Electronic Pulp

A couple of decades ago, if you strolled by the little wire-rack shelves of paperbacks in the local drug store or supermarket, you'd probably see garishly-painted covers depicting grim-faced muscular men, blazing guns, exploding helicopters, and general mayhem, along with trade dress along the top that identified the book as number # in the adventures of Mack Bolan, The Executioner or Nick Carter, Killmaster or Remo Williams, The Destroyer or one of the other Man of Action series that proliferated from the '60s through the '80s.

Those books, along with the Harlequin Romances flanking them, were the paperback junk food of that time. In many ways, they were the evolution of the bloody-pulp heroes of the '30's. (Not surprisingly, reprints of those same pulp heroes' adventures, repackaged with spiffy cover art, were being sold alongside them.) Moreover, they were artifacts of an era in which far more people read novels. Along with the mystery lovers, and the science fiction fans, and the folks who read literature and bestsellers, there were ordinary guys, men who frequented bars and drove trucks and watched pro wrestling, who read books. For entertainment. And these were some of the books they read. Evidently in great quantities, because they were all over the place, clogging used book stores and book exchanges as readers tore through them and discarded them.





My cousin Lee Goldberg got his literary start in the 1980s writing one of those series, under the pseudonym Ian Ludlow. And now he has returned to his roots, as he and his TV writing partner Bill Rabkin have started THE DEAD MAN, a series of sinewy novellas starring brawny sawyer Matthew Cahill, written primarily for the ebook market that is supplanting mass-market paperbacks.

The first book, which I finished yesterday, is a traditional superhero origin story for Cahill, who dies in an avalanche and is resurrected by supernatural means. He picks up an infernal nemesis (who likely had a hand in his resurrection), the ability to determine who is about to commit evil, and a compulsion to do something about it with his trusty axe. The series features the dense boluses of sex and gory violence endemic to the genre. And just to show that the authors don't take this stuff too seriously, there's a running gag: The narrator takes random incidental characters, folks who will never appear again, and tells us the sordid details of their lives. (After illuminating one young woman's perversion, the narrator comments, "But you'd never know any of that looking at her and are probably sorry that you know it now.")


Some of the subsequent books will be written by Lee and Bill; others will be written by guest authors, including Lee's uncle Burl Barer.

I'm not sure if the return of the Man of Action genre will encourage the working-man audience of those books to return. More likely the audience will be fans of pulps, tough-guy literature, supernatural thrillers, and the nostalgic.

As for me, well, the authors decided to name Cahill's former employer after our former family business, B. Barer & Sons. So the word "Barer" appears about 10 times in the first book. One way to get me to read a book is to repeatedly mention my name.

Starlog Logs Off

The downturn in magazine publishing has taken another victim. On Wednesday, the publisher of Starlog, the 33-year-old slick magazine about science fiction films, TV and print (in that order), announced that the magazine will cease print publication and become a Web-only magazine.

Although I haven't bought or read an issue of Starlog in years, it's one of those seminal publications (like ORIGINS OF MARVEL COMICS or THE VISUAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCIENCE FICTION) that fired my enthusiasm and shaped my interests when I was a kid. I picked up my first copy (the seventh issue, I believe) in the summer of 1977. That's when a magazine that had started surfing on the crest of Star Trek fandom and had bobbed with movies such as Logan's Run hit a monster wave: Star Wars, and the slew of SF movies that followed. I took the issue with me on a family road trip to Southern California, and read it cover to cover a few times. It had a photo spread on Star Wars (when I loaned the issue to a friend, he cut out all those photos, much to my chagrin.) It had a cover feature on stop-motion animation, something I hadn't thought much of before. It featured an interview with Harlan Ellison, which led me to start reading Ellison's books; he became one of my favorite writers. It featured ads for novelizations of something called Doctor Who; that was my introduction to that venerable British SF franchise. In that issue, and in many issues to come, Starlog's combination of journalism and fannish enthusiasm hooked me.

