Depicted below is the ever-expanding GUFFEY LIBRARY (with at least two more volumes to come in 2023)! Visit my Author's Page on Amazon and own the complete set before the tick of midnight... or else THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE will steal your soul!!!
HAPPY NEW YEAR, my friends!
The perfectly disturbing New Year’s Eve cinematic experience
could be nothing other than Victor Sjöström’s 1921 film, THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE, an adaptation of Selma Lagerlöf’s 1912
Theosophical novel entitled THY SOUL SHALL BEAR WITNESS! Though little
known today, this film had a tremendous impact on such major filmmakers as
Ingmar Bergman and Stanley Kubrick. Despite a relatively complex story structure composed of flashbacks
within flashbacks and stories within stories, the central conceit of THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE is not at all
dissimilar to that of a traditional fairy tale….
I wrote a rather lengthy article about this film for Olaf Brill and Gary D. Rhodes' 2016 anthology, EXPRESSIONISM IN THE CINEMA, published by Edinburgh University Press. The article, nearly 10,000 words long, is entitled “Here Among the Dead: THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE and the Cinema of the Occulted Taboo." Since the film has now fallen into public domain, you can watch the digitally restored Blu-ray/DVD version of THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE on YouTube (this version was originally released by Criterion back in the Fall of 2011). Watch Sjöström’s groundbreaking phantasmagoria as the clock strikes twelve….
The Phantom Carriage (1921) Victor Sjöström
From Tracey McManus' 12-29-22 TAMPA BAY TIMES article entitled "Where is Scientology’s David Miscavige? Opposing lawyers want to know.":
The process servers showed up to 10 Church of Scientology properties in Clearwater and California with legal documents in hand.
They tried 27 times over four months to serve Scientology leader David Miscavige with a federal trafficking lawsuit that names him as a defendant, according to records in the case.
Security guards, the court filings state, refused to accept documents from the process servers, declined to answer questions and said they did not know where Miscavige lived or worked despite him being the ecclesiastical leader of the organization.
The case revolves around allegations from three former Scientologists who say they were trafficked into the church as children and forced to work through adulthood for little or no pay. Valeska Paris and husband and wife Gawain and Laura Baxter, who filed the complaint in April, left the church’s military-style workforce called the Sea Org in 2009 and 2012, respectively.
Five church entities named as co-defendants already have been served and filed motions in July to push the lawsuit into internal arbitration, where it would go before a panel of loyal church members. A judge has not yet ruled on the church’s request to divert the case out of the U.S. court system. But as that decision is pending, attorneys for the three former church workers still have been unable to serve Scientology’s secretive and elusive leader.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
From Julia Black's 11-17-22 BUSINESS INSIDER article entitled "Can Super Babies Save the World?":
Elites have used lineage to consolidate money and power for most of human history. But as couples in the developed world are increasingly putting off parenthood until later in life — or abandoning it altogether — people like the Collinses are looking for hacks to make large families feasible in a modern, secular society.To read the entire article, click HERE.
From Thom Hartmann's 12-1-22 LAPROGRESSIVE article entitled "The Wealthy Human Race: Beware of Those Who Believe They Were Sent By God":
Whether they believe their God sent them or that their DNA is superior to the rest of us, the new supremacists who own the GOP represent a threat to American democracy. They’ve tried to conquer America three times in the past: will they actually do it this time?To read the entire article, click HERE.
Haley Newlin (author of NOT ANOTHER SARAH HALLS and TAKE YOUR TURN, TEDDY) just published a review of my latest novel, BELA LUGOSI'S DEAD, on CemeteryDance.com. Here's an excerpt:
Universal monsters Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolf Man and others, primarily produced between the 1930s and 1950s, still stand today as not only icons of horror but pop culture.
And yet, so many of the horrifically haunting films featuring these creatures, including Bela Lugosi’s infamous bloodthirsty Count Dracula, have been buried away and forgotten.
Robert Guffey’s Bela Lugosi’s Dead revives Universal monsters. Furthermore, it raises the stakes, pun intended, with a second storyline depicting a writer down on his luck (Mike) who dreams of writing a supernatural screenplay and publishing a magazine all about classic horror, and… you guessed it, Bela Lugosi.
