Link Proliferation: Gesù Cristo! Un piccolo uomo fatto dei quadrati!

That's right, pussycat!

The generous papercraft figure designers at Cubeecraft are offering free downloads of their models for Italian Spiderman and his lead baddie Captain Maximum.

To truly make this your Friday productivity sink, here's the first episode of Alrugo's Italian Spiderman:



Follow the flick all the way through the series and you'll be another hour or so closer to the weekend.

Leaping from papercraft to t-shirt design, Devil's Due Publishing – the group that handles the indie hit series Hack/Slash - and online t-shirt retailer Threadless are joint-hosting a horror-themed design contest. The rules can be found here. If you've got any artistic talent, give it a shot! I'm looking at you, Screamin' Spacejack.

Now that the political debates are over, let's get back to discussing the real issues of the day!

Simon "Shaun of the Dead" Pegg sounds off in the pages of the Guardian: Zombies don't run!

From Pegg's rant:

I know it is absurd to debate the rules of a reality that does not exist, but this genuinely irks me. You cannot kill a vampire with an MDF stake; werewolves can't fly; zombies do not run. It's a misconception, a bastardisation that diminishes a classic movie monster. The best phantasmagoria uses reality to render the inconceivable conceivable. The speedy zombie seems implausible to me, even within the fantastic realm it inhabits. A biological agent, I'll buy. Some sort of super-virus? Sure, why not. But death? Death is a disability, not a superpower. It's hard to run with a cold, let alone the most debilitating malady of them all.

More significantly, the fast zombie is bereft of poetic subtlety. As monsters from the id, zombies win out over vampires and werewolves when it comes to the title of Most Potent Metaphorical Monster. Where their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial savagery, the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable.

Speaking of debates, the Chronicle of Higher Education sounds off on the Mary/Percy Frankenstein authorship debate recently rekindled by the publication of an new edition of Mary Shelley's original Frankenstein manuscript. From the article:

In 1974, the late James Rieger published a new edition of the 1818 text. (Up until then, the 1831 edition, which incorporated substantial revisions by Mary, was the one familiar to most readers.) "Shelley oversaw his wife's manuscript at every stage," Rieger argued. "Not only did he correct her frequent grammatical solecisms, her spelling, and her awkward phrasing," Percy made more-substantial suggestions "for the improvement of the narrative."

Rieger summed up Percy's influence this way: "His assistance at every point in the book's manufacture was so extensive that one hardly knows whether to regard him as editor or minor collaborator."

…

One of the first scholars to put the focus back on Mary's accomplishment was Anne K. Mellor, a professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles. In the 1980s, Mellor went to the Bodleian Library in Oxford to take a look at the manuscript evidence — including the two Frankenstein notebooks — which had been more or less ignored by researchers.

…

Mellor's 1988 book Mary Shelley: Her Fiction, Her Life, Her Monsters goes after Rieger's claim that Percy's interventions improved the novel. Rieger's account is "so biased in Percy Shelley's favor that it must be read as a tissue of facts, half-truths, and pure speculation," Mellor wrote.

Her own study of the notebooks led her to conclude that Percy "made many technical corrections and several times clarified the narrative and thematic continuity of the text." In Mellor's reading, however, Percy at times "misunderstood her intentions and distorted her ideas" as he attempted to impose his style on his wife and make the novel more formal and Latinate.

"Percy never met a monosyllable that he didn't want to make a polysyllable," Mellor says. "Percy thought he was heightening her prose style, making it sound more erudite." So the monster walks around "sounding as if he's Horace."

…

We are not likely to know why Mary accepted those words, or any of Percy's other edits and additions. Robinson [editor of the new edition – CRwM] hopes that readers will take the evidence laid out in the Bodleian edition, weigh it for themselves, and — putting the ideological extremes of past disputes aside — go easy on both Shelleys.

"Some people are going to argue that Percy is usurping his authority and changing Mary. Other people would argue, at the other extreme, that Mary needs this advice," Robinson says. "I like to give them the benefit of the doubt. Here are two people who love each other. One is giving a manuscript to the other for editorial advice, one suggests changes, the other accepts them, the end. But that makes no drama."

To stay on the subject of horror novels, remember the untitled online serial novel I hipped you to back in August? It's got a title now and it available as hardcopy novel. You can score your own copy of Cryptic Bindings On/Off - A Jekyll & Hyde Story at their Web site.

Finally, for you screamers and screamettes who dig a little high culture with your morning coffee, here's a poem by Roberto Bolaño.

