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Monthly Archives: October 2013

Make*A*Wish: San Francisco to become Gotham City for a day

Miles as Batman

Miles as Batman from Make*A*Wish

The Make*A*Wish Foundation will turn part of San Francisco into Gotham City on November 15 to fulfill the dream of 5-year-old Miles to become Batman. Miles, who has leukemia, is currently in training for his big day when he’ll save Gotham City from the Riddler and the Penguin while riding around in an actual Batmobile. Of course, Miles can’t do it alone, the Foundation is seeking volunteers to help call on Miles to save a “famous Gotham City mascot.” Below details from the Make*A*Wish Foundation website where they’ll be providing more information about the big day soon.

Miles may only be 5 years old, but he is fighting a very adult battle – one that we hope will save his life. Miles has leukemia.  He is a sunny, positive little boy and finds his inspiration in super heroes. When we interviewed Miles for a wish, he surprised even his parents:  he wishes to BE Batman!

The day starts with a breaking news story. Gotham City’s Police Chief asks if anyone knows the whereabouts of Batman because he needs his help solving crime and bringing the bad guys to justice. Our little Batman, Miles, in training with adult Batman, is ready to answer the call! Of course Batman will be riding in the “real” batmobile around the City, saving the day and performing feats of derring-do!

After rescuing a damsel in distress from the cable car tracks in Nob Hill, and capturing the Riddler in the act of robbing a downtown vault, Batman will eat his lunch at the Burger Bar in San Francisco – directly above Union Square.  While at Burger Bar, he will get a call on his batphone to go to the window – where he will look down and see a huge group of volunteers jumping up and down asking for Batman’s help.  Why?

Because the Penguin will be kidnapping a famous Gotham City mascot!  The getaway car will be visible on Union Square (a convertible so that everyone can see what is happening), and the chase will be on!

After catching the Penguin, Batman will make his final stop at City Hall, where the Mayor and the Police Chief of Gotham City will thank him and give him the key to the city. We plan on having hundreds of volunteers and donors collected to cheer and thank our Batman! This is a great opportunity to see the magic of a wish in action – and a perfect outing for kids, grandkids and Bat-fans everywhere!

Dead Universes (Part IV): Defiant Comics reading order

defiant comics logoOf the four Dead Universes I’m currently collecting, the death of Defiant Comics was the most disappointing. Valiant had a long enough run that it didn’t feel premature when it died. Marvel did a great job sucking all of the satisfaction out the Ultraverse after they purchased it from Mailbu, so it didn’t feel like a great loss when it finally folded in on itself. Comics’ Greatest World never quite grabbed me. Defiant, however, was something special that never had the opportunity to reach its full potential. The Defiant universe, much like Valiant, stood apart from the other universes, because it didn’t build itself on the foundation of tired comic book tropes. The Defiant universe didn’t have analogs for Superman, Batman, or the X-Men. Many of the characters that kicked off the universe felt fresh and inspired.

Defiant Comics: Dark Dominion and Warriors of Plasm

The launch title for Defiant Comics was Warriors of Plasm and it started the reader off not on Earth, but instead a hungry, living, alien planet. The planet gives the inhabitants everything they need from itself and therefore it needs to constantly feed. This is done by conquering planets. A rift in the Universe opens and Earth is discovered and it’s this discovery that leads to a quintet of Earthlings receiving powers.

Defiant Comics Dark Dominion

Of those titles starting the universe, and the one that brought me back to this dead universe, was Dark Dominion. Steve Ditko, who only penciled part of the first issue before walking away, deserves a great deal of credit for inspiring what Jim Shooter would eventually create. According to Shooter:

He wanted a character who wasn’t bitten by a radioactive anything, or from another planet, or injected with chemicals. Whatever the character could do that was special, if anything, he wanted to be the result of his own efforts, his own thinking. If empowered, empowered in some novel, creative way by his own mind. And why does it always have to be a young guy? Why not an older man? Steve also didn’t want another muscular bodybuilder type. No mansions, no Batmobiles, no costumes. And no “official” super hero name. A real, regular person name—though he allowed that others who didn’t know his name might call the guy by some more dramatic appellation.

What Shooter produced was a 54-year-old superhero named Michael Alexander who spent his life working to overcome human fears. Pushing his fears aside granted Michael access to the “Quantum Substratum” where he could see the “Dark Dominion.” Stepping into this world allows one the ability to see the true form of fears and how they unknowingly latch onto humans.
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Bad Buys: McSweeney’s Book Release Club

onehundredOn occasion we must gather to censure rather than celebrate those publishers who provide us book addicts with our fixes.