Mike meets a young actress, Lucy, at the grave of Sharon Tate, the actress notoriously known for her brutal murder at the hands of Charles Manson’s Family. Shortly after, Mike finds backers for his magazine called Ramboona, dedicated to remembering “forgotten films,” and stumbles into a haunted maze of sorts — attempting to uncover the lost test reel of Lugosi as Frankenstein (eventually played instead by Boris Karloff).
What readers and fans of classic horror movies will revel in is Mike and Lucy’s run-ins with Maila Nurmi (Vampira), Manly P. Hall (Lugosi confidant and author), and others.
Bela Lugosi’s Dead is a remarkably authentic, hypnotizing interpretation of all the glitz and pure talent behind Lugosi’s fame, as well as the hubris that steered his downfall. Guffey depicts how Lugosi’s Dracula transformed horror from a genre of make-believe to one that spreads the notion that monsters lurk among us....Read the entire review HERE.
FURTHER PRAISE FOR BELA LUGOSI'S DEAD:
“Blending intertextual rampage through the horror-movie canon with engrossing noir mystery and a backdrop of Hollywood esoterica, Robert Guffey serves up an intoxicating pulp cocktail that will leave you wanting more. A crepuscular treasure from a fascinating author.”
--ALAN MOORE, author of V FOR VENDETTA and WATCHMEN
“In Robert Guffey's latest and greatest novel, dreams of old movies and nightmares of classic horror rack into sharp focus through the lens of a brave film historian, one determined to squint clearly at fleeting grains of film through the shifting sands of time. Never has the truth of Hollywood been so well revealed through fiction. As a result, BELA LUGOSI'S DEAD delightfully and definitively proves that Bela Lugosi isn't dead.”
--GARY D. RHODES, author of LUGOSI and TOD BROWNING'S DRACULA
"[H]orror fans will delight in how Guffey cleverly immerses movie monsters in the real world. Film buffs and monster enthusiasts will relish the supernatural characters brought to life in this atmospheric celebration of monster mayhem."
--PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"The sensation [of reading BELA LUGOSI'S DEAD] is like being led deep underground while your flashlight grows dimmer and dimmer, until you’re left in total darkness. That’s when the lights of a subterranean crypt flash on to reveal that you’re not where you expected to be, and where you are is far worse than you could have imagined. The result is an ending that left me chilled and took me a few days to fully process. As shocking as it was, everything was set up from the beginning. I know, I went back and checked, and have to give Guffey credit for pulling off a literary sleight of hand that caught me by surprise. I won’t spoil it with more, except to say that like the frog in water that’s warmed so slowly it doesn’t realize it’s coming to a lethal boil, Guffey’s readers face an equally stunning conclusion."
--TERENCE TAYLOR, NIGHTMARE MAGAZINE
The unabridged Audible Audiobook of BELA LUGOSI'S DEAD is also available! It's brilliantly read by the talented SAMUEL E. HOKE. Hoke was so dedicated to nailing the audio version that he contacted me before he began narrating the novel to make sure the accent of a particular character was exactly correct. He also went out of his way to research some of the films and documentaries about the real people and events upon which the novel is based. If you're interested, you can listen to a sample of the audiobook right HERE!
Richard Neal Schowengerdt, the scientist whose breakthrough ideas are spotlighted in my 2015 book, CHAMELEO, passed away on Christmas Eve morning in 2021 at the age of 91. I announced his death in my 12-28-21 blog post. There have been many times during the past year when I've thought to myself, "I should ask Richard about...." I could no doubt complete that sentence in any number of ways, as Richard had a broad range of interests. Alas, this idle thought is followed by sadness when I quickly realize that communication with him is now (almost) impossible.
This past November, Richard's daughter, Maria, created an ofrenda for her father in honor of Dia de los Muertos. You can see her beautiful and esoteric altar in the photographs below....
Just as Richard's indomitable spirit hovers over every inch of Maria's ofrenda, I find his influence still inhabiting my own work as well. Earlier this year, I published a follow-up to CHAMELEO in the January-February issue of NEXUS MAGAZINE (Vol. 29, No. 1). It's a rather long article entitled "Invisible Predators: Strange Creatures, Secret Weapons, and Shadow Biospheres," in which I examine the history of humanity's interaction with ostensibly invisible entities while acknowledging the technological, back-engineered aspect of such phenomena in recent decades. The article includes several quotes from Richard. You can read a downloadable copy of that article right HERE.
