Fave Books of 2007: Part One

I'll be getting into my fave DVDs and movies of 2007 in the next few days, but reckoned it best to kick off with my favorite books of the year. After all, we're all readers in this tribe, yes?

It's been a great year for reading and books, and this off-the-top-of-my-head list of my fave book experiences of the year shouldn't be taken as a 'best of' list -- I've not stayed abreast of the new fiction out this year, and though I'm omnivorous as a non-fiction reader, my interests are too peculiar and personal to even pretend I could possibly generate a "best of" reading list most readers would recognize.

But having read two-to-three books per week this past year, I can say with certainty that these were among my favorite reads, revisits and discoveries of the year!

New Works

Book of the Year! Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark

Book of the Year? It sure is to this diehard fan! Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark is Tim Lucas's valentine to cinema, and among the most stunning movie books of this or any year.

As Mark Martin commented on this blog after my umpteenth enthusiastic post about its pending arrival and revelatory publication, "You're gonna make that book pregnant." Knock it up, baby! I couldn't have been more excited about a book than I was about Tim Lucas's long-awaited Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark, and I couldn't have been more satisfied with the book itself, which somehow exceeded all expectations -- and that's saying a lot, since I've been waiting for a book like this for at least 40 of my 52 years of life.

It's literally a dream book -- I mean, one of those books I had dreamed all my life might, should, someday had to exist -- and that's just what it was for Tim, too. Thankfully, Tim and Donna (who designed this masterpiece) Lucas made Tim's dream come true, and by doing so created the book of the year!

As I've discussed here ad infinitum, Bava's films had a potent, indelible impact on my own life, and definitely impacted my creative life in more ways that I can count. It's somehow appropriate that Tim's expansive biography has arrived at a time when almost the whole of Bava's directorial work is available on DVD, and for the first time as it was intended to be seen: uncut, widescreen, and in their original language(s) rather than cut, dubbed and pan-and-scanned. I Vampiri/The Devil's Commandment, Caltiki The Immortal Monster, Black Sunday, Gli Invasori/Erik the Conqueror, Black Sabbath, The Whip and the Body/What!, Blood and Black Lace, Planet of the Vampires, Operazione Paura/Kill, Baby.... Kill!, Knives of the Avenger, Diabolik/Danger: Diabolik, Bay of Blood/Twitch of the Death Nerve, Baron Blood, Lisa and the Devil/House of Exorcism -- these and others have been central cinematic experiences for those of us who scoured TV Guide, Castle of Frankenstein, drive-ins, nabes, grindhouses, 16mm catalogues, conventions and video stores for decades, seeking any nugget of Bava gold that might surface, under any number of titles, languages or versions.

Mario Bava's life and times covers the whole of Italian cinema from its inception (via the pioneer work of his father Eugenio Bava) to the present (via the work of Mario's son Lamberto and grandson Roberto), and is so much more than the scope of Mario's films as a director, marvelous as many of those films were and are when screened today. As Tim points out (and chronicles in loving detail), Mario was a cinematographer and special effects magician for as many years before he began his directorial career as he was involved in film after his 'official' directorial debut with Black Sunday (1960) -- and it's the rich illumination of Mario's family and personal life, as well as the cinema achievements and the films themselves, that makes All the Colors of the Dark such a powerful, moving read. And the illustrations, the eye-candy -- astounding! Astonishing! Intoxicating! From the rare family and behind-the-scenes photos to the abundance of fotobustas, lobby cards, inserts and one-sheets from around the world, this tome is a feast for the eyes on every single turn of the page. A more delicious, delirium-inducing treat for lovers of Bava's work, of Italian horror (and all genre) films, cannot be imagined; Bravo, Tim and Donna!

Like Ulrich Merkl's Winsor McCay Rarebit Fiend tome (see below), Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark is simply stunning as an art object and book -- it could not be more comprehensive, beautiful, or worthy of revisiting endlessly. Also like Merkl's comparable masterwork, Tim and Donna have elevated the realm of self-publishing, of following one's most heartfelt interests and obsessions to ultimate fruition, to a new level. Like Merkl's book, Tim's Mario Bava book simply would not exist had it been left to the vagaries of traditional author/agent/publisher economy: no publisher would have gone for this ride. They would have had a million reasons not to, if an agent managed to find a home for this book in the first place (highly unlikely, if not impossible). Publishers who do produce similar labors of love (FAB Press) weren't an option; Tim really had to do this himself, and Donna (his beloved wife) was the ideal partner in every imaginable support in the venture.

Hands down, book of the year -- perhaps the decade.

"R-A-G-G-M-O-P-P -- Ragmop!"

Rob Walton's Ragmop: A sadly overlooked graphic novel classic, revised, expanded, completed and the funniest comic of the year!

There were lots of stellar graphic novels out this year, but one of my personal favorites barely earned a nod from the wasteland that passes for the comics marketplace these days. Rob Walton's Ragmop -- another self-published magnum opus of 2007 -- was launched as a comic series back in the 1990s, and suffered a premature termination in the wake of the direct market distribution implosion, just shy of Rob's planned finish line. But now it's complete, in print, and highly recommended to one and all.

Taking up the challenge anew in 2005, Rob got back to work on his sf political/theological comedic epic, and thank God he did! In its final published form, Ragmop stands as the most hilarious graphic novel of 2007 in a sea of predominantly somber works, as well as a crazyquilt guerrilla attack on the whole of Western Civilization. The scope, breadth, heart and gutbuster audaciousness of Rob's antic epic bowls me over. That he sustains this giddy highwire (and absolutely savage) social satire over almost 500 pages is truly a feat of brilliance, and it's as current to 2007 -- more relevant, in fact -- as it was when Rob launched this Bob Clampett-like space-and-time voyage in the 1990s.

What else can I say? Hell, I love Ragmop!

Get Bit While You Can: Dream of the Rarebit Fiend

Get your copy while you can -- soon to be sold out forever! Ulrich Merkl's phenomenal, definitive Winsor McCayRarebit Fiend collection, another knockout example of the power of self-publishing in the 21st Century.

Ulrich Merkl's ravishing, absolutely definitive Dream of the Rarebit Fiend collection is jam-packed with much, much more than "just" the most complete collection of Winsor McCay's seminal comic strip available anywhere on Earth. It's also a comprehensive overview of McCay's life, career and the context of the times in which one of our greatest cartoonists created this still-amazing strip, which essentially poured the foundation for the whole of 20th Century comics (and, as Merkl demonstrates, much of its art, cinema and visionary works).

I covered this marvelous book in-depth -- including an exclusive interview with Dr. Merkl! -- back in July of this year; revisit that post, please, for more info and a peek at the art.

