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Author: Matthew David Surridge

Fantasia 2017, Day 1: The Bizarre Adventure Begins (JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable)

Fantasia 2017, Day 1: The Bizarre Adventure Begins (JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond Is Unbreakable)

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Fantasia 2017The body has a memory, memory activated by the time of year and the weather and the repetition of physical activity. Every year now as summer passes its midpoint, walking through Montreal evokes for me a sense of wonder and anticipation: a physical remembrance of the Fantasia International Film Festival. I’ve covered Montreal’s genre film festival for Black Gate the last three years, walking downtown during the days of the festival and then walking back at night marveling at the things I’ve seen. Last Thursday for a fourth year I set out for the Fantasia theatres at Concordia University’s downtown campus; and so here is the first installment of my Fantasia diary for 2017.

As always, I’m looking forward over the coming weeks to things I’ve heard of and things I’ve never heard of. I’m trying to figure out what movies I’ll have to pass on seeing in order to watch other movies scheduled against them, and then what movies I’ll be able to see on a computer monitor in the Fantasia screening room. This year the recipients of the festival’s Lifetime Achievement Awards are a little outside my immediate areas of interest — B-movie auteur Larry Cohen, luchador and movie star Mil Máscaras, and Cüneyt Arkin, star of over 300 Turkish films including The Man Who Saved the World (Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam, also known as “Turkish Star Wars”). But who knows if I’ll find myself sitting in on a screening of one or more of their varied works?

This year I began my Fantasia experience on the festival’s first night, Thursday July 13, with a viewing of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable. I arrived early, reaching the Hall Theatre at 8:30 PM for a 9:45 screening, and found a line-up of ticketholders already stretching a good 200 feet. The movie’s directed by Takashi Miike, a winner of last year’s Lifetime Achievement Award, with a script by Itaru Era based on the long-running manga by Hirohiko Araki. I happened to watch this showing in the company of the redoubtable Dave Harris of Pieuvre.ca; neither of us had any experience of the manga, but after the movie we were able to speak briefly with some friends of Dave’s who were fans of the comics. “11 out of 10,” said one, while another said that the movie was so faithful it replicated specific panels on the screen. So: if you’re a fan of the source material, you will like this movie. What about those who aren’t?

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The Tripartite Hero: Matt Wagner’s Mage

The Tripartite Hero: Matt Wagner’s Mage

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Mage: The Hero Denied #0At the Emerald City Comicon in early March, Image Comics announced that starting in August they’d be publishing writer/artist Matt Wagner’s Mage: The Hero Denied, a 15-issue series with a half-length 0 issue and a double-sized conclusion. Hero Denied will be the final part of a trilogy Wagner began over thirty years ago, and I want to prepare for that last installment by looking back here at the first parts of the saga. The Mage books are two of the finest works of a great comics talent, urban fantasies mixing excellent action storytelling, a mastery of plot beats, and a sense of the mythic into gripping stories — and stories with a semi-autobiographical slant, no less.

Mage: The Hero Discovered was published by Comico from May 1984 to December 1986 (I read it in the three-volume 1987 Starblaze trade paperback collections). Wagner wrote, drew, and coloured the series, with letters by Bob Pinaha, and Sam Kieth inking from issue 6 through 15. The story follows Kevin Matchstick, inhabitant of the modern-day world, as he encounters a mysterious figure named Mirth who turns out to be a mage; Mirth introduces Matchstick to a grander and more terrifying world, one of wizardry and horrors, and leads him to the hidden truth of his nature and his link to a hero out of legend. Mage: The Hero Defined came out from Image from July 1997 through October 1999, again written and drawn by Wagner, this time with colours by Jeromy Cox and letters by Sean Konot. The series follows an older Matchstick through a stranger world of greater magics and other heroes; Matchstick meets another mage, faces consequences of his earlier actions, and discovers deeper truths about the archetypes behind him.

Always intended as a trilogy from the beginning of the story back in the 80s, the second and third chapters have necessarily been slow to follow because the story is in part an autobiography. Kevin Matchstick is the alter-ego of Matt Wagner: he’s drawn to resemble his creator, aspects of his story are fictionalisations (fantastifications?) of Wagner’s life, and other characters are analogues of people Wagner knows — and since Wagner’s a professional in comics, a number of the characters in the second series are thinly-disguised versions of other comics artists. The Hero Defined is therefore also an odd document of 1990s comics culture. If you don’t know the background, you don’t need to know it. If you do, you see another level to the story: artists become mythic heroes and villains. That works with the central concern of the tale — the transmutation of everyday life into archetypal struggle.