From Drew Harwell's 12-14-22 WASHINGTON POST article entitled "QAnon, Adrift After Trump’s Defeat, Finds New Life in Elon Musk’s Twitter":
Twitter owner Elon Musk’s boosting of far-right memes and grievances has injected new energy into the jumbled set of conspiracy theories known as QAnon, a fringe movement that Twitter and other social networks once banned as too extreme.To read the entire article, click HERE.
From no less a source than Mirriam-Webster comes the "Word of the Year" for 2022:
In this age of misinformation—of “fake news,” conspiracy theories, Twitter trolls, and deepfakes—gaslighting has emerged as a word for our time.To read the entire post, click HERE.
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From Phoebe Gloeckner's 11-10-22 CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION article entitled "My Cartoonish Cancellation: How I Became the Subject of an Equity Investigation at the University of Michigan":
In late August of 2020, I began teaching my introductory comics course at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in the same way and with the same material that I had used many times before. It’s a studio course with a smattering of history. In the first week, I assigned a technical exercise involving a comics page drawn by Robert Crumb, one of the first and most important cartoonists of the underground-comix movement. The point was to study and imitate the way Crumb created the illusion of space and three-dimensional form.
Some might call the images grotesque. In the past, though, the exercise has always been a success.
But in 2020, we were all “sheltering in place” because of the pandemic, and I was teaching on Zoom. The students Googled Robert Crumb before I could say much to contextualize his work. They immediately raised their voices in protest. Quoting from what they read, they insisted that Crumb was a “racist” and a “misogynist.” One student cried out that he had been accused of rape. Several insisted that showing any of his work was “hurtful.” They said I was “harming” the class.
I was taken aback. Comics are fundamentally a provocative medium, and Crumb is a provocative artist, but I didn’t think I had shown an especially offensive image. Crumb and his work have been the target of both high praise and bitter criticism for years, but before that moment, most of the students knew nothing about him — and seemed unwilling to question what they had read about him on the internet. Moreover, Crumb is a central figure in the history of comics. He can’t be written out of the books.
To read Glockner's entire article, click HERE.
If you've never seen René Cardona's SANTA CLAUS (1959), you might want to consider watching it on X-mas Eve. Check out the trailer below....
The winter solstice is a perfect day to explore the mindscape of Manly P. Hall via his classic lecture "When the Invincible Sun Moves Northward: The Solar Christmas" delivered at The Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles on December 16, 1984:
Recommended Reading: Will Solomon's 10-25-22 TIMES UNION piece entitled "The Upstate Occult: An Interview with Writer Mitch Horowitz":
Mitch Horowitz, a New York-based writer and historian, has written widely on the occult, including the alternative spiritual history of the U.S. As the author of “Occult America,” and a forthcoming book of essays, “Uncertain Places” (which, full disclosure, I [Will Solomon] copyedited), Horowitz has paid close attention to historical and contemporary trends, and particularly to the geographic significance of upstate New York.
The Times Union sat down with Horowitz to discuss this esoteric history of the region. The interview has been edited for length and clarity [...].
Q: Early America, and particularly these parts of New York, allowed space for religious experimentation. But that freedom was often borne out of religious persecution. We still see upswings of sometimes-violent religious intolerance today, including to alternative religious traditions: In 2021, an arsonist destroyed the “Halloween House,” a popular gathering spot for members of the Church of Satan, in Poughkeepsie’s so-called Witchcraft District. Can you talk about the incident and the apparent intolerance we’re seeing today?
A: I think that with the advent of QAnon, we may be a whisker away from a new Satanic Panic. That movement swept the United States and Britain in the 1980s and early ‘90s on account of a cultural myth and canard that child-sacrificing Satanic cults were at work. In time, and after some really tragic and disruptive criminal trials and false accusations, media coverage exposed the Satanic Panic as a widespread hoax and a kind of cultural spasm. It may have been a reaction against changes in the workforce and the economy, in particular women entering the workforce en masse, and people turning to childcare centers and other alternative forms of daycare.