If you've the time and inclination, here's the link to a lively audio slideshow, based on the book, demonstrating the influence of McCay's work on many famous films (covered in further detail in the book, folks)!

But -- the book is almost gone! Quick, get yourself a copy while you can -- exclusively available from this link -- you won't want to miss this, if you can afford this once-in-a-lifetime book.

The book was announced as 'sold out' around Christmas, but I wrote Dr. Merkl and he replied:
"My U.S. stock will last until March, and when it is sold out, I'll still have 100 books here in Europe, if someone needs it badly, but the shipping cost is terrible, about $80.00 per copy (rather than $19.00 now from the U.S. stock).... The regular price to the U.S. is $114.00 + $19.00 packaging, handling, shipping = $133.00... Many thanks!" You've been alerted -- a Myrant service to those who care -- good luck!

Don't Flinch: Interrogation Dues

If you've the chops, here's a book excerpt and a powerful interview with Fear Up Harsh's author/soldier -- recommended listening.

Fear Up Harsh by Tony Lagouranis and Allen Mikaelian was the most human, disturbing, confrontational US military Iraq War account of the year, and that's a sobering thought given the clusterfuck of books on the subject that hit the shelves (and my reading table) in the past 12 months. "Something really bad happened here" -- understatement of the decade -- is what baby-faced U.S. Army interrogator Lagouranis was first told in his initial briefing at Abu Ghraib, and so begins this snapshot of the ordeal: for Lagouranis and his notion of self and God and country, for the 'detainees' and prisoners in his grasp (and worse still for those others 'worked on'). So begins this harrowing insider's account of perhaps the grossest "miscalculation" of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Rice new foreign policy paradigms, post 9/11.

Forced by circumstance, duty and the call of his commanders (and Commander in Chief) to think and act in ways once unthinkable, Lagouranis was soon under direct orders to join forces with his fellow soldiers to terrorize detainees and prisoners with increasingly abusive psychological tactics -- "fear up harsh," indeed. "If I'd gone ahead and cut Khalid's fingers off, where would that have led? What else would I have been capable of?" -- this is one of our new veterans of an unprovoked, preemptive war confronting the worst instincts of himself, of our tactics, our country's use of terror to wage a "war on terror." Under constant mortar fire themselves and trapped in the hellish hotbox complex that had once been Saddam's most infamous torture complex, Lagouranis and his countrymen used all means at their disposal to extract "information" from their brutalized, disoriented (and, Lagouranis acknowledges throughout, often innocent) Iraqis, settling into a methodical daily ruthlessness he ultimately found intolerable. It's the banality, the utter wrong-headed stupidity of these tactics ("...The result was that we were just inept. It was so typical of the army that is was laughable...") that rings loud and clear, alongside the wrenching depravity and desperation of our new national policy. It seeps deep, deep under the skin, into the marrow; what more don't we even suspect about what's being done in our name?

Hence, this book: essential reading for every American citizen, particularly those most likely to refuse to do so and most likely to support such policies, sans an ounce of Lagouranis's courage and patriotism.

Get Flocked!

Fave new sf and prehistoric novel of the year: James Robert Smith's The Flock, the high-octane killer novel from our own 'Hemlock Man'!

Technically, The Flock surfaced in the summer of 2006, but I didn't sink my teeth into it until after Marge and I moved into our new digs in Windsor (in fact, the hubbub of the major life change that culminated in the move kept this book off my reading table for months), so it's on my 2007 list, and long overdue some attention on the Myrant forum.

It's Blackwater vs. tribal prehistoric birds -- the carnivorous Pleistocenian phorusrhacid Titanis walleri -- in the wilds of Florida, and it's a hoot. I've been a fan of James Robert Smith's writing longer than almost anyone on Earth outside of his immediate circle, having read much of his short fiction since the late 1980s (and back in the Taboo years, as an editor scouring Bob's submissions; I think I paid Bob for his first pro sale, for that matter, which I can also say about novelist Tom Sniegoski and a few cartoonists). This, his first published novel, is superficially in the Jaws and Carnosaur mold; if it's ever adapted to film, that's how it'll be taken, no doubt. But that misses the point, really.

But what Bob accomplishes here (and the aspect that will be toughest of all to capture in any other media, save perhaps comics if it's ever adapted to that medium) is persuasively steeping the reader in the mindset of a pack animal's culture, ecology and literal pecking order amid life-altering conflict and crisis, and he does so with straightforward, yet always imaginative, efficiency. To my tastes, Bob's accomplishment ranks up there with my favorite Robert F. Jones adventure novels (Bloodsport, Slade's Glacier, The Diamond Bogo, etc.), but with (yum, yum) monsters. It's the unwavering intelligence, insight and empathy for the feral intelligence and ferocity of his predatory creatures that places The Flock amid my fave reads of 2007. I read a lot of fiction, little of it sticking to the mental ribs, but The Flock delivered and will be one of those I revisit down the road, for sure. Give it a read, you won't be sorry!

[Note: Bob did his homework! Florida indeed was the home of the Pleistocene giant flightless raptor Titanus walleri, which paleontologist Pierce Brodkarb described as "larger than the African ostrich and more than twice the size of the South American rhea", and which Alan Feduccia speculated "probably arrived in North America from South America during or slightly before the Ice Age, crossing over the Central American land bridge" (both quotes from Feduccia, The Age of Birds, 1980, Harvard University Press, pp. 105-106).]

Next installment: Zdenak Burian, Joe Hill, G. Michael Dobbs's Escape, Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's Lost Girls, Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters, Jon Savage's Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture and Jodi Picoult -- more fave books of 2007!

Halloween Horrors:
A Feast of Faves from Franju, Bava, Roeg, Marins and More!

John Totleben, XQB, my ertswhile Swamp Thing compatriot and longtime friend, circa 1978

Flashback time!

I've been enjoying flashbacks to my own comics college years via the photos old Kubert School classmates like Tom Foxmarnick have been sending in response to my appeal on behalf of Bill Schelly's upcoming Joe Kubert biography. What a blast from the past it's been!

While photos have been zinging Bill's way from a lot of XQBs, Tom has really shared a lot of old memories amid this exchange, and it's been a great treat to savor the pix from thirty years ago. Man, we were a scruffy bunch, but what a time it was! Makes me even happier about my ongoing experiences at the Center for Cartoon Studies, where a new generation of cartoonists are carving out their own paths.

I've also been chipping away at all kinds of freelancing of late, including writing about my friend Neil Gaiman for a book project Chris Golden invited me into about three weeks ago, and a bit of illustration work.