I come to bury McSweeney’s Book Release Club, not to praise it. The indie darling of web and print has given me so much joy over the years (Adam Levin’s The Instructions! Lucky Peach magazine (now splitting from McSweeney’s)! It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers!) that a book club seemed destined to delight.

Let me quote from the Book Release Club page:

It’s similar to a book-of-the-month club—we’ll send BRC subscribers the next eight books we put out, roughly one per month.

McSweeney’s Book Release Club falls down on the most basic rule of a book club: send books to your subscribers. I paid my $100 on April 4, 2013 and waited for my book per month.

The months remained bookless.

Emails to McSweeney’s customer service on May 28 and June 18 went unacknowledged. I called them June 24, eventually talked to their customer service rep, Jordan, and was promised an apology book to make up for the wait. Indeed, Always Apprentices arrived not long after and I awaited the glorious beginning of my monthly McSweeneys’ books.

I got my first McSweeney’s book (Lucy Corin’s One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses) August 29, 2013, almost five months after signing up and two months after talking to their customer service rep.

Nothing has arrived since.

For taking customers’ money and providing no release schedule or proactive communication, I castigate McSweeney’s Book Release Club.

For refusing to acknowledge emails to their customer service email address, I shame McSweeney’s.

For utterly failing to keep up their end of the Book Release Club bargain by sending books at anything approaching the advertised schedule, I heartily curse McSweeney’s Book Release Club.

For shame.

 

UPDATE: Ironically, my next McSweeney’s book — High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing — appeared in my mailbox the very week I wrote this. That makes two books received in six months.

UPDATE: On Dec. 17, 2014, I received TWO books: Toro Bravo by John Gorham and Liz Crain (a cookbook I’m terribly excited to own) and The End of Love by Marcos Giralt Torrente. The tally: Four books received in eight months. Funny enough, I got The Best of McSweeney’s — with multiple autographs, no less! — from my Powell’s Indiespensable subscription last month! See Indiespensable reviewed here.

UPDATE: On March 15, 2014 I received both White Girls by Hilton Als (they offer a signed version on their website but I did not receive that edition) and The Best of McSweeney’s (three months after receiving the same edition with  multiple author autographs from McSweeney’s). The total is now six books received in eleven months; two fewer books than promised at three months longer than promised with no communication of titles or schedule.

UPDATE: April 3, 2014. One  full year after subscribing, I have received my final box (containing Confidence, or the Appearance of Confidence: the Best of Believer Music Interviews edited by Vendela Vida and Ross Simonini; and The Parallel Apartments by Bill Cotter). The box also contained my first, last, and only formal communication about the subscription: a piece of paper declaring this my final Book Release Club shipment. I think it and I are glad to be done with one another.

The upshot is this: I received books worth more than the $100 I paid. But I did not receive them in a predictable fashion. I had no say in what I received. There was no communication from the company. And on a strictly subjective level, the majority of the book selection did not appeal to my reading interests.

Good Buys: Powell’s Books’ Indiespensable book club

PowellsBook clubs are a good risk. The greatest risk of receiving regular books in the mail is that you won’t care for the book. As I love a shelf of handsome volumes, it’s a risk I happily accept.

The risks are low with Powell’s extraordinary Indiespensable book club, Every six weeks Powell’s sends a curated hardcover in a custom slipcase autographed by the author.

(That these handsome books are accompanied by extra goodies is delightful: I have received tote bags, tea, bourbon pecans, chocolates, caramels, notepads, postcards, magnets, shortbread, popcorn, advanced copies of new books, and sea salt. It’s pretty awesome.)

Powell’s hits home runs regularly with clear winners like Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, and J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus. It feels fairly phenomenal to have Coetzee’s autograph on my bookshelf.

Even when I haven’t previously heard of the book, I’m usually thrilled to bits. Recent Indiespensable volumes that blew my mind include In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods by Matt Bell, The Death of Bees by Lisa O’Donnell, and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra.

Even when I don’t love the book I appreciate its beauty  or the opportunity to have read it.  I found Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus light and fluffy but its opulent velvet slipcase was beautiful. Andre Dubus II’s memoir Townie made a good gift for my father. I admit I threw Mark Slouka’s Brewster across the room in screaming fury (I have a low tolerance for animal abuse and this book’s horrors will haunt me longer than I’d like) but it was by no means an unworthy novel.

