Comics: Don't let the pigeon drive us straight to hell.

In an afterword attached to the tail end of TPB collection of the Pigeons from Hell mini, script from Joe R. Lansdale and art by Nathan Fox and Dave Stewart, essayist and novelist Mark Finn quotes Robert E. Howard discussing his folkloric sources of inspiration:

But no Negro ghost-story ever gave me the horrors as did the tales told by my grandmother. All the gloominess and dark mysticism of the Gaelic nature was hers, and there was no light and mirth in her. Her tales showed what a strange legion of folk-lore grew up in the Scotch-Irish settlements of the Southwest, where transplanted Celtic myths and fairy-tales met and mingled with a sub-stratum of slave legends. My grandmother was but one generation removed from south Ireland and she knew by heart all the tales and superstitions of the folks, black and white, about her.

This bit comes from a letter addressed to H. P. Lovecraft. Howard and Lovecraft had a curious relationship, part mutual fan club and part professional rivalry. This particular missive was part of a multi-year long debate between the two titans of genre lit about the nature of barbarism and civilization. Howard, of course, made romanticizing the noble savage the cornerstone of his writing career. In contrast, Lovecraft viewed the barbaric impulse as atavistic in the worst possible way. For Howard, barbarism was the pulsing will to power that ran through the blood of all men in spite of the softening influences of modern culture; for Lovecraft, barbarism was the bloody nihilistic abyss that lurked underneath the fragile scaffolding of civilized progress. [For a more nuanced take on this debate, check out reader Taranaich's post in the comment section - CRwM]

One imagines that Lovecraft shuddered at Howard's breezy, energetic intellectual miscegenation; for Lovecraft, mixing is almost always equal to tainting. Howard, by contrast, happily suggest that the mutt is always the healthiest dog. Setting aside the unfortunate fact of Lovecraft's view on race, Howard's description of his inspirations points to another, more strictly aesthetic, contrast with Lovecraft. "Pigeons from Hell" actually incorporates the conditions of its own creation as a plot point: just as the story rose from a tangle of sources, the key developments in the story's narrative arise from the interplay of cultures and historical conditions. In Lovecraft, more often than not, humanity is attacked from the outside or brought down by an internal imperfection. Either some eldritch thing that shouldn't be phases into the dimension to melt your brain or you discover you've secretly been a fishman all this time. By contrast, in "Pigeons," we get a horror that is the product of a manmade disaster. The supernatural horror of "Pigeons" is the residue of normal human evil, specifically the evil of slavery. In Howard's work, you get the sense that human behavior can get so bad, it poisons the very earth, leaving behind a lethally toxic spiritual superfund site in need of karmic cleansing. The descendants of the sinners and their victims are doomed to fight the same struggles, paying the same steep costs, until the original conditions of the original violation are finally resolved.

Lansdale, Fox, and Stewart manage to capture the same feeling in their modernized adaptation. The plot, a few "why won't my cell work" moments aside, will be immediately recognizable to readers of the original. Two sisters find out they've inherited a decaying white elephant of a plantation way the hell out in bayou country in New Orleans. They visit it, with a small posse of their city-folk friends in tow, to see if they should tear down the joint and try to sell off the land or simply tear up the deed and forget the rotting pile even exists. What they find, of course, is that the primary crop of the old plantation is market-grade freaky shit. And this freaky shit comes in bulk. Zombies, ghosts, black magic, trees that turn into snakes, monsters - should anybody survive, I think we can all agree the answer is to just tear up the deed.

What's nice about Lansdale's plotting, which reflects a similar arc you'll find in the original, is the value it places on the characters as protagonists. What first appears as an riot of threats and uncanny assaults is, as the characters work through their experience, revealed to be a complex web of supernatural interactions, relationships, alliances, and antagonisms. The plantation isn't just haunted: it's got its own supernatural ecosystem. The benefit of this approach is the sense the reader gets that the agency of the protagonists' is not wasted or superficial. Occasionally Lansdale, either out of loyalty to the source story or unfortunate error, lapses in to overt string-pulling: the most notable instance being the appearance of an ancient African American hoodoo man whose chief power is the ability to conjure up massive amounts of exposition.

I'm on the fence about Fox and Stewart's art. At its best, it reminds me of non-Mignola B.P.R.D. stuff. It has the vibrant line work that seems not so much sketchy as literally shaking with life. In fact, there's often a solidity to the characters that gives them a realistic density on the page that I find lacking in the Hellboy spin-off. The downside is that there's a static, disjointed quality to the art - as if everybody has been posed for still shots and then moved to the next set-up without concern for continuity - that leads to busy, murky panels and action that doesn't flow. That said, I'm inclined toward a thumbs up as I think some of the problem with the art comes from constraints imposed by factors outside the artists control. The project's fair tight pacing requires an insane about of visual information be packed onto every page. This keeps the story moving at a brisk pace, but robs the artists of the room they'd need to really bring their all.

Comics: Once Smurfs go black . . .

The story is familiar: A lone Patient-Zero is exposed to a dangerous new contagion that alters them into a mindless predator. Efforts are made to contain and treat the infected, but Patient-Zero breaks free and spreads the disease. Soon, the infected outnumber the healthy and things look bleak . . .

You've seen it before.

But have you seen it in Smurf Village before?

Comic Book Legends (one of the maybe 3 comic blogs consistently worth reading) has a wonderful story on the Les Schtroumpfs Noirs: "the Black Smurfs."

I'll let columnist Brian Cronin explain:

The Smurfs (or, as they were known in the Franco-Belgium comics where they debuted, Les Schtroumpfs) first appeared in comic writer/artist Peyo's light-hearted sword and sorcery series, Johan et Pirlouit (Johan and Peewit) in 1958. They were quite popular and by 1959 they were starring in their own back-up stories.

Their first album came out in 1963, titled Les Schtroumpfs Noirs - the Black Smurfs.
And the Black Smurfs, their first solo comic title, was basically about zombie smurfs!!!

You see, a Smurf in the comic is stung by a rare fly who effectively turns him into a zombie (his skin turns black). He then bites other Smurfs, who ALSO turn into zombies!

The comic was never reprinted in the United States (I don't know why - likely the "Black" thing, but perhaps the zombie aspect of it, also?), so I'll have to share with you the French pages (Smurf comics aren't exactly hard to follow, luckily)...

He then gives you every page of the short story. Click through and scroll to the bottom of the page. Bonus: There's a bit about Simon Garth, Marvel's Living Zombie in there as well.