Among the latter is a spot of work for my old amigo John Rovnak's upcoming relaunch of his PaneltoPanel comics and graphic novel retail site; here's what Cat (aka Cayetano Garza) did with one of the black and white 'button' graphics I worked up for PaneltoPanel, which bodes well for Cat and I collaborating on more work in the future.

That said, I've also been pulling together a few more notes for the promised Halloween Horrors posts, and here's two barrels worth, in your face --

A few more fave horrors to consider for your Halloween viewing, folks:

* Mario Bava's I Tre Volti Della Paura (translation: The Three Faces of Fear, 1963) stars the great Boris Karloff in what was at the time a new high in adult portmanteau horror films. An modest international hit in its day (though not in Italy, where it was ignored), released in the US by American-International Pictures (hereafter AIP) as Black Sabbath, I Tre Volti Della Paura in its original form was a far more challenging and carefully-mounted three-story anthology exercise than the version my generation grew up with at drive-ins and late-night TV broadcasts. Thankfully, it's the original version that's now on DVD, and is among the greatest Halloween treasures available this year...

AIP re-edited the film extensively, rearranging the order of the three tales to no good effect (except to postpone the appearance of Karloff in the vampire tale "The Wurdalak" for the final story slot) and in fact gutting the story "The Telephone" completely by removing all references to lesbianism, rendering it senseless. AIP also removed the final shot of the film, which I won't give away here -- among Karloff's personal favorite screen moments of his career!

Should you watch this, you should be screening the original Italian version, Bava's director's cut, if you will, which restores the trio of terror tales to their correct placement, building cumulatively to a truly satisfying horrific climax. Michele Mercier is the young woman plagued by "The Telephone" in the first tale, set in contemporary Rome, setting the stage for the terrors to come in suitably restrained style; as Tim Lucas notes in his fantastic book Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark (2007), "The Telephone" established many of the templates subsequent gialli adhered to, in its way as influential a gialli as Bava's Blood and Black Lace (another of my all-time favorite films).

Trick or Treat: Here's three faces of fear at the window -- you scared yet?

Mark Damon and Boris Karloff star in the second tale, "The Wurdulak," a medieval slice of invented Russian folklore in which a wandering patriarch warrior (Karloff) returns to the family fold and infects his brood with a strain of vampirism which preys only upon its own. This is a gem of the genre, introducing many motifs (the faces at the window, the child ghoul/ghost, etc.) central to most of Bava's subsequent works. Finally, Jacqueline Pierreux dares to pluck a ring from the finger of the dead medium she worked for as a nurse, and is duly haunted by "The Drop of Water" in a tour-de-force of orchestrated visual horror sure to entertain and stir a shriek or two.

Cut for decades from all US versions, restored at last! Eugenio Bava's prop of the severed head Karloff unveils -- which, oddly enough, was central to AIP's original ad campaign!

Unless you count Bava's delirious pepla Hercules at the Center of the Earth/Hercules in the Haunted World (1961) as a horror film, this was Bava's first color horror film, and as such as seminal a work as Bava's official directorial debut, the black-and-white masterpiece Black Sunday (1960). Bava's innovative and always imaginative use of color shaped the genre in its wake, which has infinite relevance to color comics, too -- in fact, I always thought Richard Corben's color comics owed a vast debt to Bava's work. Bava's cinematic universe thrives on the unreal and artifice, and many devices contemporary 2007 audiences ironically might consider 'phoney' in this CGI-dominated era are central to his art. He often created visual splendor, uncanny atmosphere and entire universes out of next to nothing, embracing the unreal and hyper-real (like the grotesque face of the dead medium in "The Drop of Water," carved by his sculptor father Eugenio Bava, whose special effects and cinematography credits stretch back to the beginning of Italian cinema).

Let yourself go, and open your eyes to what these films played like when originally experienced over 40 years ago -- savor I Tre Volti Della Paura!

* It doesn't have to be Halloween for me to go on and on about George Franju's masterpiece Les Yeux Sans Visage/Eyes Without a Face (1959) -- it is, without a doubt, one of the most strangely poetic and absolutely lovely horror films ever made. It is also among the most chilling and disturbing. I once urged my wife to see it with me; she hated it, and though she felt it was silly, she loathed it because it repulsed her so. Lunatic that I am, I love it -- I love it like few other films. It sings to me, a sad, sorrowful, alluring song, via its images and sounds and movement and uncanny icy manner. It begins in desperation and ends in the sweet escape of madness, precise and yet as elusive as the fleeting memory of a dream upon awakening.

I first saw it as around the age of 12 or 13 on our local TV station (WCAX-TV Channel 3 out of Burlington, VT) on The Late Show, in its slightly cut and dubbed US version The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus (US release: 1963, co-featured with the Japanese/American coproduction The Manster aka The Split, 1962). I had seen the movie trailer for The Horror of Dr. Faustus/The Manster double bill in a theater as a mere lad, and that alone had almost traumatized me, as had the coming attractions for The Vampire and the Ballerina, Roger Corman's The Tower of London and The Flesh Eaters. That preview having scorched my brain cells, my anticipation further fueled by the images and review in Castle of Frankenstein (best of all '60s monster zines), I was ever watchful for a chance to see Franju's film, and once it arrived, I seized the opportunity.

Per usual, The Late Show was broken by commercials and I watched the film alone, in the family front room, with the lights out and the volume low so as to not wake anyone else in the house -- and the spell Franju's odd film cast is one I have never, ever shaken. The crass, blaring commercials only emphasized the alluring fragility of the soundtrack, juxtaposing stark naturalism (the sound is crisp, clear, punctuated by stretches of near-silence) with judicious use of Maurice Jarre's insidious musical score, and the grace of the visuals. Rarer still, WCAX evidently hadn't screened the print, as they did show the complete US version, which -- though it had been trimmed slightly -- was pretty strong stuff for late-night TV, circa 1967 or '68. I later saw a more complete version of the film on French Canadian television, which was another awakening experience as I realized the footage I was seeing in the surgery scene was going beyond what I had seen before.

When I see the film today -- as Marge and I did on the big screen at Dartmouth College's Hopkins Center in 2005, my first experience of the film in a proper theater, and via its current restored uncut print -- I am immediately back on our couch in Duxbury, VT, watching the film for the first time that fateful night. It's of course more complete, more vivid now, when I revisit it -- but it's one of the few films that upon every revisitation, I am thrust back in time and again experience it as if it were new, fresh, a first sighting. I have context now I didn't have then: I have since caught up with most of Franju's other films, including his first (more about that another time); I know Eyes Without a Face was Franju's second feature, that he was co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française and an award-winning documentarian, and I've managed to screen all his documentaries at one point or another (including his loving ode to George Melies). I have familiarized myself with the other films screenwriters Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac had a hand in, from Henri Clouzot’s Diabolique and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo to tracking down English translations of at least two of their novels. I love it all the more for that, and with 40 years under my belt since, I savor the lyric, unflinching beauty of the film all the more when I see it again.

