Review: Shark Arm...

ROOPE, Phillip, & Kevin MEAGHER, Shark Arm – A Shark, A Tattooed Arm and Two Unsolved Murders, Allen & Unwin, Crow’s Nest NSW, 2020.

Octavo; trade paperback; 291pp., with a map and 16pp. of monochrome plates. Minor wear. Near fine.

In Australia’s early criminal history there are several episodes of note, remarkable in their impact on the lives of those living in this country. The Eveleigh Railway Workshops Payroll Heist, for example, was noteworthy because it was the first criminal event in the nation which was facilitated by an automobile; The Brougham Street Riot brought the machinations of the razor-gangs four square into the public’s awareness; and The Mount Rennie Assault highlighted the perceived threat of ‘larrikinism’ for general perusal. These milestones in criminal activity are generally colourful and shocking, but they are in turn overshadowed by those great unsolved events that still linger on the periphery of Australian history, marking garish highlights in the background of the search for Justice. These include The Pyjama Girl Case; The Kidnapping and Murder of Graeme Thorne; and The Shark Arm Case. Since I am interested in the history of Australia – especially its criminal underbelly – in the early years of the Twentieth Century, I am au fait with these cases and the intricacies of their details; but they have been universally touted as being ‘unsolvable’, forever out of reach by those who seek closure in these matters. It was of interest to me therefore, to discover that someone had re-examined the issues of the Shark Arm Case and claimed to have solved it.

Like most things of this nature, the unravelling required a high degree of self-motivation on the part of the researchers (requiring them to ignore the claims by others that there was no use in pushing this case any further along) and the discovery of newly-released material, finally made available to public scrutiny. In this instance, the authors Roope and Meagher had referenced the Shark Arm Case in the course of their duties as school teachers and had seen the effect that even a gloss of its details had upon their students; they deemed it worthy of further scrutiny, to see if there was a solution hiding within its labyrinthine depths after all. This book – the result of their examinations – claims that there is.

For those unaware of this incident, it involves a 4-metre tiger shark, captured at sea off the Sydney beaches in 1930, which was sequestered in a public aquarium as an attraction for passing tourists. On ANZAC Day of that year, it became ill - after living in the aquarium for just over a week and obviously not acclimating - and regurgitated a severed human arm into its artificial environment (along with pieces of several other sharks, some birds and a rat). The event was witnessed by several onlookers and the police were called in to retrieve the limb and begin an investigation as to its origins.

It didn’t take long. Due to a tattoo on the inside forearm of the member, as well as the fingerprints that were able to be examined, the owner of the arm was determined to be one Jim Smith a former boxer and gymnasium operator who had vanished while on a work trip to Cronulla in Sydney’s southern beach suburbs. Forensics determined that the arm had been separated from its owner postmortem, so the question quickly became ‘what happened to the rest of Smith’s body?’.

In a highly-compelling style, Roope and Meagher follow all of the evidence, raking over the coals of this crime and attempting to point fingers at those who, in their opinion, were really to blame. The failed inquest and two subsequent court trials which emerged from these events were notable in changing legal practice within the country and for releasing the guilty from justice for lack of evidence. The one person who was always assumed guilty of Smith’s demise – his friend Patrick “Paddy” Brady, a known confidence trickster and forger - spent the rest of his days violently protesting his innocence both in print and in the courts; Roope and Meagher claim that there was an enormous conspiracy of silence surrounding the death – encompassing drug-smuggling, insurance fraud and a close-knit community of impoverished dock-workers and their families – which meant that Brady also knew who the culprits were and kept underscoring his innocence while tacitly letting those culpable know that he knew, in order to avoid also being removed from the equation for ‘squealing’.

For this is what led to Jim Smith’s death – he spoke about things he shouldn’t have to people who weren’t supposed to know, namely the police. In the hardscrabble early years of the Twentieth Century in Sydney, the worst thing that someone could do was to ‘snitch’ on their mates. Most people at that time, oppressed financially and with few options for making a legitimate living, had some sort of illegal activity – to a greater or lesser extent – happening on the side. Talking out of turn not only ruined people’s lives, it destroyed families, and so it was regarded as the lowest of low acts. Regardless of who was responsible for his death and how it happened – something that no-one will ever know for sure – the million-to-one chance that the shark used to dispose of the evidence got caught and then vomited-up the crucial element that got the whole ball rolling was something nobody could have foreseen, and its ramifications have echoed ever since.

For me, I was hoping that there would be a straightforward outcome to the mystery; that, hidden somewhere under all the grand guignol of a semi-digested human limb, drug smuggling, dodgy cops, conspiracies of silence and lawyers looking to make their names, there would be a clearly-identified murderer and a satisfying result. Unfortunately, real life doesn’t work that way and the grubby, society-is-to-blame outcome of Roope and Meagher’s sifting was hardly what I’d been hoping for. Still, there are gems to be found along the way and I’m always eager to open a window into this (it has to be said) sordid and despicable period of history. It’s a result; and a solid one at that. (I still feel sorry for the shark…)

Four Tentacled Horrors and… case closed?

Review: "The Color Out of Space"

STANLEY, Richard (Dir.), “The Color Out of Space”, Ace Pictures/Spectrevision/HotPinkHorror LLC., 2019.

A few months ago, this was scheduled to be shown at our local arthouse cinema, Mount Vic. Flicks, which used to be our only alternative to blockbuster fare up here (whether they’ll be re-opening in future is still an open question). I was eagerly counting down the days, getting ready to see this film in style - in a proper cinema with a blanket and a Choc-Top (and maybe a bag of Jaffas to roll down the aisle) - when suddenly it’s COVID-19 and all of the cinemas shut down. I resigned myself to other issues and looked for other alternatives to present here. Along the way, I checked in regularly with JB HiFi and asked them to let me know when the film came to DVD. They did; I bought it online; and here it is, courtesy of an overworked courier network. My coronavirus shutdown experience is complete.

