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The Drunken Odyssey

~ A Podcast About the Writing Life

The Drunken Odyssey

Monthly Archives: April 2020

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #68: Post-Friday

29 Wednesday Apr 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart

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Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #68 by Drew Barth

Post-Friday

It’s the final Wednesday in this April that has felt like it’s lasted maybe a week, and we are getting reports that Diamond Distributors will begin shipping again come May 20th. But in this interim, other avenues for distribution have opened. DC has completely forgone Diamond entirely to begin shipping select titles this week as many small publishers are finding ways to get comics into readers’ hot hands.

Two of the best right now are working with an entirely different model from the rest of the industry by offering incredibly high-quality work at a name your own price point: ShortBox and Panel Syndicate. While ShortBox’s work is going to be temporary due to COVID-19 circumstances (and is something I’ll write more on later), Panel Syndicate was created with the express intent of delivering comics at whatever price the reader wanted to pay. And their newest release, Friday by Ed Brubaker, Marcos Martin, and Muntsa Vicente, is the kind of work that you don’t just want to pay for, but you want to pay for it in gold bars.

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Brubaker describes Friday as a “post-YA” story—works about teenage protagonists becoming adults while dealing with their teen adventurer past—and from the first couple pages the reader can already feel the long history between the two main characters, Friday Fritzhugh and Lancelot Jones. Friday has returned to her hometown of Kings Hill for her winter holiday from college and is immediately brought back to the mysteries of her adolescence fresh off the train. What Friday as a story does so well throughout its first chapter is to establish everything. Friday and Lancelot as characters, the unsaid conflict between them, Kings Hill’s child sacrificing past, and the current mystery Friday has been drawn into bloom within a few pages. As a reader, you sit and marvel at the precision of storytelling to show us so much so quickly.

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This comic is filled to bursting with wonder. From Brubaker’s pitch-perfect third-person narration, to Martin’s utter precision in in his lines and panels, to the utter gorgeousness of Vicente’s tone-setting colors. It is near impossible to find flaws in this work as all three of these creators are currently some of the best in the medium. To take a moment for the coloring in Friday, Vicente works absolute magic over Martin’s line work. There is a moment early on in the story that shows a vignette of Kings Hill’s past with child sacrifices. Vicente creates what looks like a new palette for those couple pages by taking the existing palette and weathering it to the point where it looks like an EC horror comic on old newsprint. That is the power Marin and Vicente have—their evocation of hints of the past to precisely capture the mood of the story. Like I said, some of the best in the medium.

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As the distribution networks of the past can completely stop, creators need a way to keep themselves going. When we have outlets like Panel Syndicate, and stories like Friday, we’re able to see where our models could potentially go in the future. And now is the time to look to the future and how we can support each other as best we can.

Get excited. Work together.


drew-barth-mbfi

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Episode 417: Jazon Z. Morris!

25 Saturday Apr 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Craft of Fiction Writing, Episode

≈ 1 Comment

Episode 417 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).

Jason Z. Morris

This week I talk with the novelist Jason Z. Morris about structuring a novel, learning the confidence to write a novel, how the peer review process in science helps in receiving creative writing criticism, and the fun, diverse conversations to be had at the faculty cafeteria at Fordham at Lincoln Center.

TEXT DISCUSSED

Thicker Than Mud

NOTES

This episode is sponsored by the excellent people at Scribophile.

Scribophile

TDO Listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.

Consider donating to City Lights Books to sustain it and/or buying a book online from Powells.

Check out my literary adventure novel, Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame.

Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame Cover


Episode 417 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).

The Curator of Schlock #318: The Black Cat

24 Friday Apr 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, Horror, The Curator of Schlock

≈ Leave a comment

The Curator of Schlock #318 by Jeff Shuster

The Black Cat

Not the Karloff movie. 