I don't even have to see it, really -- if I just hear the opening strains of Maurice Jarre's theme to the film, I'm there again, in that darkened room, seeing it for the first time --

Jarre's ominous, sleek music plays over the titles, which unreel from the POV of a car driving a dark country road by night, the spidery tree limbs shifting in the headlights. A fretful woman (Alida Valli) is driving, with what appears to be a body in the back seat, tightly wrapped in a buttoned-up trenchcoat, its face hidden by a pulled-down hat. She stops, and clumsily drags what we now recognize as a young woman's body out of the car and drops it into a canal. Cut to a distinguished surgeon (Pierre Brasseur) pontificating to an audience on some radical new surgical transplant technique -- the “heterograft.” Moments after, the police call upon him to accompany them to police headquarters to identify a body: he says it is that of his daughter. We are shown nothing, but typical of black-and-white horror films, the dialogue is ripe with forensic dread: her face has apparently been disfigured by an auto accident (some time in the past?), but something is suspicious: the facial wounds appear fresh and are surgically precise, as if cut with a scalpel.

We follow the doctor home. The reflections of tree limbs on the hood of his black car are as spidery as the whitened tree limbs splayed beneath the titles, in negative; even as a pre-teen, watching a less-than-razor-sharp TV broadcast, these details registered. The doctor's demeanor is still cold, aloof; Valli is there, attending to him -- and they both attend to a young woman (Edith Scob) in a locked bedroom upstairs, on the uppermost floor. She is laying face down on her bed, depressed, unhappy; nothing can console her. This is the doctor's daughter, and once we see her face -- or rather, the lovely, opaque feminine full-face mask covering her own face, upon the doctor's insistence, with the tender attention of Valli's nurse urging the young woman to comply -- the dream/nightmare begins in earnest.


As the strains of the musical theme swell anew, we see Valli stalk a young woman in the streets of Paris. With her plastic raincoat, her pensive manner, face and eyes, Valli -- female lead of Carol Reed's The Third Man, later the domineering instructor in Dario Argento's Suspiria -- makes for an unusual predator. At this point in my young life, only horror movies had touched upon the then-forbidden theme of lesbianism (Dracula's Daughter, Claire Bloom in The Haunting, etc.), and Valli seemed to be seeking prey -- for herself? For -- ?

Like a waking dream, Eyes Without a Face moved -- moves -- slowly, deliberately, with cruel precision; as cruel as that of its infamous surgery sequence, in which we watch a woman's face methodically removed.

But it is Edith Scob's dance-like performance that indelibly burns Franju's film into the memory. Eugen Schüfftan's cinematography makes her a radiant presence, adorned in her her iridescent white gown and inexpressive mask (but, oh, her eyes, her eyes!), drifting through her purgative ordeal as ethereally as the doves that flit about her in the film's final shot.

Alas, this film isn't for all tastes. Bluntly stated, it's too stately a film in its pacing for many contemporary viewers. As one of the CCSers put it after we screened it, "Eyes Without a Face wasn't as multi-layered as I'd hoped it'd be, it was just kinda, 'welp, gotta cut off this face fer my daughter, I'm evil, and mean to dogs, I wonder if that'll come back to bite me....'." Now, I could counter with the film's reassessment after being so long ignored and maligned -- it was castigated upon its release, like most genuinely innovative and transgressive horror films -- but all that has changed with time. I could cite plenty of kindred voices in the mainstream these days --

-- J. Hoberman's 2003 Village Voice review

and Terrence Rafferty in The New York Times reflect the current critical view --

-- but I needn't call in the troops; cinema is, after all, a purely subjective experience for all of us.

For me, Franju's film (like those of Mario Bava) is all about atmosphere and imagery, eye and ear, an evocation of a dreamlike time and place, not narrative per se, though it's necessary to note Eyes Without a Face was among the most influential films of its era, right up there with the Hammer Films one-two punch of Curse of Frankenstein and Horror of Dracula (1957/58), Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1959), and Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960). But like those pioneering movies, Franju's creation must be considered -- experienced, if possible -- in the context of its time.

Seeing Eyes Without a Face any time in the '60s/early '70s was a revelation, meshing the stately grace, pace and visual care of Jean Cocteau with frightfully contemporary and dispassionate reinvention of the venerable 'mad scientist' horror archetypes. Seen then, it's deliberate narrative pacing was compelling in and of itself, a policier oddly ridiculed and subverted by its vivid horrors, its uncanny poetry.

It was a key influence on all who followed, and impacted my generation of horror film lovers in more ways that I can count here. It was Franju who pioneered the fusion of horror and art films, making all that followed possible -- a fact as prominent practitioners as Clive Barker, Edward Gorey (Eyes Without a Face was Gorey's all-time favorite film!), David Lynch, Guillermo del Toro, and others have cited again and again.

However, the current generation of viewers have grown up with the films Eyes influenced, all of which amplified its most obvious effects -- from its almost immediate contemporaries The Head and The Brain That Wouldn't Die (shot in Tarrytown, NY in 1959, released by AIP in 1963) to prominent 1980s-90s opuses from Clive Barker's Hellraiser to John Woo's Face/Off, cable TV series like Nip/Tuck and countless graphic forensic crime programs, Euro-sleaze like Jess Franco's Faceless (a direct remake of Franju's film), all building upon the heavy art/horror/sex spin (for its era) from Europe in the early '60s (e.g., The Awful Dr. Orloff, The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, Blood Rose, etc.) and '70s revamps (like the grim Mansion of the Doomed, which swapped face-removal for eye transplants, a film Stan Winston leaves off his career filmography!). This places any older horror film, Eyes in particular, retroactively in the shadow of all that followed, good and bad, and in the 'c'mon, scare me/gross me out' game most horror films/fans savor, an older film seen only in the context of the "NOW" is usually a diminished experience.

Still as horrific as ever it was: The tracing of the crayon on the young woman's face in preperation for the cutting, the methodical process coldly observed, the lifting of the skin from the skull -- images from the central setpiece of Franju's Les Yeux Sans Visage (1959)

The leisurely pace of Eyes is instrumental to its dread, just as similarly 'slow' pacing is critical to Roman Polanski's Repulsion, David Lynch's Eraserhead, etc. Many of my all-time favorite films -- the ones that really affected me, deeply -- are what I call 'trance' films. They mesmerize, slow one's own pace, are meditative experiences -- and while I could glibly summarize any Ingmar Bergman film just as Eyes was dismissed by one of the CCSers (who is, by the way, one hell of an artist and storyteller, among the best!), it would not change the power of Franju's masterpiece.