I picked up Starlog's fits-and-starts comic book news spinoff,COMICS SCENE, and occasionally its sister publication FANGORIA (which started out dedicated to both horror and fantasy films, before the horror took over everything). I also picked up several of the Starlog imitations from other publishers, none of which could match Starlog's Methuselah-like resilience.

In the early '80's, Starlog took on a new dimension for me: A family dimension. I was surprised to see the byline "Lee Goldberg" on several articles. What were the odds of a Starlog writer having the same name as one of my cousins? Pretty good, it turned out; it was my cousin. On his blog, Lee discusses his own history with Starlog, one of his earliest writing gigs, and one that eventually led to his marriage.

I'd like to say that being related to the prolific Starlog journalist brought me derivative fame, fortune, and romantic luck. Actually, what it got me was a comp subscription to Starlog (until the publisher cut it off) and a rainbow-foil BRAINSTORM sticker that I put on the door of my dorm room at UCLA.

I also recall the convention Starlog put on in LA in the mid-eighties. I wrote a letter to the Starlog publisher with a critique of how the con was run. I got back a two-page, single-spaced typewritten letter from the publisher responding point-by-point to the criticism. (Didn't the guy have enough to do around the office?)

In recent years, when I picked up a Starlog on the newsstands (that is, when I could find it), I found less enthusiasm in it; it seemed to become more a forum for press releases than a font of fannish delight. Maybe it's because I was an adult, and Starlog would always be directed toward the adolescent or the adolescent at heart.

Of course, Starlog isn't gone; it'll still be around as a Web magazine. But it'll be one of zillions of Web pages, and could easily disappear in the crowd. We'll have to see if a leaner economic profile will help it continue to survive.

Frikken' Frak

Apparently the Associated Press has tired for the nonce of writing about how bad Hurricane Gustav almost was but wasn't, or how the Democrats are downplaying the news about Sara Palin's daughter even though the news agencies want to play it up. So they've turned to a long ago blog post from my cousin Lee Goldberg for a news item. Specifically, Lee wrote to praise original BATTLESTAR GALACTICA producer Glen Larsen for introducing the made-up curse word "frak" to the American vocabulary with that late-'70's series -- a word that caught on recently with the critically-acclaimed remake of Galactica. The reporter interviews Lee, interviews Larson (who complains about the remake), interviews folks connected with the new series, interviews "Dilbert" creator Scott Adams, and even interviews mystery writer Robert Crais and the art director at Tor Books.

Yes, the AP hurled its legendary news-gathering skills into chronicling the sociopolitical impact of a made-up "F" word. And yet, while they mention Lee's TV writing cred, they don't plug his books. Feldercarb.

Comic-Con 2008: The Rest of the Con

Okay, so I posted about preview night of Comic-Con International:San Diego; then have remained silent until now. Well, during the con I was too busy to post; and since then (a) I've been working like a dog; (b) I've been unpacking; (c) I've been working on uploading lots of photos, and the bulk uploaders on my laptop aren't cooperating; or (d) all of the above. (Anyone who's taken a multiple choice test knows: when in doubt, pick the last choice.)

Anyway, this con was one of the best San Diego Comic-Cons I've been to -- and I've been to 22 of them in the last 28 years. This despite the capacity crowd (it sold out before the first day of the con) and some unseasonable grey weather.



Thursday morning began with a blast of humor as I attended the Tiny Toons/Freakazoid panel. Along with Warner Brothers Animation stalwarts Bruce Timm, Paul Dini, Andrea Romano and MC Paul Rugg (the voice of Freakazoid), the panel featured my old friend John P. McCann, who was a writer/producer/voice actor on Freakazoid back in the mid-nineties. (John was one of two TV writer-producers at our wedding 11 years ago. I'll talk about the other one shortly.)








I didn't get a chance to talke to John, but we did get to catch up with his wife Joy, aka Miss Attila (see the link to her blog on the right margin).