So Cat Month went awry. I wanted to review Uninvited. It’s the one with George Kennedy on the expensive yacht with the house cat with a mutant cat living inside it. Well, it got yanked from Amazon Prime status, and I ain’t paying for that noise. I went on a rage in my little cabin in the middle of the Florida Everglades, smashing all my bottles of Perrier, and now I’m quite thirsty. I wonder how sanitary the water is in these parts. I should have brought my Britta filter.

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This week’s movie is 1981’s The Black Cat from director Lucio Fulci. The movie features a black cat that goes around murdering people in a small English village. We begin with some guy getting into an automobile and while he’s driving, a black cat appears behind him and uses mind control to get the guy crash into a street lamp, killing him instantly. Does the cat have psychic powers like the weirdoes in those Scanners movies or is black magic involved?

BlackCat1

The next victims are a teenage couple who decide to lock themselves in a boatshed so they can shed their clothes away from prying eyes. I think the boyfriend of the young woman locks the shed from the inside, but the black cat steals the key while, at the same time, naturally, causing a gas leak. The young couple sucks on some bad air, causing them to foam at the mouth and die. The mother of the young girl who dies in that horrible way is Maureen Grayson (Daniela Doria). After the police discover the rotting cadavers of the two lovers, Maureen shrieks in horror at the sight.

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Still, she doesn’t grieve for long since Maureen is the cat’s next victim. The cat manages to set her house on fire and Maureen gets caught under some burning curtains. The whole scene is rather disgusting. Maureen’s face begins melting off as if she were made out of wax. She flails about for several minutes before finally deciding to end her life by jumping out the nearest window. Not a good way to go. That’s going to be a closed casket funeral.

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We have a couple of sleuths trying to get to the bottom of these mysterious deaths. One is Inspector Gorley (David Warbeck) and the other is American photojournalist Jill Trevers (Mimsy Farmer). We remember Mimsy Farmer from The Perfume of the Lady in Black. I believe her guts were eaten by a cannibalistic cult at the end of that movie, but I’m not one hundred percent sure of that. The two of them are fairly inept detectives, but really, how does one pin murders on a cat?

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It turns out there’s this crusty curmudgeon named Professor Robert Miles (Patrick Magee, whose tremendous eyebrows you might remember from A Clockwork Orange). The good professor lives in this old, dark house on the edge of town. He psychically feeds his hatred of the townsfolk into his pet black cat and the cat then murders them in horrible ways. Lucio Fulci apparently based this on the classic Edgar Allen Poe story, so naturally it has zilch to do with the original story, but it’s not bad. What more do you want from me? Sometimes “it’s not bad” is good enough.


Jeffrey Shuster 3

Photo by Leslie Salas.

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, and episode 284) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #67: Deep Time

22 Wednesday Apr 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart

≈ Leave a comment

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #67 by Drew Barth

Deep Time

It’s about mid-way to Halloween, so you know what that means: it’s time to talk about ghosts. The history of ghosts in comic fiction is long, storied, and paved with some of the best characters the medium has to offer. Everything from House of Mysteryand Eerie to characters like Gentleman Ghost and Deadman have created this wonderful canon of spooks. And we’re coming upon that again with a bit of a twist. Spectre Deep 6 is the first in a fresh series of graphic novels by Jennifer Brody and Jules Rivera.

Spectre Deep 6 takes the idea of ghosts and weaponizes it. We’re introduced to Captain Bianca Vasquez and the Spectre Program—a secret military program that takes the recently deceased and transforms them into spectral covert operatives. As a team, they get their orders, complete their missions, and receive “day passes” for just a few hours to exist near their old lives. And while it could just be ghosting around Brody and Rivera incorporate what all good ghost drama needs: restraint. The six members of the Spectre Program are still ethereal—if they are not contained by means of a personal bell jar, their operative suits, or the “day passes” they receive, they can simply dissipate into nothing.