In between the film’s cancellation and the disc’s arrival, the Fortean Times published a review of the movie and an article by the director discussing the influence of HPL on modern horror fare (issue FT390, March 2020). Richard Stanley’s wide-ranging and obscure musings on the nature of the Mythos had some interesting things to say but very little of pertinence to the movie, leaving me to wish he’d stayed on topic a bit more, and David Sutton’s review of the film sat rather uncomfortably alongside it. I was wondering how this whole thing would turn out. I became uneasy…

In the final analysis, and sad to say, this effort is a straight-out “meh”. It has some clever aspects and some interesting points to make but I came away feeling a little less than gratified. There’s not really much here that we haven’t seen before, either in cinematic Mythos fare, or in straight horror film. Let’s take a look…

The story begins with one the best lines that HPL ever wrote – “West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut” – setting the scene immediately. The ensuing paragraphs of the written version detail the cancerous nature of the wilderness with its dark shadows and mystery; Stanley, to his credit, throws most of this at us right from the start, in the form of a narration which cherry-picks all the best lines and phrases from Lovecraft’s introduction. And I don’t blame him: the source material here is pure gold, as far as the Mythos goes. Along with it are some nice tracking shots of wild spaces and gloomy undergrowth: there is lots of pretty camerawork in this piece and it certainly helps to sell the narrative.

Stanley has taken the decision to bring the tale right into the present. In the short story, the details emerge from the muddled rememberings of an old resident – Ammi Pierce - who tells the visiting hydrographic engineer of the events which took place on the Gardner farm years before during the “strange days”. Here, in order to give the narrative a sense of immediacy, this secondhand aspect of the story is removed, and we get to see the events as they happen. This is necessary for any attempt at filming such material – cinema is a medium for showing, not telling, and this alteration would have been done regardless of who was doing the scripting. From here though, other choices begin to reveal themselves and not all of them are the best of decisions.

To get things out of the way right from the start, the Colour (I’m going to spell this the British way from now on: Lovecraft did, and it just looks wrong to me otherwise) is supposed to be off the spectrum, something indescribable. Here, it’s hot pink with constant shifts into the purple phase of the colour wheel. This isn’t a bad choice – it had to be something and there are worse colour palettes out there to choose from. Purple and its myriad other shades, denote indecision and uncertainty, so here it works as a symbol for something unexplained, or inexplicable. If the story had been set sometime approximating the original material it would have worked even better than it does in this contemporary update, but it’s fine. I think a lot of the nay-sayers out there need to take a deep breath…

(Personally, I think the whole film should have been shot in monochrome - black-and-white - with the colour being the only colour-element in the film. That would have demonstrated its alien-ness even better, to my mind!)

As to updating the narrative to a modern era, there’s a level of clunkiness that steps in. Right at the beginning we’re treated to a scene where our modern hydrographer encounters the eldest Gardner child enacting a Wiccan ritual on a lakeside. It’s a “meet-cute” between the characters who become the young lovers in our tale (although, to be fair, they are more correctly doomed young lovers) and it gives us an awareness of the Arkham region’s continuing obsession with witchcraft along with the notion of an impending reservoir development all of which are hallmarks of the Lovecraft tale. As introductions go it’s not awful, but the witchcraft doesn’t really go anywhere later on and seems a bit extraneous. The character is supposed to be opinionated and forthright – the family rebel – but with everything that she does for the rest of the movie, this evidence of her “alternative” inclinations and her edginess seems a little forced rather than anything else.

The rest of the Gardners are revealed to us in the following scenes and they are a bog-standard group of horror-film fodder characters – an upbeat Dad; a moderating and long-suffering Mother; a stoner Middle Child (although he could be the oldest sibling – it’s not clear. Still: stoner); and the over-imaginative Youngest Child. This is pretty much by-the-numbers in terms of cinematic horror fare and, while it tracks accurately with the short story personae (apart from the gender-swap in the case of the Eldest Child), it’s not anything new in terms of horror films. It’s fairly obvious who is there to facilitate what, and it’s fairly clear, right from the get-go with this arrangement, who lives and who dies.

(Of course, I should issue a Spoiler Alert at this point, although I assume that, if you’re here reading this, you’ve read Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” at least once before. If you need a refresher – or if you want to jump in for the first time – take a few moments to go and read it. I’ll still be here when you get back.)

This is the problem with filming a classic story like this. The piece worked back in the day because it was fresh and different; since then a bunch of genre tropes have accreted on such material, with roots far back in the classic stories, but which now look tired and overdone. Nowadays we need someone like Jordan Peele to look at the old fare and go “that’s trite; let’s try something new”. Here, sadly, such thinking has not altogether been brought to bear. This list of characters might well be an homage to the source material, but they are Hollywood stereotypes, geared to our expectations, and so our interest and excitement are cut off at the knees from the outset.

Nevertheless, some attempt is made to change things up a little: the eldest child is gender-swapped and given witchcraft as a hobby, and the Mother is recovering from an aggressive bout of cancer treatment. Still, this is about the limit of their innovation, to the point where Middle Child is practically a cipher, with nothing to do for the bulk of his screen time, until the point where he gets killed off almost out of hand to simply tie off a loose end. It’s almost weird the way that even Nicolas Cage can’t drag anything fresh from his role as the father – you’d think that the moment Cage touched the script the Weirdness would overflow, but no. It’s a solid performance but it’s still paint-by-numbers.

The rest of the story is just body-horror. If you’ve seen John Carpenter’s “The Thing” then you’ve pretty much seen this, just dialled down a notch or two. The effects are fine – ‘always happy to see practical effects in place of an overuse of CGI – but even here it’s a bit patchy. While the ‘mother-merging-with-her-child’ effects are quite well done and appropriately disturbing, other scenes like the one with the llamas, not so much. And the choice to use effects, or not, is sporadic – we get shown a white horse at the start which, while all the other creatures are getting twisted and bent out of shape around it, only has a light purple iridescence in its eyes to indicate that it too has been affected. Frankly, they should have just dropped the horse (although, again, horses are in the source material; maybe Stanley should have tried not to be so didactic).

