I woke up. I was lying on the floor of a strange apartment and reeling in pain from getting my arm dislodged from its socket by the Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando. I felt like I was going to die.
“Don’t you ever sneak up on me,” the ninja said. “I could have killed you.” He clapped his hands together three times before grabbing my arm again to pop it back into its socket. I cried out, “Edwige!” And then I passed out.
— To be continued.
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This is Science Gone Wrong Month on my humble blog. Tonight’s movie is 2016’s Morgan from director Luke Scott, son of Ridley Scott who is also listed as producer. The movie stars Kate Mara, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Paul Giamatti, Michelle Yeoh, Toby Jones, and Anya Taylor-Joy among others. You even get a cameo from Brian Cox. What a cast! And they star in a movie about a test tube baby that goes on a massacre in an isolated estate in the country. This is a B movie with an A cast.
A woman by the name of Lee Weathers (Kate Mara) gets dispatched to a research compound deep in the country. This is one of those near future movies where corporations are now messing around with genetic engineering. It seems that there was an incident that happened at the lab involving an experimental creature named Morgan. It seems that Morgan repeatedly stabbed a Dr. Kathy Grieff (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in the eye. Morgan has no gender, but the scientists keep switching between her and it. Morgan is played by the lovely Anya Taylor-Joy, but she looks like a monster here with grey skin and slicked back hair.
Dr. Simon Ziegler explains to Lee how Morgan was created using synthetic DNA and nanotechnology and a bunch of science gobbledygook that I can’t make heads or tails of. What I find disturbing is how much this staff of scientists love Morgan and treat it/her as one of the family. The scientists even threw Morgan a birthday party. They’re very proud of their experiment and hope risk management will ignore the whole incident concerning the eye stabbing. Lee informs them that a psychologist by the name of Dr. Alan Shapiro (Paul Giamatti) will be stopping by to make the final assessment.
Dr. Shapiro shows up and acts like a perfect ass. He takes one look at Morgan and states that it’s already failed the psych exam. He also insists on speaking to Morgan directly inside its cell. The scientists don’t think that’s such a good idea and Dr. Shapiro tells them not to tell him how to do his job. Dr. Shapiro’s psych evaluation of Morgan involves him constantly trying to get a rise out of the patient. He tells Morgan that it has no friends. Dr. Shapiro threatens Morgan with permanent imprisonment and possible termination. Morgan doesn’t like this so it rips out Dr. Shapiro’s throat.
With Morgan failing its psych exam, the scientists are ordered by corporate to put Morgan to sleep. They refuse to do this and make arrangements to flee the lab with Morgan. The scientists lock Lee in Morgan’s cell so she won’t interfere. At first I thought Morgan had some kind of psychic hold on the scientists, but they’re really just this stupid. It’s around this time that Morgan goes on a killing spree, murdering the very scientists that were trying to help it. There’s a twist ending that I won’t spoil here. Until next week.
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #209 by Drew Barth
A Minor Shock
We’re rather spoiled for comics in the US. If we have a decent shop close by, we can pick up any variety of comics that Diamond distributes as well as a few odds and ends that fall onto a typical comic shelf. Outside of these borders, however, when looking across the Atlantic, comics have been a little more difficult. Well, DC Comics have been more difficult. The UK has had its own comic scene and sensibilities for decades—magazines like 2000 AD and publishers like Titan—but DC Comics were notoriously difficult to come by in the regular monthly formats we’re used to. This is where London Editions Magazines came in and one of their forays into getting more DC stories, namely Vertigo comics, into reader’s hands in the form of Shockwave.
Shockwave on its own has an interesting history. London Editions Magazines, and its parent company Egmont, had been publishing DC Comic anthologies and magazines for year prior—typically compilations of Batman and Superman stories sold as monthly or annual stories. But they had wanted to branch out into some of DC’s lesser known characters and stories and began that with DC Action in 1990. This magazine focused on stories like Grant Morrison’s Animal Man and Marv Wolfman and George Perez’s Teen Titans comics from the late and early 80s, respectively. But, after six issues, this anthology was canceled. Their next attempt at bringing in more mature stories was with Zones, an anthology that reprinted Swamp Thing, The Shadow, and Wasteland. This was also cut even shorter with only four issues before LEM shifted focus to the similarly short-lived Shockwave.
