My to-read piles — the Towers of Shame, known collectively as the Wall of Shame — have gotten so uncontrollable that I'm making a dedicated effort to clear out as much as I can. One self-disciplinary move is to read whatever's on top, regardless if that's the thing I most want to read today. This has been a stunningly effective tool; I have cleared out one Tower of Shame already and am working on Tower No. 2. Here's the latest:
CINEMA PURGATORIO TPB
Writer: Alan Moore | Art: Kevin O'Neill
Avatar Press, 2018
This trade paperback collects the "Cinema Purgatorio" stories that filled the first 8 pages of the 18 issues of the 2016 anthology Alan Moore's Cinema Purgatorio from Avatar Press. I didn't buy those issues, so I can't tell you what the non-Cinema stories were about.
Which doesn't mean I don't have a lot to say. Too much, really, for a short review. (And I aim to keep it short.) I could write 2,000 words just describing the content. This is Alan Moore, after all, which means he can pack a lot into 8 pages. I probably spent more time researching his references than I did reading each story.
Which is fun! Well, for me. I'm pretty sure it's not fun for everybody.
The title itself is a literary reference, to Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, a narrative poem about a soul's journey in the afterlife, comprised of Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. It defined the state of the Catholic Church's ecclesiastical worldview in the 14th century, and is a pretty big deal.
Of course, no Alan Moore reference worth its salt has just one antecedent; there's a 1988 Italian movie titled Cinema Paradiso also. I tell you this to make sure that those inspired to read this work spend the next six weeks researching, so you don't miss any clever Alan Moore bits. (Paradiso isn't an obscure movie to cineastes; there's a theater named Cinema Paradiso here in Memphis.)
The 18 episodes all take place within a run-down theater called the Cinema Purgatorio in an unknown town viewed from the eyes of an unknown narrator (we literally see through her eyes, therefore never seeing her face — except once in a mirror). The narrator keeps coming back to the theater, despite its bizarre fare and having unhappy experiences, asking herself why she keeps doing so. That is part of the mystery, and alert readers can catch clues as to what this is all about, which comes to a climax in the 18th episode.
Several elements reappear in every segment (or almost every segment) whose importance varies from "vital to the narrative" to "in-joke gags," such as the omnipresent Screen Regrets magazine, the creepy hotel manager, the usherette with the unexplained limp, the ticket-seller and her odd spiel, and an image of a dead man on a couch, shot to death. All of this is a reference to something — even the Screen Regrets articles and cover blurbs — and that something is usually the framing device. For now!
The middle six-ish pages are always the movie the narrator comes to see. The movie is usually about movie history, usually uses movie tropes and movie characters as stand-ins for what the story is about ... and is always pretty awful. Because if you know anything about Hollywood's salacious history, there's a lot of awful there.
For example, one movie is A Night at the Lawyers, starring the Warner Bros. It uses the Marx Brothers as analogs for the four Warner brothers, explaining how they formed a successful studio — which is not a pretty picture, to male a dual reference myself. To understand this one, I had to bone up on the Warner brothers. (Thankfully, I was already familiar with Groucho, Chico, Zeppo and Harpo, and didn't have to research them.) If this story is true, Jack Warner (Groucho/Jacko) was a pretty terrible person.
Another fascinating movie is The Abandoned Sunset, based on Sunset Boulevard. It begins with six dead characters under sheets in an L.A. morgue, telling each other how they got there. This is derived from a real scene in Sunset Boulevard that the studio wouldn't let director Billy Wilder use, of that movie's narrator (William Holden) starting the story from under a sheet in the morgue. (The movie as released begins with Holden's character floating face-down in a swimming pool, bleeding from four bullet holes. That's ... better?) The Holden character's "how I got here" story is, of course, the movie. In Purgatorio, Moore's throughline is the blacklisting of the '50s -- at least two characters are pertinent — but also includes interesting bits of each corpse's CV.
I'll help your research by IDing the corpses for you:
- Alvah Bessie, jailed as one of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten;
- Sal Mineo, James Dean contemporary whose career tanked after coming out as bisexual;
- Howard Rushmore, lefty-turned-righty Hollywood "journalist" who got many writers blacklisted;
- Gloria Swanson, silent-era film star, best known for playing Norma Desmond, a fading silent-era film star, in Sunset Boulevard;
- Lana Turner, whose daughter stabbed mobster (and Turner's bf) Johnny Stompanato to death for abusing her mother; and
- Chalky White, professional boxer and Mae West's chauffeur.
