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Rebirth: DC’s Corrective Reboot

Rebirth: DC’s Corrective Reboot

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366074__SX640_QL80_TTD_The last time I blogged about a reboot, the word may have given people hives. But don’t reach for your anti-histamines yet. Well… keep them handy. Your reboot allergic reaction may not be triggered by a Corrective Reboot.

What the heck’s a corrective reboot? Well, it’s like corrective lenses.

I reviewed comics for weeklycomicbookreview.com from 2008-2010. I covered mostly DC, with a fair chunk of Dynamite (I love me my John Carter of Mars, The Lone Ranger, and Kato). I read Superman and Wonder Woman and Green Lantern, but my favorite DC titles seemed to be Red Robin (Tim Drake), Batgirl (Stephanie Brown, mentored by Barbaba Gordon AKA Oracle) and Dick Grayson as Batman. I guess, looking back, I like it when sidekicks make good.

Shortly after I stopped reviewing, DC did a reboot called The New 52. Some of the continuity was preserved, but some wasn’t. As… counter-intuitive as that sounds, the result was that about ten years was shaved off of all the DCU and we lost some sidekicks and some relationships.

For example, prior to the New 52 reboot, enough time had passed for four Robins to have swung about in scaled Underoos (Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, Tim Drake and Damian Wayne). And of course, many of the DCU’s greatest buddy relationships (or romantic ones, in the case of Green Arrow and Black Canary) had time to form.

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Blogging The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer, Part Eight – “Andaman — Second!”

Blogging The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer, Part Eight – “Andaman — Second!”

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NOTE: The following article was first published on June 6, 2010. Thank you to John O’Neill for agreeing to reprint these early articles so they are archived at Black Gate which has been my home for nearly 6 years and 270 articles now. Thank you to Deuce Richardson without whom I never would have found my way. Minor editorial changes have been made in some cases to the original text.

51Jj9Pe2unL._SX315_BO1,204,203,200_248009“Andaman — Second!” was the seventh installment of Sax Rohmer’s serial, Fu-Manchu first published in The Story-Teller in April 1913. The story would later comprise Chapters 18-20 of the novel, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (originally re-titled The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu for U.S. publication). Rohmer returned the series to its Holmesian roots by mining Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans” for inspiration. Conan Doyle’s case concerns stolen submarine plans taken from Cadogan West while Rohmer’s story involves stolen aero-torpedo plans taken from Norris West. “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans” was published in 1912, just a few months before Rohmer wrote “Andaman — Second!” and shows that Sherlock Holmes was still very much a model for the Fu-Manchu series at this early stage.

The story starts out with Dr. Petrie in the final throes of fighting his feelings for Karamaneh. He tries telling himself that slavery in the 20th Century is an impossibility, but he cannot doubt Karamaneh’s account of her tragic life of bondage and enforced servitude. Try as he might to convince himself that she is too foreign to his values and culture and that she has been jaded and corrupted by her life and experiences, he cannot deny his heart. The reader’s expectation at this point is that Rohmer will bring the two lovers together once Petrie wins her freedom from Dr. Fu-Manchu. Of course, it is worth remembering that Rohmer delights in breaking with tradition. Happy Endings are never assured in his fiction.

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The Fu Manchu That Almost Was

The Fu Manchu That Almost Was

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maxresdefaultFu_Manchu_(Grindhouse)The late Harry Alan Towers is best remembered by Sax Rohmer fans for writing and producing five Fu Manchu films starring Christopher Lee and two Sumuru films starring Shirley Eaton in the 1960s. Towers would later write and produce a third Sumuru film starring Alexandra Kamp in 2003. This effort was a sci-fi reworking of the concept that owed little to Rohmer. What is less well known was that Towers had also spent years trying to make a sixth Fu Manchu film that would also have marked a significant break from its predecessors.

Towers’ original treatment was copyrighted and revised several times over the years. The project started life as Fu Manchu, Master of the World (1979) and was also registered under the titles, The Secret of Fu Manchu (1989), Fu Manchu, Emperor of Crime (1992), and Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu (1995). Towers came closest to seeing the project become reality when Vine International Pictures and LolaFilms teamed in 1999 to co-produce The Fiendish Trap of Fu Manchu (a title that perhaps sought to make atonement for the 1980 Peter Sellers spoof, The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu).

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A Downed Pilot, a Mad Duke, and a Riddle in the Grove of Monsters: A Green and Ancient Light by Frederic S. Durbin

A Downed Pilot, a Mad Duke, and a Riddle in the Grove of Monsters: A Green and Ancient Light by Frederic S. Durbin

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A Green and Ancient Light Frederic S. Durbin-small

To my left, dwarf iris. To my right, lilacs. All around me, sunlight. Because truly, the only appropriate location to write a review of Frederic S. Durbin’s latest novel, A Green and Ancient Light, is in a garden with a blue sky above and a wisteria-tinged wind teasing by.

OK, OK. A sacred wood would also be suitable… but they are harder to find in Iowa. What’s not hard to find in Iowa? Cornfields. Which is where I procured my copy of A Green and Ancient Light, after it was shot there by a trebuchet. The book smelled of clouds after I ripped the package open. If you doubt me, I have a notice typed by Durbin himself on a 1935 L.C. Smith 8 to prove it.

Do I squeal now or later? How about always. I LOVE THIS BOOK. It left me breathless. I didn’t want to move after I finished it. Moving meant breaking a beautiful moment. Moving meant stepping out of the sublime. Moving meant letting go of a village that I wanted to live in. A Green and Ancient Light is SO GOOD.

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Art of the Genre: Gunsmith Light Novel Now on Kickstarter

Art of the Genre: Gunsmith Light Novel Now on Kickstarter

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2 CompAotG News!

Art of the Genre lead author Scott Taylor has just created his first science fiction novel to be released on the Kickstarter platform. This is the 8th novel either written or edited by Taylor on the crowdfunding site, and the first since Airship of Fools in August 2014.

Taylor explains,

The concept for the novel was born from the Massively Multi-Player Online games that bloomed into popularity at the turn of the millennia, and expanded upon by works like Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One and Riki Kawahara’s Sword Art Online. I blend elements of modern day pop culture with aspects of William Gibson’s Neuromancer in the otherworldly setting of ASH. Here, unique player personalities must face the challenges of depression, the concept of second lives conflicting with lives in the real world, and the pressures of an extended ‘deep dive.’

The Gunsmith: Tales of a Time in ASH campaign ends on June 8th, and can be supported on Kickstarter here.

Vintage Treasures: The People of the Mist by H. Rider Haggard

Vintage Treasures: The People of the Mist by H. Rider Haggard

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The People of the Mist H Rider Haggard-back-small The People of the Mist H Rider Haggard-small

I’ve never read any H. Rider Haggard… which is a pretty serious oversight for a guy in my position. He wrote a handful of acknowledged classics, including She and some 14 novels featuring Allan Quatermain, the most famous of which is King Solomon’s Mines. But if I were stuck on a desert island (a fate that’s starting to look more and more appealing as the years go by) and could grab only one Haggard novel before the ship went down, I think my first choice would be his 1894 classic The People of the Mist. It was reprinted in paperback for the first time in English in 1973 as part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy library, with a thoughtful 6-page introduction by Lin Carter. The wonderful wraparound Dean Ellis cover (above) has always fired my imagination, as has the description on the inside cover.

The internationally famous author of She and King Solomon’s Mines writes a glittering adventure set in ancient Africa — a marvelous tale of peoples hidden in a valley cut off from the rest of the world, their primitive and savage culture harking back before the mists of time.

Haggard possesses the gift not only of making his tales seem totally authentic, but of stretching out suspense to its outside limits — and surely no adventure has had as breathtaking a climax as the hurtling ride over a trembling icepath that occurs in People of the Mist!

The People of the Mist was published in December 1973 as part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line. It was edited by Lin Carter, with a wraparound cover by Dean Ellis. It is 365 pages, priced at $1.50. Remarkably, it is still in print today in over a dozen different editions, including eight different digital editions, starting at 99 cents.

Pathfinder Goes to the Stars (and Other Announcements)

Pathfinder Goes to the Stars (and Other Announcements)

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starfinderThe dividing line between fantasy and science fiction can be difficult to define. I’ve been on convention panels on the subject a few times, at both ConFusion in Detroit and Windycon in Chicago, and have been in the audience of even more of them, but never once have I seen a group of people fully agree on where that diving line is, or even that such a definition exists. The genre is so fluid, including settings with science so fantastic and magical systems so dogmatic that the dividing line seems impossible to lay out. Many of us are fans of both and always have been, though perhaps we appreciate science fiction and fantasy for different reasons, regardless of how we define them.

This weekend, at PaizoCon, the creators of the Pathfinder RPG announced that they would be happily dancing along this boundary with the new Starfinder RPG. With the Starfinder RPG Core Rulebook slated for an August 2017 release date, it looks like this will create whole spacefaring options set in the distant future of the Pathfinder setting, as described in the announcement blog post:

Starfinder is set in Golarion’s solar system, but far in a possible future—one in which the gods have mysteriously spirited Golarion away to an unknown location, and refuse to answer questions about it. In its place, the cultures of that world have evolved and spread throughout the solar system, especially to a vast space platform called Absalom Station. Gifted access to a hyperspace dimension by an ascended AI deity, the residents of the system suddenly find themselves with the ability to travel faster than light, and the race is on to explore and colonize potentially millions of worlds. But there are horrors out there in the darkness…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Dr. Watson for Comic Relief?

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Dr. Watson for Comic Relief?

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BruceWatson_EyesFor many (especially of a certain age), the image of Doctor Watson is that of a buffoon who provides little assistance and lots of laughs. And the “credit” for that perception can be laid at the feet of Nigel Bruce. Bruce appeared in fourteen popular movies opposite Basil Rathbone’s beloved Holmes, and he also played the good doctor in well over two hundred radio plays – most with Rathbone.