GODZILLA IN MEXICO

Listen carefully, my son: bombs were falling
over Mexico City
but no one even noticed.
The air carried poison through
the streets and open windows.
You'd just finished eating and were watching
cartoons on TV.
I was reading in the bedroom next door
when I realized we were going to die.
Despite the dizziness and nausea I dragged myself
to the kitchen and found you on the floor.
We hugged. You asked what was happening
and I didn't tell you we were on death's program
but instead that we were going on a journey,
one more, together, and that you shouldn't be afraid.
When it left, death didn't even
close our eyes.
What are we? you asked a week or year later,
ants, bees, wrong numbers
in the big rotten soup of chance?
We're human beings, my son, almost birds,
public heroes and secrets.

Stay classy, Screamers and Screamette's. And remember, rispetti la donna!

News: How the West was won?

According to Comic Book Resources Devil's Due Publishing will be independently distributing issues 16 and 17 of their guilty-pleasure horror hit Hack/Slash as Diamond will no longer touch those two issues. The reason:

The decision follows Diamond’s receipt of a Cease and Desist letter regarding the issues from an unknown, recently registered company, Re-Animator, LLC, in connection with Dynamite Entertainment’s Nick Barrucci.

Hack/Slash is featuring Lovecraft's famed mad scientist, Herbert West, in its latest story arc. Apparently Re-Animator LLC felt this infringed on their ownership of the character.

Re-Animator LLC, a company that seems to exist solely as a Delaware PO Box, was the company that sold the rights to Dynamite Entertainment when Dynamite was featuring West in their Army of Darkness comics. However, R-A LLC seems to have been created solely for the purpose of snatching up what may be a public domain figure, the character of West, and then "selling" it to Dynamite.

This comes as a bit of a surprise to horror director Brian Yuzna, who helmed the second and third installments of the Re-Animator film franchise. Yuzna was pretty sure that he owned the character of Herbert West. Here's an annoyed Yuzna from the article:

"It may seem crazy to Re-Animator fans to think that a company that had nothing to do with the classic films could actually claim ownership of the "Re-Animator" brand and threaten to stop anyone else from creating comics, films or merchandise with the word 'reanimator' or 're-animator' in it- even the actual producer of the films that created the brand—but in this wacky world that is exactly what has happened."

According to CRB, Yuzna has owned the Re-Animator film franchise, on which both comics based their respective Wests, for more than twenty years.

All of this might be moot: various factions of Lovecraft's estate have fought for years to close off his works from the public domain. Many argue that, under existing laws, the various feuding parties claiming to speak officially for the Lovecraft estate have long since blown their chances to keep the famed author's work under copyright. However, this nebulous claim hasn't prevent these groups from behaving as if their ownership was a given. They regular cut deals with publishers, threaten web sites posting Lovecraft's works, and so on. If any of these groups were to somehow gain the force of law for their currently BS claims, then DDP, Dynamite, Yuzna, and the flimsy R-A LLC would all be screwed.

Comics: Doll versus doll.

Let's review the brilliantly simple premise behind the Devil's Due Publisher series Hack/Slash: Cassy Hack, the "final girl" survivor of a slasher rampage, now spends her time dressing in skimpy Goth/punk outfits and dispatching slashers. She's got a sidekick named Vlad – a mountain of a man who was a slasher in training before Hack liberated him from his would-be mentor. Think of the series, which began as a group of haphazardly released one-shots several years ago, as the Misfits to Buffy's Third Eye Blind. It is good spirited and sly, but straight forward and unabashedly violent; it skirts self-parody without lapsing into postmodern narrative tricks; and though it constantly risks utter absurdity, its love for the trappings of the horror genre prevent it from lapsing entirely into teen-soap territory.

Most importantly, it is fun. Let's not forget that.

In fact, my only on-going complaint with the comics was something the comic makers didn't have much control over: Due to the rights and franchises involved, Cassy Hack and Vlad couldn't go up against the familiar slashers we all knew. Mostly our intrepid slasher-slayers went after original killers or tongue in cheek clones of famous slashers. This was okay, as far as it went. But we wanted a real dust up. If you're going to create characters who kill slashers, eventually the reader is going to demand we see how they measure up against Jason, Freddy, Leatherface, and the other murderous madmen who are the touchstones of the genre.

Finally, this month, Cassy and Vlad got to mix up with a franchise fiend. In a special one-shot issue available at your finer comic purveyors, the duo cross paths with the demonically diminutive Chucky.

