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Author: Sue Granquist

Goth Chick News: Fan-Girling Over the FAN EXPO

Goth Chick News: Fan-Girling Over the FAN EXPO

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Way back in 2010, Black Gate photog Chris Z suggested we check out the Wizard World Chicago Comic Con. This was by no means a new event in our fair city. In fact, the Chicago Comic Con was first held at the Playboy Towers Hotel (yes, that Playboy) in 1972. Wizard World, original publishers of the famous Wizard Magazine, purchased the event in 1996, giving it nationwide publicity and eventually expanded to host similar events in nearly twenty cities. By 2011 it was the largest convention of its kind in Chicago, and though it wasn’t strictly in the idiom of GCN, the show runners were gracious and granted us press passes that year. It turned out to be one of our favorite events and we have covered it every year since.

Like so many other businesses, the entertainment convention industry took a huge hit during the covid-19 pandemic. Even the biggest comic convention in the world, San Diego Comic-Con, which is run by a non-profit organization that also runs WonderCon, admitted the lack of live events during 2020 put a huge burden on the company’s finances. By 2021 Wizard World had cut back their conventions to six including Philadelphia, New Orleans, Portland, Cleveland, and St. Louis. Luckily Chicago remained as well since by now the people we met at this event were the sources of ongoing GCN content throughout the year. However, in August 2021 Wizard World announced they would be selling the convention events business to FAN EXPO.

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Goth Chick News: Does This Make the Xenomorph Queen a Disney Princess…?

Goth Chick News: Does This Make the Xenomorph Queen a Disney Princess…?

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I’m not sure what to think about this, so I’m asking all of you.

To begin, let’s base this discussion on two facts. First, with the 2019 acquisition of Fox, Disney became the owners of the long-running Alien sci-fi franchise. Second, in 2012 Ridley Scott, who created the original masterpiece that was Alien (1979), decided to leap back in after five other directors had a go at some portion of the story. This effectively scuttled the planned Alien movie we all deserved, which would have been a sequel to Aliens directed by Neill Blomkamp and would have ignored the movies which followed Aliens. This story would have reunited Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and Hicks (Michael Biehn), and probably would have been awesome.

Instead, what we got was Sigourney Weaver permanently bowing out from the franchise, and two prequels from Scott, which were anything but awesome. Though nostalgia and eternal optimism caused die-hard fans to make Prometheus (2012) a technical box office hit ($130M budget against a $403M take), we’d learned our lesson by the time Alien: Covenant came around in 2017. It was considered a disappointment by Hollywood standards, bringing in less than half the ticket sales as its predecessor. Personally, I wished Scott would have kept his hands to himself.

Now, with this in mind, we have the news I’m about to share.

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Goth Chick News: How Many Horror Films Has Harrison Ford Been In? Two

Goth Chick News: How Many Horror Films Has Harrison Ford Been In? Two

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What Lies Beneath (DreamWorks Pictures, 2000)

This is the week when you can’t spit a piece of gum without hitting some reference to the fifth installment of the Indiana Jones franchise, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which lands in theaters on Friday. Though due to quite a lot of early buzz my hopes are less than high, I will of course be in the theater on the 30th having purchased my tickets a month ago. Nostalgia alone will make Indy 5 a huge hit, even if it really is a master class in CGI and not much else (pardon my potentially unfounded snark).

But it did get me to wondering about Harrison Ford and horror.

I have vague memories of one horror movie in particular, starring Ford, called What Lies Beneath (2000) which costarred Michelle Pfeiffer and was directed by Robert Zemeckis. Ford plays an adulterous husband who murders his lover, placing her body in her car and sinking it into the nearby lake. However, the unquiet ghost comes back both for revenge and to save Ford’s wife (Pfeiffer) from being the next victim.

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Goth Chick News: As I Continue My Trip Down the Gaming Memory Lane, A Look Back at Phantasmagoria

Goth Chick News: As I Continue My Trip Down the Gaming Memory Lane, A Look Back at Phantasmagoria

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Phantasmagoria (Sierra On-Line, August 24, 1995)

I had quite a lot of email regarding my article on a reboot of the insanely popular PC game from 1994, The 7th Guest. And since you lot are generally pretty subdued, I decided to jump on the enthusiasm and keep the goodness going by revisiting another more controversial game from around that same time period, which I referenced in the write up on The 7th Guest. And if you’re keeping track, this isn’t the first time I have publicly declared Phantasmagoria, the 1995 horror-themed video game by Sierra On-Line as one of my all-time-favorites to this day. I first wrote about it back in 2016 when there was chatter that a movie was in the works, based on the game. But more on that in a minute.

Why you ask, would Phantasmagoria rank so high in my esteem, when the quality of today’s gaming experiences are movie-like. Compared to, for instance, games like Uncharted and Dying Light, Phantasmagoria’s live-actor-against-computer generated-background appears fairly cheesy. And you would be absolutely right. But gather round the soft glow of the monitor and heed this historic tale.

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Goth Chick News: Yes, I Realize Its Only June, But It’s the Midwest Haunters Convention

Goth Chick News: Yes, I Realize Its Only June, But It’s the Midwest Haunters Convention

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The fabulousness that is the Halloween season does not simply appear on October 1st. Much like Christmas décor in September, the haunt season needs a good long runway, with the primary difference being that we aficionados don’t normally start blasting Monster Mash while temperatures are still in the 80’s. No, our lot is slightly more subtle. When we start getting all spooky in the summertime, we do it in private at events like the Midwest Haunters Convention.

The MHC is the largest Halloween show of its kind in the US, dedicated to all Halloween lovers; actors, enthusiasts, home/pro haunters, makeup artists and special effects creators. MHC is part of the TransWorld family of events and organizers of the largest professional haunt show in the country, the Halloween and Attractions Show which takes place in the early part of each year in St. Louis. However, unlike the earlier show, MHC is open to the public, and Black Gate photog Chris Z and I were once again lucky enough to score an invitation to this year’s event at the Rosemont Convention Center outside of Chicago.

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Goth Chick News: The 7th Guest Finds New Life Thanks to VR

Goth Chick News: The 7th Guest Finds New Life Thanks to VR

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Monty Python’s Complete Waste of Time (7th Level, October 1994) and The 7th Guest (Trilobyte/Virgin, April 1993)

I remember it like it was yesterday. The year was 1994 and all I wanted was a computer with a compact disc read-only memory. You see, having a CD-ROM-capable PC, which had only become available the year before, opened an entirely new world of entertainment. However, a machine with those advanced capabilities, including 24-bit VGA graphics, would set you back around $2,300 (or roughly double that in today’s dollars). I literally used to haunt my local CompUSA store where they had floor models of these technological marvels I could actually play with.

Oh, the longing…

And then miracle of miracles, I received a $1000 refund on my taxes and promptly financed the rest at some ridiculous interest rate, loading my very own Packard Bell Pentium Multimedia PC into the trunk, along with monitor and printer. But as euphoric as this was, the real scores were riding shotgun in the front seat, CD-ROMs of Monty Python’s Complete Waste of Time, and The 7th Guest.

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Goth Chick News Interviews: Comic Creator Tom Fenoglio

Goth Chick News Interviews: Comic Creator Tom Fenoglio

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Hunter Ninja Bear, Volume 1: Provenance from Fenom Comics

As I told you back in April, Black Gate photog Chris Z and I made our annual pilgrimage to the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo (C2E2). During that adventure we crossed paths with brothers Joe and Tom Fenoglio, founders of the indie comic company Fenom Comics. They were promoting their graphic novel Hunter Ninja Bear, Volume 1: Provenance, which caught our attention due to the incredible illustrations.