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These restraints are what create some of the most interesting character aspects in Spectre Deep 6. Through the characters initial introductions, we get small glimpses into who they were before the Spectre Program. But once they’re given their day passes, who they are starts to unfold and much of the personalities we had been introduced to originally begin to fall away. We have characters like Bart Bartholomew, someone who on introduction exudes a surfer-slacker archetype. But then we see what he does with his day pass and how he died. What we know of him is stripped down to its core where Brody and Rivera reveal this sadness and longing that we wouldn’t have seen in his original introduction.

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And much of this emotional weight is helped along with Rivera’s expert paneling and composition. Many of the strongest moments in Spectre Deep 6 are when traditional panels fall away and the page is allowed to become as ethereal as the characters. Many flashbacks use this style and it really helps to create this sense of the world being intangible—the characters are cut off from the past completely and must exist in this ghostly present.

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Spectre Deep 6 is a haunted sci-fi spectacle and this is only the first volume. There is such a massive depth of character and setting throughout, and with the story ending on a cliffhanger, you immediately want to reach over for the next volume. But that’s going to be a bit of a wait: 2021. That wait, however, will probably be worth it.

Get excited. Get ghosts.


drew-barth-mbfiDrew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Episode 416: Kimiko Hahn!

18 Saturday Apr 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Episode 416 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).

This week I talk with the poet Kimiko Hahn about the mysteriousness of objects, the mourning involved in memory, the strange penchant of Dr. Chevalier Quixote Jackson, the need to trespass in literature, and discovering the scheme of a book of poetry.

Kimiko Hahn by Beowulf Sheehan

Photo by Beowulf Sheehan.

TEXT DISCUSSED

Foreign Bodies

NOTES

This episode is sponsored by the excellent people at Scribophile.

Scribophile

TDO Listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.

Consider donating to City Lights Books to sustain it and/or buying a book online from Powells.

Check out my literary adventure novel, Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame.

Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame Cover


Episode 416 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).

The Diaries of a Sozzled Scribbler #7

16 Thursday Apr 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Sozzled Scribbler

≈ Leave a comment

The Diaries of a Sozzled Scribbler #7

Transcribed by DMETRI KAKMI

16 April 2020

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming to my press conference. I called you to my private rooms at the Hotel Cortez to make possibly the most shocking revelation of our times.

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The coronavirus pandemic is a hoax, a ruse, a deception, a jape, a bluff, a practical joke, a heavenly jest. In short, a lie.

As your friend and ally, I tell you that you don’t have to hunker down in your ugly little homes, too scared to go out in case you catch the virus and die, because it ain’t real.

There’s nothing out there except fresh air now that you busy busy worker bees aren’t driving your cheap little motorcars to work every day or taking ghastly passenger jets to famous tourists sites when your masters release you briefly from servitude.

I repeat. Coronavirus is a fiction. An illusion, like civilization or Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson’s brain. And you, my friend, have been hornswoggled.

But I see sceptical faces. Who made it up? I hear you say.

That’s easy. A cabal of toilet paper manufacturers and protective mask makers.

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Settle down. Allow me to clarify before you cancel me on social media.

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These are not your average toilet paper hucksters from Chattanooga and fashionable purveyors of protective masks from Tokyo. They are apex predators, ultra rich individuals who control the world behind the governments you elect to power.

What was that, young man? Yes, you, the fey one. Why did they make it up?

The answer is twofold.

First, the coronavirus was invented to keep the poor off the streets. While you hunker down in your sad little homes, watching Netflix, the rich are out and about, enjoying in sublime solitude the world’s great beauty spots heretofore swamped by the great unwashed.

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Second, the coronavirus and its overflow—the stockpiling of toilet paper—was invented for laughs. For the rich, the pandemic is a comic interlude in a life filled with divertissement.

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You may not be aware, but every poor man’s toilet is equipped with a secret camera. It’s placed inside the bowl to capture his likeness as he wipes his fundament with the rarest of all commodities: the toilet paper, which has made kings of those who sit upon the throne of filthy lucre.