I think what I was expecting was something that would remain faithful to the concept of the original story, but also take it out to new pastures and have a little of the director involved. There are interesting innovations – the Colour affecting radio transmissions and other electronics; the crazy stoner dude (Cheech Marin) in the whacked-out cabin – but it’s all a little hesitant, as if the director was afraid to change the recipe of this sacred cheeseburger. Richard Stanley’s undeserved career narrative has been dragged out into the light ever since this film got green-lit; maybe he’s just a little gun-shy at this point (but frankly, Marlon Brando was just dining out on his own legend towards the end and certainly Val Kilmer should have been kicked into line; “The Island of Doctor Moreau” bombed, certainly, but the Hollywood studios should have stood by their director and pointed their fingers at the prima donnas who were actually to blame).

Millennia ago, there was a portmanteau film called “Creepshow” which debuted in 1982. One of the stories which comprised that film was “The Lonely Death of Jordy Verrill” which was a knock-off version of “The Colour Out of Space” except that the meteorite which crashes on the remote farm turns all of the animal life around it into plants. There’s only one character in the piece – played by, of all people, Stephen King – but it’s the stand-out chapter of the whole film. That’s because it’s got Lovecraft’s good bones as a narrative and, even bowdlerized like it was here, it can take the punishment. I think that’s where Richard Stanley falls short: this story can take it; you’ve just got to push it hard enough.

In the end, this is a good tale being held back by hesitancy and too much hero worship. The director didn’t do enough to make it his own and push the envelope. In short, it’s too much just a re-telling of HPL’s version. In itself that’s not a bad thing – gods know that there are way too many awful versions of Lovecraft’s material out there already – but even a good re-telling can’t outweigh an innovative and imaginative new piece. It’s like the difference between the awful 2011 re-make of “The Thing” versus something like 1998’s “Pi”: there’s no contest.

In the final analysis, this is expert filmmaking that’s true to its source material and is entirely entertaining. You will enjoy the 110 minutes spent with it and you won’t feel that you’ve wasted either your time or your money. Will it come back to haunt you though? Not at all.

Three-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors.

Yet Another Shark Flick...

ROBERTS, Johannes (Dir.), “47 Metres Down: Uncaged”, Entertainment Studios Motion Pictures/thefyzz, 2019.

I’ve spent some time looking back over my experiences in the surf, at sea, or on the beach, during the past day or so, and I’ve made a list of life-threatening incidents that I’ve experienced; that is, moments which might have led to danger should things have gone pear-shaped. I’ve compiled the following:

·                 Got caught in a Riptide

·                 Stung by Jellyfish

·                 Encountered a Sea-snake

·                 Picked up a live Cone Shell by accident

·                 Jumped into Shallow Water

·                 Blundered into a Moray Eel

·                 Got my foot caught in a broken Lobster Trap; almost drowned trying to get free

·                 Got barrel-rolled by a Dumping Wave

·                Got my feet shredded by Coral

·                 Bitten by Ants

·                 Sunburn and Heat-stroke

·                 Stung by Sand-Flies

·                 Overrun by Sea Lice

·                 Nipped by Crabs

·                 Encountered a Snake

·                 Pinned by a falling Mound of Sand

·                 Seasickness

·                 Almost Capsized in a Boat

·                 Passed within “coo-ee” of a Shark

Australian kids – at least they did in my day – spend a lot of time at the beach: there has to be an upside to living alongside all of the poisonous and deadly creatures we share the country with. However, at no time was I ever led to believe that such activity was ever entirely safe. My parents drilled into me that there were dangers to be met with along the way and that I had to be careful. Still, children get inquisitive and they get into trouble, as even this short list will prove. And, on the whole, I never really liked the beach: I preferred to stay on the sand rather than get into the water, so my tally of deadly encounters is probably on the lower-than-average side of things. (And before anyone makes comments about sea lice, they’re not like other types of lice but they’ll definitely give you the heebies.)

What I’m driving at here is this: if you go to where the danger is, the danger will find you and, if you’re not careful, it will probably get you, no matter how prepared you think you are. Down here we’re one month into winter and that means that all of our local shark species are doing their winter thing; in the case of Great White Sharks, it means that they’re moving north along the coastlines towards the Equator. They do this every year. Sometimes they do it in great numbers and on those occasions, we refer to those migrations as “shark years” – it happens on average every five years or so. Recently, we had an attack on our northern New South Wales beaches; that’s a shame and the victim’s family has my commiserations. However, that wouldn’t have happened if the person involved hadn’t gotten into the water (it’s winter, for chrissakes!). Despite this, people tend to go off the deep end about these things and forget about all of the times that they themselves went out to the edge of civilization and got caught in, or by, something that might have ended very badly for them. Instead they holler for drift nets and culls, ignoring the fact that these measures invariably kill vastly more sealife than just the sharks for which they’re designed. And governments go ahead and implement these stupid measures because they have one eye firmly focused on their electoral approval and sharks don’t vote.

Think of this: sharks – on average – kill ten people across the planet every year; people destroy – on average – ten million shark lives per annum. ‘Good thing sharks don’t vote, isn’t it?

All of which makes me wonder, yet again, where the funding for all of these shark “creature feature” movies comes from? Sharks are an easy ‘go to’ for such movies because they’re perceived to be abundant (they’re not any more) and easy to access; any film which involves them is more than likely going to be filmed somewhere with high tourist potential and which will look very cinematic when photographed; and the people appearing in the film will most likely be young, attractive and – therefore – scantily-clad. Who wouldn’t pony up the cash for such a project? Add in the fact that CGI is dirt cheap when it comes to animating things which are essentially tubes with fins and teeth on one end, and it’s a triple threat. Of course, creating an atmosphere of terror concerning these fish also helps those industries who thrive by making shark-fin soup, Chinese medicines and shark nets; industries which might likely be convinced to contribute to the cost of making such a film. The sooner governments stop responding to the illusory threats of shark invasions, and the sooner Chinese quackery is outlawed across the planet, the better.