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Old New Pulp: Byron Preiss’ Weird Heroes

Old New Pulp: Byron Preiss’ Weird Heroes

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Weird Heroes Volume 1Weird Heroes was a series of eight books put out by Byron Preiss Visual Publications from 1975 through 1977, a copiously-illustrated mix of novels and short stories that aimed at creating a new kind of pulp fiction with new kinds of pulp heroes. The series had a specific set of ideals for its heroes, linked with an appreciative but not uncritical love of pulp fiction from the 1920s through 40s. Well-known creators from comics and science fiction contributed to the books, and one character would spawn a six-volume series of his own. And yet Preiss’ long-term plans for Weird Heroes were cut short with the eighth volume, and today it’s hard to find much discussion of the books online (though they’re well-remembered when they are discussed). That absence is a little surprising, as a whole new generation of writers has come along with an interest in creating new pulps. Now that we’re separated from Weird Heroes by about the amount of time it was separated from the original pulps, it’s well worth a look back at its truncated run.

Editor Byron Preiss was only 21 years old when he founded Byron Preiss Visual Publications in 1974, and the company began putting out two series of illustrated paperbacks the next year, Weird Heroes and Fiction Illustrated (which ran for four volumes with a fifth issued under a different name). Both were packaged by BPVP to be published by Pyramid Books. Weird Heroes started its run with two anthologies of short fiction that, according to Preiss’ introductions to both books, were conceived as a single volume but divided up due to length constraints. Over the course of the series’ run, it published work by Archie Goodwin, Steve Englehart, Harlan Ellison, and Michael Moorcock, alongside art by Jim Steranko, Alex Niño, Neal Adams, and P. Craig Russell.

In the editorial matter within the first book, Preiss laid out what he hoped to do with the series. Across a general introduction, a historical discussion of “old American pulp,” and an interview with Fritz Leiber later on in the book, Preiss articulated a specific sense of what old pulps did well, what they did poorly, what he wanted to take from them, and what he wanted to improve on. He also wrote about presenting an alternative to the heroes that had emerged up to that point in 1970s popular culture. Broadly, he wanted to recapture the storytelling thrills of pulp fiction and its sense of wonder, while avoiding its misogyny and racism — and unlike what he saw in both the pulps and much 1970s hero fiction, he wanted to find a way to resolve stories and conflicts without the use of violence and murder.

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A Fairy Tale At The Heart Of The World: The Prince of Morning Bells by Nancy Kress

A Fairy Tale At The Heart Of The World: The Prince of Morning Bells by Nancy Kress

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The Prince of Morning BellsContrary to conventional wisdom, sometimes a book’s cover gives matter enough for a fair judgment. The copy I read of Nancy Kress’ The Prince of Morning Bells is a 1981 first printing by Timescape; the book was reprinted in the year 2000 by Foxacre Press, and I learned from Black Gate supremo John O’Neill’s 2012 look at the title that a digital version came out in 2011. At any rate, the front cover of the Timescape edition promises: “In the magical tradition of The Last Unicorn, the tale of a restless young princess and her wondrous quest!” Parts of the blurb are only half-accurate, but the important part, the difficult-to-believe part, is quite correct. The Prince of Morning Bells is worth mentioning with The Last Unicorn, not just in terms of quality but in tone. It works with classic fantasy traditions, using a witty and often lightly-ironic style with a sprinkling of anachronism to tell a deep and profoundly moving tale. Kress has apparently noted the influence herself, though I don’t find the books excessively similar. Their bones are configured in different shapes. Distinctive, individual, The Prince of Morning Bells shows how a fantasy tale can transmute allegory into anti-allegory, telling a symbolic story that works as story while also working as symbol.

It is the story of Kirila, who begins as an eighteen-year-old princess discontented with what seems an increasingly unimportant life. She therefore decides to set out on a great Quest for the Heart of the World. She’s soon joined on her travels by a talking dog, Chessie, who claims to be a prince under a curse that can only be removed at the Heart of the World, which he tells her is to be found in the Tents of Omnium. Together they journey on, as Kirila encounters challenges and temptations; the story, which had opened on a comic note, gradually sounds bleaker tones and darker shades until, at the mid-point of the book, there is an unexpected structural turn. Kirila’s quest continues, but her resources and energy are taxed further than one might have imagined. The promised happy ending seems distant; and indeed the conclusion, although everything promised, is at the same time more equivocal than one might have imagined. Yet also satisfying, with real wisdom gained, Kirila thoroughly changed and developed, and a sense of both mystery and high majesty overriding all.

The book’s a fairy tale as much as fantasy, and if in the beginning it seems like a sending-up of fairy-tale cliches, it quickly grows more serious. As Kirila matures in the course of her adventures the quest gains in emotional intensity, giving the plot its centre without becoming episodic. Structurally, the book’s clever; although it divides into two halves, it’s so much of a piece it avoids a feeling of easy symmetry. Instead the midpoint does what a good midpoint’s supposed to, initiating the falling action in an unexpected way, leading through an increasing emotional intensity to an inevitable yet unpredictable conclusion. Kirila becomes an everywoman whose journey is a symbolic progress through life, yet if she begins as a generic spunky red-haired princess with a temper, she swiftly becomes an individual with distinctive gifts and flaws. While the quest defines the book, the shape of the quest follows the shape of her choices, prompted by who she is and what she wants. Fairy tale and characterisation combine.

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The Rationality of the Monstrous: Fourscore Phantasmagores

The Rationality of the Monstrous: Fourscore Phantasmagores

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Fourscore PhantasmagoresThere’s a paradox in the nature of a dictionary of monsters. The medieval bestiaries at least claimed to be compendia of actual knowledge. But books like Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero’s Book of Imaginary Beings (Manual de zoología fantástica) and perhaps even Katharine Briggs’ Dictionary of Fairies are only superficially rational collections of information. Though alphabetised and cross-referenced, the logical framework’s a way of presenting wild fantasy and dream: basilisks and baldanders, brownies and banshees, sylphs and sphinxes. The Monster Manual, and the role-playing handbooks it inspired, take this contradiction to a new level — detailed statistics for each creature described along with the avowed intent of inspiring new stories featuring the legendary or imaginary entities. Quantified, numerically precise, the monsters in these enchiridia still crack open the inside of the head, driving readers to imagine worlds big enough to hold dungeon-dwellers and dragons. Rupert Bottenberg’s Fourscore Phantasmagores is the newest volume of these wonders for gamers and monster-lovers of all stripes, presenting, as it says on the cover, “A Gathering of Grotequeries for Gapejaws and Gamemasters.” And, conscious of its predecessors, the book’s a rich source of inspiration; a grimoire seeding new myths.

Published by ChiZine Publications’ imprint ChiGraphic, Phantasmagores mixes words and pictures, all from Bottenberg, into 80 different monstrous imaginings. (In the interests of full disclosure I’ll note that I know Bottenberg through his work as director of the animation section at the Fantasia International Film Festival; well enough that I wouldn’t normally call him by his last name, but such are the conventions of criticism.) A foreword by Ian C. Esselmont and introduction by Bottenberg help establish the precedents and aim of the book: this is explicitly a collection of creatures for use in role-playing games, even though it can be read as illustrated prose poetry. Each of the monsters gets a full-page full-colour image; brief and often ironic notes on its type, size, habitat, traits, and attacks; and a paragraph of allusive descriptive text. There are virtually no numbers, and nothing system-specific, but enough information to get the essence of each creature across. Which is to say: there’s enough detail to work with, enough that individual gamemasters can work up stats and campaign-related specifics as needed. The book’s success lies not just in the cleverness and craft of its language and art, but in the precision with which it implies more than it says, spurring readers to imagine even more. You don’t need to be a gamer to enjoy this book — but you’ll get practical use out of it if you are.

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The Gestation of Cape and Cowl: Thoughts On Jess Nevins’ The Evolution Of The Costumed Avenger

The Gestation of Cape and Cowl: Thoughts On Jess Nevins’ The Evolution Of The Costumed Avenger

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The Evolution of the Costumed AvengerThough he’s written short stories and three self-published novels, Jess Nevins is likely best known as an excavator of fantastic fictions past: an archaeologist digging through the strata of the prose of bygone years, unearthing now pieces of story and now blackened ashes of some once-thriving genre long since consumed and built over by its lineal successor. Across annotated guides (three to Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, one to Bill Willingham and Mark Buckingham’s Fables) and self-published encyclopedias (of Pulps and of Golden Age Superheroes with Pulp Heroes soon to come, as well as 2005’s Monkeybrain-published Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana) Nevins has reassembled old pieces of fantastika, indicating direct influences on modern writing and establishing directories of almost-forgotten story. He’s one of the people broadening the history of genre, in his books, and in articles such as his pieces for io9 on the Victorian Hugo Awards that never were.

Now he has a new book about the development of the superhero and what came before. The Evolution of the Costumed Avenger is subtitled The 4000–Year History of the Superhero, and delivers what it promises. Much that has fallen into obscurity is brought to light in this book. Precedents are unearthed. Archetypal forms are catalogued. But more than that, and perhaps more valuable, known things are recontextualised. Four thousand years of the Western heroic tradition, if not of Western literary tradition, are here imagined in a new way: as prologue to the coming of the superhero. The superhero, lately so central to popular fiction on page and screen, here finds a new apotheosis as the lens through which all preceding heroes are to be perceived. As the end-point of evolution.

And that’s fair enough. That’s what a history often does, foregrounding its subject, putting it at the centre of things. Nevins does his job well, writing in a style that’s academic in its rigour and its careful references to other scholars, while avoiding the jargon and convoluted syntax that mars much academic writing. His prose is clear, yet dense with information, moving quickly while constantly introducing new facts and new ideas. Given the vastness of his subject the book’s quite brief and indeed perhaps too brief: barely 300 pages, though those (like me) who relish discursive and tangential footnotes will appreciate the further 50 pages of endnotes. Nevins’ research is excellent throughout, particularly in the chapters covering the last two or three centuries. As is perhaps inevitable I have some questions and some doubts; most of them revolve around the way that Nevins defines the book in its opening chapter, and around the concluding chapters where Nevins presents a brief history of post–Golden Age superheroes. But The Evolution of the Costumed Avenger is clearly a success, not just an entertaining book but one vital for its field; a work that provides much food for thought to any reader with an even marginal interest in its subject.

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Fantasia 2016: An Attempt At A Conclusion

Fantasia 2016: An Attempt At A Conclusion

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The 2016 Fantasia International Film FestivalHaving finally posted reviews of all the movies I saw at the 2016 Fantasia International Film Festival, I want by way of conclusion to think about what I’ve learned. I don’t just mean about film, or about the film industry. But about genre, and what genre does, and how it works on film.

I will start, though, by saying that I feel I have learned a little bit more this year about the way the film industry works. For one thing, I’ve seen how quickly the business moves; a number of works I’ve reviewed have already turned up on Netflix, Amazon, or a video-on-demand service. For another thing, I saw this year how important the length of a movie can be — I saw more films this year than last that pushed the two-hour mark, and if some of them justified that length, others perhaps did not. And: for whatever reason, this year I was struck by the scale of ambition it takes to make a film, in the sense of how many resources it takes and how many moving parts are involved. Even a relatively cheap movie will cost six figures; even a no-budget film probably has a budget, and that budget probably has at least five digits in it. I knew this, of course. But for whatever reason, what I heard in the question-and-answer sessions with the directors this year brought home how much making a movie involves project management; how many moving parts are involved in filmmaking, the sheer scale not just of a major production but even of a very small one.

Still: what really hit me this year was the way that film, and people in film, approached genre. Guillermo del Toro’s impassioned discussions of the importance of genre, horror, and monsters helped frame the festival for me. I found myself watching how a movie, how a story, approached the idea of genre. How it played with conventions, referred to other films, or tried to forge its own path. I think I do tend to focus on these things anyway, but at Fantasia this year the movies I saw seemed to come together to demonstrate something about the nature of genre and moviemaking.

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Fantasia 2016, Day 21: Aiming Low to Hit a Silver Heaven (Judge Archer, If There’s A Hell Below, and On the Silver Globe)

Fantasia 2016, Day 21: Aiming Low to Hit a Silver Heaven (Judge Archer, If There’s A Hell Below, and On the Silver Globe)

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Judge ArcherWednesday, August 3, was the last day of the Fantasia International Film Festival. Three full weeks of genre films would wrap up here, and I was looking forward to the three last films of the year. The day would begin with the Chinese martial-arts film Judge Archer (Jianshi liu baiyuan). After that came the independent American movie If There’s a Hell Below, promising a paranoid thriller about whistleblowers and government surveillance. Finally came a movie I’d been eagerly anticipating since the start of the festival, the Polish science-fictional classic from 1977 On the Silver Globe (Na srebrnym globie), a space opera about colonization and war on an alien planet. All three were rewarding, and all three were pleasantly (and increasingly) elliptical.

Judge Archer was written and directed by Xu Haofeng. Set in 1917 in a China divided among rival armies, it follows a man (Yang Song) who becomes a supremely skillful archer and uses those skills to judge disputes between martial arts schools. When one of those warlords kills the father of a beautiful woman (Yenny Martin), she asks the man — who has taken the cursed name Judge Archer from his master — to bring him to justice. But the warlord has a beautiful wife (Li Chengyuan), who is tempting the judge to abandon his beliefs. Betrayals and duels follow as the story finally, inevitably, works itself out in a semi-mystical duel.

Xu’s background is worth describing here. A long-time student of martial arts, he wrote a bestselling memoir of one of his masters in 2006, The Bygone Kung Fu World (Shiqu de wulin), then followed with another bestselling book in 2006, Dao Shi Xiao Shan (a title translated as alternately Monk Comes Down the Mountain or A Taoist Monk Plunging Into the Madding Crowd). His books have been characterised as less fantastical than most wuxia tales, with a fascination for cultural elements such as painting and calligraphy, as well as an abiding sense of the loss of a traditional kung fu culture. He directed his first movie, The Sword Identity (Wo kou de zong ji), in 2011. Judge Archer was completed in 2012, but not released until this year; in the interim Xu wrote the script for Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster (Yi dai zong shi), then wrote and directed another film, The Final Master (Shi fu). His films tend to shun spectacular wire work in favour of more realistic and intense martial arts duels, often evoking a sense of the importance of kung fu traditions and the passing of those traditions in the modern world.

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Fantasia 2016, Day 20: Twisting History and Twice-Told Tales (The Arbalest and The Piper)

Fantasia 2016, Day 20: Twisting History and Twice-Told Tales (The Arbalest and The Piper)

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The ArbalestTuesday, August 2, was the next-to-last day of the 2016 Fantasia festival. I had two movies lined up. First would come The Arbalest, at the De Sève Theatre: a period fantasy about a man who made an addictive puzzle in a slightly alternate 1970s. That would be followed by The Piper (Sonmin), a Korean film that reimagined the Pied Piper story as set in a postwar Korean village. Both looked promising. One delivered on that promise.

The Arbalest is the debut feature by writer/director Adam Pinney, presenting the career of millionaire toy inventor Foster Kalt (Mike Brune). In the late 1970s the reclusive Kalt prepares to tell the story of his life to a TV news crew. He reveals less to them than one might expect, but we see flashbacks to his past; specifically, to the eve of a crucial toy fair, when Kalt spends a fateful night in a hotel room with two other people. One of them, an unnamed man (Jon Briddell), is the real inventor of the Kalt Kube, the toy Kalt would go on to present as his own. The other is a woman named Sylvia (Tallie Medel), with whom Kalt falls madly in love. Further flashbacks show us Kalt stalking Sylvia, taking a cottage near her home, and entering into conflict with her and her husband (Robert Walker Branchaud).

The Arbalest is a difficult movie to figure out, though on a basic plot level what’s happening and why is always clear. Movement between different time periods is smooth and assured. But what we’re watching is increasingly baffling, both in terms of character development and of the world we think we’re seeing.

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Fantasia 2016, Day 19: Critiques of Cartesian Dualism, Plus an Elk (Embers, L’Élan, We Are the Flesh)

Fantasia 2016, Day 19: Critiques of Cartesian Dualism, Plus an Elk (Embers, L’Élan, We Are the Flesh)

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EmbersBy Monday, August 1, the end of the 2016 Fantasia Film Festival was in sight. Two more days, and it’d be over for another year. Bearing that in mind I was determined to pass by the Festival’s screening room and catch up with some films I’d missed earlier in the festival. First, though, I was headed to the De Séve Theatre for a showing of the American-Polish science-fiction movie Embers, about a world struck by a plague of forgetting. After that I’d go to the screening room, where I’d watch the French absurdist comedy L’Élan and the Mexican horror-fantasy We Are the Flesh (Tenemos la carne).

A short film called “Event Horizon” played before Embers. Directed and written by Josépha Celestin, it’s a sweet but slow film about a young girl (Kate McLaughlin) in 1997 with a desire to explore, and a black hole that appears not far from her home in a Scottish village. Other youths aren’t as idealistic as she is, providing some tension to the piece. It’s an understated story, for good or ill, with striking cinematography. It’s remarkable for doing something character-based with a distinctly science-fictional premise.

Embers is the first feature film from director Claire Carré, with a script by Carré and Charles Spano. It gives us a future in which the world’s afflicted by a mysterious global plague robbing its victims of their short-term memories. The plague struck ten years before the film begins, and seems to have infected virtually everyone. Embers follows several different plot strands — some of which overlap and some of which do not — in the decayed world that has resulted. Time having passed since I saw Embers at Fantasia, I will note that it’s now on Netflix in Canada and the US; and I will say at once that anyone looking for a cerebral yet character-centred science-fiction film should see this movie. Well-crafted and elliptical, it avoids presenting easy answers or obvious genre structural strategies while being science-fiction in the most profound sense, using a nominally technologically-based shift in the world to raise questions about identity and human nature.

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