Stuff: The Jess List

In my review of I Sell the Dead, I mentioned that my wife generally hates horror films. When she doesn't find them boring, she finds them unpleasant. For her, watching horror is like sitting in a dentist's waiting room: uncomfortable, dull, occasionally punctuated by anxiety-inducing screams. During this explanation, I mentioned that there was a short list of flicks that passed the Jess Test. Though I meant this in an abstract sort of way, a couple of readers asked what films were on this list. So, I asked my wife to write up a list of genre treats that she actually does like. Not all of the works on the Jess List are, perhaps, horror-proper, but they're all what Jess talks about when she talks about horror.

Without further ado, I present to you the unedited, unabridged Jess List, straight from the woman herself:

Shaun of the Dead
The Frighteners
Ghostbusters
Jaws (but I hate the first shark scene)
I Sell the Dead
Bubba Ho-Tep
Hellboy 1 & 2
Army of Darkness
Land of the Dead
Universal Monsters: Creature of the Black Lagoon, Dracula, Frankenstein (Wolfman is a little lame)
The Thing from Another Planet + remake The Thing (but I have to squint at some parts)
Kaiju movies (Godzilla et al)
Interview with the Vampire (the first R-rated movie I ever saw in high school)
Rear Window (favorite Hitchcock)
Topper (with Cary Grant as 1/2 of hedonistic ghostly couple)
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Disney version; this totally scared me as a kid but is now delicious.)



Jess NOT list (my least favorites):
These are not necessarily bad art. The fact that they linger in memory and come up in conversation indicates that they are in fact especially powerful. But they haunt me in ways I find entirely unpleasant. I have lost nights of sleep to these films, which I begrudge.
The Ring
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Hitchcock's Frenzy
Seven
book: Monster Island by David Wellington (zombie novel, too scary to finish)


TV shows:
Buffy (just the first season; I checked out pretty much after Angel went bad)
Dexter

Books:
Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow
Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link (practitioner of "the new weird")
American Gods & Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
Johannes Cabal, Necromancer & Johannes Cabal, Detective


Comics:
Sandman (mixed, sometimes nightmare inducing)
House of Mystery by (Fables creators) Bill Willingham & Mike Sturges
Hellboy & BPRD by Mike Mignola

DON'T STOMP THINKING ABOUT TOMORROW! If you haven't entered ANTSS Killer Kaiju contest yet, you freakin' should! It's as easy as stomping on your favorite scale-model city.

Comics: All aboard that's going aboard.

Bram Stoker's Dracula is an oddly uneven book. It's front-heavy. All the great stuff - Harker's time in Drac's castle; the voyage of the Demeter; Lucy's transformation, death, resurrection, and destruction - happens in the first half or two-thirds of the book. With the possible exception of vampiration interruptus scene, a near perfect vision of the Victorian nightmare projection of sexuality, the last third's pretty slow going. Though we're meant to get the feeling of mad dash through Europe, the result is a strangely emotionless list of ports of call and overland routes, punctuated by repetitious portents from Mina, and ending in a dud fight that end's the count's bloody undeath in an almost exhausted way. Consequently, when artists of various types take up the threads of Stoker's original, it's almost always elements from the early portion of the novel that they focus on. Prequels that give us backstory for Dracula and his three wives, for example, pick up the somewhat hanging thread of the monstrous femme vamps of Drac's mini-harem.

Personally, my favorite episode has always been the short, but sweet log of the doomed cargo ship Demeter. For those who have never read the book, the Demeter is the unlucky ship that has the displeasure of shipping Drac's coffin from mainland Europe to England. Unfortunately for the crew, the count wakes up hungry and starts picking off the sailors one by one. The whole incident is related through the captain's log, so the presence of Dracula is never fully revealed; he's nothing but shadows and fear, a creeping absence, a roll call of names of the missing. In a brilliant closing move on Stoker's part, the bit ends with the lone captain writing down his plan for reaching England, a plan rich in dramatic irony as the readers knows the moment he says it that it ensures he's powerless against Dracula. In this short scene, Stoker truly plays far above his standard level. Here the collage format of the novel, elsewhere little more than a somewhat clumsy lift from Wilkie Collins, is essential to the story: the tension in this scene doesn't come from any ambiguity of the fate of the sailors - they're prey and they never have a chance - but from the fact that the reader understands the situation and the sailors do not. It also has a taut economy to it that is atypical of the rest of Stoker's novel (see previous about endgame).

It has long baffled me that the scene on the Demeter has often been overlooked by adapters and revisionists. The first film adaptation, Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu, included an extended scene based on The Demeter's last voyage; but after that it largely vanishes from the adaptations; Browning's 1931 classic merely alludes to the scene, setting the mold for the majority of adaptations that followed. It seems like perfect horror premise: a crew, trapped on an inescapable boat, hunted by a sinister power from beyond. This is the very template of a million sci-fi/horror flicks, from The Thing from Another Planet to every flick in the Alien franchise.

So, it was no small thrill to hear that, not one, but two projects were revisiting the hulk of the doomed Demeter: a limited series comic from IDW and a flick in-pre-production-limbo flick. We'll have to focus on the one that actually exists at this point. Penned by Pumpkinhead screenwriter Gary Gerani and illustrated by the mixed media art of Stuart Saygar, the expansively titled Bram Stoker's Death Ship: the Last Voyage of the Demeter expands the Demeter scene into a four part mini-series. Promising, but not completely filling, Death Ship reveals what I didn't understand, but what adapters of Stoker's tale seem to have grasped: the Demeter scene is actually really tricky to adapt.

There's a harsh catch-22 at the heart of the task. The bit works because Stoker struck a near perfect balance between the relentless narrative drive of the scene and the amount of detail needed to sell it. At it's heart, the Demeter scene is a countdown to Dracula's arrival in England. The crew of the ship that carries him there is barely sketched out: there's the bold one, the drunk, the kid, and so on. What's important about them in the pace of their deaths: one after the other, the period in between getting shorter and shorter. It's like the heartbeat in Tell-tale Heart or the carpet/hardwood Big-Wheel scene in The Shining in that its power comes from it ever-tightening rhythm. Mess up that coiling rhythm and you mess up the scene.

This means that Gerani is between a rock and hard place. If you're going to make the voyage of the Demeter your story, then you need to flesh out the roles of the crew. In the original, the continuity of the captain's voice is hook enough to hang the interest of the reader upon. We need more detail, or we won't give a toss what happens to the crew. However, every added detail adds some drag to the plot. How much stuff can you add on to Stoker's original streamlined narrative before the drag impacts the speed and, by extension, screws up the pacing that is essential to its dramatic power. The creator's of Death Ship understand that more is not necessarily better in this case. They flesh out the crew as little as possible, working with narration and montage to suggest depth of character rather than risk dragging down the narrative chasing greater detail. The sacrifice, of course, is that the impact of the story comes at a remove. The reader cares less about the fate of the crew and, instead, the story's significance comes from our knowledge of context. This gives the whole thing an air of irrelevance rather fated doom.