The characters remain under the sheets througout (except in flashback), but by paying attention to the dialogue and the "camera" angle, you can figure who's talking in any given frame.
This being Alan Moore, bits in some of the movies reference the framing sequence, or each other, or are just one-off gags. You have to figure out which is which. The upshot is that the 18 movies with their framing sequences and movies, despite being episodic, form a sort of interstitially, thematically connected whole.
Complicated enough? Keep Google handy! Or cheat and use Cinema Purgatorio Annotato, a list of references. It's not comprehensive, but it can be a starting point.
Because we're going to dive into screwball comedies, Tod Browning, the Keystone Kops, George Reeves, musical comedy, Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer (Fritz the Cat), Westerns, Fatty Arbuckle, children's TV, Bugsy Siegel, an actor who spent his whole career as a cross-dressed grandma, the Blue Dahlia, Willis O'Brien and King Kong, and, yes, still more!
You're either going to love this, as I did, or hate it, as did the writers of most of the reviews on Amazon.
JUNGLE COMICS VOL. 1 HC
Reprints Jungle Comics #1-3 (Jan-Mar 40, Fiction House)
PS Artbooks, 2023
This was on top as I was banging through a lot of PS Artbooks, but it was slow going. I raced ahead with the others as this fell behind, as these are very bad comics.
The one bright spot is the presence of the ultra-bizarre Fantomah strip by Fletcher Hanks in issues #2-3. I'd already read those in a Fantomah collection, but they were a mild reprieve from the mind-numbingly bad writing and amateurish artwork of the other features, all leavened with a healthy dose of racism.
THE RIDDLER: YEAR ONE
Writer: Paul Dano | Art: Stevan Subic
DC Comics, 2023
This is the origin story of The Riddler in The Batman (2022), written by the actor who played him. If you've seen the movie, you know that The Riddler is brilliant, fixated on Batman and completely off his nut. This is the story of how he got that way.
I enjoyed it well enough, but I started to get antsy in the second half for the thing to end (because I knew how it had to end — I've seen the movie). There are only so many "look how crazy I am" fantasy sequences I can tolerate before they get boring. Oh, wait, I know how many "look how crazy I am" fantasy sequences I can tolerate: "one." Because after that it's just pointless repetition.
SOUL PLUMBER HC
Writers: Marcus Parks, Henry Zedrowski | Art: John McCrea
DC Comics Black Label, 2022
I had been been snapping up everything DC publishes under its Black Label imprint, because I had yet to be disappointed.
First time for everything, I guess.
Soul Plumber isn't bad-bad. It's just typical of a certain kind of adolescent comics in the UK I no longer enjoy. The artwork is busy and ugly, the jokes are peurile, the violence is over the top, the story sophomoric in its attitude and self-importance. Think Nemesis the Warlock, Dicks or Marshall Law, and you're on the right track. I enjoyed such books when I was younger, but they no longer hold any interest for me in my dotage.
THE OTHER HISTORY OF THE DC UNIVERSE HC
Writer: John Ridley | Art: Guiseppe Camuncoli
DC Comics, 2021
I'm not sure what I was expecting. But what I got was riveting.
History isn't just a collection of reprints, or new stories set in the immortal DC Universe where nobody ages. It is, in fact, a history -- one that runs parallel to the comics we read from 1972-2000, and the historical events we lived through in those years. Arthur Ashe defeating Jimmy Connors at Wimbledon (1975) is included, as is Ronald Reagan getting elected (1980). "Crisis on Infinite Earths" (1986) is included, as are "Death of Superman" (1992) and "The Judas Contract" (1984). This all told in the words of the six major characters, whose memories of personal events and major crises don't always agree. All six narrators are people of color, and their takeaway is usually different than the "official" story we read in Outsiders, Justice League, Teen Titans and other titles.