This theme has reasserted itself through the work of Alex Jones and people adjacent to the QAnon movement, and it’s now commonly encountered online. And despite the news coverage and the widespread debunking of the Satanic Panic, we seem to be going through this cultural amnesia in which we’re revisiting it. The attempted homicidal arson in Poughkeepsie is an unfortunate case in point.
To read the entire interview, click HERE.
1. ONE BEAUTIFUL SPRING DAY by Jim Woodring (published by Fantagraphics):
One of the most imaginative graphic novels ever created, ONE BEAUTIFUL SPRING DAY includes three previously published volumes (POOCHYTOWN, FRAN, and CONGRESS OF THE ANIMALS) chronicling the misadventures of a Candide-like, anthropomorphic Everyman named Frank plus one hundred brand new pages that combine to form a wordless, four-hundred-page, phantasmagoric epic of Homeric proportions.
In Woodring's surreal, dream-like landscape, known only as "the Unifactor," surprising moments of extreme body horror casually brush up against vaudevillian hijinx straight out of George Herriman's KRAZY KAT, almost as if Frank perceives very little differences between these disparate experiences; revelatory, violent, numinous events merge with the silly and the cartoonish and the absurd so often that the reader soon loses the ability to distinguish between the vulgar and the profound. ONE BEAUTIFUL SPRING DAY distorts one's mindscape in ways that are both magical and disturbing at the same time. I can't recommend this book highly enough.
To the casual reader, Ed Piskor's RED ROOM might at first appear to be little more than an exercise in splatterpunk excess; for the more discerning reader, however, it turns out to be a clever, insightful, McLuhanesque satire about the effects of technology on the human condition and vice versa. Here’s the plot synopsis that appears at the beginning of each issue:
The DARK WEB provides means to use the internet ANONYMOUSLY, free from consequence. CRYPTOCURRENCY transactions lack a detectable paper trail, providing further obfuscation. These tools are being abused to create a NEFARIOUS subculture of MURDER for ENTERTAINMENT in real time via WEBCAM. WHO would participate in such a sick enterprise? WHO are the VICTIMS? WHO are the CUSTOMERS? WHO are the MURDERERS?
Throughout each issue, the reader is not
only shown the extreme violence being streamed in the Red Room but also the
ongoing thread of comments from the viewers paying to watch (and critique) the
violence. From the way the comments are written, the reader begins to form a
mental picture of the type of person who would shell out an excessive amount of
money to witness something as bloody as this unfold before their eyes. The
perverse chatroom comments, particularly the ones that appear in RED ROOM: TRIGGER WARNINGS #3, are eerily
similar to what I’ve read in QAnon chatrooms while researching my latest book, OPERATION MINDFUCK: QANON & THE CULT OF DONALD TRUMP.
If you think comparing a story about a cult of snuff film enthusiasts to the followers of QAnon is way off the mark, consider the fact that soon after Joe Biden’s certification as president, QAnon followers began enthusiastically sharing doctored photographs and videos on social media that appeared to show scaffolding near the White House on which human beings were being hanged. The QAnon cultists couldn’t have been more elated. They thought this was proof that Trump was still President, had declared martial law, and was now following through on “the Plan” to execute Satanic Democrats—in public view. When it became obvious to even the most gullible QAnon follower that these photos and videos were fake, the sigh of disappointment was heard around the world. These Christian Patriots were inconsolably upset that they had not been watching genuine snuff films.
Though not explicitly about QAnon, the hypocrisy of MAGA Trumpism, and the radicalization of the evangelical right, RED ROOM nonetheless holds up a distorted mirror to its audience that successfully unveils the ugliest Jungian shadows of early twenty-first century America. If "splatterpunk satire" isn't already a recognized category of fiction, perhaps RED ROOM will put it on the literary map.
