Black Gate

“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

Paul Bishop wrote the very first entry for our Discovering Robert E. Howard series (covering REH’s fight stories). I knew he’d come up with another great piece for the return of A (Black) Gat in the Hand – and boy, did he! I had never even heard of the Lance Spearman books, but what a cool story! Pulp magazines fell by the way-side for pocket paperbacks and comic books. Topics related to the latter two groups will be sprinkled in to this series. And today, Paul is going to tell us about a third entry: the popular ‘Look Books’ Read on!

‘Lance Spearman, has a charming way with girls and a deadly way with thugs’

Look-books—a term coined for magazines featuring a mash up of action photographs accompanied by comic strip style captions (also known as photo books)—are relatively unknown in America. However, in many other parts of the world, this comic book hybrid of captioned action photographs had a rabid following from the ‘60s to the late ‘80s. In Africa, look-books served as surrogates for films—as a means to tell film-like stories— at a time when commercial African cinema was not yet invented.

African Film Magazine (AFM) was the most popular of the African look-books. Alternately called Spear Magazine, every bi-weekly issue had eager fans clamoring for it at their local newsstand. Created by James Richard Abe Bailey, the character of Lance Spearman shattered racist stereotypes of the uncivilized, uneducated, spear-carrying Africans as portrayed in most Western comic books of the era. Each issue of AFM contained thirty-one pages of action filled black and white captioned photographs edited in urbane cinematic style.

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“Machine Walks on Moon” doesn’t have nearly the headline power as “Man Walks on Moon,” but for a short time in the early 1960s the U.S. Army funded a project for a moon walker.

The “Pedipulator,” as General Electric’s ordnance department in Pittsfield, MA, called it, was a concept vehicle. The concept, all but admitted in so many words by ordnance GM Gene R. Peterson, was to pump money into GE. Cold war spending in the US/USSR missile race had boosted employment in the department by 250%. They needed something to do. So they turned, once again, to the incredibly fertile mind of Ralph Mosher, whose Man-Mate, Handyman, and Hardiman I talked about in my last column.

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July 17 for me was a day of rest and running errands; then for my first film at Fantasia on July 18 I went to the De Sève Theatre to watch Maggie (메기). Directed by Yi Ok-seop from a film she wrote with star Koo Kyo-hwan, it’s the story of Yeo Yoon-young (Lee Ju-young), and her boyfriend Sung-won (Koo). Yoon-young’s a nurse at Love of Maria Hospital in Seoul. One day, an X-ray surfaces showing a man and a woman having sex in the X-ray room. The next day almost nobody comes in to work; the X-ray room’s a popular site for assignations, and everyone thinks they’re one of the figures in the X-ray. Yoon-young’s the only one who dares show her face, along with Doctor Lee (Moon So-ri). They end up forming an unlikely partnership as Maggie helps Lee learn to trust other people. Meanwhile, Sung-won finds work filling in sinkholes opening up in Korea, following an earthquake predicted by a catfish named Maggie — who also turns out to play an important role within the film.

This is only roughly a description of the movie, indicating just a few of the plot strands. Maggie unfolds through a series of vignettes, with flashbacks and chapter titles and an unseen narrator. It’s a consciously quirky approach to a film that isn’t afraid of punching up its plot with a certain amount of surrealism. You wonder what happens to the patients at a hospital with no staff, for example, and though we do see a few people left in the empty building, by and large the question’s unanswered.

What is most interesting, and I think in the long run surprisingly effective, is the contrast between the surface tone of light comedy and a deeper sense of abiding bleakness. The conclusion suggests hidden depths to people we think we know, and not always abysses into which we would choose to gaze. While the pacing and general approach seem to aim at a gentle comfort, much of what actually transpires depicts some real pain.

The vignette structure seems to ask the viewer to see the humour of events, and the surrealism is at first distancing, but the subject matter (of trust, of violence) has a weight that in the end can’t be ignored. This could have been a significant disconnect, and at first I felt it was. The more I thought about it — and after having seen at least one movie that tried something similar to Maggie and in my judgement failed — the more I came to appreciate this film, and suspect that I hadn’t been sensitive enough at first viewing to what it was trying to do.

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