If one can slow the world for the necessary 90-120 minutes to steep oneself in the experience of the 'trance' films -- like Eyes Without a Face -- the experience is haunting, disturbing, devastating.

(Note: the Criterion release of Eyes Without a Face features photos I contributed to the gallery, hence the 'thank you' I earned -- as you can tell, I really love this film).


* Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963) from the novel The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, starring Julie Harris, Richard Johnson, Russ Tamblyn and Claire Bloom, is my amigo Joseph A. Citro's all-time favorite ghost movie, and still considered among the best horror films ever made. Like Franju's Eyes Without a Face, this is a hypnotic film, though it's more in accord with American audience tastes: its characters are more demonstrative and active, as a film it isn't as deliberately icy in nature. Seen with in the appropriate venue -- sans interruptions of any kind -- The Haunting still casts a powerful spell, raising real goosebumps at least three times.

It's what you don't see that chills in this excellent, evocative adaptation of the novel Jackson wrote while living in Bennington, VT, which remains (next to her classic short story "The Lottery") the best-known of her works, but also the best modern ghost novel of the 20th Century, the yardstick by which all others are measured. Robert Wise cut his teeth as editor and director under producer Val Lewton at RKO in the '40s, and was part of Lewton's creative braintrust behind Lewton's powerful 'horror of suggestion' gems like The Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, The Leopard Man and -- directed by Wise -- Curse of the Cat People and The Body Snatcher. Along with fellow Lewton veteran Mark Robson, Wise became one of Hollywood's premiere mainstream directors, with films like West Side Story, The Sound of Music, The Sand Pebbles and The Andromeda Strain among his most popular hits, but his mastery of the Lewton principle was never better expressed than via his atmospheric adaptation of Jackson's novel.


The Haunting is dated in many ways, particularly via Russ Tamblyn's 'daddy-o' hipster dialogue (which Tamblyn resurrected for his Twin Peaks character of Dr. Jacoby) , but Claire Bloom's lesbian psychic was unusually frank for a studio film of this time (and remains "unpunished" for her sexual preference -- rarer still!), and Julie Harris's lead performance remains among the best of any '60s film, much less '60s horror film. Richard Johnson plays the dedicated psychic investigator, precursor to countless paranormal researchers and ghostbusters to follow; Johnson, of course, is best known to gorehounds for his turn as the voodoo-obsessed mad doctor of Lucio Fulci's Zombie (1981).

Be sure to check out the original version -- not the abysmal Jan de Bont 1999 remake -- and enjoy!

Other favorites:

* The Call of Cthulhu (2005) is the most faithful adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's work ever brought to the big screen, care of the H.P. Lovecraft Historic Society. As in Manitoba filmmaker Guy Maddin's films (e.g., Tales of the Gimli Hospital, Careful, The Saddest Music in the World, etc.), this is a 'faux silent' film -- presented as if it had been produced the year Lovecraft wrote his famed short story "The Call of Cthulhu," 1926. Very cleverly and stylishly done, with limited budgetary means and effects (miniatures, stop-motion animation, etc.) and silent-movie intertitles -- no worries, there's also a great musical score. Essential viewing!

* Nicolas Roeg's physic thriller Don't Look Now (1973), starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, has been much imitated (you'll see how once you've seen the film) though it was almost buried when the production company completed this uncanny, almost sui generis drama in tandem with the similarly genre-challenged The Wicker Man (another favorite, natch). Thankfully, the star power alone of Sutherland and Christie led to this being picked up by Paramount for theatrical release, indelibly marking those of us who saw it -- though it's impact was soon drowned out by the blockbuster success of The Exorcist at the end of that very year. Like Walkabout and his first collaborative directorial effort Performance, Nicolas Roeg's distinctive approach to storytelling here weds its perfect complement in its source short story by Daphne deMaurier (author of Rebecca and the short story that inspired The Birds). Roeg's 'fragmented reality' vision of the universe is the ideal methodology to exploring and illuminating the dread nooks and crannies of psychic experience -- we, the audience, essentially experience the psychic visions of the protagonist as he experiences them, and share his uncomprehending rush to -- ?? This is also a truly adult horror film, in that its characters and their relationships are fully realized, dimensional, and strongly felt, as is their world and their plight; thus, the horror of the climax is more potent than that of the typical '70s genre exercise. We care about this couple, their loss, and their fate.

* A genuinely rare slice of '60s cinema that fused fringe movies, Brazilian carnival culture, EC-style horror comics, Catholicism gone mad, and bizarre philosophical rants was Jose Majica Marins's (writer, director and star) At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul (1963)! This was Marins's first film, introducing to the big screen his mad undertaker character Ze do Caixao (US name: Coffin Joe, coined by Something Weird's beloved honcho Mike Vraney), a sort of "Crypt Keeper" type in search of the "perfect woman" to be his wife. Marins and Ze do Caixao went on to become a pop culture star in Brazil: radio, TV, comicbooks, movies, stage, and even pop songs -- Marins did it all. This was the first true horror film ever made in Brazil, and it's surprisingly graphic and sacriligious for its time. Check it out -- IF YOU DARE!!

* The first great political horror film of the sound era was Abel Gance's 1937 J'Accuse! (aka That They May Live, 1939, the cut US theatrical release). Gance's stirring remake of his 1919 WW1 classic (which D.W. Griffith admired and said "wrote history with lightning") expands the silent film's fantasy climax -- in which the dead of WW1 march on the living -- into a passionate anti-war drama, with which Gance (with the foolish optimism of a poet) hoped would prevent what became WW2. Alas, mere weeks after J'Accuse opened in France, the Third Reich had occupied Gance's native country and the film was banned by the Nazis and the French gov't. This is a stunning film; note many of the walking dead are indeed veterans of WW1. Recommended co-feature: Joe Dante and Sam Hamm's "Homecoming" (2005) from Showtime's Masters of Horror TV series, the film that had 'em standing and clapping for five minutes in Italy in 2005! What if the dead soldiers from the Iraq War awoke from their 'sleep' -- and voted? Amazing slice of agitprop horror from screenwriter of Batman Sam Hamm and vet 'monster kid' director Joe Dante (who wrote for Famous Monsters of Filmland and Castle of Frankenstein monster zines in the '60s, and since his directorial debut co-directing drive-in gem Hollywood Boulevard and solo-directing Piranha has made The Howling, Gremlins and Gremlins 2, The 'Burbs, The Second Civil War, Innerspace, Matinee, etc.).