3. RECKLESS: FOLLOW ME DOWN by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips (published by Image):
Not long after the airing of the series finale of BETTER CALL SAUL earlier this year, I happened to stumble across a NEW YORKER interview with writer/director Vince Gilligan (creator of BREAKING BAD and BETTER CALL SAUL) who commented that he was looking forward to creating a brand new television show centered around a traditional "good guy" rather than an ethically challenged anti-hero. He added that the only television shows he found himself watching these days were those produced back in the 1960s and '70s:
"Yeah, there’s a real pleasure to watching shows like that [...]. I love the old stuff. I love old episodes of EMERGENCY! and THE ROCKFORD FILES and COLUMBO and THE TWILIGHT ZONE and HOGAN’S HEROES. It’s comfort food for my brain. I hope that kind of storytelling never goes away. For my next show, I’d like the lead character to be an old-fashioned hero, an old-fashioned good guy. Jim Rockford is kind of rough around the edges, but he always does the right thing. Fifteen years ago, when I was conceiving of Walter White, I looked around and thought, Well, what is current TV? It’s mostly good guys. But now I’m looking around, thinking, Gee, there’s an awful lot of bad guys on TV, and not just on shows but on the news. It feels like a world of shitheels now, both in fiction and in real life. I think it’s probably time again for a character who doesn’t go for the easy money. I’d be very happy if I could write a more old-fashioned hero, someone who is not out for themselves at every turn."
Trends in entertainment tend to swing from one extreme to the other and back again, so it was inevitable that one of the most innovative writers working in television would realize that a course correction away from the morally bankrupt "villain-as-hero" archetype would be necessary sooner or later. I find it fascinating that Ed Brubaker, one of the most innovative writers working in comic books, came to that same conclusion even earlier than Gilligan. As far back as the 1970s, when George Lucas lifted the premise for STAR WARS from the pages of Jack Kirby's FOURTH WORLD series, comic books have been pointing the way forward, at least when it comes to the mediums of television and film.
Brubaker and his longtime collaborator, Sean Phillips, released RECKLESS (the first in an open-ended series of self-contained graphic novels) at the tail end of 2020. The main character is Ethan Reckless, an FBI agent turned private detective living in 1980s Los Angeles. He shares some similarities with classic crime noir anti-heroes such as Richard Stark's professional thief, Parker; however, despite the fact that Reckless is willing to employ some questionable methods in order to get the job done, including committing serious crimes, one never gets the sense that he does so purely for self-gain. Even if Reckless' judgement is off-kilter, the reader always knows that he's at least trying his best to do the right thing. In this sense, he shares more in common with such serial detective characters as Stephen Cannell and Roy Huggins' Jim Rockford than with more recent television anti-heroes as Jeff Lindsay's Dexter Morgan or Vince Gilligan's Walter White and Saul Goodman.
As in all memorable detective fiction, the setting of RECKLESS serves as another character in the narrative. Though the Los Angeles of RECKLESS is appropriately realistic, Sean Phillips succeeds in re-imagining the entire landscape through his own distinctive vision; an oddly romantic, twilit glow always seems to be hovering over the sprawling metropolis, even in the midst of a smog-filled afternoon. Phillips' version of the city immerses us in a sense of nostalgia for a Los Angeles that no longer exists, and perhaps never existed in the first place, and yet for some reason we feel that, if we were granted the ability to travel back in time to 1980s L.A., we would find Reckless holed up in his little rundown art house movie theater, anxious to jump into yet another cold case that needs resolving in order to escape a past that's often far too painful to confront.
Of the five RECKLESS graphic novels that have been published so far, the latest (FOLLOW ME DOWN) is quite possibly the most complex, at least in terms of the moral ambiguities that surround Ethan's character arc, which in this particular adventure spans fifteen years (1989 to 2004) over the course of only 144 pages. Since you can read these graphic novels out of order, why not start here and work your back to the beginning? Reportedly, Brubaker and Phillips have promised many more Reckless stories to come.
4. FLUNG OUT OF SPACE by Grace Ellis and Hannah Templer (published by Abrams ComicArts):
FLUNG OUT OF SPACE is a fictional biography of the crime noir novelist Patricia Highsmith, author of STRANGERS ON A TRAIN and THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY. This graphic novel focuses on the late 1940s and early 1950s, before Highsmith became a bestselling novelist, when she was still in her twenties and writing comic book stories for ACG editor Richard E. Hughes, who's most well known today for having created HERBIE, a wonderfully bizarre comic book that Alan Moore cites as the inspiration for Rorschach's distinctive speech patterns in WATCHMEN.