That said, I think Death Ship suffers somewhat in a monthly format. The pacing of the story and the pacing of the comic biz do not work well together here. Gathered together, and read in a single sitting, I suspect the story will regain its drive and the economic characterization will seem more like a part of an overall artistic design and less like a conspicuous lack. Delivered as a tight, swift-moving whole, it'll better reflect the atypical verve of the original. Right now, it feels like a bit of a tease.

Though I do like Saygar's Dracula. More Man-bat than Bela, Saygar's vampire is an impressive beast.

Comics: My mash-up pitch? I'm going to put vampires in "Dracula."

It's a shame that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies didn't simply start life as comic book project. The original remix novel, credited to both Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, was, for the vast majority of its fans, little more than a cover. The insides contained too much Austen for your average zombie buff and the book remains one of those strange oft purchased, rarely read hits. For most folks, it's a collectable to be displayed rather than a novel to be read.

The new graphic novel adaptation of P&P&Z actually stands a chance of being read, but it is hard to imagine anybody with such a connection to the original that they'd purchase a second version of it. If they read it, then they've pretty much exhausted the book's central gag (a gag that is exhausted once you've grasped the premise from the back cover marketing copy). If they bought it as a collectable and either abandoned the book or never tried to read it, then they don't care so much for the content that they need a cheat sheet.

Sales concerns aside, the new Tony Lee and Cliff Richards adaptation knows what its audience came for. Writer Lee removes all the Austen you can from the book, focusing far more intensely on the zombies, slaughter, ninjas, and other grab-bag fanboy elements Grahame-Smith jammed into Austen's acid-etched satire of manners.

The downside, I guess, of this is that you lose the aura of punk-ish desecration the original had. Though, honestly, how much of a loss is that for most readers? The power of provocation depends on a violation of accepted values, but was Austen's work so universally admired by fans of zombie pop that it really mattered. The mash-up's "sacrilegious" punch was always more a conceptual than felt thing.

Furthermore, the adapters haven't been able to fix any of the problems that plagued the original mash-up. The joining of Grahame-Smith's modern pop horror tropes (most notably his Buffy-ish take on Elizabeth Bennet) to the crystalline precision of Austen's characterizations is forced and the results are a cast that jerks wildly between extreme personalities for no reason other than that's how the joke works. Nor is the zombie disaster particularly connected to the larger context of the book. Unlike Grahame-Smith's second novel, which uses vampirism as metaphorical way to view the institution of slavery, the monsters here - variously called unmentionables, dreadfuls, and zombies - just show up. Their point is that they're about as far from Austen as you can get. That's it. (In all fairness, this is hardly a unique problem to Grahame-Smith's work; nearly every zombie-in-X book I've ever read basically rewards you for knowing as little as possible about the period in question.)

The upside is the you get a fast-moving period adventure piece that is lightly entertaining, especially if you have no interest in Pride and Prejudice. Even during the conversational stretches, Lee and Richards have the advantage of being able to pack the visuals with allusions to the book's zombie crisis, giving zombie fans something to ponder while the characters re-regurgitate lines from the original-original novel. Further, Richards' art is pleasingly reminiscent of classic heroic cartooning from the likes of Alex Toth. His depictions of the Bennet sisters are genuinely lovely without lapsing into the absurd curves of good girl art.

All in all, not a bad deal for somebody looking for a quick zombie fix, and it comes without all the effort of actually reading a classic. The book's published by Quirk and it's going to set you back about $15.

Comics: Buried alive.

Tomorrow night, you could do you normal Friday thing and soil handfuls of tissue while whispering sweet nothings at Suicide Girls downloads. Or, you can save your dignity and your tissues by going to Desert Island - one of Brooklyn's finest post-Android's Dungeon era style comic shops - and celebrate the first ish of We Will Bury You.

Brought to you by the creative team of Grant, Grant, and Strahm, We Will Bury brings the Roaring Twenties to a screaming halt. Set in an alternate version of the Silent Cal years, the comic follows the adventures of a thief and an anarchist escort as they struggle for survival in a zombie-ridden Manhattan. The signing is from 7 to 9. Be there or be L7.

Comics: A viewer-count baiting post about Twilight and fucking.

Yesterday I posted a comic from See Mike Draw. He also created the following which made me laugh. Because I'm immature. And need to grow up. Granted. But still. Butt still . . . get it? Right. Sorry. Immature. Anywho. I thought it was funny.

Click to enlarge.

Comics: Twilight of the superheroes?

Just FYI, here's the Amazon rankings of the cape and cowl set's biggest hitters in the category "books."

Wathcmen - rank: 433
Batman: The Dark Night Returns - rank: 1,430
Incognito - rank: 4,284
Batman: Year One - rank: 4,887
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, vol. 1 - rank: 5,645
Batman: Arkham Asylum - rank: 6,466

Anybody want to guess what the as-yet-unreleased first volume of the mangafied Twilight adaptation is ranked on the strength of pre-orders alone?

Twilight: The Graphic Novel, vol. 1 - rank: 4

Great googly moogly.

Meta: Awards season.

Seems like everybody is giving everybody awards these days. And, as living proof that surplus drives down value, even I've received one! That's right, loyal Screamers and Screamettes, horror blogger and nifty person Sarah, of the blog Scare Sarah, has awarded your humble horror host with the Kreativ Blogger award.

Regular readers know that I generally don't get into the meme-award thing, but it seems like everybody's having a grand old time with these things lately and it's been some time since I've shouted out to some of the blogs I dig, so away we go.

First, I've gathered that I'm supposed to tell you seven interesting things about myself. I promise you that I can definitely tell you seven things about me. Whether they're interesting or not, well . . .

Thing the One:
I have this fantasy in which I go back to sixth-grade, but fully possessed of everything I know and have learned up to this point in my life. I know that I should use this foreknowledge to fight injustice, stop 9/11, and head off the AIDS crisis - but what I honestly imagine doing is learning guitar and preemptively stealing every song that I ever dug and condensing several decades of musical awesomeness into a single, unbelievable rock career that would make me the undisputed God of Rock. Aside from the sketchy ethics of stealing (even though, technically, these songs didn't yet exist when I stole them), the real flaw in this plan is that my musical tastes are pretty goofy, so the idea that anybody would somehow be more excited by my preemptive versions of, say, Daisy Chainsaw's "Dog with Sharper Teeth" or Left Lane Cruiser's "Big Mama" than they were when these songs first appeared and then sank into obscurity is wrong-headed at best.

Thing the Two:
I once started writing a novel that was about a quartet of custom-porno filmmakers who get hired by a cryptofascist multimillionaire to make large-scale hardcore flick set in the Holocaust. I got five or six chapters into it when my hard drive died and the novel was lost forever, which, considering, was probably not such a terrible thing to have had happen. It's working title was Camp Romance.