Administratively, Powell’s deserves credit for sharing weeks in advance what book is next and what day it ships. Today I learned that I can expect Donna Tartt’s new novel just after its Nov. 6 ship date. As an ongoing subscriber I can take the book off my shopping list, and new subscribers have a chance to jump on board for this particular shipment or an ongoing subscription.

Powell’s Indiespensable is the right way to run a book club: organized, reliable, one-of-a-kind editions, extra goodies, and well stocked with quality books.  The Shared Universe recommends it unreservedly.

Dead Universes (part III): Reading order

ghostDeciding how to read a Dead Universe informs the best way to collect a Dead Universe. Do you read it series-by-series, as it came out when originally published, or in some sort of chronological order? Knowing this will help determine how to invest in Dead Universes.

Chronological Reading Order

Reading a Universe in chronological order is tempting, especially if the publisher had taken time to plot out a rough skeleton of the timeline. This is easiest with Defiant due to less than 60 issues being published thanks to Marvel’s company killing lawsuit. The website ShooterWorks.com has posted notes from the never published universe-wide crossover event, Schism, which helps establish a solid reading order. Using those notes and my own reading of the titles I’ve built a preferred Defiant Comics chronology.

The original Valiant Universe (VH1), on the other hand, had a long and healthy life before greed drove the universe into the ground. Due to that long publishing life putting the whole thing into a chronological reading order would be a bit of a bear. Thankfully, Joshua Eves at ValiantFans.com enjoys wrestling bears and did the heavy lifting to establish a timeline. While it would definitely be interesting to read the universe in this order it would require waiting until all of the relevant issues have been collected. Putting that collection together will take time and money because it isn’t very often someone puts up for sale an entire lot of all published Valiant issues.

Series-by-Series Reading Order

Steve Englehart, one of the founding fathers of the Ultraverse, has said the intention was “from the outset to share the playground and join in each other’s games,” so there’s a great deal more crossover in the Ultraverse than some of the other Dead Universes. That makes a chronological reading enticing. However, if you include everything published, including after the accursed Marvel buyout, there are nearly 800 single issues in the Ultraverse. Subtracting the issues after the Marvel takeover you’re still looking at more than 500 single issues. It isn’t as many as the Valiant Universe, but it would still take a great deal of work to figure out the rough chronology. Of course, there’s far less time jumping in the Ultraverse than in Valiant, so arguably someone could read the issues as they initially hit the market and probably come close to a chronology.

I’ve decided to read Malibu’s Ultraverse series-by-series based on when that series started. As an example, Prime, Hardcase, and The Strangers were first to market in June 1993, so I’ll read those all the way through starting with The Strangers which is considered the launch title of the universe. Next would be Freex and Mantra which both came out in July 1993. Those would be followed by Exiles and Prototype (August 1993), The Solution (September 1993), Sludge and Night Man (October 1993), so on and so forth. It’ll be interesting to first see the Ultraverse evolve entirely through the eyes of Prime and then see how it all connects through the perspective of Night Man.
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SF Guardian’s readers name Isotope Best Comic Store in the Bay

isotoprelogoIsotope: The Comic Book Lounge, 326 Fell Street in San Francisco, has been named Best Comic Book Store by readers of the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Isotope proprietor James Sime wrote on the store’s website that this is the eleventh year in a row the store has been bestowed the honor. Congratulations, Isotope!

Last Gasp’s Ron Turner to be roasted at LitQuake

lastgaspWhen I wrote about comic related events at San Francisco’s LitQuake this year I made one glaring omission: LitQuake’s 2013 Barbary Coast Award Roast of Last Gasp’s Ron Turner.

Last Gasp is perhaps one of the most well known “comix” publishers from the 1970s. Many other underground publishers were hit hard by a 1973 Supreme Court ruling that local communities could determine what was too indecent to be protected by the First Amendment, but Last Gasp benefited from the liberalism of the Bay Area (unfortunately, this ruling had ripple effects in more conservative regions of the country greatly reducing off-the-rack sales for underground comix overall). Last Gasp has provided publishing opportunities for a long list of alternative creators including R. Crumb in the 70s, Bill Griffith in the 80s, Frank Kozik in the 90s, Mark Ryden in the aughts.

Wednesday night the storied company will be honored as it receives LitQuakes 2013 Barbary Coast Award in conjunction with a roast of Last Gasp founder Ron Turner. The event starts at 8 p.m. in Z Space, 450 Florida St in San Francisco. Tickets and more details are available here.