Another comic book editor she worked with at the time was Stanley Leiber, who would later be known as Stan Lee. Surprisingly, Lee plays a significant supporting role in this story when Highsmith agrees to go on a blind date with him. Not surprisingly, she ends up hating the experience.
It's interesting to note that, according to Highsmith's biographer, Joan Schenkar (author of THE TALENTED MISS HIGHSMITH), this encounter actually occurred in real life. In the words of Golden Age comic book editor Vince Gato, who had set up the date, the match didn't quite take because "Stan Lee was only interested in Stan Lee." Schenkar adds, "...and Pat wasn’t exactly admitting where her real sexual interests lay." Of course, this would have been over ten years before Lee, Steve Ditko, and Jack Kirby ushered in the Marvel Age of Comics.
According to comic book historian Paul Gravett, during these productive years in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Highsmith wrote numerous stories for such four-color heroes as Black Terror, Pyroman, Fighting Yank, The Destroyer, Sergeant Bill King, Jap Buster Johnson (yes, that was the character's actual name), The Human Torch, Spy Smasher, Captain Midnight, and Golden Arrow. Comic books would not remain Highsmith's primary source of income as the 1950s rolled on. After making her impressive literary debut with STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, adapted by Alfred Hitchcock into a successful film in 1951, Highsmith applied her talents to writing a highly regarded cult novel entitled THE PRICE OF SALT. Republished in 1990 under the title CAROL, this controversial book was the first American novel to feature lesbian protagonists who did not meet tragic ends. Due to the censorious strictures of the day, Highsmith was forced to publish the book under a pseudonym ("Claire Morgan").
Much of FLUNG OUT OF SPACE deals with Highsmith's conflicted attitudes towards her own homosexuality and how this ambivalence impacted her literary output.
One of the reasons she wrote so many comic book stories for low level
publishers like ACG and Timely was to pay for conversion therapy, a
measure she felt pressured into attempting. In one particularly amusing
scene, Highsmith's first go-round at "corrective" therapy is cut short
when she attempts to seduce her female psychiatrist.
5. MANIAC OF NEW YORK VOL. 2: THE BRONX IS BURNING by Elliott Kaplan and Andrea Mutti (published by AfterShock Comics):
In MANIAC OF NEW YORK, Elliot Kalan and Andrea Mutti manage to hijack a moribund subgenre (the slasher story), turn it inside out, and transform it into a clever satire with political overtones that bear great relevance to our current American zeitgeist, which overbrims with hypocrisy, shameless self-aggrandizement, religious zealotry, and performative politicking of a type not seen since the McCarthy Era of the 1940s and 1950s.
Despite having to deal with insurmountable bureaucratic obstacles on a daily basis, our two heroines (Detectives Gina Greene and Zelda Pettibone) manage to join forces in a valiant attempt to defeat what appears to be a metaphor given physical form, a Jungian archetype brought to life: Maniac Harry, an invincible supernatural killer who has brought all of New York to its knees. The true horror of the story is revealed in the way human beings decide to deal with this seemingly unstoppable threat. If Donald Westlake had turned his hand to writing a slasher flick, it might have played out like this.
6. IT'S LONELY AT THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH by Zoe Thorogood (published by Image):
This raw, painfully honest, darkly humorous memoir succeeds in deconstructing the emotional landscape of anxiety and clinical depression while also deconstructing the graphic novel structure itself. Zoe Thorogood's experimentation with format shares more in common with prescient avant-garde classics such as Laurence Sterne's TRISTAM SHANDY than it does with previous confessional graphic novels (Chester Brown's I NEVER LIKED YOU or Harvey Pekar's AMERICAN SPLENDOR, for example, which are far more quotidian in nature). Similar to Sterne, Thorogood's experimentation manages to be playful and utilitarian at the same time; her experimentation is always in service of the narrative, not the other way around. As mainstream comic book scribe Chip Zdarsky recently wrote (in an attempt to describe the artistic success of IT'S LONELY AT THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH), "[Thorogood] wildly manipulates the form while holding onto you tightly, as if this impossible task is the easiest thing in the world for the cartoonist to do."