Thing the Three:
I have three tattoos. The first of which was inflicted upon me in a Richmond hotel room by a woman who actually went by the professional moniker Teddy Bear. Though Teddy Bear was quite lovely and talented, what she was not was fluent in Chinese. Consequently the Chinese figure I have permanently stained on my skin apparently means nothing. It's nonsense in a language I can't read. Despite this, I'm still quite fond of it.

Thing the Four:
When I was 17, I was briefly wanted by the FBI. As silly as this sounds, it was all a big misunderstanding and I was never arrested or charged with anything.

Thing the Five:
I once calculated the estimated number of books that I could read assuming I live to the average age of an American male. This was a massive mistake. For years I would avoid reading books that looked fun because I would think, "Is this really so great that it should be one of your remaining [fill in countdown number]?" Eventually, I got over this obsession. I'm glad I never did it for films; I probably would have never started a horror blog.

Thing the Six:
I wish the term "bedswerver" - a now neglected slang term for an unfaithful person - came back into common usage. It is so wonderfully descriptive.

Thing the Seven:
My wife and I once debated getting a cat as a pet. We brainstormed some names and we thought that they were all so good that we couldn't eliminate any of them. So we hit on this plan that we would give the cat a rotating name. We'd place a chalkboard in the kitchen and write "This week the cat's name is:" on it. We'd work through the names we already had and add new ones as they struck our fancy. We figured the cat wouldn't mind as it was unlikely to give a crap what we called it. (The same plan, we theorized, would not work for a dog.) We purchased a chalkboard and mounted it on the kitchen wall. But we never got a cat.

Okay, now on to who gets the award. Since this is the Kreativ Blogger award, I think it should go to a blog that goes beyond the standard "thumb's up/thumb's down" reviews, net trawled "coverage" of pop culture, and you're predictable "I Googled it, then wrote it" analysis. I'd also like to use it draw attention to a great blog I haven't really plugged before.

I give this to the Mark and ShadowBanker, the boys of Ecocomics. The vast majority of comics writing on the Web is little more than fanboy mash notes and poison pen letters. Admittedly, the quality of the material discussed might be a little more highbrow and the writing more nuanced or clever than the chatter on the floor of the NYCC - but really it comes down to the same thing: People telling you what they liked and hated, ad nauseum. Emphasis on nauseum.

Ecocomics instead takes familiar material and, by applying economics concepts to it in an accessible and entertaining way, actually opens up the material to fresh understandings. Instead of arguing about superhero decadence or lamenting some random creator's political biases, Ecocomics reminds me of the geeky joys of playfully overthinking the characters and concepts I love. Remember those silly/great arguments about who could beat who in a fight? Remember obsessing about continuity contradictions? Ecocomics manages to evoke the pleasures of that sort of active fan engagement without the normal schmaltz of dweeb nostalgia. It reinvests the comics with possibilities and a sense of pleasure.

There's a lot of great writers out there ready to tell you what they enjoyed. Ecocomics is one of the few comic blogs out there that invites you to enjoy comics with them.

Comics: Change the record.

One of the oddest things about Max Brooks's popular zombie-centric franchise - the highest point of which is the critic and fan fave novel World War Z - is how haphazardly it all hangs together. The cornerstone of the whole thing is his '03 Zombie Survival Guide, a goofy spoof of the then wildly popular Worst Case Scenario books and their imitators. A gag impulse-buy book, the book and it's author then appeared in Brooks's second book, World War Z: The premise of that novel's oral history conceit is that Brooks was selected for the job of oral historian because his well-known writer of a zombie survival guide is considered essential reading by the humans that made it out of the zombicaust. Aside from the tonal shift - the guide is clearly a goof, but the novel (though often hilarious in the way any really obsessively detailed consideration of the impossible inevitably is) takes its premise as seriously as it can - there's a sort of continuity error insomuch as Z assumes a guide written after a single, global zombie outbreak, but the guide assumes that there have been many outbreaks of differing magnitudes. The latest addition to the franchise, a graphic novel expansion of a section from Brooks's original guide titled Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks, mixes the premises of the first book and the tone of the second. Recorded Attacks posits that zombie outbreaks of varying severity have been a regular part of human existence since the Stone Age and, within the Brooksian world of zombies, certain cultures have highly developed responses to fighting the undead. Though the tone of new graphic novel owes more to WWZ than the tongue-in-cheek meta-ness of the guide.

The comic begins with a hypothetical attack on a tribe of prehistoric humans. From there, readers go to ancient Egypt (where the removal mummies' brains takes on a new significance), the borders of the Roman Empire, and so on, in a rapid tour of zombie/pure strain human history.

Eagle-eyed readers may spot the conflict between this opener and the title of the book. After all, the point of the label "prehistoric" is to underscore the fact that the period in question produced no historic record. Brooks repeated breaks his conceit that the stories in his book are "recorded" attacks. Later, he tells the story of an outbreak that was later reported as a slave rebellion. He actually ends this story with the narration telling us that there was no record of what really happened in that incident, causing readers with a bias towards narrative logic to wonder how, then, could it be in a book pretending to be a collection of recorded attacks.

Those head scratching paradoxes aside, the stories are, on the whole, rather fun. The book's standout is a series of interconnected bits that infect humanity's grimmest crime - the 400 plus years of the Atlantic slave trade - with the zombies. There's an effective and creepy parallel between the predation of the slavers and the cannibalism of the zombies. Ibraim Roberson finely done black and white art is up to the task. He handles the rapid shifts in time confidently and his action and horror scenes are suitably lively and grisly.

In fact, the only thing the book really suffers from is the fact that the zombie markets been absolutely glutted for nearly a decade now. A competently handled, reasonably clever work like Recorded Attacks might have been great in '02, but now it is not only the victim of a crowded field, it trails behind Walking Dead, the definitive comic treatment of the whole zombie thing. There are those who can't get enough of the shambling dead. Such readers will find more than enough to enjoy here to make the book worth their time. For readers fatigued by this endless zombie moment we seem to find ourselves in, this will seem like more of the same.

Movies: Three kinds of apocalypse.

Yesterday, the wife, my horror flick wingman Dave, and I went to go see the latest recrudescence of zombie cinema, long-time Jimmy Kimmel Live! director Ruben Fleischer's Zombieland. Watching Fleischer's rigorously non-objectionable zom-com actioner, I realized that my taste in end times has changed radically over the years.

For those who haven't heard the news, because you just came out of a coma, in your private isolation ward, in a special secret lab, on the bottom of the ocean, on the Jupiter moon of Io, Zombieland features Woody Harrelson (doing a cleaned up, good guy version of his Mickey character from Natural Born Killers) and the poor man's Michael Cera, Jesse Eisenberg, on a wacky road trip across a zombie infested post-collapse US. Along the way, the boys meet a hottie and her younger sister, Woody gets dangerously close to having to emote, and not-Cera learns that sometimes to win somebody's heart you need to do an awful lot of killing. Built around an uninspired plot, populated with thin characters, and breezily predictable, Zombieland is aimed as people who find Shaun of the Dead too cerebral and Diary of the Dead too frightening.

What is innovative about Zombieland is its tone. Zombieland may put to rest the idea that the engine of zombie cinema runs off steady flow of cultural anxieties, from war to financial meltdown. It is hard to imagine a less angsty, troubled film than Zombieland. Not only do our characters gleefully dispatch zombies with giddy abandon, but when one of the characters accidentally dispatches a pure strain human the most notable reaction is laughter followed by a hasty, "But it is sad though."

What Zombieland has done is take the Merry Looter Scene typical of zombie flicks since Dawn of the Dead and made it the entire basis for the flick's charm. The Merry Looter Scene is the near inevitable scene in a modern post-apoc flick in which our protags go hog wild in a grocery store, shopping mall, whatever. Despite the apocalyptic conditions that prevail, there's something carnivalesque about the scene and, more often then not, the scene involves our protags wallowing in fancy clothes, nice booze, fancy new cars, or whatever else symbolizes that the lowly survivors are now free of the economic constraints the once bound them. Doom's all around them, but in the topsy-turvy world of the zombie holocaust, the bike messenger and the beat cop are now the rulers of all they survey. They aren't really the meek - they've usually had to do a metric assload of killing to get where they are - but they have definitely inherited the Earth. (As an aside, this is hardly novel. As seen in this years Silent Scream Series, the French silent film The Crazy Ray features a carnivalesque apocalypse.)

The thing about this is that it is expresses an essentially conservative, in the most literal sense of the term, impulse. In flicks like Zombieland, 28 Days Later, and the various "of the Dead" franchise films, the world is pretty much the one we recognize, simply more dangerous and more depopulated. More importantly, there's a crucial continuity with the old world. In Zombieland, aside from the rubbish in the streets, the infrastructure of the old world is still intact. (In fact, we even get a gag in which the narrator explains that a particular Texas town looks like it was destroyed in the zombicaust, but it is actually just a dump.) Everywhere they go has power, there are no unchecked wildfires, nobody frets about leaking nuclear power plants, and so on. All that has happened is that the people who were once the losers and outcasts are now free to do as they wish. And what they wish to do is drive nice cars, stay in plush joints, drink A-grade booze, get laid, and play Monopoly with real money. The characters in Zombieland don't want to be on the bottom of the heap, but they want the heap.

Which brings us to Thundarr the Barbarian. When I was a kid, my favorite post-apoc landscape belonged to the short-running Thundarr the Barbarian cartoon (1980 to '82). In the "future" of that show, in the then far-distant year of 1994, a runaway planet zipped between the Earth and the Moon. The Moon split in two, but gravity held each half in about the same position of the current Moon. The Earth was racked by catastrophes and, 2000 year later, is home to all manner of magic and mutants.

But don't take my word for it. Here's the intro:



Admittedly, the cosmic doom visited upon the Earth in that intro is far more epic than a zombie holocaust (that damn runaway planet apparently even stole all our clouds). But that's not really the distinction that sticks out in my mind. Rather, the world of Thundarr seems to have radically split from the pre-disaster world. The show did have one character who constantly pointed out the remnants of pre-collapse world: Princess Ariel's function in the show was to act as a exposition, explaining trains and soda pop and bowling and Cape Canaveral and whatever else might pop up to Thundarr as the plots demanded. (Oddly, the female figure who remains the sole link to Earth's past was a reoccurring motif in '80s cartoons: the mom in The Herculoids was a stranded Earth astronaut who attempted to teach her child about her native home as was Prince Adam's mom in He-Man.) What's interesting, however, is that Thundarr usually didn't give a rats ass. Insomuch as Ariel's book lernin' was useful for blowing up the evil wizard's war tanks or killing any given shoe's baddy, he cared. But there was never this sense that Thundarr or his Wookie-rip-off companion Ookla were ever all that interested in the pre-collapse world. The idea of re-establishing the previous order or even mourning its passing doesn't occur to them. They represent a radical break with the past. The heap has been swept away and replaced. These post-apoc works are the opposite of the Merry Looter flicks. We're going to dub them "Ookla, Ariel, We Ride," or OAWR, works.

As a kid, it was that kind of post-apoc I dug. In my juvenile mind, the post-end looked like Gamma World or Thunder Dome - and as soon as the fit hit the shan, we'd all start wearing football padding studded with metal spikes. There should be mutant animals and plants walking about. Sure, we can have a car or two. Maybe even a gun. But, honestly, what we really need is Year Zero weaponry and some black magic. Good times.

Now, however, I have to admit that Thundarr-style shenanigans now seem hopelessly dated. Case in point, though it is hopelessly unoriginal, Zombieland doesn't seem retro in anyway. The same can't be said of Doomsday, Neil Marshall's retro-tastic post-apoc flick which managed not only to get numerous football safety pad fashion plates in shot, but also managed to work in a bunch of Medieval knights in a castle because why the hell not?

Eighties vintage feel aside, I think there's something else behind my shift from digging surrealistic Thundarr cosmic doom to more Zombieland-style doom-mongering. I think part of it has to do with growing older. When you're a kid, you have no emotional investment in the system that supports you. All of it is confusing, illogical, and often profoundly unfair. OAWR films not only satisfy the fantasy that the adult world gets swept away, but the radical weirdness of the world levels everybody regardless of real-life experience. In contrast, as I've grown older and softer in the belly, I don't mind the idea that life as we'd know it would be swept away in a violent wave of mutilation - but I totally want a comfy bed when I'm not slaughtering undead or fighting cannibal bike gangs or what have you.

So that's what I'm proposing Zombieland doesn't feel as dated as the original Dawn of the Dead because the horror audience is aging and we are too into our apartments and children and cars and our increasingly valueless 401Ks to enjoy the fantasy of the world as we know it getting totally wiped off the face of the Earth. We just want the all the jerks dead so we no longer have to punch clock.