The plot actually ties-in into the continuities of both franchises. The central villain, a religiously inspired maniac who intends to "save the soul" of Cassy Hack even if it means causing the mortal coil a stupendous amount of damage, is a returning character from the Hack/Slash one-shot "Girls Gone Dead." In that previous one-shot, Cassy defeated her by setting her on fire. Ouch. Now extra crispy and bent on revenge, our mad villain wants out of her charred body and into the body of Cassy's gigantic and powerful partner. If only there was like a voodoo amulet that could . . . oh, hey, wait! Enter a dismembered Chucky, sitting in the evidence room a North Hollywood police station after getting the business end of an axe at the close of Seed of Chucky. Our villain revives the Chuckster, heads down to New Orleans, sets a trap for our heroes, and swaps bodies with Vlad. Ultimately, Chucky and Cassy join forces to get Vlad back into his body and retrieve Chucky's magic amulet.

It is a goofy contrivance, sure, but no more forced or goofy than the plot twists that drove Universal's old school monster mash-ups. Just picking it up you've pretty much admitted you're reading it for the opportunity to watch Cassy and Hack mix it up with Chucky. How the writers get us there seems somewhat irrelevant.

The combo works fairly well. The past few years have seen numerous movie psychos make the transition from film to comic. Avatar produced of collection of poorly received issues based on New Line's trinity of horror icons: Freddy, Jason, and Leatherface. Ultimately, these made the jump to DC with mixed, but mostly positive, results. Chucky, perhaps one of the silliest slashers ever created, makes the transition well. He is still quick with the cheesy puns and pop culture references, but his comic book persona seems smarter and more deliberate. After watching him play henpecked hubby and clueless dad, there's something cool about watching him get back to his gleefully murderous roots. While Cassy and Vlad prove the equal of the famed cinema slasher in the carnage department, Chucky ultimately steals the book. He fits well into the strange, darkly comedic, semi-parodic world of Hack/Slash and he adds to the bloody fun.

The book has some flaws. The story feels compressed. The book jumps suddenly from one scene to the next and the lack of transitions seems sloppy. It almost seems like the writers had a mini-series in mind and, last minute, things were trimmed down to a single 40-some page one-off. This becomes especially weird in the last scene, where Cassy goes from recovering from injuries in a hotel room to a final fight with Chuckles in a swap without so much as an explanation of how our two star characters ended up there.

Still, it seems foolish to quibble about such details when one of the major characters of the book is a homicidal children's doll. We're not talking Proust here. Hack/Slash has been about delivering reliable horror tinged kicks to genre fans, and in this Hack/Slash versus Chucky does just what it is supposed to do.

Comics: The good bad girl versus the bad Good Guy doll.

Hack/Slash, an irregularly released series of mini-series from Devil's Due Press, is one of those guilty pleasures that makes horror comic reading at once so embarrassing and, yet, so much damn fun.

The premise, cooked up by writer Tim Seeley, is so brilliantly obvious that it makes you wonder how we've gone through more than 20 years of slasher flicks without somebody hitting on it. Follow me here: Cassie Hack was kinda the pretty/ugly girl at high school. Apparently, regardless of how obviously hot one is, not being blonde is enough to ensure you grief. Her mother, the slightly over-protective lunch lady at Cassie's school, took revenge for her daughter's constant petty humiliations by killing and serving up several of Cassie's tormentors. Eventually, Cassie had a confrontation with her own mother and killed her.

Unfortunately for Cassie (but luckily for fans of clever meta-horror cheese), her mother came back as The Lunch Lady, a classic post-Jason style supernatural slasher. In the world of Hack/Slash, the slasher is a specific type of undead – denied the pleasures of life, the vengeful creatures hunt out youth, sex, fun and so on, killing that which they can never have. Cassie was forced to once again put her mother down. And in doing so, found her calling. Cassie (after trading in her pretty/ugly look for something with a more naughty Goth school girl vibe) travels the country with her hulking, reformed slasher-trainee sidekick Vlad, hunting down and disposing of slashers.

That's whole premise: Hot chick in naughty Goth schoolgirl outfits and heavily armed Frankenstein-looking mammer jammer hunt down and kill slashers.

Sure, The Watchmen it ain't – but who cares when you've got a hot chick in naughty Goth schoolgirl outfits and heavily armed Frankenstein-looking mammer jammer hunting down and killing slashers? Honestly. Sure, the entire character of Cassie Hack is sort of nothing more than a over the top experiement in the delivery of fan service. And sure the whole thing is often more goofy then scary. But I mentioned the whole "hot chick . . . mammer jammer . . . kill slasher" thing, right? The defense rests.

I bring the comic up now because, normally, the slashers Cassie and Vlad face (when not fighting demonically possessed toys or zombie house pets) are satiric homages to famous slasher characters and not, actually, famous monsters from filmland. However, according to an interview with the series writer, Devil's Due plans to produce a genuine franchise cross-over. That's right! My favorite subgenre of horror cheese: a freakin' Monster Mash!

The cinematic slasher in question is the pint-sized psycho Chucky. Look for the dame versus doll battle royale to hit shelves this March.