7. HYPERTHICK by Steve Aylett (published by Floating World Comics):
During the past few decades, the graphic novel medium has been best represented by its most postmodern narratives (Art Spiegelman's MAUS, Chris Ware's JIMMY CORRIGAN, THE SMARTEST KID ON EARTH, Daniel Clowes' ICE HAVEN, and Alan Moore and J.H. Williams' PROMETHEA being just a few examples). In a field notable for such bold experimentation, Steve Aylett's HYPERTHICK might very well be the most postmodern (or post-postmodern) graphic novel ever published. Aylett, known for such trangressive science fiction novels as SLAUGHTERMATIC and NOVAHEAD, has now turned his satiric talents to the comic book medium with carnivalesque results, lifting public domain comic book art from a panoply of uncredited sources and--like the alchemists of old--transforming these base materials into something far stranger and more magical than their intended purpose. Aylett edits and remasters the artwork while replacing the original dialogue with Andre-Breton-like automatic writing, resulting in such immortal lines as, "My dreams are full of others' impulses, so waking life is my only real chance," "If you drink a glass of water while falling off a cliff it has the same effect as poison," and "We'll organize a pitchfork crisis, then a false thicket to kill time, add regulations as we go along, declare ourselves 'cautiously thrilled,' move the margins irrespective of the exchequer's annual outburst and Bob's your screaming uncle."
Pulp fiction heroes (created to function as nothing more than empty ciphers) are reinterpreted as brand new, bizarre characters like Benny the Hen, Fox Grave, Kryton Sweeny, Su Pesto, Biloxi Blake, and Luka Bazooka. Writing about HYPERTHICK, Alan Moore said, "Steve Aylett has blundered like a confused and angry bear into a new dimension of poetic genius,” and Grant Morrison called the book "...astonishing--like being riot-hosed with language, ideas and imagery! Makes everything else feel like vague drifting aerosol….”
I think it's notable that HYPERTHICK boasts one of the strangest production descriptions on Amazon: "Follow Benny the Hen, Su Pesto, Biloxi Blake and Fox Grave as they lurch from one fulfilling fiasco to another. Wall-to-wall trickster figures face off in a lateral drench of comedic honesty. What is the Memphis Conjecture? Are owls to blame? Where do characters go when they run out of bends to go around? Lucid dream or psychedelic stoicism? Ignite your chemistry and discover the heart of the spiral narrative. In Clownsurround!"
If you're at all interested in surrealism, postmodernism, comic books, or jabberwocky in general, then do yourself a favor and order a copy of the collected edition of HYPERTHICK which includes three issues of this truly idiosyncratic and unforgettable series... all in Clownsurround.
8. SHAOLIN COWBOY: CRUEL TO BE KIN by Geoff Darrow (published by Dark Horse):
Imagine a sprawling, industrial metropolis located on the back of a gargantuan lizard. Imagine this lizard is skittering through a desolate American desert strewn with beer cans and other man-made detritus. Imagine a chainsaw-wielding cowboy monk trapped in the stomach of the lizard while locked in mortal combat with an angry shark who has a human head lodged in its ravenous mouth. Oh, and imagine that the monk is holding not just one chainsaw, but two chainsaws... and both chainsaws are tied to either end of an extremely long wooden stick. Imagine this same monk being forced to hold his own against giant farting pigs, talking komodo dragons, floating jellyfishes, massive plucked chickens, murderous mutant crustaceans, and hordes of white supremacist gun nuts who look a hell of a lot like Adolf Hitler. Imagine the highest body count of neo-Nazis you've ever seen in a single comic book. And if you try to imagine any of this without ever having seen the unbelievably detailed artwork of Geoff Darrow, whatever you're imagining will pale in comparison to the madness that's actually been committed to the page.