Shockwave was one of the last attempts at these anthology reprint magazines as DC’s catalog, including the reprinted Vertigo stories, were becoming more common in UK comic shops. At four issues before cancellation it still managed to pack in a good amount of comics. Just in the first issue we have the opening of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s Black Orchid, the first portion of issue seven of Animal Man by Grant Morrison and Chris Truog, another Grant Morrison story in the form of Hellblazer with David Lloyd, and an article on UFOs by Jay Taylor. It’s the kind of lineup that feels legendary now, but was the kind of thing you could pack into a reprint anthology in the hopes of keeping publication going back then. But even with this overwhelming quality, no one seemed to buy Shockwave and its final issue came just a few months later.
I couldn’t help but pick these first two issues of Shockwave up when I saw them in a used comic bin. They provide this fascinating snapshot of comics publishing in the UK at the time and show the ways in which more adult oriented comics were presented in that different context. While they may have been attempting something closer to the format that had been so successful for 2000 AD for so long, a magazine like Shockwave still gives us something unique to look at when contrasted with how we typically consume comics in America.
Get excited. Get shocked.
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Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.
Drew Barth (Episode 331,485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
In a bookshop interview a few years ago, Fiona Benson said, “I think I have always been a little bit violent.” The audience laughed, mildly, maybe as thrown off by her soft-spoken and questioning tone as I was. Did she mean that? After all, isn’t it always the quiet ones, as the saying goes? They’re the Jekylls with the Hydian dark sides. Right?
I don’t know. Benson’s second poetry collection, Vertigo & Ghost (Cape Poetry, 2019)—she has since published a third and fourth book—contains violence of the brutal sort, but also a sort you may not expect.
Vertigo & Ghost starts with a poem that stands apart from the rest, a prólogos. “Ace of Bass”— named after the 90s pop group, but also the sport of tennis—burns with fervent optimism. The speaker and her friends sit on the tennis court, ostensibly to “practice our backhand,” but really to talk about boys. And sex, which “wasn’t here yet, but it was coming, / and we were running towards it, its gorgeous euphoric mist.” Sex was a “deep well of love,” a fix for every desire, an ace with every serve and never over the baseline, a matter of the heart as much as their “own starved bodies.” The only inkling of violence is the asphalt’s “intricate red pattern on our thighs,” from sitting too long.
The naivete of this prologue contrasts Part One. Zeus–king of the Greek pantheon, and also a real person–is the star. He is a megalomaniacal sexual predator.
Mercifully, the section begins with Zeus behind bars being confronted by the apparent victim of another crime for which he has so far eluded justice. In this first poem, “[Zeus],” despite his containment, the danger he embodies is palpable: “bullet-proof glass / and a speaker-phone between us / and still I wasn’t safe.” In “[screenplay],” the speaker observes Zeus in the prison yard, smiling face up in the rain, and wonders, “why he’s here?” Zeus is a god “who can pass through the vaults / and walls of this prison.” Even a tracheotomy (“[surveillance]”) can’t prevent Zeus from making veiled threats-cum-compliments with his “voice somewhere between motor-rev and burp.”
Drugs, in another poem named “[surveillance]”, that are delivered to him in a “doll-sized paper cup” by a psychiatric nurse, only lend a surreal edge to his shocking declaration that he will rape a child. In yet another poem named “[surveillance]”, the speaker (walking home with her child) hears thunder, the mythical Zeus’s hallmark weapon, and quickens her step. The only thing worse than Zeus as a free man is Zeus “all around me / in the heavy air / watching.”
The most frightening thing about Zeus’s power is that it doesn’t reside solely within his body: it’s supported by the scaffolding of a society made for his body. In a poem called “archives,” the judge sentencing Zeus for his crime takes the opportunity to mention certain of his admirable qualities:
Zeus given light sentence, temporary gaol. The judge delivers that he is an exemplary member of the swimming squad; look at his muscular shoulders, the way he forges through water; as for the girl.
These qualities don’t just mitigate Zeus’s crime in the judge’s eyes; the judge consciously connects them to his predatory behavior, as a natural thing. The judge’s reluctant hands were forced to apply the law to this potent and awe-inspiring man, undeserving of punishment.
In “[surveillance: track and field],” Zeus, now as a girls’ track coach with a blond pony-tail, trains (grooms) his “BEAUTIES” to love the chase, to accept it, but only “IF YOU GROOM WELL.” In “[personal],” a woman flees her own personal Zeus, an abusive mate, only to be tracked down to the train station, where he, bouquet in hand, “shouldered my bag / took my bike / and wheeled it, / while everyone around / smiled at his courtly manners.”
The poem “[transformation: Nemesis]” is basically a series of predator-prey metaphors—she a fish, he a shark; she a snake, he a mongoose; and so on—suggesting the various ways we conceive of sexual pursuit and conquest, for which the mythical Zeus is famed, as natural and even framing it as an epic struggle (“we made a crater where we fell / screaming through the night / a bloody prolapse”). In “[transformation: Daphne],” we are reminded that abusive and predatory behavior can be learned by sons from their fathers, in Benson’s vivid retelling of the myth of Daphne’s transformation into a laurel tree before being raped by Zeus’s son, Apollo. Continuing the predator-prey metaphors, Apollo is a dog chasing a rabbit that eventually tires from being chased and gives up:
When a hare dies it screams like a mortal child. Disconcerted, Apollo looks up from the field. There’s Zeus in the dark holding the lamp, keeping it steady for the rape, and the kill.
Transformations abound.. Aside from Daphne and Nemesis, there is, for example, “[transformation: Io]” in which she is apparently in the hospital, recovering from an assault, and mooing and ineptly tonguing her food. This heart-breaking poem portrays the emotional and psychological transformation that victims of sexual violations experience. Likewise, “[transformation: Callisto]” illustrates the trauma that follows assault. Callisto is a bear, an animal who “squats to shit does not wipe does not wash,” has an anti-social “look-away demeanor.” She shuns and is shunned by society, “chased out of town / with tranq guns and flares.” But Benson shows us that healing is possible. Within the same poem, she finds “pleasure in the woods — / the sun shining amber on her fur.” She even finds redemption:
…There are moments in her cave when she feels almost safe, and sleeps to dream of the cub who mewed at her briefly before he was taken; his eyes swollen shut from the pressure of birth, his small blind face searching for her voice, his kicking legs and his tiny fists waving. Bundled out of the room. Perfect human.
This is the point in the book where the woman who has known violence begins to heal and to be reborn by giving life. The process of giving life—making it, bearing it, protecting it—is surprisingly violent.
Part Two covers a lot of ground, but one of the biggest subjects is the experience of motherhood
Another subject is grief. In “Almond Blossom,” the speaker is overwhelmed with grief, unable to appreciate the “wintered bird’s small song,” yet aware that she must trust spring will come and pull her back: “earth’s already begun her slow incline, inch by ruined inch, easing you back from the brink.” In “Toad,” she finds kinship with the “grotesque / beaded” creature, a sister, sharing the purgatory of hibernation. “Beatitude,” a tribute to Gerard Manley Hopkins, brings redemption again as her “sad, agnostic soul” finds its way back into nature’s grandeur. To do so, she must commit trespass, legally and figuratively, floating down the river past the martins’ nests dug out of the bank. She is “a compass to the currents,” not because she provides direction, but because she is made to give it, to become the sign, pulled around in the water just as the Earth’s magnetic field tugs on a compass needle.
Grief gradually moves toward healing. In “Blue Heron,” someone has lost something. The wading bird standing in the marsh, watching the shadows of the fish under the slowly-forming ice, doing the “slow, hunched river-work of grief,” is presented with a choice: fly south with the others to a warmer clime, or stay and freeze. Heal or lose yourself. The speaker plainly and trustingly urges the heron to “lift / from the tightening shallows,” and assures the reader that “there will be love, release.”
The very next poem, “Wildebeest”, somersaults into the theme of motherhood. Benson depicts the birth of a child as the birth of a wildebeest calf. The birth is a stampede, her body “both the flood / and the furious corral,” a “torrent of muscle” impossibly squeezing out a “Taurean star…unfolding / like sharp origami // then falling in a hot / and slippery rush.” The baby is relievedly human, “dark-haired like your sister.”
The theme of transformation continues to figure prominently as Part Two draws closer to its end. Like the bear imagery in the Callisto poem, the speaker expresses an appalled acceptance of the distortions her body has endured from pregnancy and childbirth. In “After Birth,” her stomach is “a flaccid bag,” her breasts leaking colostrum, and all for “the stranger sleeping in the crib.” The title of the poem “Ruins” suggests how the speaker views her body, but however much that bothers her, we trust she wouldn’t change a thing about her life when she says, with the most adorable imagery, “amen I say to all of this / if I have you — / your screwball smile / at every dawn.”
As the children grow, so does the speaker’s awareness of the threats to their safety and her role as their protector. “Daughter Drowning” focuses on the guilt a mother feels about the vigils her infant receives after almost drowning, while her older sister is “fighting for attention, as if it were oxygen / and she were drowning” and the speaker “hadn’t even seen her / start to slip.”
In “Cells,” Benson weaves an intriguing explanation of the “agonies of protection” she feels towards no one in particular, involving the cells of a miscarried chimeric fetus living on in the mother’s body and that time scientists built a robot car driven by a web of rat neurons. The car went crazy, scurrying for cover. The speaker has her miscarried daughter’s cells in her brain and “it’s not my own mortality / I flail at now, but theirs.” She concludes with the haunting lines, “Look how fitfully I steer, / how obsolete I am in person; / I am wheeled and governed.”
“Mexican Free-Tail Bats” is another example of Benson’s skill in fusing human and animal into one subject. The baby bats (kits) fall to the floor of the cave and stagger around on their little wing-tips while the mother bat swoops around under the dozing colony on the cave roof, like a “black glove of panic,” frantically thinking “not here; not here.”
About motherhood, Benson expresses guilt, anxiety, fear, revulsion, joy, and contentment. Part Two begins in a somber vein. The slide from despair into hope is not a clear and straight path, with some poems slipping back into despair.
The Zeus poems evoke a similar uncertainty. Just as sometimes it’s hard to put a finger on the moment of wrong-doing in instances of sexual harassment and intimidation, the Zeus poems are difficult to refer to in this review with precision because the titles are redundant. There are at least three poems titled “[surveillance]” and four just titled “[Zeus].” The poems elude reference just as predators elude recognition.
One thing not left to uncertainty in the Zeus poems is identifying when Zeus himself is speaking. Benson’s ingenious use of all caps for his words underscores how the predator’s words are so often given more importance than the victim’s, not only because he asserts himself, speaking loudly and boldly, but because society believes his word, emphasizes its importance, and values the qualities he embodies. The all caps also evoke the oft-ridiculed online writing style of bullies yelling in the comments, and offers perhaps the only opening for readers to laugh at the monstrous Zeus.
While reading Vertigo & Ghost, I mused upon how dark and violent it is, and wondered how Benson held these images and ideas in her head so evenly and considerately. Her secret, I believe, is contained within the poem named “Love Poem, Lucca.” Her husband James is “the sure / and steady ground; because of him / we live.” Their relationship, his commitment to her self-actualization and to her safety, gives her room to explore the watchtower they are visiting as a family, that “brick vase of forest” with the trees profanely growing out of the top of it. She does this despite her apparent fear of heights and fear for her child who “ricochets between the ledge / and the steep of the stair like a firework / in a confined space, half crazed, / about to fall.” But this dangerous outing is a necessary exploration if one is to truly live. Despite the danger and her anxiety, Benson undertakes the quest. She writes about violence, explores it, and even makes it beautiful, because she has someone—James—to pull her back. Love is her safety line.
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Brian A. Salmons lives in Orlando and writes essays, poems, and plays, which can be found in Qu, The Ekphrastic Review, Autofocus Lit, Stereo Stories, Memoir Mixtapes, Arkansas International, and other places. He also reads for Autofocus Lit.
Find him on IG @teacup_should_be and Twitter @brianasalmons.
Episode 561 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, Samantha Nickerson talks to Felicia Berliner about her new novel, Shmutz, and the challenges of existing within multiple identities,
plus Samantha Nickerson talks to Deb Rogers about her new novel, Florida Woman, group-think, cults, and lots of monkeys.
Today’s Guest Host
TEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
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.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
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Episode 561 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).
I did a stupid thing. I overheard the Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando, playing the Moonlight Sonata on his Casio Keyboard. I decided to sneak up behind him while he was distracted, thinking I might take that mask off and get a peak at his face. Before my fingers reached his mask, he grabbed my wrist, jerked my arm hard. I heard a pop and realized he had just dislocated my shoulder. And then I passed out. — To be continued.
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You know, I think it’s high time I looked to 2023 and the many wonderful movies the year has in store for us. And what better way to do it than by checking out some movie posters for upcoming releases and surmising their plots from them. Let’s dig in.
Baby Ruby
Noémie Merlant and Kit Harrington star in this psychological horror movie about a couple struggling to conceive their first child. The husband decides to buy an infant on the black market from a southern gentleman in a seersucker suit. The baby seller hands the child over on the condition her new parents name her Ruby. The wife is set on calling her Margaret and descends into madness over the fact they have to name the child Ruby. After a bloody finale, Ruby gets adopted by the Queen of Denmark.
The Outwaters
A quirky comedy set in a small town in New Mexico. A weird face appears in the sky and the locals find themselves ill equipped to handle the dozens of tourists visiting their little borough each day. A fight breaks out between two rival families over the merchandising rights to the face in the sky. Meanwhile, a crackpot inventor creates a rocket pack so he can fly up to ask the face in the sky what the meaning of life is.
Beau is Afraid
Joaquin Phoenix stars as Beau. As a boy, Beau is too afraid to leave his room and hangs out all day in his pajamas. As a young man, Beau is too afraid to leave his room and hangs out all day in his pajamas. As a middle-aged man, Beau is too afraid to leave his room and hangs out all day in his pajamas. As an old man, Beau is too afraid to leave his room and hangs out all day in his pajamas. Then he dies.
Inside
William Dafoe plays a recluse who lives in a green house on the 51st floor of a high rise in Mumbai. He experiments with plants to create a rare variant of cucumber that grows in any environment. A pickle consortium sends an assassin to take him out. Jason Statham also stars.
A Good Person
Morgan Freeman plays a good person. Florence Pugh plays a bad person. All Morgan Freeman’s character wants to do is build a miniature replica of the Empire State Building using used matchsticks. He then plans to enter his creation into a matchstick miniature contest. If he wins the $50,000 prize, he’ll donate the money to the local orphanage because he’s a good person. While carrying his creation to the contest, Florence Pugh, knocks him over with her bike. He crushes his creation with his weight. She laughs as she rides away because she’s a bad person.
Episode 560 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, Rachael Tillman and I discuss the art of persona writing through Philip Schultz’s recent book, Comforts of the Abyss.
TEXT DISCUSSED
NOTES
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.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
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Episode 560 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).
I was making myself at home in the one bedroom apartment of the Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando. I examined his shelves and noticed a collection of Red Rose Tea figurines. The most prominent ones were woodland creatures and the holiday collection. I bet I could sell the lot for $32.50 on eBay. I picked up a miniature Uncle Sam, but put it back down when I heard the sound of the Moonlight Sonata tinkling from the bedroom. — To be continued.
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This week’s movie is 2022’s Black Adam from director Jaume Collet-Serra. I know that director. He was responsible for two Liam Neeson movies I covered last year: Non-Stop and The Commuter. For what it’s worth, I liked those movies so I went into Black Adam with an open mind. I mean you have Dwayne Johnson in the starring role and he looks just like the DC comics character the movie is named for.
Let’s get one thing out of the way. Black Adam is a super villain. He’s like the arch-nemesis of Captain Marvel. Not the Marvel Universe Captain Marvel, but the DC Universe Captain Marvel. I think they have to call him Shazam now because DC lost the rights to the name or something. Oh, and don’t expect Shazam to show up in this movie even though he’s the superhero and Black Adam is the supervillain. Because maybe Black Adam isn’t really a supervillain after all, but a brooding anti-hero.
I give the movie points for the setting. Our story takes place in the fictional middle-eastern nation of Kahndaq. This country has always been the target of oppressors for thousands of years. The latest group exploiting this country is Intergang, an international gang of mercenaries. This evil organization is searching for the legendary Crown of Sabbac, a mystical item that will give its wearer the powers of hell or something like that. An archaeologist named Adrianna Tomaz (Sarah Shahi) finds the location of the crown in an ancient tomb. She’s hoping to get the crown before Intergang so she can hide it in another location.
No sooner does she find the crown that Intergang shows up to take it for their own nefarious purposes. Adrianna reads an ancient spell and sets free Teth-Adam, the legendary champion of Kahndaq. Teth-Adam (Dwayne Johnson) slaughters the Intergang soldiers and I do not feel bad for them. They kind of deserved to die unlike those mercenaries Morbius hired, but let’s not bring up that again. The United States government takes note of the situation and dispatches the Justice Society to put a stop to Teth-Adam.
Who are the Justice Society? They’re a team of superheroes who are not the Justice League. We have Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan), Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell), and Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo). Hawkman and Doctor Fate have a long history of fighting evil and are very old friends. Atom Smasher can grow really large and has Fonzie for a grandfather. Cyclone can create cyclones? Doctor Fate is a wizard and Hackman has wings and can fly around and hit things with his mallet.
Black Adam belongs to the same DC cinematic universe that gave us that Batman killing Superman movie years back. And while I can appreciate seeing the Rock toss bad guys around like rag dolls, it just isn’t enough. I like the actors, but by the time we get to the climactic battle scene with the demon lord and his army of the undead, it feels like we’re just going through the motions.
We get a Superman cameo at the end with Henry Cavill portraying the Man of Steel, but James Gunn recently announced that Cavill will not be returning to the role of Superman as Warner Media is planning a reboot of the DC cinematic universe. Funny how they let that cat out the bag when there are four more movies set in this current DC cinematic universe due out this year. Kind of destroys the hype for Aquamaniacs out there.
Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #208 by Drew Barth
Ending at the Ending
Apocalypse stories abound. The world ends in one of a dozen different ways and people need to live through it. But what’s most significant between these stories is the timing of them. When does the apocalypse happen and when is this story occurring? Are we right at the edge of things going bad? Are we a couple weeks in where we can still trick ourselves into thinking things could go back to normal? Or, are we like Once Upon a Time at the End of the World by Jason Aaron, Alexandre Tefenkgi, and Lee Loughridge and teetering at the edge of the end?
We start here at the end of things. Much of the planet is a barren waste with molten plastic and garbage taking up much of the land. Fauna has been warped beyond recognition into strange forms of tentacles and carapaces while greenery simply doesn’t exist outside of the toxic. The world has ended, but there’s still some people around. This is the story of Mezzy and Maceo—a hardened wasteland survivor and a kid who has been living out the end times in a skyscraper filled with candy and cannons, respectively. After Maceo lets Mezzy into his tower, we get a glimpse at just how different their lives have been as well as the similarity they have in their lack of contact with other people. But this tower isn’t something Mezzy could live in and Maceo can no longer standing living alone after talking with someone for the first time in years.
The final two pages of this first issue may as well be the start of the final issue as we’re flung decades into the future to see Maceo as an old man and the final stages of the world violently churning above. And this kind of bookending of the series creates an interesting dynamic between the reader and the creators. We now have a strong idea of where this entire story is taking us—at least to some extent—after just being introduced to this world and our main characters. It’s giving us the series’ end as a stinger to help draw us back into this world if we weren’t feeling too sure about the beginning. It’s the idea of the final page stinger taken to its logical conclusion: if the final page of the first issue doesn’t hook you enough, why not try for the final moments of the entire series?
At its first issue, Once Upon a Time at the End of the World has set up the ending of its world very well. And the team of Aaron, Tefenkgi, and Loughridge have crafted a story for this world that can’t help but make you want to see more of, even as the characters teeter right on the edge of the end of all things. It’s the kind of apocalypse you want to see through to the end.
Get excited. Get ending.
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Drew Barth at Miami Book Fair in 2019.
Drew Barth (Episode 331,485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.
Episode 558 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).
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This week I have a long overdue convo with the poet Laurie Rachkus Uttich.
TEXTS DISCUSSED
Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk
by Charles Simic
Late at night our hands stop working. They lie open with tracks of animals Journeying across the fresh snow. They need no one. Solitude surrounds them.
As they come closer, as they touch, It is like two small streams Which upon entering a wide river Feel the pull of the distant sea.
The sea is a room far back in time Lit by the headlights of a passing car. A glass of milk glows on the table. Only you can reach it for me now.
NOTES
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.
If you are an amazon customer, one way to support this show is to begin shopping with this affiliate link, so that the podcast is granted a small commission on anything you purchase at no additional cost to yourself.
_______
Episode 559 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).
There I was in the secret hideout of the Revenging Manta, the ninja vigilante of downtown Orlando. By secret hideout, I mean his one bedroom apartment. I went to take a shower, lathering up with Dove sensitive skin soap and massaging my follicles with Pert Plus, shampoo and conditioner in one. There was even a nice cotton bathroom waiting for me. I needed to brush my teeth and saw a lone, cherry red soft bristle toothbrush sitting in a cup by the sink. I figured what the ninja didn’t know couldn’t hurt him.
— To be continued.
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This week’s movie is 2022’s Morbius from director Daniel Espinosa. Much like Venom, this movie features a Spider-Man villain with no Spider-Man. But he’s not really a bad guy; he’s kind of a tortured soul named Michael Morbius (Jared Leto). Born with a debilitating blood disease, Dr. Michael Morbius has spent his life trying to cure it, even studying to become the world’s preeminent expert on the subject. He even receives a prize from the King of Sweden for his invention of artificial blood which has saved more lives than penicillin.
It’s about this moment that I’m wondering why I should care about anything Marvel-related after they killed off Tony Stark!
I know.
I know.
This Sony Marvel universe is not the Disney Marvel universe though there are crossovers between the universes. How does that work? It’s all just a big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey bullshit! (If I’m wrong, explain it to me in the comments, with diagrams and math problems if need be.)
Dr. Michael Morbius visits Costa Rica to capture some vampire bats to experiment with. I don’t think I’d experiment with vampire bats. That might turn me into a monster in the Sony Marvel universe. But I trust the good intentions of Dr. Michael Morbius as we see him comforting a sick little girl in the hospital who has the same genetic disorder as him. If only he could find a cure, not just for himself, but for all the poor afflicted children of the world. With the help of his love interest/colleague Dr. Martine Bancroft (Adria Arjona), the two set out for the high seas to conduct an illegal experiment in a secret laboratory on a freighter guarded by a dozen or so mercenaries. (I promise you I’ve never done that myself.)
Dr. Brancroft injects the serum into Morbiuss’s back, thus transforming him into a monster thirsting for human blood. This would be the part in the movie where we cut to Peter Parker trying to figure how he’s going to pay the rent this month, but there’s no Spider-Man here, Morbius makes short work of the mercenaries, draining their blood and slashing them to ribbons. That’s okay as these were mercs who probably deserved to die anyway. Morbius jumps ship leaving Dr. Bancroft to deal with the cops.
Oh, did I mention that Morbius has a childhood friend named Lucien played by Matt Smith? Like Morbius, Lucien also has a debilitating blood disease that keeps him on crutches. Morbius refuses to give Lucien the bat potion as he doesn’t want Lucien to share his vampiric existence. So Lucien just steals the bat potion when Morbius is incapacitated. Lucien’s first victim is a nurse and a single mother.
Boo!
That makes him a bad living vampire, unlike Morbius.
Did you ever want to see Matt Smith dance shirtless to the tune of EKSE by Off the Meds? Then this is the movie for you.
Did you want to see Jared Leto zipping around New York City like a flying squirrel? Then this is the movie for you.
And be sure to watch that after credits scene, Let’s just say there may be a Sinister Six movie coming in the future. A Sinister Six movie with no Spider-Man. A Sinister Six movie where they’re bad, but not bad guys.
The Drunken Odyssey 