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You see, nothing is funnier for the rich than watching the poor wipe their behinds with the very substance that has made them wealthy. They scream with laughter and fall about.

Here’s another scoop. The rich, of course, don’t wipe their bottoms. They get poor people from third world countries to rim them clean. It’s quite effective and rather naughtily piquant, I’m told.

Final question please. This press conference is becoming rather raucous, and I’m running out of alcohol.

How do I know this?

Easy. I am part of the international jet-set who flit here and yon, without a care in the world, knowing all good things will come to them sooner rather than later. Needless to say one hears things when one moves in such elite circles. It’s lucky for you I have a social conscience and wish to help those less fortunate than I.

But why the long faces? I see, you feel despondent. You think you have been made a fool of and want to avenge yourselves on those who have led you down the garden path.

Let me give you that final push towards the abyss. I saved the best for last. The nail in the coronavirus coffin, shall we say.

What do you think of protective face masks?

I can now reveal the mask is as big a fraud as toilet paper. There is no need to wear a face mask when you go out. Truth is the rich invented face masks for the poor to wear; you haven’t seen Mr Musk wear one, have you? There is good reason for that.

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Nothing is worse for the rich than having to look upon the countenance of the poor. It puts one off champagne and caviar, what? And so they came up with this neat little trick with the masks.

Wear an approved face covering, they said, and you will be protected from airborne droplets that may or may not contain the virus—a virus, let us remember, that does not exist.

What they didn’t say is that the mask stops them from having to look at you.

And now I shall make perhaps my most radical observation.

Like the hipster beard, the face mask is the Islamification of the western face. Which gives you a little clue as to who might be behind all this… No, no, settle down. Think about it, I beg you. After all, the Middle East does not use toilet paper; it uses the shatafa.

Stop that. I’m not Islamophobic. Some of my best friends were Muslim terrorists.

So I say unto the poor, wipe the bull dust from your eyes. There is no coronavirus. You don’t have to stay at home. Go forth and commingle with your brethren.

Until next we meet. Cheerio!

Uttered sotto voce as Mr Sozzled left the podium, but captured by ultra-sensitive microphones: ‘If that doesn’t wipe out three quarters of the vermin nothing will. Now where’s my fucking martini?’


people-2570596_1920 Sozzled

The Sozzled Scribbler was born in the shadow of the Erechtheion in Athens, Greece, to an Egyptian street walker (his father) and a Greek bear wrestler (his mother). He has lived in Istanbul, Rome, London, New Orleans and is currently stateless. He partakes of four bottles of Bombay gin and nine packets of Gauloises cigarettes a day.

Dmetri Kakmi, is a writer and editor. His first book Mother Land was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards in Australia, and his new book The Door will be released in September 2020.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #66: Crate Digging

15 Wednesday Apr 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart

≈ Leave a comment

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #66 by Drew Barth

Crate Digging

We find ourselves in week three of Diamond Distributors’ hiatus from weekly comics, so it’s time for some catching up. Personally, I’ve been going through a backlog nearing two hundred issues, but during this isolation I’ve also had time to dig through my long boxes. There’s easily a dozen or more series in there that have been forgotten, but one in particular stood out from 1993: Sebastian O. A quick three-issue run from Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell, Sebastian O exists as close to a thematic prequel to The Invisibles as that pair could create without outright calling it a prequel. Touching on themes of alternate realities, dystopia, and societal control, both Sebastian O and The Invisibles explore Morrison and Yeowell’s comic rebellions at Vertigo, but the latter did things a bit more Wilde.

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Sebastian O asks an essential question: What if Oscar Wilde was an exquisitely trained killer with a murder mansion? Sebastian O begins with our titular character imprisoned in an asylum in a time vaguely similar to Victorian England with more computers and machines than the time allowed. After breaking out of this asylum, Sebastian takes to committing quite a few murders in order to determine who had him put away and for what reason. The mystery begins to unfold and the world we’re present for takes its shape.