I was lucky enough to be the recipient of a copy and having had a holiday weekend to devote to reading it, I must admit I’m now kind of obsessed with this story of three forces of nature (a hunter, a ninja, and a bear). I had to know more, and Tom indulged me with a quick response to all my questions as well as some juicy graphics.

So, Tom meet everyone. Everyone, meet Tom, cofounder of Fenom.

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Goth Chick News: One from the Vaults, The Egyptologist Remains One of My Favs

Goth Chick News: One from the Vaults, The Egyptologist Remains One of My Favs

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The Egyptologist (Random House paperback edition, May 2005). Right: Canadian edition

You might assume that with stacks of books waiting patiently in every corner of GCN’s Black Gate offices, I shouldn’t have time to read something twice. And that assumption would be a correct one if I could consistently maintain a reasonable amount of self-discipline. However, I am a firm believer in the benefits of comfort food, no matter how nutritionally deficient it is, and that goes double for the mental comfort food that is a remarkable story. So yes, when I’m having a lousy week, I grab a cinnamon PopTart and one of my favorite stories off the bookshelf. The beauty of the re-read is that you can generally plow through the entire tale in roughly the same amount of time it takes to eat an entire box of PopTarts.

With that background in mind, I want to tell you about The Egyptologist. A quick peruse through the Black Gate archives confirmed my suspicion that I never wrote about this book when I first read it, probably because back then, we were still in print, and I wrote only one article per issue. First published in hardcover in 2004, I purchased The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips, to take with me on one of my dream trips; a three-week tour through Egypt in the company of Medu Hassan, a researcher from the Cairo Museum. This pre-dates e-books being a thing, as the Sony Libre wouldn’t hit the market until later that year. So back then, traveling with reading material meant packing books and this particular hardcover was a last-minute addition, added to my bag primarily due to the title and my destination, and not because I knew what I was getting into.

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Goth Chick News: This Is Seriously Incredible (and Kind of Disturbing)

Goth Chick News: This Is Seriously Incredible (and Kind of Disturbing)

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@danruse

I am very much a newbie to the world of artificial intelligence (AI), but I’m finding it infinitely fascinating. Like most people, I started with ChatGPT and then started playing around with Bard and other competitors. The possibilities are mind-bending and frightening in nearly equal measure, but I have started incorporating it into my work life, albeit slowly. I even tried asking ChatGPT to write a GCN article, but thankfully you’d notice the difference between it and me, or at least until AI gets a better sense of humor.

The latest thing I’ve been digging into is AI interpreting images. For instance, there is an AI tool called Midjourney which creates images from text prompts. For a basic plan of $96 per year, you purchase time on Midjourney’s powerful Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to interpret and process your text prompts. In response to your prompts (i.e. “New York in the summer”), Midjourney creates four graphic interpretations of what it thinks you asked it for. You can then zero in on the image closest to your liking, and perfect/enhance it further.

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Goth Chick News: Good and Bad News About World War Z

Goth Chick News: Good and Bad News About World War Z

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World War Z by Max Brooks (Three Rivers Press, October 16, 2007)

It’s a bit difficult to get my brain around, but it’s been ten years since the release of the movie version of World War Z. The film is based on the novel by Max Brooks, whom I had the pleasure of meeting back in 2015. In the midst of having a full-on fangirl moment I accomplished two things; first, Brooks signed my copy of WWZ, and second, I managed to irk him a bit by asking about a sequel. At the time I wasn’t sure why Brooks didn’t seem keen to talk about it. However, a few months later Paramount pictures announced they had green-lighted a second film, with Brooks signed on as a writer. It then seemed logical that, having just penned the agreement for a film, Brooks could not discuss it and therefore shut down my line of questioning.

And here we are in 2023. The good news is that WWZ fans are getting a special treat from Scream Factory, while the bad news is that a movie sequel seems all but finally and totally dead.

Let’s start with the good news.

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