Which brings me – stepping off my soapbox – to this film.

In the past four decades or so, the concept of the shark film has morphed and adapted. Initially, let’s say sometime in the 60s, if you saw a shark in a movie, it was often just a glimpse of a fin sticking out of the water. In “Thunderball” – the Bond film – we saw some close-up sharks and even Sean Connery was a bit shocked by how close to them he ended up (apparently, there was only a pane of glass between him and the fish at the end of the flick, and he’d been told quite clearly that they would be using a dead shark – they didn’t). “Jaws”, of course, was the first definitive shark film, riffing off the Peter Benchley novel which was mostly about stuff other than a big fish, for which the shark was simply a metaphor. At that point, it was just the fact that it was a shark that got audiences hyperventilating; later shark films had to up the ante.

In the “Jaws” sequels (viewing not advised), the sharks got bigger and were assigned motive, implying that they had the capacity to reason (ooh! Spooky!). This was further developed in “Deep Blue Sea” and again in “The Shallows”. (I should just point out too that sharks do reason and are not stupid – science has caught up with Renny Harlin and Jaume Collet-Serra, or, more correctly, vice versa.) In each ensuing iteration, size became a factor until we hit “The Meg” where it got ridiculous. Putting aside the silliness of the “Sharknado” outliers, I had begun to wonder where such movie fare could possibly go now? Well, here it is in “47 Metres Down: Uncaged” – blind, zombie, Great White Sharks!

(Of course, they’re not really undead; but the way that they’re portrayed here they certainly look like it!)

In this film, four poorly-characterised young women take off on an illicit cave-diving jaunt, swimming down from a cenote in the Yucatan jungle into a submerged Mayan catacomb which debouches – they are vaguely told – out into the open ocean. Things go (ahem) swimmingly, until – deep inside the subaqueous complex – a blind Great White Shark roars out of the gloom and traps them underwater by collapsing the tunnel they came in by. The ‘brainy girl’ Mia decides that these sharks have evolved down here and are blind as a result because, as we know, anything living in a cave must be blind and colourless (we are also treated to the sight of an enormous – and screaming - neon tetra – a type of tropical fish familiar to anyone who’s ever kept an aquarium – blind and of gigantic proportions because, well, cave… sketchy evolution reference… whatever). So, the premise of this film is established: there’s no easy exit; the only way out is to go through to the ocean, avoiding all the zombie sharks en route.

With the first film in this series, “47 Metres Down”, there were a lot of things to be enjoyed. The story didn’t just hang upon a big monster fish rocketing unexpectedly out of the dark every ten minutes or so; there were some interesting story wrinkles stemming from the use of SCUBA gear that took the narrative into new and strange areas. Here, there’s some of that DNA in the coding but not nearly as well executed. For starters, geography is an issue. In the first movie, we, the audience, knew where we were the whole time. There was a boat upstairs; 35 metres below that, the communications cut out; 12 metres further down from there we had the separated shark-diving cage with our two prospective victims inside, slowly running out of air. The film retailed this information well and – just like in “The Shallows” – used this map to guide its story along. In this tale, because we’re underwater and in a stone labyrinth, we never really know where we are, or where the threat is coming from. I understand that that’s the point – that this is what causes our characters to be terrified – but what we see on the screen is a bunch of silt and bubbles, some thrashing limbs, a glimpse of teeth and then it’s all over. We can’t tell exactly what’s happened and how it took place until our survivors gather and do a re-cap. That’s not ideal.

The set dressing has some issues as well. One reason that I shelled out for this movie was the promise of Mayan surroundings – having just read everything I could lay my hands on about the Maya culture, I am great with Maya knowledge and wanted to see how this stood up. In the depths of these catacombs (which, as a concept, strictly aren’t Mayan but, whatevs), they have these humanoid statues, rough human shapes, standing around in circles like shop dummies. These in no way reflect Mayan art styles and are there only for the purpose of making the characters (and us) think that there are other characters, or other people, lurking in the gloom. It’s a cheap scare tactic. Otherwise, I was sold on this: it looks good. Without the window mannequins however, we might have had a clearer idea of what was going on.

Like the first film, the writers take what they’ve chosen and run with it, and they do this quite well, creating some truly unexpected but logical moments of real terror. There are some jump scares, but they aren’t cheap, and there are some moments of equipment, and other, critical failure, but they’re handled well. The last few scenes, where our heroes hit the open ocean, have some truly OMG moments but they were deftly handled and subtly flagged leading to very satisfying results. This movie is definitely worth the price of admission because if sustained threat is what you’re into, it certainly delivers.

(I should point out though that, near the start, there’s an extended sequence that seems to be little more than a video clip for the 1987 Aztec Camera song “Somewhere In My Heart”. If you loathe Aztec Camera and all they stand for, feel free to fast forward through this – it goes on for some time…)

The downside? Well, clarity (as discussed) is a bit of a problem, but mainly – just like it did in the first movie, the Hollywood Morality Playbook rears its ugly head. At no point in this film was I unaware of who was going to make it home alive. All of this is flagged during the lacklustre character development phase and by subsequent character choices. (I made a note of the character’s names going in but, for the most part, the only differences between them are the styles and colours of the bikinis that they’re wearing.) Mia, the brainy girl, because she gets bullied by the school bitch at the start of the film, gets to live, and her stepsister Sasha also survives, not because she comes to Mia’s defense but because she feels bad for doing nothing about it, despite making some half-hearted attempts at later reconciliation. However, she does get punished for her inaction. Alex, the Asian girl, dies for being the brains behind the whole misadventure, with its implications of sexual impropriety with one of the two boys associated with the diving set-up (they’re walking Spam; don’t get attached). And Nicole, who is pushy and sassy and never does what she’s told, also doesn’t make it because Bad Girl (obviously). Basically, if they’re in the water they’re chum, unless they’re someone else’s stepsister, and the script makes all kinds of twisted justifications to rationalise this. Not cool. And certainly not something which should stand in for actual characters.