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Happy Halloween, one and all!

Sorry About Being Offline....

...but my CCS duties and prep for the coming weeks -- along with ongoing work finishing up a short western comic story I'm writing and drawing for the SPX-debuting CCS student comic project Dead Man's Hand -- has cut my computer time to a minimum this week. I'll do better next!

(My own fault, though 'fault' there isn't; it's all catch-up in part for enjoying myself so much with the weekend away with Marge and our amigos Mike and Mary -- pix here, on Mike's blog.)

I've also been plunging every other free moment into my reading of Tim Lucas's Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark, which is absorbing as any book I've read this year. I diverted time from all this & that tonight to enjoy a long-overdue phone chat with Tim.

Now, off to bed -- have a great Thursday, and catch you here later today or early tomorrow AM.

"I Now Can See..."

Ah, the pinkeye is at last fading; this is the first morning since Tuesday I've awakened with just a slight itch in the orb instead of gunkathon deluxe. What a relief! Still keeping the eyedrop therapy going, but nice to literally have light at the end of the ol' eyeball.
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Blur Volume 1 is in hand, with the initial orders already shipped (and my first to Canada -- hey, Bob, and thanks! -- going out this AM). I'm really happy with the book, and plunging into the book-formatting of Volumes 2, 3 and 4 with the high from Volume 1's arrival feeding the work.

If you'd like to support this ongoing archival project, please place your order for the first volume this weekend -- it's the best way to support my creative life, and ensure a lasting series of volumes preserving my writing, artwork and comics continues.

To those who have already ordered Volume 1, thanks for your support! It means the world to me.

I know my returning to work on Tyrant and new comics is all that many desire from me, but this new phase in my life is falling into place, piece by piece, and Blur is a vital piece in this stage. Please, support this effort, if you can; I can promise you solid reading in return, and assure you Blur brings me a major step closer to getting more new work out, as well.

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As it does to other creators and their projects...

Foremost among those fellow authors in my thoughts this week are my good friends Tim and Donna Lucas, whose lives have been turned upside-down by the long-awaited delivery of their new book, Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark.

Personally satisfying as it might be, my little box of Blur doesn't hold a candle to what Tim and Donna are punchdrunk on today: two truckloads of the Bava book arrived yesterday, and Tim posted this photo (taken by Donna) of himself and the motherlode of Bava books straining Tim and Donna's dining room floor. Here's hoping it holds up!

Actually, here's hoping Tim and Donna hold up -- the enormous task of shipping the books lies ahead. From my own experience with Taboo and Tyrant in the old days, I know well the weird fusion of giddy satisfaction and exhaustion such a process entails -- but I never dealt with as physically oversized a tome as the Mario Bava book. Good luck, Tim and Donna!

As one of the anxious recipients of the book (more than one copy: I've prepurchased copies to donate to both the Center for Cartoon Studies Schulz Library and the Bissette Special Collection at Henderson State University's HUIE Library), I'm eager for the day my own copy arrives, but hey, Tim and Donna, pace yourselves and take care of yourselves in the days ahead.

Tim and Donna announced the joyous news on the Video Watchblog (always great reading), and there's

more photos, news, info and the purchase links are here, at the Bava book blog!

Congratulations, Tim and Donna, and much love from the Bissette hacienda on this momentous weekend...

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The very real economic crisis upon us -- predicted by many economists since 2001, and emblematic of the US at every level (has any US President ever racked up such an enormous national deficit?) -- has finally "supplanted terrorism as the gravest immediate risk threatening the economy...," though note the credit risk is untethered from government spending in the survey.

It shouldn't be: as above, so below.

Have a great Saturday and weekend; I won't be posting tomorrow.
Road trip!

To Mean Widdle Kids Everywhere...

Here ya go -- knock yourself out this morning.

Or knock the block.

You can indulge your best (blow cars to save pedestrians) or worst (toast citizens, dogs, vehicles) instincts, or both by just blowing up the whole damned city. Left click to intensify the sunbeam.

Compliments of Rick (Roderick) Bates.
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Time is running out on the pre-ship pricing for Tim Lucas's new book Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark (shipping August 21).

Here's the link to get this 12-pound, illustrated with 1000+ images, 760,927 words (equivalent in length to 10 average-length novels) full-color wonder for half-price (yep, half the retail price: $120 plus shipping till Tuesday, thereafter $250 plus shipping) for a few... more... days!

So make your move --

-- and have a great Saturday...

Flights of Fantasy: Bava & Stardust

There's only one week left for the special preorder pricing on Tim Lucas's stunning new book Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark (shipping later this month), and I urge you to take advantage of this opportunity while and if you can.

Right now, Tim and Donna are still offering the pre-publication price of $120 for Mario Bava: ATCOTD until the expected delivery date of August 21. This is the perfect opportunity to acquire the book (for yourself, or as a gift) at less than half its publication price, which will be adjusted to its retail price of $250 (plus $10 US postage or $40 postage outside the US) as of August 21st. Don't wait!

The details and ordering link await you here (along with tons of other Bava imagery, art, trivia and delights), with the special pricing notice in Tim's "Thursday, July 19, 2007: Important Bava Book Announcements" post.

Tim and Donna have a pretty amazing auction at eBay right now, commemorating the release of the book with an eye-popping bevy of extras you have to see to believe.

For constant info and updates, Tim's marvelous Video Watchblog is the place to visit -- always worth reading in any case, particularly if you love the films, music and pop culture Tim and I do -- which is easily found every day at my fave links menu at right.

Don't wait -- this is literally a once-in-a-lifetime chance to own the definitive biography and overview of Bava's life and films at half its retail price! More on this tome later this month, when I curl up with my own copy and come up for air...
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My wife Marjory and I had a lovely evening out last night, catching Stardust (2007) at the local theater (The Nugget in Hanover, NH). Marj really loved the film, as did I, but that means a lot more coming from Marj -- I mean, as Myrant readers know, I'm a cineomnivore, willing and able to feast on almost anything that moves (and even that which doesn't, as my Andy Warhol DVD collection attests). Marj is far more selective and fussy in her tastes, and Stardust won her heart as fully as The Princess Bride did (I asked her en route to Ben & Jerry's afterwards).

Now, Stardust doesn't need my hoohah to promote the film. It's been and being ballyhooed as aggressively as any summer studio blockbuster

(if your computer has the chops and you have the necessary high-speed access, here's the studio's website for Stardust, folks; knock yourselves out).