The Other History was originally published in five oversize issues, each of which gave a major character's POV, and serve as chapters for this book:
- BOOK ONE: 1972-1995: Jefferson Pierce
- BOOK TWO: 1970-1989: Karen Beecher-Duncan & Mal Duncan
- BOOK THREE: 1993-1996: Tatsu Yamashiro
- BOOK FOUR: 1992-1997 Renee Montoya
- BOOK FIVE: 1981-2000 Anissa Pierce
As you can see, there is some chronological overlap. But not in the narratives. For example, the Duncans might make mention somewhere in their story that "Black Lightning had become active by the time we did such-and-so." Those are acknowledgements of events elsewhere in the book, but they don't derail the focus of the given chapter. We've already read Jefferson Pierce's story from his own lips, and don't need to see what others thought long distance. Black Lightning, Bumblebee, Hornblower/Guardian II, Katana, The Question II and Thunder each tell their own stories — of their private careers, their public superhero lives, their relationships, their teams, the ending of those teams if those teams ended — and what they thought of it all.
It's an astonishing achievement. Not just the creativity of creating interior worlds for characters that by and large that didn't have them, but dovetailing their opinions and actions with actual, unchanging comic book events — like explaining all those cancellations of Teen Titans and Outsiders! Real history is involved as well, and the characters age in real time. That's as good a reason as any to end the book where they did, before Jefferson Pierce hits his 80s.
I am a bit disappointed that there's no John Stewart chapter. Of all these characters, he went through the most personality transplants. I'd like to see how Ridley justified or smoothed out all these different takes. If he can make sense of all the Outsiders, John Stewart should be easy!
Anyway, I couldn't put this one down, and I'll bet you can't, either.
REEFER MADNESS TPB
Dark Horse, 2018
Craig Yoe, sometimes referred to as a "comics archaeologist," digs up a collection of stories from the 1950s where "Satan's cigarettes" (and other references you will never hear again) is a major player. And yes, weed in the '50s was widely (and often inaccurately) excoriated for its doleful effects on unsuspecting (and sometimes suspecting) youth.
The reactions of authority figures to marijuana in these stories is so hysterical as to be hilarious -- at first. I started reading this book several years ago, laughing as I went. But there was a certain sameness to each story. I stopped laughing, got bored and put the book down.
But needs must and I picked it up again, in order to barrel through the second half of the book and shorten the Tower of Shame in which it lived. Nothing much had changed, except my attitude. Instead of hoping for a laugh, I instead paid attention to the history of these stories, artists and publishers. Where did the stories come from? Was a given story typical of a given publisher's output? What else did a given artist draw? That's a thing I greatly enjoy, so I zoomed through the second half of the book and here we are.
I don't know if any of that will help you decide if you want to read the book or not. It is a window into a time when Grown-Up Nation believed marijuana was as dangerous and deadly as heroin, opium or cocaine which, from the vantage point of the 21st century, seems insane (or hilarious). I do imagine, though, that it would've been a lot funnier had I been stoned, which is probably the natural state in which to read these stories.
DUNE PART 2 HC
Writers: Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson | Art: Raul Allen and Patricia Martin
Dark Horse, 2022
In Dune Part 1, I was mostly concerned about remembering Frank Herbert's trilogy, which I read in high school. Now, most of it has flooded back, and I have the movie as well to spark my memory. I'm in a better position now to question if a given scene is accurate to the book, or made up for the movies (or the comics). So that anxiety has been vanguished.
And, by and large, I don't expect a lot of deviance from Brian Herbert (Frank's son) and Kevin J. Anderson (one of the country's premier SF writers, who probably grew up on Dune). For the most part, reading these graphic novels is a genial voyage through a story whose major beats I still remember, but am reading with the fresh eyes of a man decades older than my high school self. I am enjoying this "re-read" of an SF classic immensely, as I did for the first time, and not altogether for the same reasons.
One complaint: I found the art a bit pedestrain in Part 1, and I have to say it doesn't improve in Part 2. I can tell what's going on well enough, which is the primarly goal of communication — no complaints there. It just isn't very interesting to look at. Even giant sandworms seem a bit bland. One wonders what one of the major artists from Marvel, DC or Image could have done with this material.
CRIME CONFIDENTIAL TPB
Reprints crime comics from the '50s
Yoe Books, 2021
Here's another one I picked up and put down, not because of lack of interest, but because it was too large and unwieldy! I could only read it in certain circumstances, due its size and my light requirements. (I am old, my eyes need help.) I finally made the time and the place available, and zoomed right on through. (Dogs were moved, but not harmed, for me to achieve reading position.)