Mixed Media: A Shirley Jacksonesque conversation about Shirley Jackson

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The author cannot decide which era’s editions are the most fun to collect

“It’s just that,” said Miss Pryor as she stabbed her cigarette out, “there’s a rather beastly amount of italics.”“The better to brainwash you with,” said Ms. Queen, who was rather more cynical.

“One hardly knows whether one is reading one’s own version of events or the author’s.” Miss Pryor was not against italicized words, as such — after all, we must expect to set a standard, as she learned from The Road Through the Wall — but they did rather go on. For example, was it really necessary to know where the emphasis fell when Mrs. Merriam said “Well, you don’t need to worry… I was never so shocked”?

“What you are experiencing,” said Ms. Queen crisply, “is resistance to a cultural tone that is just distant enough to strike the reader as slightly archaic. It’s the fallout of a Great War and a Great Depression influencing an author keenly interested in the ways our deliberate social structures crumble in the face of real struggle.”

“And real horror?” asked Miss Pryor hopefully.

“In the broadest possible sense. Which books have you read?”

“The Haunting of Hill House. We Have Always Lived in the Castle.” Miss Pryor ticked them off on her fingers as she recited. “The Road Through the Wall. Hangsaman. The Sundial. And collected short stories.”

“In which books did a supernatural, external threat figure?”

“Oh, I suppose… well, The Haunting of Hill House and perhaps The Sundial… but it’s very Turn of the Screw, isn’t it, in that you aren’t sure whether the narrator is quite reliable… why, one could hardly name a number!”

Ms. Queen nodded. “Exactly so. Shirley Jackson’s talent lies in growing disease as the strict social orders of her day imploded. Isolated homes figure prominently, often headed by women who would have faced considerable difficulty in gaining social acceptance as heads of household. The poor little girls of The Road Through the Wall, the young remainders of a murdered family in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the dictatorial widow of The Sundial, or poor caretaker Eleanor who, in caring for her shut-in mother, became a shut-in herself.”

“And the lesbians,” offered Miss Pryor, who thought herself rather clever to have noticed.

“Well, yes, including lesbians as sympathetic characters before mainstream literature or society was quite prepared to acknowledge them was perhaps rather marvelous, though you must admit that by identifying those characters with boys’ names– Theo, Tony– the dated narrative remains somewhat problematic.”

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Pricey vintage is fun for the bookshelf, but expect the edition to ruin all surprises and subtleties

“What I hate are the vintage covers,” announced Miss Pryor in a sudden passion. “Why did I pay so much for a charming edition from 1951 only to have the final chapter spoiled for me on the back cover or the introductory summary page? Twice?!”
“Caveat emptor. All decades approach their horror literature differently.”

“I don’t stay after dark,” said Mrs. Dudley, who was beginning to clear away tea.

“It’s as if Jackson had earned such a reputation for terror that the publishers scrambled desperately to distract one from the bulk of the story, which is generally about someone whose inner life, insecurities, and occasionally awkward attempts to find a place in life are so like one’s own that the real horror is how well Shirley Jackson knew the human condition.”

“So there won’t be anyone around if you need help,” said Mrs. Dudley.

Ms. Queen smiled politely. “It’s not for nothing that she has an award named after her .”

“We couldn’t even hear you, in the night,” said Mrs. Dudley. “In the dark.”

“She writes of– and challenges– upper class American society by using it as the lens through which to examine folie a deux, mental illness, sexual molestation, apocalyptic endism, cult psychology, the vicious one-upmanship of the really wealthy–”

“Yes, indeed,” said Ms. Queen hastily. “I think you’ve got the gist now.”

Within Hill House, not sane, floors were firm, doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Dead Universes (part II): Best Practices

Marvel's ad after they bought out Ultraverse.

Marvel’s ad after they bought out Ultraverse.

Thursday I kicked off what’s intended to be a long running series dedicated to the exploration of Dead Universes. Today’s post is dedicated to looking at some of the ‘best practices’ for individuals who think they may want to get into reading or collecting Dead Universes.

1. Have a game plan. Know what you want to collect in advance and how you’ll go about doing it. I haven’t jumped into the original Valiant Universe yet for two reasons. The first is I have a substantial number of Valiant titles in my long boxes, which are 2000 miles away. It’ll be cheaper to mail them across the country over Christmas than to buy duplicates of the first 20 issues of Magnus, Solar, Harbinger, and Archer & Armstrong. The second is I haven’t quite figured out how much of the Valiant universe I want to read. I know I’ll stick through Jim Shooter’s run, but will I seek out everything up until Acclaim tried to turn the company into a video game promotional unit?

For Ultraverse, my demarcation line is roughly Godwheel. That’s when Marvel heroes first started coming into the Ultraverse and when the quality of the titles started to decline significantly.

2. Buy complete runs when possible. This is a bit of advice I wish I’d known going into my quest to acquire Ultraverse titles. Sure you might be able to get Prime 1-10 for $5, but you’ll have a harder time completing the rest of the series. Readers tend to decline the longer a series goes on (which is why Marvel and DC keep canceling and restarting titles), so there are fewer of the later issues in the resale marketplace.

3. Shop around. There’s a vendor on ebay currently selling a complete run of Freex for $45, which is much too high. One month ago I purchased a complete run for $15 ($20 with shipping). I have a rule to never pay more than the number of issues in the run, so essentially $1 per issue. It’s worth repeating that I’m collecting for the stories and not potential future value, so if you want an all near mint line you’ll likely be pay more.

4. Don’t be afraid to wait. If you’re unhappy with the price results coming back don’t be afraid to wait. My generation, the one that grew up during the comic Universe boom of the 90s, is getting to an age where many of us are embarrassed to have junk in our parent’s basement or we need to sacrifice long boxes to make space in our homes for baby cribs.

Next week I’ll take a look at “reading orders” of Dead Universes.

Review: The Hawkline Monster by Richard Brautigan

As part of r/horrorlit’s Horror Novel a Day writers, I’m pretty sure of two things: I took on too many novels (six total) and my definition of horror is suspiciously broad.

Hawkline monster

Hawkline Monster image courtesy of Grant Hanna at http://granthanna.com

Take The Hawkline Monster by Richard Brautigan. It’s more of a gothic western novella than a horror novel. (It is in fact subtitled A Western Gothic.)

But isn’t deception a solid component of plenty of good horror? I don’t mean my deception of being well-versed in horror novels; I mean the deceptive simplicity with which Beat poet/author Brautigan offers the story. By the time you turn the first page of a chapter you’re almost to the next one. Events unpack in sentences so efficient Hemingway would weep:

The voyage from San Francisco to Hawaii had been the most terrifying experience Greer and Cameron had ever gone through, even more terrible than the time they shot a deputy sheriff in Idaho ten times and he wouldn’t die and Greer finally had to say to the deputy sheriff “Please die because we don’t want to shoot you again.” And the deputy sheriff had said “OK, I’ll die, but don’t shoot me again.”

“We won’t shoot you again,” Cameron had said.

“OK, I’m dead,” and he was.

Characters deceive the reader and others; someone exists and then doesn’t; twins’ identities meld and split fluidly. The nature of the Hawkline Monster itself is a creative bit of fearful imagination from a haunted poet whose life ended in suicide. The places the monsters hides…!

My journey to The Hawkline Monster began with this PWxyz entry.  Gabe Habash’s passionate recommendation might have led me to make a note of the book (from the blog: “Honestly, I’m working really hard to not slip into hyperbole here, to refrain from lapsing into a vocab commensurate with the heights of my appreciation for it. This book is the real deal. I can’t recommend it enough. … Do yourself a favor and give him a try. If you don’t like him, I’ll eat my shoe like Werner Herzog.)” but what urged me to buy the book immediately was Habash’s insistence that only Cronenberg could do justice to a hypothetical film of the story. Cronenberg’s film style is very much to my tastes (the guy’s acting– Cabal, Last Night— also assures him a big warm soft spot in my heart).

While I initially read the book through a Cronenberg filter it was impossible not to love the sparse style on its own merits. One of the ways simplicity aids horror is to lull and fool: the process of reading involves moments of “Uh huh… unfolding as expected… wait, WHAT?” A character dies not through violence but through identity obliteration. (To voluntarily kill a part of yourself that has served its purpose is not terror, but to undergo involuntary mental manipulation is. This book has both.) The monster fights with anger and light. Ice caves under the house keep the grounds in a perpetual state of freeze even in summer. A basement lab holds The Chemicals, the final experiment of a Harvard scientist who enjoyed his teaching position until one of his experiments got loose and ate the family dog in front of the neighbors’ wedding party. A 1902 setting allows for Wild West elements like gunfights, hired guns, hanged men, and brothels. It is a flavorful read.

“All the things that happen are like children’s pranks except the child has supernatural powers,” says one character, and if there’s one thing that horror teaches us it’s that children with undue power wield it in horrific ways (thanks, Twilight Zone). While nighttime shivers are unlikely, The Hawkline Monster deserves a place in a thoughtful horror canon on the basis of its dissection of what is frightening and how to write about it.