< resource >
COMIC EFFECT #37
($3.50 from Jim Kingman / PO Box 2188 / Pasadena, CA / 91102-2188 USA. Web:
www.comiceffect.com)
This horror-themed issue of
Comic Effect is a nice trip down memory lane for fans of EC comics,
Tomb of Dracula, DC's Silver Age horror books and so forth. Probably my favorite article this time around is Jim Kingman's "The Road Much Traveled", in which he mixes travel writing (following a road trip from California to Florida) with reflections on comics (stories that he read on said trip). Another bit I liked is Kingman's review of Milligan and Fegredo's
Face but mostly because he manages to juxtapose it with an issue of
Welcome Back, Kotter. Also in the issue: Kingman's (what, again?) list of essential horror reading; Peter Enfantino's
Haunt of Fear tribute and synopses for his favorite stories; Jason Sacks' discussion of the last few issues of Marvel's
Tomb of Dracula by Wolfman and Colan; and an interesting comparison (by Allen J. Schuler) of themes in Marvels' non-superhero
Tales to Astonish of November, 1961 and
Fantastic Four #1 which was released the same month (and began the new age of Marvel superheroes). Schuler makes it pretty clear – and I find it amusing – that the earliest Marvel superhero comics were really the same comics they'd been doing except everyone had colorful costumes. I'm not sure I'd ever really looked at it like that. Anyway, there's more in the issue, of course. If you've never read
Comic Effect and you're a fan of horror comics, I'd recommend starting with this one.
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< comics >
BOMBABY #1
by Antony Mazzotta
($3.50,
SLG Publishing,
Bombaby.com)
Review by Mike Hunter
Far as I know, this is the first American comic to deal with the version of modern India exemplified by "Bollywood" movies, where – as flashy musicals did in the U.S. during the Great Depression – wealth, romance, and glamour offer escapism for the impoverished masses.
Bombaby begins with a splash page of a crowded cinema, the audience watching a silhouetted woman brushing her hair. A Hindu chant dances through the air. In the next page, the screen is seen from its "other side," the bedroom mirror of the heroine, Sangeeta Mukherjee, who finishes tending her luxuriant tresses, picks up a book on meditation, and commences her spiritual exercises.
Startled to find herself having an "out-of-body-experience" – which she keeps telling herself is "only a dream" – she floats about her parents' mansion. Her tomboyish "cockroach" of a little sister, Shakti (the name for the active, creative force of the universe, seen as female in Hinduism), is spotted at mischief. Her arranged-marriage fiancé, drolly named Sham, cockily strides in, Sangeeta wondering, "I wonder what makes him so happy? Probably found a rupee on the front steps..." Outside the house, a mystic eye is seen by the reader, and a force pulls her startled astral form toward the glittering modern towers of the city, while a narrator's voice intones, "The ancient dynasties venerated her...she gave them guidance...as time passed, many had forgotten her...[so] she must return..." – serpentlike Hindu demons float, unseen, about a stretch limousine – "...in her latest...and greatest...of incarnations."
Here is another dazzling splash page, an aerial view of the city with smoke arising from a spotlit shootout below. In neon lights "Diva Devi" (Devi, literally "shining one," is a "generic" term for Goddess*) glows above that mystic eye, in which the mushroom cloud of an atomic explosion is seen – remember India is a nuclear power – and the title of the book, and name of that avatar appears: "Bombaby - the Screen Goddess."
Sangeeta is appalled to find her astral self in the midst of the shootout, the limo plowing among the combatants and capturing the object of the conflict, a metallic attaché case. She swoops in, grabs the case "...[so] these men will have nothing to fight over...", and takes off, her presence only sensed by one of the men after the case, who bears a Goddess tattoo, cries out "Ma" (Hindu Goddesses are frequently revered as maternal figures) and "Forgive my sins, Goddess!"
Astonishingly, in view of the masterful assurance displayed, this is writer/artist Antony Mazzotta's first published comic. In places the art suggests Kyle Baker's rubberyness, and, like Baker, Mazzotta is expert in using a computer. But he knows how to rein in the beast: the effects and unusual palette of colors never overwhelm the art's "readability." Mazzotta knows to use Mumbai for Bombay, the city renamed a few years back from the colonial version back to its ancient original name. Everywhere he shows enough acquaintance with the modes, styles, and speech patterns of modern India to satirize knowingly. Even Sangeeta's beauty differs from the bland Western fashion. The gaudy, borderline-tacky glitz of well-off Indians (balusters in her home take the form of wrought-iron dollar signs) is, as hinted by the cover, with the Goddess looking down upon a littered grey waste peopled by the starved poor, likely going to be contrasted with the privation all-too-prevalent in India in future issues. But
www.bombaby.com offers tantalizing glimpses of more fun – Shakti is transformed into a blue tiger – and colorful villains to come.
Bombaby - The Screen Goddess is on the racks of comic stores right now. Get in on the ground floor of what is sure to be an impressively towering edifice...
*
shivashakti.com mentions, "...There are said to be 33,000,000 Devis [in Hinduism]...", hence the need for "generic" terms!
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< recordings >
COMPLETELY IN THE DARK!
by Judson Fountain
($15.00,
Innova Recordings)
Review by Mark Campos
Another jewelcase for the "Incredibly Strange" shelf. Judson Fountain and his pals recorded these no-budget radio dramas in the late '60s, releasing them on LPs, sending them to radio stations for possible airplay. The best of these shows have been gathered on CD by the legendary Irwin Chusid.
Fountain was a big fan of spooky shows like "Lights Out" and "Inner Sanctum", and in trying to recreate the thrills of that earlier era, managed to create something you will either find wildly hilarious and entertaining, or not. Fountain's speciality character, a screechy-voiced old hag, turns up in almost every one of these skits (most vividly in "Granny, Sing No More!", in which she holds one horrible note, a la Jerry Colonna). His other character is a gruff-voiced old man, usually an aged tough guy like Pop Serriano in "The Old Woman of Haunted House": "See this phone? I still got connections! I'm Pop Serriano!" His pal Sandor Weisburger both acts and announces, essaying both tasks through his thick Live From Brooklyn accent. When he impersonates a stern Irish dad, his brogue slips sideways and starts coming out more like an angry Jamaican.
The scripts seem half-improvised, but were probably completely written out – words pile up like train cars in a wreck – phrases like "garbage can from Thailand" and "You blew the whistle!" are repeated until backward reels the mind. The skits were recorded "live in the studio", which means nothing is edited out, and if you want you can gloat over every dropped cue and vocal flub, and there are so many.
Frequently, to indicate some unnameable horror coming to get somebody, Judson would drop the needle on a spooky effects record. He does this in a couple of skits, and it convulses me that it's the exact same record each time. A very consistant unnameable horror! Elsewhere, a wifebeating sequence is signified by another effects record, which makes the skit sound dead similar to Monty Python's "Mary, Queen of Scots" routine.
And, of course, the skits are full of wonderfully quotable bits of surrealism: "Standing there in back of you, face-to-face, is now the old man you killed! He's old, horrible looking – and he's dead!" You'll chortle yourself sick.
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< novels >
THE IMMENSITY OF THE HERE AND NOW
by Paul West
($23.00,
Voyant Publishing. ISBN 0-9665998-5-3)
Review by Tom Spurgeon
For those of us for whom Spain’s commuter bombings of 3/11/04 marked the first time we sat down and thought hard about an act of terrorism not on our own country’s soil, it became clear that a heretofore not talked about outcome of the World Trade Center destruction in 2001 is broadly felt, perniciously lingers and remains largely psychic in nature. The writer Paul West understood this instinctively, and last year tiny Voyant Publishing released the most significant piece of art to react to this world-changing event, the novel
The Immensity of the Here and Now. The criminally under-appreciated West wrote one of the better novels of the last century (one you will find on some of the more astute critical lists),
The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests. Many of the strengths that distinguished that work can be found in this latest, particularly his stop-and-smile skill with vivid sentences, sparkling gems of unique thought and phrasing in a sea of dense paragraphs.
The Immensity of the Here and Now goes deep into root reactions to the event in question, tackling troubling insights head on and bringing an almost Quixotic dedication to sort tiny moments of clarity out of the nearly impossible to grasp. It’s virtuoso work on a subject to which nearly all of us can relate even if our first reaction is to put everything in a pile and walk away. This is a brave and sometimes brilliant book.
Gil Roth’s Voyant is a small company dedicated to writers like West, Samuel Delany (they published an excellent collection of his mid-1980s letters called
1984), and newer discovery Vincent Czyz. They are a true boutique publisher, dedicated to value in art over commerce, and you could do little better in the service of diverse voices in the trade than to poke around their web site for something that strikes you worth checking out.
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