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It wouldn’t be a Grant Morrison story if there wasn’t some mention of alternate realities. The story here begins its bloom with the introduction of the Magic Lantern and the idea that this reality isn’t the first or last the characters have experienced. Hence the computers, the teleconferencing with Queen Victoria, and finding out that Queen Victoria is basically just a controlled video on a handheld computer. We have small comments here and there about the oddity of the world, but they’re whisked away like dirt on Sebastian’s suits. Was this reality ever really the one everyone had been born into? We simply don’t know. But knowing Morrison’s past and future work, Sebastian O could very well be a part of the many multiverses and realities he’s conjured over the years.

so3As good of a story Sebastian O is, nothing is more enjoyable than digging around in a pile of comics and pulling out something neglected and forgotten for so long. And there is also little more enjoyable than opening up a comic from the 90s and seeing ads for already doomed products (oh Coneheads: The Movie, did anyone want you?) because hindsight is fun. But as we wait to hear more from the monthly comics world, we all have books we’ve yet to get through. Let’s make a small dent in that TBR pile.

Get excited. Get dandy.


drew-barth-mbfiDrew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Episode 415: Emily Brandt!

11 Saturday Apr 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Poetry

≈ Leave a comment

Episode 415 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).

This week I talk with poet Emily Brandt about her new book Falsehood by After Hours Press. We delve into her personal connection with the poems and her growth from taking a poetry class as a one-off to her experience in NYU’s MFA program to published poet. We also discuss the effect her students have had on her writing and her life, which range from high school students to veterans of the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Emily Brandt

TEXT DISCUSSED

Falsehood

NOTES

This episode is sponsored by the excellent people at Scribophile.

Scribophile

TDO Listeners can get 20% of a premium subscription to Scribophile. After using the above link to register for a basic account, go here while still logged in to upgrade the account with the discount.

Consider donating to City Lights Books to sustain it and/or buying a book online from Powells.

Check out my literary adventure novel, Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame.

Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame Cover


Episode 415 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on Apple podcasts, stitcher, spotify, or click here to stream (right click to download, if that’s your thing).

The Curator of Schlock #317: The Uncanny

10 Friday Apr 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, Horror, The Curator of Schlock

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Donald Pleasence, Peter Cushing, Ray Milland, The Uncanny

The Curator of Schlock #317 by Jeff Shuster

The Uncanny

Peter Cushing and Ray Milland. Need I say more?

I’m still reeling from Night of 1,000 Cats. Did you know the Mexican cut of the movie is a full half hour longer than the American version? What did editors cut out? Did it show Hugo Stiglitz doing some really depraved things to those women he brought to his monastery? Maybe a childhood flashback shows him murder his parents and feed them to the family cat? A half hour is a lot of potential missing character development. I need to know what possesses a man to collect women’s’ heads.

I need closure.

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This week’s movie is 1977’s The Uncanny from director Denis Héroux. It is an anthology movie featuring three tales of terror and a framing story. This framing story involves a writer named Wilbur Gray (Peter Cushing) who has written a book on how cats rule the world. You see, cats are our masters and we’re their servants. They’ve just fooled us into seeing them as pets. An interested publisher named Frank Richards (Ray Milland) is intrigued by the book, but not completely sold on the idea. Wilbur then details three incidents involving felines his prove his point.

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Our first story centers around a young woman named Janet (Susan Pelhaligon) working as a maid in London in the year 1912. Her employer is old crone named Miss Malkin (Joan Greenwood) who loves her many cats, but despises her jet-setting nephew, Michael (Simon Williams). She adjusts her will, leaving her nephew with next to nothing while her vast fortune will go to the care of her cats. Janet is actually having an affair with her nephew and murders Miss Malkin while attempting to steal the revised will.