SHAOLIN COWBOY is one of the most unique comic books ever published in America. I would also hazard to add it's the most violent anti-violence narrative I've ever encountered in any medium. The dadaist satire that lies at the core of SHAOLIN COWBOY acknowledges that violence and America are inextricably entwined... and yet the narrative never romanticizes this unholy marriage. Instead, the tone of the narrative seems to look at all this ultra-violence somewhat askance, as if trying to figure out how and why the machinery of Western civilization is primarily oiled with blood. If an extraterrestrial anthropologist-cum-artist landed on Earth just long enough to see how Americans behaved toward one another on an average day in 2022, then returned to his home planet in order to exhibit the blood-drenched absurdities he had just witnessed, he might come up with something that looked like the artwork in SHAOLIN COWBOY--and it wouldn't be an exaggeration, far from it. Perhaps this is what violence looks like when you're not viewing it through human eyes imprisoned in three dimensions. SHAOLIN COWBOY is what America appears to be when filtered through the eyes of an ultraterrestrial dimension... but this dimension exists only inside the brain of Geoff Darrow. Fortunately for us, Darrow has documented his strange visions in the form of SHAOLIN COWBOY, a clever refutation and celebration of the absurd desert wasteland known at the moment as the United States of America.
(Note: SHAOLIN COWBOY: CRUEL TO BE KIN is the fourth volume in the series. Previous volumes include SHAOLIN COWBOY: START TREK, SHAOLIN COWBOY: SHEMP BUFFET, and SHAOLIN COWBOY: WHO'LL STOP THE REIGN?, all of which are available in collected editions published by Dark Horse Comics)
9. RED SCARE by Liam Francis Walsh (published by Graphix):
It just occurred to me that four of the ten comic books on this list deal with the authoritarian past of early twentieth century America. Both FLUNG OUT OF SPACE and RED SCARE take place during the McCarthy Era of the 1940s and 1950s. THE GOOD ASIAN [see entry #10] takes place in 1936, after the implementation of the Chinese Exclusion Act. HYPERTHICK is entirely composed of repurposed artwork created during the 1940s and '50s. All of the artists involved in these books seem to be attempting to make sense of the horrors of the past by transforming them into twenty-first century Art. By doing so, of course, the creators are also attempting to make sense of the present. As William Faulkner once wrote (in his 1951 novel, REQUIEM FOR A NUN), "The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past."
Intended for children of all ages, Liam Francis Walsh's RED SCARE is a highly entertaining recontextualizing of the McCarthy Era that examines the extreme paranoia of Cold War America in the form of a high-spirited science fiction adventure involving atomic weapons, communist spies, relentless FBI agents, flying saucers, and a polio-stricken young girl named Peggy who accidentally comes into possession of an extraterrestrial device that grants her the ability to fly.
Walsh seems to take his cue from previous pulp-inspired comic books such as Dave Stevens' THE ROCKETEER (Peggy's discovery of the "mysterious artifact" parallels Cliff Secord's reckless appropriation of an experimental rocket pack in the Rocketeer's first adventure), Michael Cherkas and Larry Hancock's 1980s black-and-white masterpiece, THE SILENT INVASION, and a slew of noir-tinged science fiction movies of the 1950s such as IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE, INVADERS FROM MARS, and INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. Imagine the paranoia-fueled cinematic parables of such B-film auteurs as Jack Arnold, William Cameron Menzies, and Don Siegel transformed into a McCarthy Era cautionary tale about the dangers of xenophobia and mob mentality as reinterpreted by Hergé (the famed writer/artist of THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN), and you might get a pretty good sense of what awaits you in the pages of Liam Francis Walsh's RED SCARE.
10. THE GOOD ASIAN by Pornsak Pichetshote and Alexandre Tefenkgi (published by Image):
Last year, I described the first half of THE
GOOD ASIAN as "a meticulously researched murder mystery that illuminates
the racial and class divides of the twenty-first century just as much
as it examines the violently dramatic social problems of Depression-era
San Francisco." The main character of THE GOOD ASIAN is Edison Hark, a Chinese-American detective who's investigating the disappearance of Ivy Chen (the young lover of Hark's adopted millionaire father, Mason Carroway) in the deadly streets of San Francisco's Chinatown. The second half of the THE GOOD ASIAN follows through on the promise of the first half, sticking the landing on an expertly crafted detective story that pays homage to the classics of the past created by the likes of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Cornell Woolrich while also delivering an emotionally resonant character study of a man divided between two very different--and very violent--worlds.