Like Reefer Madness, this is a collection of '50s stories with a common theme: this time, crime. Mostly of the "true crime" variety, so you'll see some familiar names, like Al Capone, Legs Diamond, Pretty Boy Foyd, Dutch Schultz, Lucky Luciano and John Dillinger. Like all "true crime" comics of the period, the bare bones of the story will be accurate -- banks robbed, names of the gang members, time and place of death -- but virtually everything else is made up. I mean, how on earth could a comic book writer know what one gangster told another in an isolated farmhouse 30 years previous? It's not like anyone was taking dictation while on the lam. The writer doesn't know, so he fills the word balloons with some tough-guy dialogue — not in the interests of re-creating history, but of glorifying these violent men (and some women) to entertain the children buying the books. Sure, the bad guys (and gals) will eventually get their comeuppance in the final panel. But up to that point, it's over-the-top, sleazy violence. Which, you know, sold pretty well!
The reall selling point for me is the artists involved. They include Charles Biro (Crime Does Not Pay), Dick Briefer (Frankenstein), John Buscema (Conan the Barbarian), Gene Colan (Tomb of Dracula), Jack Cole (Plastic Man), Reed Crandall (Blackhawk), Fred Gaurdineer (The Durango Kid), Everett Raymond Kinstler (official portraits of Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan), Mort Meskin ("Johnny Quick"), Bob Powell (Sheena, Queen of the Jungle), Mike Sekowsky (Justice League of America), Leonard Starr ("On Stage"), Alex Toth (Space Ghost) and more. Most of the material here isn't those artists' best work, but you can always see the roots of what that art will someday be.
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Through this mechanism, he explained why Mal went through various superhero personae (IRL reason: they all sucked, and none of them clicked with the audience), why he would agree to be Titans HQ caretaker (IRL reason: keep the only Black member around in case of a revival), why Karen decided to become Bumblebee (IRL reason: Black female superhero needed)
This reminded me of something I said a while back about Cyborg (that he was a “joiner”). In a dizzying group of comics and TV shows, Cyborg has been included everywhere. I certainly don’t have a problem with heroes who aren’t white being in superhero teams. It would be nice, however, if new characters were created instead of wearing out the few that already exist.
I noticed this thread this morning. It's almost 0200, and I was up making some spelling correxions and a final polish of the second part of my Semi-Imaginary Stories articles, the one I posted yesterday. (Somehow, no matter how much I edit these things before posting, I always find mistakes and think of better ways to say something after I post.) Your post here, Cap, reminds me of how I've let my to-read books pile up. I've got a great book covering the history of the creation of the Doc Savage novels---I started it two years ago, while on a cruise. I got two-thirds of the way through it, but it's lain fallow ever since. It's deeply researched and written well; I just never seem to take the time to read at home, anymore.
I've also got a thick book on the Perry Mason television show, written by Ed Robertson. I've got Robinson's books on The Fugitive, Maverick, and The Rockford Files. I like his style and he knows his stuff. But it's been gathering dust for about a year.
I love books on television shows. I've got one huge bookcase populated with nothing but. I regularly ply the output of publishers, and there's quite a few more that I'd like to buy and peruse. But I don't because I let myself get occupied with the various sites I follow on the Internet, and it's tough enough to keep current with those. Now that I'm a man of leisure, I've been throwing myself into my writing. It's curious because I used to be a voracious reader. Two walls of my den are lined with huge bookcases filled with a good thousand or more of books, hardcover and paperback, any one of which I'd love to re-read, again. But, it's occurred to me that, if I did nothing else but read them again, I don't have enough time in life to do so.
It doesn't help that the Roku channels are replete with old television series that grab my attention. I'll waste a day binge-watching 77 Sunset Strip, Lawman, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, The F.B.I., and the like. I was glad to discover that the Good Mrs. Benson enjoys some of the same shows, many of which were originally aired before she was born. (She tended to write off that old black-and-white stuff as trite, until I introduced her to some of the excellent writing that came out of the Golden Age of Television. Now she, grudgingly, admits that The Fugitive is as good as her high-water mark, The West Wing.) She's especially fond of Combat!, which surprised me to no end. That's always good for us to have a lazy afternoon with pizza and wine.
I really need to get to these books before I need a ladder to reach the top one on the stack.
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