I get the feeling, having seen this happen twice now, that Johannes Roberts has a bit of a thing for taking mousey girls and pushing them to the point where they explode and strike back in anger. That’s key to both of these films and the way that they meet their resolution. Once was interesting; twice is no accident. The appeal of most shark flicks (not for me personally, but it’s why, I think, these films get made) is the possibility of seeing young, vulnerable women, threatened by large voracious carnivores. The ideal of the ‘young beauty in danger’ is as old as Dracula and actually, even older than that. Here, the goal apparently, is to strip the young beauty of all hope and leave her in extremis with only herself and her outraged sense of justice to rely upon. Obviously, Roberts finds this fascinating; on the other hand, I find watching young twenty-something women punching sharks in the face somewhat ludicrous. Maybe that’s just me.

Regardless, this is worth a watch, especially if the shark flick is your horror movie of choice. It’s not great but it’s entertaining as far as it goes. I wonder though, where this sub-genre will go from here: vampire sharks? Virus-carrying, kill-crazed zombie were-sharks? Who can say? After “Sharknado” the concept seems almost bullet-proof; however, I know for sure that playing the Maximising Card did no favours for the “Predator” franchise, so I can’t see it working much longer with this one. In the meantime, solely for the interesting narrative arc on offer with this film, I’m giving it three Tentacled Horrors.

Atomic Comics Meltdown!

Ever since sitting through “Swamp Thing” recently I’ve been a bit focused upon comics and the concerns of the four-colour world. I’ve unearthed my comics collection to give it a bit of sprucing-up and care, and re-familiarized myself with the contents thereof. I’ve also tuned in to various YouTube presenters who make their living discussing the offerings of Marvel and DC and I’ve encountered a bizarre thing. You might also have met up with it. It concerns Marvel, specifically, and its new offerings for 2020. According to the amount of heat that the issue has generated, there’s a lot of anger and disappointment out there in the world and frankly, I can see why.

Everything New is Old again…

The source of the discombobulation is the release of two titles – “X-Men: Children of the Atom” and “The New Warriors” (which is actually a re-launch of an older title, after a hiatus). The first title is an “X-Men” offshoot, or perhaps a “New Mutants” re-launch, as much as it is anything. It involves a group of younger characters who all seem to be descended from earlier mutant heroes – specifically, the headline stars of the “X-Men” franchise. The players of this piece are all exactly the same as their previous iterations in terms of their abilities – and to some extent personalities – but they’ve all been race- or gender-swapped to make them ‘different’. My initial reaction was concern about how they were going to explain how some of these old-guard characters managed to procreate (if that is the rationale behind them, which seems unnecessarily obscure at this point). I mean, sure, most of us would be onboard the notion that Gambit had an unacknowledged child hanging around out there somewhere, but Nightcrawler? The upright Catholic and sometime priest? Not so much.

The main issue here which seems to have been deliberately overlooked, is that regardless of race and gender, a person with the same powers as, say, Cyclops, is going to travel pretty much the same road that Cyclops has trod over the last – what is it? – almost 60 years. Whatever you’re going to say with a female version of the character, guess what? You’ve already said it. Can Marvel be this tone-deaf? It seems so. It doesn’t matter that you’ve taken the characters and given them a new coat of paint; it doesn’t matter that there’s some kind of deeply-hidden rationale for why these characters should exist, lurking in some fan wiki somewhere; no amount of a patronising gloss of Gen-Z patois and consumerist hooks (“Look! He’s on TikTok!”) makes any of this new. If you look deep behind the glossy cover art, you can see that this is all just the cynical Big Corporate financing of a safe option.

We’ve always liked the “X-Men”, right? Then we’ll like them again. Or else.

The other launch is even more problematic and has caused even more frothing online, with the result that it seems to have been canned even before it hit the stores. Let’s investigate…

High Concept: the Problem with Altitude…

“The New Warriors” is a title that has come and gone across the last 30 years and was imagined as a second-string “Avengers” support group much as the “New Mutants” were designed to support the “X-Men”; it was also partially intended to showcase new characters in the Marvel Universe, in order to gauge fan reactions. The last time it appeared was in the 90s where it was headlined by such individuals as Night Thrasher (who sounds like he has an issue with night terrors, but that’s just me), Nova and Namorita, among others, before being cancelled. Now, it’s been re-launched with a completely new line-up… and people aren’t happy.

It’s easy to see why. There are two unequal halves to this new superhero team and each of them is problematic, leading to fans crying out that Marvel is “pandering”; or setting inflammatory “bait”; or that it is just being “patronizing”. Whatever merits these accusations may have (and that last one is pretty unassailable) there are other, more pressing, reasons why this should have been strangled at birth. Let’s take the first half:

Meet twin superheroes, Snowflake and Safespace. Actually, don’t think of them as ‘superheroes’ at all – that’s a problem with these two, because they aren’t; they’re actually figures of sullen pity, dressed up in sackcloth and ashes so that we can clearly see their shame. Don’t worry – they’re proud to be on display like this; it fuels their inner passions. These two are designed to break the stereotypical superhero image; they are not heroes in any traditional, certainly not in a superhero comics, sense. They have been created to be iconoclastic; a slap in the face and a “take that!” from their writer and artist, both of whom are on record for having been “intimidated” by traditional superhero fare. So, why are they working in the industry at all, one wonders?

