Toby Thompson, narrates the action. The rock changes hands and various people all wish for something. Some of the wishes aren't good ones, one kid gets really big, another is turned into a dung beetle, you get the idea. Toby's parents, Leslie Mann and Jon Cryer, get stuck together as a half man and half woman. William H Macy, James Spader, Kat Dennings and all five of Robert's kids are in the movie. There's plenty of silly things going on and they made me laugh. I liked the kids quite a bit, most of them do a great job, and I especially liked Jolie Vanier as Tobi's nemesis Helvetica Black, and the kid who played Loogie. You can see the trailer here, to see what's going on.

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First up, Jack The Giant Slayer, a 2013 Bryan Singer movie that adapts the classic Jack And The Beanstalk and adds a bit of giant killing. The basic elements of the original story is there: magic beans, a giant beanstalk, giants, a magical floating kingdom and Jack climbing the beanstalk. Of course, it's Bryan Singer and things are bit jazzed up with a horde of invading giants, a romance, a giant battle, huge collateral damage to the kingdom, an evil dirty dealing, murderous duke and a magical crown that controls the giants. There's some action, some humor and plenty of plant life. The giant's GCI isn't too bad most of the time. The cast are all pretty good. I didn't recognize Nicolas Hoult, who plays Jack, from anything but I see I had seen him in the X-Men movies, where he played The Beast. There's also Ewan McGregor, Stanley Tucci and Ian McShane. It's fun but bombastic at times.

Our second feature was Comic Book Villains, a 2002 black comedy written and directed by James Robinson. He's mostly a comic book writer. I haven't read any of his comic material but I did like his screenplay for The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Much more enjoyable than the comic book series for me. The cast includes DJ Qualls, Donal Logue, Cary Elwes, Michael Rapaport, Natasha Lyonne, Eileen Brennan, Monet Mazur, Danny Masterson and James Duval. The story is about a nice, and valuable, comic collection that Eileen's son had built over decades. He bought the comics when he was a kid and still has them. He's just died when the movie starts. The two rival comic shops hear about the collection and ask Eileen if she wants to sell it. She says no and that should have been it. The two rivals continue to try to get the collection, each seeing the riches or fame that they could get selling off the collection. First they try sweet talking her, doing chores and odd jobs around her house. Donal is one rival shop and he's only got DJ for a friend. He's one sad pathetic guy who dreams of getting famous for finding an unknown old and valuable collection. He's not even that interested in the money though his shop is on it's last legs and he's dead broke. Michael and Natasha are a couple and they own the other shop. They're the kind of people who open a comic shop because they want to own their own business. They sell all sorts of other things like Magic Cards, posters and toys but aren't really interested in comics. They want the collection for the cash they can get. The rivalry heats up, bad decisions are made, and soon people are dying because of the collection. The climax might have ended a little over the top but hey, they really did became comic book villains, done in by their greed. DJ is the only one who gets to know Eileen as a person and he's the only one who comes out of it the better. i found it for a couple of bucks and I was glad I got it. I'll be watching it again someday.

The Umbrella Man by DOK (J C Hager) 1911

The book was published in 1911. I bought the book in 1993 from a shop in St Paul that isn't there anymore. I forgot the name, it was on 7th Street. The book was pretty much as you see it. The paper isn't yellowed, it's actually brown Kraft paper, kind of thick, say a 60# text maybe, and the cover is similar but much heavier.

    

You can see it's been well handled. I'm proud to say none of those stains on the cover are mine. The binding has been failing so I cut the pages out and scanned them.

I thought the cartoons were fun, there's that goofy head umbrella, and the duck is entertaining. I liked Hager's style and his work is nicely reproduced in black and orange.

You can read more about J C Hager on the Wikipedia.  You can see the whole book in my Flickr album.