There was much to savor, first and foremost for me the sheer joy of seeing the work of two old comics industry friends -- Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess -- brought so vividly to life on the big screen, sans the slings and arrows too many other film adaptations inflict upon their wellsprings. Congrats to Neil and Charlie; personal points of identification aside, it was among the most pleasurable nights in a movie theater Marj and I have shared this year, and for that we're both thankful.

The basics of Neil's and Charlie's creation are faithfully transposed to cinema, via Jane Goldman and director Matthew Vaughn's rather breezy screenplay. Youthful Tristan Thorn (Charlie Cox), unaware of his magical birthright (relayed to us via the film's vivid opener), vainly courts the vain Victoria Forester (Sienna Miller) in their village of Wall, promising to retrieve a fallen star for her which they see plunge into the deep woods behind the wall that borders their village. Beyond that wall, natch, lingers the Faerie realm in Gaimanian guise. In his quest Tristan finds the star in human form, Yvaine (Claire Danes), and high adventure. Unknown to both Tristan and Yvaine, she is being pursued by two other potential suitors: eager-to-assume-the-throne Septimus (Mark Strong), who requires the jewel Yvaine crashed to Earth with and wears if he is to be crowned king, and the witch Lamia (Michelle Pfeiffer), who needs Yvaine's heart to restore youth and extended life to herself and her two cackling sisters (oh, and, uh, once Septimus catches the heart part, he wants that, too, to achieve immortality and the crown).

The film is perfectly cast, and there were abundant pleasures there, too, from the engaging leads to the character bits inhabited by sage vets like David Kelly (the beguiling Irish actor most American viewers will recognize from his key roles in Tim Burton's Roald Dahl adaptation Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and 1998's Waking Ned, though he has over 80 onscreen roles in his pocket); Kelly plays the elderly ass-kicking wall guard, FYI. I quite enjoyed Melanie Hill as Ditchwater Sal, the gypsy-like sorceress who keeps Tristan's mother imprisoned, and Jake Curran scored for me as Bernard, the hapless peasant Lamia turns into a goat and Septimus drafts into his entourage; Hill played Annie Crook's ma in From Hell and is a familiar face on British television, while Curran is a completely new presence to me. One familiar face I was happy to see was Dexter Fletcher as First Mate aboard Capt. Shakespeare's aerial pirate ship. Fletcher first registered for this vet movie addict as Baby Face in Alan Parker's misbegotten Bugsy Malone (1976) and most vividly as Byte's put-upon 'boy' in David Lynch's classic The Elephant Man (1980). He was martyred in Nicola Bruce and Michael Coulson's memorable heroin-horror short Wings of Death (1985), a role which also informed his spin as the youthful Caravaggio in Derek Jarmon's Caravaggio (1986), though more viewers caught him in young hero mode in The Rachel Papers (1989). I knew he had survived the '80s -- he was Soap in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), which I also dug -- but it was an unexpected treat to see him in Stardust. This kind of thing is, after all, one of the primo pleasures of cinema, and Stardust boasts a great ensemble cast.

Best of all, though, is Michelle Pfeiffer in full-bore witch/bitch mode, right on the heels of her triumphant racist villainy in the unnecessary (the John Waters original is the better film) Hairspray (2007; Marj and I caught that two weeks ago, and had some fun with it). Pfeiffer savors her role as thoroughly as Angelica Huston did her very similar role in Nicolas Roeg/Jim Henson's adaptation of Roald Dahl's The Witches (1990); it's good to see her soar out of the doldrums of The Deep End of the Ocean, The Story of Us (both 1999), What Lies Beneath (2000), I Am Sam (2001) and White Oleander (2002), films she was always better than but couldn't transcend. Clearly Pfeiffer is stretching into new directions with these most recent villainous roles, and her glee is intoxicating. By turns cunning and catty, secretive and shrill, her Lamia rules the screen when she's on it and appropriately casts a shadow over the proceedings when she's off it. Any good fantasy film sporting witchery is utterly dependent upon the quality of its witch, and Pfeiffer delivers in spades.

But enough on that; what about Neil and Charlie? There are many differences between Neil's and Charlie's Stardust and the film adaptation, major (gone is the eloquent red-leaved tree, modeled upon Neil's friend Tori Amos) and minor (our hero Tristran is now Tristan, for the 'r' impaired); Neil and others have covered this ad infinitum online already, and that's not an issue for me. The film works beautifully on its own terms, as it should, and scores as one of the year's (and this current cycle's) best fantasies.

As most of you know, Neil and Charlie's Stardust was originally published by DC/Vertigo in 1997 as a four-issue "prestige" mini-series, and though it was a bit of a fish out of water -- these were illustrated novella chapter-books, really, not comics or a serialized graphic novel -- Stardust did well, winning solid sales and industry kudos and awards. DC/Vertigo collected and repackaged the whole in 1998 in complete hardcover and a trade paperback editions; thus, Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess' Stardust (Being A Romance Within The Realm of Faerie) (the full title) spilled beyond the boundaries of the direct sales and comics marketplace with style (mmmmm, that hardcover was bound in faux leather and featured all four of Charlie's covers and many sketches; the paperback and all subsequent trade editions featured new covers by Charles).

But wait, there is more, much more. When Charlie's beloved wife Karen suffered terrible injuries in an auto accident, Neil and Charlie and a bevy of artists (William Stout, Mike Mignola, Terri Windling, Bryan Talbot, Jill Thompson, Paul Chadwick, P. Craig Russell, Michael Zulli, Terry Moore, Linda Medley, Dave McKean, Jeff Smith, Trina Robbins, Steve Leialoha, Gary Gianni, Stan Sakai, Mike Kaluta, Moebius, Geoff Darrow, Brian Froud and a whole lot more) pulled together a special Green Man Press fund-raiser portfolio A Fall of Stardust (1999), which contained two chapbooks (the first by Neil, the second authored by Susanna Clarke) and a wealth of art plates.

Eight years later, DC/Vertigo published a new hardcover edition of Stardust sporting over 50 pages of new material.

All this and more is detailed on Charlie's own Green Man Press website, which is well worth a visit!

What's critical here, to me, is the steady collaborative solidarity Neil and Charlie have maintained over the decade.

Notably, the film credits -- onscreen and in all it's promotional materials -- its source as the book written by Neil and illustrated by Charles Vess. This is an almost historically unprecedented screen credit; we are a long, long way away from the era of Willy Pogany (see below), when illustrators were screen stars in their own right.