Putting aside the gender-bending and concepts of passive heroism, the main issue with these two is that they are (for all their protestations about being “non-binary”) a duo. This is problematic. It has never satisfactorily worked throughout comics history: the “Wonder Twins” was an iteration of it that was more accurately a TV show, teaching kids the benefits of co-operation, before being drawn into the four-colour world, but other two-step characters have always been fraught. Think of Northstar and Aurora from “Alpha Flight”; think of Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch from “The Avengers”; think of “Cloak and Dagger”. These high-concept, ‘we two are one’ imaginings have always been difficult to pull off. Why did Marvel think it would work this time around? Let’s re-cap:

Northstar and Aurora had similar powers – superspeed, flight and an energy strike – and costumes to go with it; when they combined their powers, they could create a massive power surge. As characters they were both arrogant and abrasive. Their character arc saw a wedge driven between them that would force them apart: Aurora changed her outfit and distanced herself from her brother who fell from grace and discovered he was gay. This is really all that there is to say of consequence with these types of characters: if together we are ‘X’; individually, who are we? With Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, the same issues were discussed, but they were ramped up unnecessarily (and ickily) by the Ultimate Universe’s incestuous take on them. In the case of “Cloak and Dagger”, these same issues were compounded by notions of socio-economic distance, wherein one character was wealthy and entitled while their counterpart came from the “wrong side of the tracks”. And they threw in commentaries about drugs and inter-racial relationships as well, just to beef it all up.

Here again we see two characters bound together by their concept – an offensive capability teamed up with one that is all defense (but qualified) – and a unity of purpose. What do you do with it? Well, personally, I don’t think that the writer has really thought about it all that much, but my guess would be that, at some point these two will be driven apart somehow. There’s a ‘poor me!’, Morrissey-esque quality to these two that’s just itching to be addressed: a “non-binary” figure who shoots ice shurikens and another who can create force-fields but only to protect others? They seem to me to be 1) lame; and 2) set up to take a fall, crying ‘woe is me!’ all the way with Boy George singing “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” in the background. And the way that they’re always drawn clinging on to each other is off-putting: did we learn nothing from the “Ultimate Avengers” fiasco? Apparently not.

Back to the Kindergarten…!

The rest of the team is similarly problematic and, despite there being no immediately obvious over-arching concept encapsulating them, there actually is one. And it’s patronisingly offensive. Let’s look at the characters individually…

First off there’s Screentime. Commentators have said that he looks like “Ben 10, all growed up” and they’re not wrong. His superpower, gained from inhaling his uncle’s illegal “internet gas”, is to have instant access to the world wide web at any time. So, he’s a kid with a smartphone? What the-? Somehow the concept of ‘superhero’ got completely lost while this guy was being thought up.

(And it’s not like there isn’t a precedent for such a character in the Marvel universe. The “New Mutant” Cipher was a very interesting character that covered the concept of ‘what if I have a superpower, only it’s not really useful?’ very well indeed. And useful is relative here: Cipher should have been shipped off to museums worldwide to crack Mayan glyphs, cuneiform, Rongorongo script - everything that researchers have been busting their heads against for decades. I’d even point him at SETI except that in a Marvel universe, extra-terrestrial intelligence is pretty much a given. In the case of Screentime however, it’s a case of ‘been there; done that’ all over again.)

Next, there’s B-Negative who is (wait for it) a vampire! What, is it the 70s again, when Marvel comics were awash with vampires? To refine, he’s a “living vampire”, an offshoot of the same experimentation that created the 70s Marvel antihero “Morbius, the Living Vampire” which – given that there’s a film version of that comic coming to big screens soon, starring (groan!) Jared Leto – seems like a cynical marketing hook to me. Further, he’s defined as a Goth. When did the writer and artist of this series last go to a high school? Are goths still a thing? I’m pretty sure they died out with the 80s, so I’m not sure just to whom this concept is being targeted.

Finally - and here’s where the over-arching concept comes into play to tie these three together – there’s Trailblazer. She’s a racially diverse young woman (her ethnicity is confoundingly obscure for some reason) of a less-than-athletic physique (not judging; it’s just notable in a universe where Heroic Proportion holds sway). Her superpower is that she has a Bag of Holding (looking at all of you D&D players out there) which manifests as a “magic backpack”. In short – and even her name is a giveaway here – this is Dora the Explorer all grown up. Once this piece of the architecture has been identified, it’s not hard to read Screentime as a kind of ‘Google-Mappy’ and B-Negative as ‘Boots the Vampire Monkey’. I rest my case.

I actually think that – if this comic has been pulled – it wasn’t done so because it’s calling its readers childish, it was done so for litigious reasons - concerns over infringement of copyright - more than anything else. Disney is nothing if not gun-shy…

Think of the Children!

I’ve watched a lot of bearded, bespectacled, baseball-capped commentators recently, stridently complaining about these titles and what it means for Marvel in the future. I’m guessing – since it’s likely that these titles won’t make the cut, or, if they do, they won’t stay the distance – the only people they will offend will be adults. Seriously, the only people who buy comics these days are grownups, so whether these concepts will even be exposed to children is a moot point. Let me explain:

When I was a kid, comics looked like this (above). They were cheaply printed on cheap stock, licensed from the US by local companies and put together in Singapore, or Hong Kong. They were black-and-white with few ads, and they were sold in stacks alongside the daily newspapers and other magazines, like “Beano” and “The Broons”. The upside was that they were large – 48, 64, or 96 pages long – and could keep you entertained for a week, or a summer holiday; the downside was that they weren’t continuous, so you inevitably got only one or two instalments in a story arc before they petered out, leaving you hanging. When import restrictions were lifted in the early 80s, the only shops that sold the imported original comics – Minotaur Books in Melbourne, or Kings Comics in Sydney, for example – were elite establishments with moneyed clientele: no kids allowed. It’s still the case today. Comics are “collectibles”; not “children’s entertainment”. That’s what television is for.

Still, this material is being - self-confessedly - targeted at “Zoomers”, the shudderingly bad moniker being applied to members of the so-called “Generation Z”, who quite likely, won’t be the ones buying this stuff and crying in outrage (although they might form a second-wave of purchasers coming to see what the fuss is all about). Old bearded, bespectacled, baseball-capped commentators (along with black, female and non-binary commentators) will be reading this stuff and bellowing about how being “woke” in this fashion is ruining all of their comics material. On the one hand, all I can say is, if you don’t like it, don’t buy it – Marvel will feel the pinch and move on. On the other hand, if writing and drawing this stuff has been done deliberately to aggravate this sector of the Marvel audience, then claims that this stuff is just there to “bait” the readers seem to be justified. That’s not ideal, but again, we can turn to history.