In the first two films, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, he was a bit of a clown. But after the franchise shifted from Fox to Universal, that portrayal was understated compared to the next twelve movies he made with Rathbone. The scripts called for Bruce to play a dolt – his daughter said that the disappointed Bruce made up the term ‘Boobus Brittanicus’ to describe his un-Doyle like character.

The poem below appeared in Punch Magazine. Unfortunately, after digging through my shelves, I cannot find where I got this from (I thought that it was one of Peter Haining’s books, but that didn’t pan out). But it is from the nineteen forties, when Rathbone was the brilliant, active Holmes and Bruce provided comic relief.

I think it’s both an amusing and insightful commentary on the Bruce phenomenon:

The stately Holmes of England, how beautiful he stood
Long, long ago in Baker Street – and still in Hollywood
He keeps the ancient flair for clues, the firm incisive chin,
The deerstalker, the dressing gown, the shag, the violin.

But Watson, Doctor Watson! How altered, how betrayed
The fleet of foot, the warrior once, the faster than Lestrade!
What imbecile production, what madness for the moon
Has screened my glorious Watson as well nigh a buffoon?

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Joseph P Laycock’s Dangerous Games: Revisiting the “Moral” Panic Around D&D (and You Thought the ‘Pups Were Bad)

Joseph P Laycock’s Dangerous Games: Revisiting the “Moral” Panic Around D&D (and You Thought the ‘Pups Were Bad)

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Laycock Moral Panic
Laycock… set out to investigate the forces of darkness so we don’t have to.

The 80s Dungeons and Dragons Moral Panic gave my teenage AD&D group a headache… fortunately, only literally.

I confess that we drank too much beer while watching the movie Mazes and Monsters. We giggled at the odd (willful?) misrepresentation of our world, but perhaps that was a kind of false bravado because we also talked too late into the night: “Did they just…?” and “Erk?” and “WTF?”

Mazes and Monsters
“Did they just…?” “Erk?” “WTF?”

And so, as is the way of things, we woke up without answers to those questions, but with headaches — or at least I did.

I now know that we were lucky growing up in cosmopolitan, largely secularist, middle class Edinburgh.

Scratch the Internet (e.g.) and you’ll uncover heartbreaking stories of teenagers — even outside the USA — thrown into needless conflict with their parents, and parents duped into betrayals that can’t be fixed: imagine coming home to find your lovingly created campaign world, months of work, had been burned?*

*You’ll also get a reminder that the entire United States wasn’t consumed by this latter-day witch hunt. If you guys gave us the panic, you also gave us D&D in the first place. Plus Rock and Roll and jeans. Thanks!

And when you read these heartrending accounts, you come back to the questions, “Did they just…?” and “Erk?” and “WTF?”, more or less my 12-year-old-son’s response when he heard about all this on a podcast.

Which brings us to the subject of that podcast: Joseph P Laycock’s book, Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds.

Laycock is like a Call of Cthulhu character: a card-carrying theology professor who has set out to investigate the forces of darkness so we don’t have to.

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Amal El-Mohtar on Clockwork Canada

Amal El-Mohtar on Clockwork Canada

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Clockwork Canada-smallI’ve been enjoying Amal El-Mohtar’s review column at Lightspeed magazine. In her latest, for the May issue, she calls Max Gladstone’s Four Roads Cross, the upcoming book in his Craft Sequence, “breathtakingly satisfying,” and Nnedi Okorafor’s Nebula-award winning Tor.com novella Binti “a startling whirlwind of a book that engaged and entranced me.”

But it’s her review of Dominik Parisien’s new anthology Clockwork Canada that I found most intriguing. Party because I’m Canadian, but also because the book sounds so darn enticing. Here’s Amal.

In Clockwork Canada, [Dominik]’s brought an artificer’s eye to this collection’s various parts to ensure they work together as a whole that is more than their sum… It’s an enormously diverse collection, both in terms of its authors’ backgrounds and interests and the eclecticism of its contents: These are stories that span the breadth (and occasionally, literally, depth) of Canada, geographically and temporally, as well as the whole spectrum of steampunk. There’s a good mix of adventure stories and domestic stories, some more hopeful, some more horror; some are more fantastic, some more science fictional. Some stories imagine alternate histories, while others nestle small, beautiful stories in the corners of enormous events; some do both, and more, tangling retro and futurism in different measures.

This is not a collection of beaver jokes and maple syrup. I hugely appreciated seeing, across all these stories, a Canada shorn of any of the jingoistic patter that masquerades as heart-warming pluralism these days. These stories probe and poke at the country’s beginnings as at the edges of a wound: the workers who fed their bodies like coal into the railroad’s furnace; the immigrants who were turned away at ports for being too brown, too foreign; the enslavement of African peoples; the indigenous people displaced and decimated. “So you think you know about Canada,” any of these stories might begin. “Let me tell you about Canada…”

An excellent showcase for new and established Canadian voices as well as for Parisien’s editorial skill, Clockwork Canada’s a fascinating, faceted read that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Read Amal’s complete review here. We previously covered Clockwork Canada — including listing the complete TOC — here. Clockwork Canada was published by Exile Editions on May 1, 2016. It is 304 pages, priced at $19.95 in trade paperback and $7.99 for the digital version.