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I know murder is wrong and all, but am I supposed to feel sorry for some old bitty who hoards her cash away just to give it away to some lousy strays after she dies? At least her prodigal nephew would give that money back to the community. Let him waste his money at fancy restaurants and hotels. As long as he’s a good tipper, we can look the other way, am I right? At any rate, the cats know what’s up and want to keep the will intact. Janet and Michael suffer a gruesome fate and the fortune goes to the cats.

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The other two stories are in a similar vein. You’ve got one about an orphaned girl named Lucy (Katrina Holden Bronson) and her cat, Wellington. They move in with her Aunt and Uncle and their cruel daughter, Angela (Chloe Franks). Angela incessantly bullies Lucy even though she knows Lucy’s mother was a witch and that Lucy inherited lots of books on black magic. I wonder how this is going to turn out.

More importantly, Katrina Holden Bronson is the daughter of Charles Bronson and Jill Ireland!

The final story takes place in the Golden Age of Hollywood where an actor named Valentine (Donald Pleasence) murders his wife and convinces the studio to cast his mistress in his deceased wife’s part. And his deceased wife had a pet cat, so you know what’s coming.

So The Uncanny is kind of a low rent Tales From the Crypt, but I got to see Ray Milland chewing the scenery with Peter Cushing. That was worth my 90 minutes.

Let’s see—I seem to remember that Peter Cushing was in some other movie in 1977, but I can’t quite remember what it is.


Jeffrey Shuster 1

Photo by Leslie Salas

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, and episode 284) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #65: Detective of the Century

08 Wednesday Apr 2020

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart

≈ Leave a comment

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #65 by Drew Barth

Detective of the Century

John Allison is one of the most consistent comic writers of the past twenty-five years. Starting out with Bobbinsin 1998, his characters and story evolved into Scary-Go-Rounda few years after (around the time I jumped in), which led to Bad Machinery, and a later return to Bobbins. But what makes Allison’s work so good and so consistent over these many years is how he is able to take a character from Scary-Go-Roundlike Esther de Groot and expand into a new series, Giant Days, without losing anything from her original voice or character after ten years since her inception. And he is working with those same skills with Charlotte Grote in his new series from Boom! Studios, Wicked Things.

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If you’re at all familiar with Bad Machinery and its mystery kids, you’re already familiar with Charlotte and her companion, Claire Little. If Bad Machinery is a series you’re not familiar with, then now is a great time to get caught up as it is a stellar work of comics. And luckily, as Allison had done with Giant Days, Wicked Things is a new story and setting with a couple existing characters—you don’t need all of the previous work to understand who they are as they’re established within a few panels. And those few panels help establish the story here: Charlotte Grotte is nominated for “Teen Detective of the Year” before going to university and must travel to London to attend the award ceremony and, while in attendance, a murder occurs. From this first issue, we’re going full Agatha Christie in the best way possible.

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What truly elevates all of these characters and their moments of humor and absurdity is the wonderful line work of Max Sarin. Every panel is packed with fluid motion, expressive faces, and the kind of keen sense for detail-packed composition that makes a reader never want to miss anything on the page. They help to establish a different mood and feel from Bad Machinery while still maintaining the heart of what made characters like Charlotte and Claire so memorable and endearing. At times, it’s like reading through storyboards for a cartoon as the fluidity sings through the bleed-space into each moment.

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When I say that John Allison is consistent, Wicked Things is one of the reasons why I say it. Sometimes it’s hard to find a first issue I want to look through over again and again like this—for the Charlotte being the same Lottie I’ve been reading for a decade, for the art that springs forth with so much life—and it makes me so excited for how this medium can express so much on the page. And there is still so much to this story for Allison and Sarin to explore with the cliff-hanger the first issue ends on that I’m shaking with excitement for it to return. This is what good comics can do and it’s always time to read as much as we can now.

Get excited. Solve a mystery.


drew-barth-mbfi

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

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