Of late, DC/Vertigo film adaptations have reverted to screen and ad credits more anonymous than those that adorned serial and movie adaptations of Golden Age comicbooks, a reversion unfortunately fueled in part by the highly-publicized decision of Alan Moore to self-exile himself and his good name from any further Hollywood productions. With the notable exception of David Lloyd's well-deserved credit on V for Vendetta, Alan's decision relegated the rest of his collaborators to the limbo of "based on the DC/Vertigo Graphic Novel" or somesuch. Good for DC/Vertigo, bad for the respective artists relegated to this limbo (note, however, this is not meant to villify DC/Vertigo, just to identify the issue at hand; remember, they published Stardust).

In fact, the exile of mere "illustrators" to this limbo of no screen credit is sadly emblematic of the 'creator rights' era of comics publishing, save for those key works that were wholly creator-owned and comics-creator originated (e.g., Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Crow, Fish Police, The Tick, etc.). Things are better than they were pre-1980, but the illusion that the creator rights battles have been fought and won is a pervasive and destructive one. When, in 1986, cartoonist Bill Wray adapted to comics the short story "Eight O’Clock in the Morning" by Ray Nelson (aka Radell "Ray" Faraday Nelson), published twenty years earlier in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, for the short-lived Eclipse Comics anthology Alien Encounters under the title "Nada," he arguably created something new: a collaborative work with new, unique elements. It was Bill Wray's adaptation, not the original F & SF pulp publication of the story, that brought Nelson's story to the attention of filmmaker John Carpenter, who loved it. Carpenter contacted both the writer's agent and Eclipse Comics to buy the rights to both and adapt them himself (scripting under the screen pseudoname "Frank Armitage") into the film They Live (1988).

Much to Bill's frustration -- and despite the fact he had introduced visual narrative elements unique to his adaptation that made it into the film -- in whatever role they played in negotiations, Eclipse Comics refused to acknowledge or concede Bill's role as a creative collaborator. Indeed, it could be argued that it was Bill's adaptation and art that made "Eight O'Clock in the Morning" desirable to Carpenter in the first place. Thus, Bill received nothing: no screen credit, no income, no nothing. This, from one of the first direct market publishers to tout themselves as "creator friendly" -- a sad precedent had been established.

The cover of the 1999 British hardcover novel edition (Headline), sans Charlie's illustrations; the comparative US editions were published by Avon (hardcover and paperback).

Now, Neil could have gone that route. Many writers would have, and many have.

Neil had, in fact, sanctioned the publication in 1999 of both UK and US editions of Stardust sans Charlie's illustrations

(but don't take my word for it, though I've referenced my own bookshelves and files -- it's all confirmed here at Wikipedia's entry on Stardust).

It's standard practice in the book industry to relegate illustrators to interchangeable, disposable components of the author's realm. I do not deplore this per se, as it is a practice that is utterly pragmatic and firmly established as a fair and legal precedent. In comics, this is far, far more problematic -- after all, the imagery/art in comics is essential to the narrative aspect of the form, and cannot be simply removed or changed without dire consequence or a significant impact (note, as a reference point, Paul Pope's delirious reinterpretation of Jack Kirby's Omac in Paul's issue of Solo) -- and how many illustrators can lay proprietary claim to the author's work they've illuminated? Precious few.

I've illustrated my share of books, and whether it's my ink-slinging or another artist's, or no illustrations at all, the novels, non-fiction and short stories I've illustrated by writers like Joe Lansdale, Joe Citro, Nancy Collins, Rick Hautala, Doug Winter and, yes, Neil Gaiman neither live nor die by my role in a specific edition. Do the filmmakers behind the various Edgar Rice Burroughs characters owe money and screen credit to J. Allen St. John or Frank Frazetta? Neither, asserts the Burroughs estate (and Burroughs in his lifetime), and that's the norm -- reasonably enough, especially given the plethora of illustrators individual authors (consider Edgar Allan Poe alone in this context) have been graced with over generations.

Still, there are exceptions. Amid the current boom in zombie films, comics, music and literature, how many know the name of Alexander King (do you? I thought not). Few, damned few -- King was the artist who codified almost all the zombie imagery the pop culture still thrives upon, when he illustrated (back in 1929) eccentric W.B. Seabrook's influential best-seller The Magic Island, which introduced the concept (and word) 'zombi' to most of Western civilization. It was King's illustrations that were instantly plundered -- as the only available reference point, really -- for stage plays, pulp illustrations and the first zombie movie, White Zombie (1931). All hail, Alexander King!

More to the point, I cited Willy Pogany earlier in this post. This Hungarian-born early 20th Century illustrator was so firmly lodged in the public's mind's eye and had earned such prestige as a fantasy illustrator that soon after feature films began to "borrow" his distinctive imagery (e.g., the 1927 Douglas Fairbanks vehicle The Thief of Bagdad comes to mind, lifting from Pogany and other famed fantasy illustrators of the era), Hollywood came knocking on his door.

By the time sound became a fixture of mainstream motion pictures, Pogany had begun working in a number of artistic capacities in Hollywood,

establishing a precedent others would tap in decades to come.

If you've never heard of Pogany, or seen his work, you owe it to yourself to rectify that situation; Wikipedia offers the quickest inroad

and here's Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr.'s excellent lavishly-illustrated online bio and biblio of Pogany's career.

I cite Pogany because:
(a) Pogany is the precursor to the more active collaborative relations and spirit between filmmakers and artists/illustrators/cartoonists initiated (read: resurrected) in the 1970s by the likes of Alejandro Jodorowsky (via his doomed Dune production), George Lucas and Ridley Scott (via Alien, which spun off Jodo's collapsed Dune to involve Jean Giraud, Chris Foss, Ron Cobb and H.R. Giger in its production designs).
(b) Pogany is among the magnificent pantheon of classical fantasy illustrators Charles has built his own vision and career upon.

Now, Neil knows both these things, as does Charlie. Neil knew he was fortunate enough to be working with the Willy Pogany of his generation, just as Charlie felt privileged to be working with Neil.

In short, Neil -- who is, after all, the veteran DC/Vertigo author whose track record (and extremely skillful diplomacy) with the publisher fueled the contracts he and Charlie negotiated and signed a decade ago; and who is, after all, co-producer of the movie adaptation of Stardust -- recognized and has properly honored Charlie's intrinsic worth and importance to Stardust.

Stardust wouldn't exist without Charlie -- or, if it did, it would be a very different work.

Neil's ongoing good relations with all involved ensured both he and Charlie would be involved in and credited for their role in Stardust's creation, where others who went before them were not.

Kudos to Neil, kudos to Charlie, and it couldn't have happened to a nicer pair of fellows.

Enjoy Stardust, one and all, and have a great Tuesday...