Where To From Here?

When they re-created Spider-Man as a mixed-race youth, we saw a lot of the same issues that this stuff is causing today – outrage; despair; alarm. What happened? Well, the Spider-verse happened, and everyone got to have their cake and eat it as they saw fit. This seems to be a more egregious outbreak of this malady though and might need some more diligent oversight.

First, comics has a history. We have seen a Golden Age, a Silver Age, and a Bronze Age of comics covering both Marvel and DC; it’s a full-time job just trying to keep track of who was doing what and where with whom. There have been some critical moments of rationalization and re-imagination – Crisis on Infinite Earths; Secret Wars I & II; the New 52; the Civil Wars – and not everyone enjoys what happens to their favourite titles or characters along the way. Much of what happens though, is built upon the preceding history and good writers and scripters take from the past to build the future. What’s happening here is different:

The architects behind these two aberrations (and they are aberrant) have no desire to look backwards or to generate story from the back-catalogue. This betokens either willful ignorance, or petulant disregard, for the form. In the case of Children of the Atom, the writer appears to have quite a bit of game in comics generally; perhaps the importance of all the history hasn’t been brought to their attention? Maybe they think they’re working in some kind of a vacuum? As to the (New) New Warriors writer, his hidden agenda seems clearly to be a spiteful ruination of the superhero comics form, at the same time that he seems to be taking a prissy swipe at the comics-reading community. If the cancellation of this title has been authorized then it’s just deserts; if not, then I’m sure that the readership will vote with their feet.

*****

I’m not saying that there is no room for these kinds of stories. Representation is a fine ideal and is needed now, more than ever: I’m just not sure that many people are going to see things they can relate to in these two offerings. That being said, if you look at the pile of 70s comics above, you’ll see one second from the right in the bottom row that clearly shows Tyroc, a black character from 1976 who ran (eventually) with the Legion of Super Heroes, making him the first black superhero in DC’s roster. Sure, the character is not looked-upon that favourably nowadays, but it was a clear and heartfelt attempt (maybe not so much by the artists) to build a character within the DC canon that the black readership could relate to. Clunky, but it got the ball rolling. Maybe this will too, I don’t know (it’s certainly just as clunky!).

Both DC and Marvel have created spin-off imprints from their main lines to accommodate differently-orientated, slanted, graphic and adult content, and maybe this where these two titles would sit more comfortably. Are Marvel saying that such fare should be moved to the mainstream? If so, I think they’ve read their readership incorrectly. It’s time to fire up these niche publishing arms and push this type of content into those laps rather than downsizing the companies out of operation. The mainstream comics continuum is just that – mainstream – ‘edgy’ is for elsewhere. As hellishly conservative as America is, you’d think they’d’ve realized this by now…

Review: Carrie

KING, Stephen, Carrie, New English Library Ltd., Dunton Green, Sevenoaks Kent, UK, 1983.

Octavo; paperback; 222pp. Moderate wear; rolled; spine creased; covers rubbed and edgeworn; text block edges toned with some spotting; retailer’s ink stamp to the inside front cover; previous owner’s bookplate to the title page. Fair.

This is more like it. Here is King with an editor firmly in place, reining in the rambling and circuitous tangents and keeping him on track. Interestingly, there’s still a lot of scaffolding going on here, and it almost takes out the whole exercise, but he gets control of it somewhat towards the end. There’s even a little Mythos stuff happening along the way to keep us Lovecraftian types happy. Let’s dig in…

For those not familiar with the movie or the book, this is the story of Carrie White, a repressed, mother-dominated, young woman who becomes the target of cruel bullying from her school peers; at the end of the novel she uses her powerful telekinetic (“TK”) gifts to kill most of her tormentors while laying waste to the town and its denizens. The story is presented to us as a series of narrative scenes broken up by excerpts from a government report (the “White Report”) about the incident, and others taken from books and articles published about the happening, written by the witnesses and survivors. Making the events in the story a fait accompli in this manner lends the whole exercise a grim inevitability that nevertheless keeps the reader turning pages.

This is King’s first horror novel and the first book published under his own name (he wrote other novels under the pseudonym “Richard Bachman”). In this work, he establishes what becomes a common trope in his later efforts, namely the setting of the tale in a bucolic New England American town, in this case the fictional town of Chamberlain ME. Along with this, he invokes the concept of populating the locale with a range of quirky and idiosyncratic side characters who throw their own lights onto the events. This is something he refines in his next novel – ‘Salem’s Lot – where such recording of the town and its occupants reaches a fever-pitch, becoming almost like a James Herbert novel in its efforts to create and then dispose of as many side characters as possible.

Here, it’s not so bad. The personae who show up – those not connected to the school – are lightly sketched and glossed over, offering their opinions and then moving away from the spotlight. Some of them get referenced by later characters as having met gruesome fates and such reiteration makes for some satisfying eliminations of loose ends. For the most part however, this and the obviously well-mapped nature of the town (at least in the author’s head) is still scaffolding and most of the extraneous detail is unnecessary for the plot to progress.

Interestingly, there’s less of this in the retailing of the school and its occupants. Here, King is happy to assume that everyone knows what an American high school entails and he glides past piles of information as understood material, which he wouldn’t have dared to do in another setting. He’s willing to trust his audience in some venues, but not others, which is a definite shortcoming. In later books this is glaring, but here there’s the sense that a word-limit has been imposed and he’s watching it intently. Many of these moments can be overlooked as grace notes in the descriptions, telling details that cinch the idea without bogging things down, and in this story it’s clear that a little has gone a long way. Obviously, an editor unafraid to anoint a King manuscript with a red Sharpie was in attendance. But back to the school…

From long cinematic exposure, we are attuned to how a stereotypical high school in America works (in fact, I went to an American high school myself for a period of time and it’s actually scary how by-the-book these places are!). There are the cool kids and the nerds; the jocks and the dweebs. We have cheerleaders and quarterbacks and stoners; lesbian-tinged sports mistresses and proms. All made to order. As I said, in any other venue, King would info-dump us to death about how things work and where things are but, in this setting, even he would have to admit that he’d be trying to teach us how to suck eggs. However, because this is such familiar turf, he devotes his talent to other ends and actually – now that he doesn’t have to cling so desperately to unnecessary details – makes some stunning inroads into the material.