There is, notably, a third way for post-apoc tales. Most post-collapse worlds, be they Merry Looter tales or OAWR works, have a strong element of wish fulfillment in that they posit a simpler world. In Zombieland the characters discuss how great it is that parking is free and we're not plagued with Facebook status updates. The fantasy is that a disaster strips all the superficial crap away, leaving behind something purer and truer; see Walking Dead back cover copy. Few post-apoc works suggest that life will simply just get worse and worse and worse. Nothing is clarified, and if you started at the bottom of the heap, some armed warlord a-hole will most likely just stomp you down even more. Adam Rapp and George O'Connor's Ball Peen Hammer is one of the few post-apoc works that suggests that a post-collapse world would look like Somalia on its worst day. In Rapp and O'Conner's grim graphic novel, there's still a government, but it has grown brutal and sporadic in its presence. Dog packs run the street. A flesh-eating virus is rotting its way through population. There is no power or running water. There are conspiracies afoot; but, with no stable communication systems, nobody can be sure what is going on, or even if those involved in the conspiracy still know what's going on. Worse yet, there's a young generation of kids who feel this state of affair is normal. Honestly, the dark hard-edged weirdness of Ball Peen Hammer is probably the most genuine image of what humanity, without all the social props, would look like. But it is too relentless to pack a megaplex. We're more optimistic about the end of everything.

Contest: Booty call.

Thank you everybody who entered the ANTSS Every Damn Comic of Solomon Kane Ever Contest. The fickle finger of fate has pointed out our winner: Pauline the Pirate Queen!

Avast Pauline, email me a mailing address at [my blogging pen name]44[that "at" symbol]yahoo[the dot]com. I'll get the books packaged up and on their way.

Contest: I Kane, I saw, I conquered.

Just a reminder: Throw your hat in the ring for not one, but two big prozes in ANTSS Kane Komics Giveaway! Winners will be selected at random tomorrow morning.

Contest: House of Kane.

Perhaps I'm still loopy from how well the whole anniversary Silent Scream series went. Maybe it's because October is here and that means we're that much closer to the fright freak's high holy day. It could be the cold medicine.

Whatever the reason, I feel like giving away stuff.

Specifically, I'm giving away two - count 'em - two big ol' comic books featuring everybody's favorite dour monster hunting Puritan: Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane.

First, I'm giving away one copy of The Saga of Solomon Kane, an omnibus style doorstop that collects hundreds of black and white pages of Kane action from his adventures in Marvel's Conan comics to his more recent shenanigans at Dark Horse.

What it doesn't include, however, is Dark Horse's recent Castle of the Devil series. So I'm going to throw that in too!

That's right!

Win this mammerjammer and you're basically awash in pulpy he-hero action!

So what do you have to do? Just leave me message below. The winner will be randomly chosen Monday morning.

Employees of Dark Horse are eligible to enter, but seriously, dude, just take it from the office. It's no biggy. Contestants should know that both books are "lightly used," though I can't discern any defects or abuse. I'm also going to have to limit this contest to folks from the US - blame shipping costs or my own rampaging jingoism, either way that's how we're doing this one.

Comics: Play them like a Harpe from hell.

The Newsrama site is hosting a preview of Harpe: America's First Serial Killers, a graphic novel that recounts the "true story" of Micajah and Wiley Harpe, two 18th Century outlaws who tore through the frontier from 1797 to 1799, leaving an estimated 20 to 40 victims in their wake.

I use quotes on the "true story" not to impugn the veracity of the comics creators, Chad Kinkle and Adam Shaw, but rather because it is difficult to separate frontier legend from the actual criminal career of the Harpe brothers, so the project is inherently going be a little wobbly on the truth matricies.

Still, whatever the author's allegiance to the historical facts, the Harpe's story is sufficient grisly enough to make a promising premise for comic project. Worth checking out.

Movies: The unacknowledged source for "Drag Me to Hell"?

Over at the regular "Comic Book Legends" column of the Comic Book Resources site, author Brian Cronin takes note of some interesting similarities between the plot of Sam Raimi's much-lauded spookshow thriller Drag Me to Hell and issue 21 of Haunt of Fear.

For those who somehow missed it, Drag Me to Hell tells the story of an ambitious bank officer who denies a gypsy a housing loan. The angry gypsy places a curse upon her: For three days a supernatural beast called a lamia will torment her and, when the three days are up, the beast will drag her soul to hell. She's tormented by this curse and, despite the protests of her well meaning but skeptical fiancée (a psychologist), the cursed clerk visits a mystic. The mystic attempts, with the help of others, to transfer the lamia curse to another victim. However, this transfer ultimately fails and the bank clerk ends up get dragged to hell right as a train was going to run her over.

While missing most of the incidents in Raimi's movie, the 1953 issue of Haunt of Fear features a young woman under a curse of a lamia. She's got the well meaning, but skeptical psychologist fiancée. And a climax involving death-by-train.

Here's the Haunt of Fear story (to to embiggen):

So, coincidence? Rip-off? Unacknowledged inspiration?

Cronin is hesitant to pull the "rip-off" trigger. From his column: I think it’s almost certainly just a coincidence. It’s not like the stories are even exactly the same. And it’s not like Al Feldstein invented the Lamia – it’s an established demo from Greek folklore (although it’s a demon that has been used in many different ways over the years). But it’s still interesting!

He also adds the following observation, as if to say that it would actually be fair play to rip-off EC.

It WOULD be pretty funny, though, if EC, which was known for essentially appropriating story ideas from various forms of media (without crediting the swipe) was itself appropriated without credit!

In my opinion, there's more than enough unique material in Raimi's movie to avoid the charge of theft. However, if the old comic did serve as an inspiration, then it seems like giving the source a nod in the credits would be the right thing to do. For all of its original material, the Raimi story isn't so far from the Haunt tale that it's impossible to imagine it being an adaptation. If – and that's still a firm "if" – there was some link, it would be a BS move to not explicitly credit the source.

Comics: Take a number.

In Das Unheimliche, Freud's book-length mediation on everyday weirdness that popularized the term "uncanny," the father of psychoanalysis touches on the weirdness of unexpected numeric patterns.

If we take another class of things, it is easy to see that there, too, it is only this factor of involuntary repetition which surrounds what would otherwise by innocent enough with an uncanny atmosphere, and forces upon us the idea of something fateful and inescapable when otherwise we should have spoken only of ‘chance’. For instance, we naturally attach no importance to the event when we hand in an overcoat and get a cloakroom ticket with the number, let us say, 62; or when we find that our cabin on a ship bears that number. But the impression is altered if two such events, each in itself indifferent, happen close together — if we come across the number 62 several times in a single day, or if we begin to notice that everything which has a number — addresses, hotel rooms, compartments in railway trains — invariably has the same one, or at all events one which contains the same figures. We do feel this to be uncanny. And unless a man is utterly hardened and proof against the lure of superstition, he will be tempted to ascribe a secret meaning to this obstinate recurrence of a number; he will take it, perhaps, as an indication of the span of life allotted to him.

For Freud, the uncanny was an in-head toxic spill of grokked, but suppressed knowledge. (His theory works better in German, where the root word of "uncanny" can be taken to mean both "home" and "hidden.") When we encounter seemingly meaningful repetition, we dig for hidden meanings and approach all the nasty things we hide in our mental attics. Because we can't unearth any of those demons and remain sane, we project our feelings of uncanny recognition onto an external source, essentially scapegoating others for our odd sense of familiarity. In folkloric terms, these scapegoats become witches, fairy-folk, goblins, boogymen, or anything one can imagine Hellboy shooting. Less creatively, the conspiracy-minded use the appearance of false patterns to implicate the Jews, the Bush administration, the Gay Agenda, the Bohemian Grove bunch, the Federal Reserve Bank, the forgers who created Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate, those Papists that snuck a supposititious child in the birthing chamber of Mary II, Scientologists, or what have you.

In general, the march of neuroscience has not been kind to the theories of Freud. Like Bohr's model of the atom, the image of a clumpy nucleus and moon-like electrons traveling in neatly circular orbits that persists mainly because it is easy to explain and makes a nice iconic image, Freud's theories persist in the public imagination because they are easy to digest, have a poetic resonance with our personal understanding of the world, and have been embedded in key cultural landmarks by generations of creators who intentional created works off his philosophical template. Outside of English departments and philosophy courses, Freud doesn't get much love. Despite this general downgrading of Freud's ideas, modern research into how the brain works suggest Freud wasn't totally off the mark on the whole uncanny thing. In grotesquely simplified terms, the sense of import one gets around repetition might be an evolved reaction in our very sensitive pattern-seeking apparatuses in our brain. Pattern-recognition is such an important trait, the thinking goes, that false positives due to over-sensitivity would be an acceptable level of increased noise given the overall system's greater receptivity to genuine signals. Studies show that the uncanny sense of the irrational portentous is real, if unconnected to any notions of suppressed emotions or memories.

Ironically, the uncanny – the Fruedian concept that has the strongest scientific support – is the one least respected in the world of arts and letters. Instead of Freud's concept of the unfamiliar familiar, the term "uncanny" has come to mean something along the lines of "the inexplicable" or "that which should not be." The sense of eerie, but perhaps meaningless repetition, is hardly evoked anymore.

This makes Thomas Ott's graphic novel The Number: 73304-23-4153-6-96-8 an oddity: Ott's fashioned a noir-ish tale of fate, dames, murder, and madness that is, in the old Freudian sense, genuinely uncanny.

The plot of the The Number is a tight, elliptical, almost O. Henry-ish story about a schlubby state executioner who finds one of his victims, a murderer sentenced to death by electric chair, left behind a mysterious string of numbers: the titular 73304-23-4153-6-96-8. The executioner pockets the number and things nothing of it. Slowly, the numbers in the sequence begin to appear throughout his daily routine. At first, their appearance seems more benevolent than sinister. The numbers appear to lead him to a new love interest and, later, he makes a killing in a small gambling club by exploiting his knowledge of the number sequence. But the numbers giveth, and the numbers taketh away. Before the executioner knows what hit him, his new bird's flown the coop, she's taken the dough, and the numbers seem hell-bent on getting him into increasingly dangerous jams. The resolution, a phantasmagoric and sanity-questioning scene of revenge, leaves us pondering whether the numbers were, in fact, reoccurring or whether the execution was imposing the pattern on the randomness around him.

While the plot might not be the most original idea, Ott carries it off with a stylish confidence that gives the story real force. The art is rendered in a stark black and white, halfway between the gritty realism of the Ashcan School and the expressionism of Peter Kuper. This mix is especially potent near the end of the story, when the visuals grow more intensely surreal. Ott also mostly restricts himself to a stingy number of panels per page, all of which float in a deep field of surrounding black. These simple layouts – always a simple mix of quarter-, half-, or full-page rectangles that always keep a small amount of negative space between them – contribute to both the down-and-out, hardboiled visual aesthetic and the claustrophobic sense of fated repetition. Finally, Ott's "acting" is strong enough that his characters can carry the story without a single line of dialogue.

The finest moment in the whole book – and an excellent example of Ott's sly storytelling – comes when, searching for a sign, the executioner takes handful of French fries off of his plate and places them in a series on a table top, one after the other, in neatly aligned rows. Staring at that picture, I tried to puzzle out just what section of the sequence we were looking at. Unable to immediately grasp it, I added up the number of fries and then added up the digits in the repeated sequence. No dice; they didn't match. Had I missed something? Or was the executioner free of the numbers? Free or abandoned? But maybe there was something there and I just wasn't seeing the pattern . . .

And in that panel Ott's story went from being a story about the uncanny to being, itself, uncanny.

Stuff: "And that, in a sentence, is why your horror sucks."

When it comes to obsessively policing the "correctness" of works within their chosen genre, nobody beats horror fans.

Sure, sci-fi readers may have us matched when it comes self-defensive knee-jerk reactions to what we perceive as anti-genre bias in the mainstream. But nobody can get as hot when proposing what should and should not be considered as a valid addition to our pet genre. You couldn't find a mystery fan who, even if their tastes ran towards the hardest of hardboiled crime fic, would not recognize the elegant classics of Elizabeth Daly, the juvenile Nancy Drew series, and the aw-shucks slapstick of Kinky Friedman as all belonging legitimately to the genre. Sci-fi guys regularly lay down definitions RE the scientific rigor of the romances they read, but they know it's bullshit: Not a one of them wouldn't count Philip K. Dick among their number and his works are about as scientifically rigorous as The Great Space Coaster. I can't imagine you hear many romance novel readers say, "I don't consider romances between nurses and doctors to be real romance. It's either lusty pirates with good hearts and the clever, but sheltered - don't forget sheltered, sheltered is the whole thing! - daughters of wealthy shipping magnates or nothing!"

But horror fandom, with rare exceptions, seems to exist in a constant state of self-induced appreciation pogromitude, a constant ferreting out of "not REAL horror," with bloggers, forums, and twitter feeds acting as a million little horror-centric HUACs. While few in the sci-fi ghetto would rail on about Artemis Fowl or The Hunger Game, the fact that tween girls enjoy the Twilight series is apparently a source of unending and obsessive focus for horror fans who, at their age, should really be minimally obsessed with monitoring and evaluating the behavoirs of tween girls. Seriously, boys and girls, it's a wee bit creepy.

The constant clash between horror's self-appointed purity police is lightly spoofed in the latest issue of Vertigo's Unwritten. (You can stop reading now Tucker, it's going to involve words and an inauspicious lack of female nudity; blame writer Mike Carey and artist Peter Gross.) The new ish features a cabal of horror writers who gather at the Villa Diodati, the Swiss timeshare at which Mary Shelly first conceived of Frankenstein and his monster, to discuss the importance of Frankenstein and argue about the genre. For fans, the clichéd creators and the works they describe are funny.

Here's the group giving introductions. Give it the ol' clickety click to embiggen.

Later, the Torture Porn guy and the Laurell K. Hamilton analog mix it up a bit. Again, the clicking's the trick.

Comics: Blame it on Kane.

Though he was never popular enough to achieve the iconic status of Conan, pulp legend Robert E. Howard's grim vigilante Puritan Solomon Kane has managed a thoroughly respectable run in the comic medium. Through the 1970s and 80s, the lanky and dour anti-hero appeared in no fewer than eight different Marvel Comics titles, even doing battle with Marvel's Dracula in Dracula Lives!, the ironically short-lived follow-up to Marvel's popular Tomb of Dracula series. The property lay fallow for more than a decade. In 2006, Kane's copyright holder sealed a deal with Dark Horse to bring grim avenger back to the funny books. Dark Horse's first Kane story arc – an adaptation of an unfinished Howard story fragment called "The Castle of the Devil" – ran though 2008 and is now available in the trade.

From the pulp-tastic cover to the final bonus story, Solomon Kane: The Castle of the Devil is a solid product. Benefiting from a tight script; art that fuses traditional illustration with the new nervous line sketchiness of the South American invasion; and a plot full of werewolves, Satanist, and demons; Kane hits an admittedly tiny, but indubitably sweet spot. The comic adaptation, written by Scott Allie with art by Mario Guevara and color by Dave Stewart, not only finishes Howard's story in a satisfactory manner, but uses the medium's visual elements to strip away some of the awkward purpleness of Howard's prose. Lean and efficient, the comic adaptation gives the original a fresh narrative ruthlessness.

The story arc opens as all good pulp tales should: with a fight. A sleeping Kane is attacked by a trio of men. The taciturn wanderer dispatches them with all due gore. He continues his travels the next day. He encounters a young boy on a gibbet and cuts him free before the boy is choked to death. Shortly thereafter, he encounters a chatty bon vivant by the ironic name of John Silent, who quickly becomes Kane's traveling companion. After his encounter with the three would-be assassins and the nearly-hanged boy, Kane has decided to discuss a baron's traditional duties to properly maintain a civil atmosphere of order and peace with the local power: Baron von Staler. Kane and Silent travel to his castle, known in the region as "The Castle of the Devil," and are greeted with surprising warmth by the Baron and his exotic Arabian wife. Of course, this friendliness hides dark secrets buried in the past of the castle. Before long, Kane is clashing with dark magicians, werewolves, cultists, and a quartet of bat-winged demons.

Good times.

As chaotic as the story gets, Allie keeps things streamlined as a possible. Though the dialogue contains "Easter eggs" for fans of the original stories and novels, Allie wisely avoided the reoccurring cast of heroes and villains that filled the Howard's originals. He also stripped Kane of magical items and powers, something that Howard did not do but that I think actually work thematically with the simplicity of Kane's character. In a world of shapeshifters and complicated supernatural bargains, it fits with Kane's literally Puritanical persona that he would trust only his skills and his mundane tools to get his work done. Allie also deftly avoids the relentlessly purple Howardian prose that has sunk many would-be Howard adapter. By trusting the art to communicate Howard's descriptive passages, he can cut down on the more florid touches and focus on plotting and effective dialogue.

Mario Guevara's art is crisp and his character designs suitably distinguished. His cadaverous Kane is especially nice, showing a nice contrast to the hulking Conan for which Howard is more famous. Guevara gets great mileage out of simple page layouts, maximizing narrative clarity (until the end, when the action sometimes overwhelms him and he loses the narrative flow). Stewart's somber palate completes the package, giving the art a pleasingly craftsman-like feel.

The collection also includes a stand-alone Kane story, "The Nightcomers," and a collection of concept art early sketches. I'm not immersed enough in the minutiae of comic to be the right audience for the background materials, but I though the extra story - a ghost story that emphasizes mood over action - was a welcome inclusion.

True Crime: "Mr. Wan, Saw 7 is calling on line 1 for you."

Germany is looking down the shaky and forgetful barrel of a new era of crime. The citizens of that fair nation live in the terrifying shadow of a recent explosion (read "two known cases") of what the ever-quick-to-dub media has dubbed "silver crime."

What, pray tell, is "silver crime." We turn to the Time UK Online for a little enlightenment:

A group of well-to-do pensioners who lost their savings in the credit crunch staged an arthritic revenge attack and held their terrified financial adviser to ransom, prosecutors said yesterday.

The alleged kidnapping is the latest example of what is being dubbed “silver crime” — the violent backlash of pensioners who feel cheated by the world.

“As I was letting myself into my front door I was assaulted from behind and hit hard,” the financial adviser James Amburn, a 56-year-old German-American, said. “Then they bound me with masking tape until I looked like a mummy. I thought I was a dead man.”

He was freed by 40 heavily armed policemen from the counter-terrorist unit last Saturday. The frightened consultant was in his underwear, his body lacerated by wounds allegedly inflicted by angry pensioners.

The group of "impoverished" pensioners included two couples that lost a sack of Euros in the American housing market. The first couple used the cellar in the vacation home to hold the financial advisor hostage. The second couple, a pair of retired doctors, supervised the abuse. The frightening, if fragile-hipped, foursome hoped that they could beat the financial advisor into giving back all the money they lost.

The financial advisor almost escaped when, after stripping him down to his skivvies beating him badly enough of break a rib, the four amateur torturers allowed their victim a backyard smoke break.

"Oh, God! Please don't kill me! And, um, can I smoke in here?"
"In the house. Ah, no."
"Then, if you're not beating me right this moment, could I step out and have a quick smoke."
"Of course, my dear man. We're Germans, not savages. Besides, the wife's missing her stories. We can pick this up in thirty. That work for you?"

The financial advisor made it over the vacation house's back wall – the cash-strapped pensioners were so poor that they couldn't even build a decent backyard wall for their vacation house – and went running in his tightie-whities for help. However, the pensioners gave wheezy chase to the fugitive financier, shouting that he was a thief. (Having stolen, apparently, several bruises, cuts, and a single pair of briefs.) A "helpful" group of young men subdued the nearly naked "burglar" and, as you do, handed him over to the two old couples chasing him. The police, presumably, would have better things to do than investigate a robbery.

For attempting to escape, the financier was beaten again.

Convinced that they'd finally broken the suit's will to resist, the elderly couples had the advisor fax a request for funds to a Swiss bank. The advisors fax contained a coded message that played on the fact that the German word for a financial policy is spelled like the English word for "police." His captors did not notice the call for help and, a short time later, the counter-terror unit arrived.

Comic cred goes to Dinosaur Comics.