I attended a spotlight on one of the guests of honor, photorealistic comics penciller Paul Gulacy; and found out that he could do a terrific Sinatra impersonation. Gulacy revealed that when he was drawing "Master of Kung-Fu" back in the pre-VCR days, he would attend martial-arts movies in grindhouse theatres, toting an audio tape recorder with him. After the flick, when he sat at his drawing board, he would play back his tapes of the fight scenes; and when he heard the kyaas and grunts and impacts, he could play the fights back in his mind and draw them.



Later that afternoon, we went to a panel on the upcoming RED SONJA movie. Red Sonja is a character with an odd provenance: Seventies Conan the Barbarian comics writer Roy Thomas based her on a character Conan creator Robert E. Howard had wrote in a non-Conan story, but inserted her into the Conan universe. She was fairly popular when she appeared in a two-part Conan story, but her popularity exploded in the mid-seventies when her fairly practical battle outfit (a mail shirt and leather hot pants) was transformed into the most impractical suit of armor in history: a scale-mail bikini that left most of her body exposed. In the eighties, the producers of the Conan movie made a highly forgettable RS movie with Brigette Nielson, minus the bikini. Later, when Marvel lost the license for Conan, it also lost the license for Sonja -- a character created for Marvel. Currently, Dark Horse has the license for Conan and Dynamite has the comics license for Sonja. Now, Robert Rodrieguez (of SPY KIDS, DESPERADO, and SIN CITY fame) is planning a new Sonja movie, inspired by the issues of SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN he used to read as a kid. Rodrieguez won't direct it; his assistant director on several projects, Doug Aarniokoski, will (because he's DGA and Rodrieguez quit that organization), with lots of collaboration by Rodrieguez. The actress chosen as Sonja, Rose McGowan (whom GRINDHOUSE viewers will remember as the lady with the machine gun on her stump), appeared on the panel with Rodrieguez. And the poster art they flashed showed that, yes, she would be wearing the bikini (although it's more of a tankini now).



We attended a panel put together by Entertainment Weekly featuring Jim Lee, Grant Morrison, Colleen Doran, John Cassaday, and Mike Mignola (fortunately, the room did not ignite from sheer talent); and finished off the day by visiting our comics writer friend who was holding court in the lobby lounge of a nearby hotel. He snapped this picture of us:



We started Friday out with the panel for BATMAN: BRAVE AND THE BOLD, the latest animated incarnation of the Caped Crusader. (I'm too tired to count all the animated series that have featured the Darknight Detective.) This one avoids the dark, brooding version of our hero; the producers rightly opine that the Bruce Timm-Alan Burnett series from the nineties did the dark animated Batman about as well as it can be done. Instead, this series takes the more cartoony version of Batman drawn by 40's to '60's artist Dick Sprang, and tries to do a lighter-hearted Batman that is still action-packed and not a total goofball. The footage shown looked great.




I somehow managed to get into Hall H for one of the most anticipated movie-project presentations of the con: WATCHMAN. (Amy wasn't able to join me; the 6,500 seat hall quickly filled to capacity.) 300 director Zack Snyder and artist Dave Gibbons introduced essentially the entire cast of Watchmen, most of them relative unknowns except for Billy Crudup (who was so good in ALMOST FAMOUS) as godlike naked blue guy Dr. Manhattan; and Carla Gugino (the mom from SPY KIDS, KAREN SISCO, and the topless parole officer from SIN CITY) as Sally Jupiter, the superhero stage mom with a dark secret. The cast was tremendously enthusiastic, and the footage shown truly looked ripped from the graphic novel.

Here's Dave Gibbons on the panel:



Here's Crudup:



And some other cast members.



That afternoon, I attended the Scribe Awards/Media Tie-in Writer's Panel, primarily because my cousin Lee Goldberg (who co-founded the tie-in writer's organization that gave out the awards) was on the panel. When I got to the panel, Lee was waiting outside with his cute daughter Maddie. He shared the panel with co-found Max Allen Collins, STAR WARS/DUNE author Kevin J. Anderson (who handed out gummy sandworms as a promo for his latest DUNE book), and veteran SF/tie-in writer Alan Dean Foster. Everybody took turns telling Foster how much they loved his STAR TREK LOG novelizations of the STAR TREK animated series in the seventies. (I loved them too.) Lee won an award for his Monk novel MR. MONK AND THE TWO ASSISTANTS (which the moderator mispronounced, twice, as MR. MONK AND THE TWO ASSASSINS).





Yes, Lee was the other TV writer/producer at our wedding. (And Maddie was there too, although she doesn't remember it now . . . )



Amy put on a costume and took part in a HELLSING costume photoshoot:





Then we hied ourselves to a local theater where Viz was screening the first BLEACH movie, BLEACH: MEMORIES OF NOBODY. The film was important to us for two reasons: First, when we were in Japan last year, the DVD of the film was just coming out; and we loved the Japanese announcer for the TV commercials who intoned -- with that odd cadence of one delivering lines in a foreign language -- the English words "Bleach! Memories of Nobody!" Second, the creator of the Bleach manga, Tite Kubo, attended the screening, as did several winners of an essay contest given by Weekly Shonen Jump, the mag that publishes BLEACH in Japan. As was explained at the screening, this was Kubo's first appearance in North America; and it was rare for creators of weekly manga features to venture abroad, because they have to produce a mind-boggling 19 pages of story and art EVERY WEEK. (Kubo's been doing that for seven years!) But the magazine allowed him to get ahead on the feature so that he could make this trip. The movie itself was fun, if primarily an excuse to allow each of the supporting characters in the strip to appear and show off his or her power.

Saturday began with an extra special treat: I was one of twenty winners of an online contest to actually meet Kubo, and get his autograph on a specially-prepared Bleach Shikishi (autograph board). Despite some logistical problems, I managed to get my autograph; and wished the smiling, Rayban-wearing, red-hair-dyed Kubo-sensei (in Japanese)a good time in America -- to which he responded, in English, "Thank you very much."




Amazingly, I then managed to get into another panel I had been looking forward to: one concerning the new comics anthology COMIC BOOK TATTOO, featuring stories inspired by the lyrics of Tori Amos. Ms. Amos herself was front and center in the panel, and was both articulate and entertaining, particularly when delivering imitations of her exasperated conversations with her English-accented daughter.






Getting into the Tori panel was particularly surprising because although I had secured seats in the room before the panel (by slipping into the Ralph Bakshi panel while Bakshi was waxing political -- "If you don't vote for Obama, you're crazy!"), I left it when I received a phone call on my cell from Seattle-based comic book writer/artist Mike Grell. Grell was doing sketches by commission at the con, and would take the cell phone number of the, er, commissioners. Thus summoned, I met him at his table at Artist's Alley, and picked up a beautiful sketch of Saturn Girl of the Legion of Superheroes (which Grell drew in the mid-seventies). I then fought my way upstream through the attendees who inevitably throng the dealer's room on Saturday; and still managed to score a seat fairly close to the front of the room.

(Interestingly, although publications such as the L.A. Times have bemoaned that the interest in comics programming at the con has been eclipsed by the movie blitzing, I noted that some of the hardest panels to get into were those aimed squarely at comics fans. I tried to get into some of Mark Evanier's comics history panels after they started, only to be confronted with a sign on the door of Room 8 announcing the room was at capacity.)



One of the best panels on Saturday was the one celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Legion of Superheroes, the ever-expanding band of future teen superfolk that has maintained a loyal fan following for decades. The panel included Paul Levitz (who wrote the Legion in the Seventies and Eighties, and is now president of DC Comics), Keith Giffen (who drew and plotted the Legion in the eighties), Mike Grell (discussed above), Tom and Mary Bierbaum (the married couple of Legion fans who wrote the comic in the late eighties), Geoff Johns (currently writing a Legion miniseries), and Colleen Doran (Legion fan and, often, artist). It's a joy to be in a room where everyone's so enthusiastic about the subject material.

Saturday ended with the Comic-Con masquerade, to which our friends Natalie and Sarah (who were in the masquerade) got us VIP tickets. (Unfortunately, the fellow "VIPs" behind us apparently took their status as license to talk non-stop.)



Here's some photos of our friends on stage:





On Sunday, we packed up our toys; had breakfast at Cafe Noir, down the street from our hotel, and hit the con for the last time. We attended a panel about the goth icon Emily the Strange (a merchandising juggernaut, with stores in Hong Kong and Tokyo),



one about Elfquest, the long-running (30 years) comics series which has been optioned by Warner Brothers for a film (the director was on the panel),





another on The Art of the Cover (moderated by Evanier -- the last of the 17 panels he MC'd);





and a last strike at the Dealer's Room before we said goodby to the con. (And the Con said goodbye to us . . . .)





Our last comics event of the evening was the movie we watched while waiting for the traffic to die down: HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY. It was a fun and visually beautiful movie, even if the paper-thin plot depended on supposedly brilliant characters doing really stupid things. (Mild spoiler: I am sick of fantasy movies in which the characters spend most of the movie trying to keep the magical macguffin the bad guy needs to take over/rule/destroy the world away from him; and then deliberately deliver said macguffin directly to the bad guy. Whatever happened to outwitting your opponent?)

That was it for another Comic-Con. Hope the next one is as good or better.

The Blog Rondelet

In her blog, Colleen Doran writes about turning Portugese comics creators on to Harlan Ellison's work by discussing the book HARLAN ELLISON'S WATCHING.

In his blog, novelist and comics writer Duane Swierczynski writes about opening a new edition of HARLAN ELLISON'S WATCHING, and finding a reference to my cousin Lee Goldberg.

In his blog, Lee Goldberg writes that he is disappointed with Duane Swierczynski's latest novel, and hopes that DS's next novel meets his expectations of the writer. This triggers a storm of comments about how and when writers (particularly those who do not yet have a reputation) are willing to give negative reviews to other writers -- one in which Swierczynski joins.

All we need is for Colleen to write about Duane, and (to paraphrase Darth Vader) the circle will be complete.

Blog Hero Team-Up

Back in the '70's and '80's, Marvel published a comic book called MARVEL TEAM-UP. The original idea was probably that all sorts of characters would team up with each other; but eventually the company took its best-selling character -- Spider-Man -- and featured him in every issue teaming up with other characters. This would (a) preserve the trademarks for characters who didn't have their own series and (b) theoretically give a sales boost to characters who weren't as well known as Spidey.

Because Marvel's heroes are a prickly bunch, the standard formula was that (1) characters would meet in a situation that made one or both believe the other was a crook or assailant; (2) the characters would brawl; and (3) realizing the mistake, the characters would, yes, team up and defeat the true evildoer.

Today's blogs feature a team-up of bloggers whose sites I frequent. My cousin Lee Goldberg blogs about the Book Expo which is being held at the LA Convention Center (site of next month's Anime Expo). Meanwhile, TV/animation/comics/everything writer Mark Evanier -- who has written some superhero team-ups in his time -- not only blogs about the same book expo, but talks about seeing Lee there. Contrary to formula, the two titans of the typewriter did not brawl when they encountered each other. To the contrary, Mark praises Lee as a "champion" because of Lee's campaign to alert beginning writers to the perils of vanity presses that market themselves as publishers.

Mark and Lee (and about 125,000 others, including Amy and me) will be at Comic-con International: San Diego next month. I've no doubt that if they meet there, they will continue to flout formula, and proceed straight to the team-up.