The high points of this novel are the character sketches King provides of many of the main actors. Leaving aside Carrie herself at the moment, many of her peers – all side characters in the drama which unfolds – are given extra time in the spotlight and become well-rounded to the point where they start to rise out of their stereotypical background. Prime among these are the two main villains, Christine Hargensen and Billy Nolan. Chris is the girl who delights the most in the degradation of Carrie which occurs at the start of the novel; backed up by her lawyer father, who gets litigious on the school for trying to punish his – his! – daughter, she lets her sense of entitlement run away with her and plots Carrie’s comeuppance. Luring local dropout and ne’er-do-well Billy into her scheme with promises of sex, she rapidly discovers that her sidekick beau has his own demons and he soon takes over as the master in their plotting, driven by longed-for retributions of his own. Watching these two hook up and then engage in a tightly-fought battle for dominance is riveting and is worth the price of admission.

Another witness to Carrie’s shame at the start of the book is Susan Snell, who feels great remorse for her involvement and then tries to make up for it by arranging for her boyfriend to take Carrie to the prom in her stead, knowing that Carrie wouldn’t be attending under normal circumstances. While nowhere near as captivating as Chris’s downfall at the hands of Billy, Sue’s progression through the novel is finely-drawn and believable and she becomes the final witness to Carrie’s revenge. It has to be said that Thomas “Tommy” Ross, Sue’s compliant boyfriend, is somewhat lacklustre in all of this. He goes to his sacrifice like a lamb to the slaughter and he feels like little more than a stuffed shirt in the proceedings. I think we’re meant to feel some kind of sympathy for him – like he’s some sort of saint – but he comes off as simply unbelievable. Then there’s Carrie.

Writing religiously-repressed characters is a high-wire act. If you push it too hard, it just falls across the line into parody. King walks that line here with Carrie and her mother. The amazing thing that he does with this is to keep us thinking that Carrie is fundamentally alright; that beneath all of this repression and isolation and social awkwardness, there’s a real little girl waiting to step forth. And it works. We see this ugly duckling step up and take flight, transforming into a swan on the night of the prom and being crowned Prom Queen. Even her blossoming super-powers get rolled up into this progression and it’s not too hard a stretch to buy into. There are a couple of moments when it almost goes too far, but these instances get reined in. King is nothing if not psychologically insightful when it comes to character. After the bucket of pig’s blood falls onto her though, it’s all over bar the shouting.

Once the blood hits the floor, Carrie goes from high school dream girl to nameless force for destruction. The crucial thing to note here is that she leaves the school – where King feels he can trust us to know what’s what – and heads into town, a town that King has meticulously pieced together in his head and which he insists on describing to us in minute detail, because we obviously can’t be trusted to take the concept of “town” onboard. After a few hiccups and sputters, Carrie just goes postal and trashes the place, and we lose all sense of the character while King gives us street names and local infrastructure: she rips down power lines on X-street; she tears up gas mains on Y-street; she burns down a church on Z-street. There’s a moment when we’re told that she psychically unscrews all three bolts on each of a succession of fire-hydrants: was I aware before this that fire-hydrants have three bolts? Did I need to know this? No, and no, and being told this sort of stuff – scaffolding – is completely beside the point. Anyway, the town gets its just deserts, everyone who has ever been mean to Carrie gets what’s coming to them and Carrie and Sue confront each other and bond psychically just long enough for Sue to “see” the sensation of Carrie dying and “crossing over” (it’s a nice touch; I’ll pay it).

Of course, the carnage is hinted at all through the story due to the scene cuts being interspersed with excerpts from the White Report and other sources. We know from these that the end result will be big, but it’s not really until we get there that we learn just HOW devastating Carrie’s vengeance was. It’s a nice exercise in building expectations and dread. My one quibble is that, from the tone of the ‘Report, it’s clear that the Powers That Be are completely onboard with believing in TK, even discussing strategies for identifying the gene responsible and suppressing it in latent individuals. I think we all know that a report such as this would be doing its darnedest to de-bunk psychic powers and would work hard to discredit witnesses and their statements. Sure, there would be a discussion about rogue superpowers and how to control them, but it would be a Top Secret document that only the President and the Chiefs of Staff would be privy to. Of course, this book was written back in the mid-Seventies when we were all a lot less jaded than we are today…

There’s a clear line of succession from this story through to The Shining, in that the horror of the material stems from psychic powers and their ramifications. Even after The Shining, King was still not able to let this particular notion lie – Firestarter had its day in the sun too, and there’s also a sequel to The Shining now, Doctor Sleep. King’s trick of inserting stray comments, italicized and in parentheses, into the internal monologues of his characters obviously stems from Carrie and it shows up again, also to good effect, in The Shining (I don’t recall it being used in ‘Salem’s Lot; maybe it’s a King constant, but either way I’m not going back to check). The over-explaining is kept in check here, but the flood gates loosen in the next novel, only to be clamped back down in The Shining due to the limitations imposed by that book’s setting; thereafter, the gloves are off. There’s nothing to be done: it’s now a feature and there’s no going back. Even his children – those who also write - are infected with it. I don’t know, maybe people like being lectured to by Stephen King? I know I don’t like it and my opinion of him as a writer has not shifted a bit.

In the final analysis, there’s gold in this tome but not where you'd expect. It’s better than other King novels in some ways, but it’s also a little clunky in places; the quality of writing between this book and ‘Salem’s Lot is a quantum shift. If he trusted his readers a little more this would rate higher but, as it is, I’m giving it three-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors.