100 REVIEWS IN 100 DAYS

Thought I'd forgotten about this, eh?  Nope, my plate's been pretty full, but I've been accumulating a few reviews, just in case I fall behind.  I'm going to start posting them next week.  Every day I have Internet access, I will post a review.  That will go on for 100 days, as there are 100 stories in THE CENTURY'S BEST HORROR FICTION, one for every year of the 20th Century.  I'll try to do some research to show where each story first appeared, and if at all possible, get a picture of the author.  That's going to be hard, considering how obscure some of these guys are.

As a result of this new project, a lot of my other posts will be suspended.  Cool Shit will definitely go away for a while.  (Not too big a loss.  I've just been talking about the same books, anyway.)  Comic book reviews will also fall by the wayside for the most part.  Forgotten Comic Books and Everyone's Got One will also stop appearing in that time.  The only exception I'll make is C2E2 coverage.  Starting Monday, we'll be balls deep in the horror classics of the last century.

Anyway, on Wednesday we'll have a review of the new comic book adaptation of AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS.  On Thursday will be Cool Shit (provided I'm impressed enough to write one).  On Friday is Everyone's Got One, which will be entitled FUCK THE LAW.  Then, the horror!  The horror!

FORGOTTEN COMIC BOOKS #3: SCARAB

It happened during the infancy of Vertigo. THE SANDMAN was far from over. Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon were wowing people on HELLBLAZER. ANIMAL MAN, DOOM PATROL, and SHADE, THE CHANGING MAN were still going. Joe R. Lansdale’s reimagining of JONAH HEX had just ended. PREACHER and TRANSMETROPOLITAN weren’t even twinkles in their creators’ eyes yet. Exciting things were happening in the world of comics.



And a little book, an 8-issue miniseries by the name of SCARAB, flew under everyone’s radar and was quickly forgotten. Not by me, though.


How to describe SCARAB? Imagine if John Constantine was a superhero, and that’s about as close as you can get. Scot Eaton’s mind-blowing artwork reminds one of the way things used to be during Delano’s run on HELLBLAZER, or Moore’s run on SWAMP THING. It really changes the way a reader reads a comic book.


The story? It comes from a little-known British writer, John Smith, who had only been known to Americans at the time from a fill-in story on HELLBLAZER. I wish he’d gotten a few more issues in on Vertigo’s flagship book, though, he was that good.


SCARAB concerns itself with Louis Sendak, an old man who used to be a Golden Age DC superhero (although he has no official DC history; this is his first appearance) called Scarab. He is the guardian of a doorway in his house that leads to the Labyrinth, a place where William S. Burroughs and Lewis Carroll would have been at home, brain-fucking each other for eternity. Decades ago, his wife Eleanor disappeared into the Labyrinth, and he’s been looking for her ever since. However, in his old age, he’s given up, and he no longer wears the mantle of the Scarab. All of this changes when the Sicari, a ghastly creature from a long line of assassin sorcerers, seeks to find his home in the Labyrinth, but first he must find it.


As a result of this struggle, Louis is brutally attacked by the Sicari, who then rushes into the Labyrinth. Louis drags his broken and bloody body to the Scarabaeus, the device that transforms him into the Scarab, and healed, he chases the Sicari down just in time to save Eleanor from dying at the assassin’s hands, but not in time to save her spirit.


Now, the old man stands vigil over the youthful body of his wife, who still breathes, but her spirit is lost in the Net, a world of orgasmic power that not even Timothy Leary on his biggest LSD binge could describe. I can’t pile enough accolades on Eaton’s artwork. He does things that the human mind wasn’t meant to envision.


The same holds true for Smith’s storytelling. When relating Eleanor’s power-surge through the Net, he hits the proper stream-of-consciousness beat. He does even better when describing Louis’s dilemma. What can he do to save his wife? What can he do to save himself?


With a little help from the Phantom Stranger, he figures out a way to transform his weak and elderly body into what it once was in his prime. He also becomes the Scarab more often, fighting villains that would have Batman shitting out his entire digestive system. I think even Superman would have a difficult time getting his mind around this stuff. Constantine could handle it. Swamp Thing, too. But none of the superheroes could.


Take, for example, the 2-issue arc, “Moveable Feasts.” In this little tale, all of the men in a little North Carolina town named Whitehaven get involved in a self-castration cult before drowning themselves in the ocean. The women are left behind, impregnated by nothing less than the great god Pan, even little old ladies who couldn’t conceive and little girls years before their first menstruation. The only man left behind, a guy who broke his leg and was therefore stuck in the hospital, is a raving drunk, angry that he missed his chance at honoring Pan by cutting off his dick and drowning himself. Oh, and after a vicious struggle, Pan raped him, too. Yes, he was impregnated, as well.


Or how about the garden in “Paradise Defiled?” People who have lost all hope on earth can sometimes wander into a torture garden, where a fallen angel sculpts their bodies into infernal works of art.


And should I even mention “The Scream over Hiroshima?” I will, if only to say that 50,000 people dying all at once in the blink of an eye will undoubtedly taint the spiritual world . . . .


Stuart Moore, the editor of this book, stated that SCARAB was an experiment of sorts. Vertigo is a horrific place to be . . . but it also falls under the DCU. Is it possible to have a superhero book in their Vertigo line?


This was his answer. John Smith’s deviant, insane ramblings combined with Scot Eaton’s rip-your-soul-out-an-inch-at-a-time artwork. They planned for eight issues, and if there was enough of an interest in Louis Sendak’s world, then there would have been more.


Sadly, while reader response was good, there simply weren’t enough readers. SCARAB disappeared almost as quickly as it appeared. You won’t find a trade collection of this anywhere, and if you’re lucky, you’ll find the single issues.


It’s worth it, if you do. No comics experience should be without it. You’ll look at what comics are capable of with new eyes, I guarantee it. Besides, you want to know what happens when Louis finally finds Eleanor’s spirit. You want to see the joining that happens. You want to see how this mind-fuck of a book ends.


Don’t let SCARAB fall by the wayside.

FORGOTTEN COMIC BOOKS #3: STRAW MEN

When I was a very young comic book reader, I bought STRAW MEN #1 from a bargain bin. I thought the cover looked pretty cool, and I liked THEM!, so I thought it would make for good reading. Surprise, surprise, it turned out to be much more than a good read; it was fucking awesome. Writers Michael Vance and R.A. Jones wrote about things that comic books didn’t really go into in those days. Alan Moore was just starting to stretch the idea of what comic books could do. It was very adult stuff, but also super-intelligent and very socially relevant.



I had to have more. Unfortunately, no matter how far and wide I shopped, I couldn’t find any subsequent issues. Time moved on, years stretched, and so on and so forth. Fresh out of college, I learned about the INTERNET. I also learned that Mile High Comics had an online store, and they had just about everything. That included issues 2-8 of STRAW MEN. The entire series was finally in my grasp, and it was just as kick-ass as I thought it would be. Even more.


Contained within these eight issues is a story that stretches across decades. It all begins in a shit-splat Oklahoma burg, Gate, and the Experimental Atomic Plant One. This is where Dr. Jon Stonewall conducts his experiments in an attempt at genetically engineering the perfect human being, a person free of mutation and sickness. He’s got pretty good reasons for doing this, considering his son was born with a defect that made his left hand look like a jumbled mess.


Craig Stonewall, the aforementioned son, is the protagonist of this story. In his father’s eyes, he’s more than just physically defective. Jon sees Craig as a weakling, someone who stagnates in whatever misery he feels he’s in rather than doing something about it. He wants to make a man out of Craig more than almost anything else.


And this is very clear to Craig, who harbors a lifelong hatred of his father as a result. However, Jon is right about most of these things, even though Craig denies it. Yet Craig’s hatred with Jon is not unwarranted, either. His father will go to any lengths to ensure that his will is done, and that includes manipulation and murder.


Even more so, it includes the formation of political and religious organizations. Jon is the puppet master behind the Primacy Party and the Primacy Church (despite being a confessed atheist). Both have goals to bring human beings to perfection through scientific experimentation. Both also give Jon an incredible amount of support through money to fund said experiments. In charge of both organizations is the good-intentioned Robert Hughes, who believes this is what God wants, and he’s got his eye on the White House . . . . But Jon knows how willful his puppet can be, so he makes sure he has something with which to blackmail Hughes: an orgy that Jon orchestrated just so he could videotape the good reverend in a compromising position.


Have I mentioned that Jon has no trouble in experimenting with his son’s pregnant wife? In fact, that’s how the real story begins, with Carol in labor, and Craig speeding toward the EAP1, which has now been converted to Gate’s medical center. Craig worries in the waiting room, afraid that his own mutation might come out through his son. He has no idea that his father had been using Carol, who had actually consented through her own fear of defect (due to an earlier miscarriage before she met Craig, her uterus is no longer normal), to perfect his radiation treatments.


Long story short, Carol dies giving birth, and Jon kidnaps Craig’s son and tells Craig that the child also died. However, Craig finds out the truth and comes after his father . . . only to be too late. The child has been whisked away (we later find out to Canada), and in order to throw Craig off the trail, Jon frames him for murder. This also works in Jon’s favor, because the doctor he had murdered is the only other person who knows that the child did not die.


Which brings us to Jon’s instrument of destruction: Weeper. He is truly a fucked-in-the-head villain, as fucked in the head as they come. When we find out about his past, it’s no wonder. During the late ‘Forties, he was captured by Chairman Mao’s goons, and he was tortured for several months. Starved. Beaten. Raped. Repeatedly. “When is a man a woman?” the torturer asks. As he pulls his pants down and gets ready to rape Weeper for the first time, he shouts, “Any time I want!” After months of this, he is driven insane. When American soldiers rescue him, he looks like a concentration camp survivor, and he thinks in terms of song lyrics. By the time we meet him, his favorites are songs by the Doors and “I Am the Walrus” by the Beatles. He decides he is the Lizard King, that he can do anything. The man is absolutely vile and heartless, shockingly so for the period in which he was written.


Craig runs from Gate, and after many years of trials and tribulations, he falls in with a circus and starts making money off of his deformity in the sideshow. Soon, his closest friends are freaks, in particular a dog boy by the name of Growler. After a while, he even starts believing his father’s story about the death of his son.


However, in his absence, something very pivotal happens to Jon Stonewall: he is told that he has cancer. Malignant. He doesn’t have long to live. After years of experimenting with radiation, the disease has finally caught up with him. So, he comes up with a brilliant plan, very Machiavellian, and with the help of Weeper and several government connections, he sets it in motion.


It all begins when Craig sees the cover of TIME with Jon on it . . . and Craig’s son?! In the article, Jon claims to have genetically engineered the child to be perfect in every way. He’s finally achieved his lifetime goal.


Well, sort of. Nothing is what it seems, not even Jon’s plan. You see, he has a back up plan, and it’s pretty fucking grim. It leads to one of the most heartbreaking endings in comic book history. It hurts almost as much as the ending of EX MACHINA.


That’s a lot of territory to cover, and there’s a lot more I haven’t told you about. My favorite part is a speech Jon gives concerning his own childhood in issue 6. He tells a story of the good ol’ days, of happiness and cheer, of loving parents, and all of that. As he says these things, the artwork of Rob Davis shows us the reality, of how Jon constantly got his ass kicked by bullies, and how his ostracized father (a self-confessed Communist) brought his entire family down, which caused Jon’s mother to abandon them. It’s an ugly little story, and it explains a lot about how Jon became the man he is.


Jon Stonewall is, in fact, the most interesting character in the book. He has lofty, noble goals. When you get right down to it, he wants to save the human race from its own faulty genetic code. You can’t get nobler than that. But he is so underhanded and evil in his methods that one can’t help but think of him as a villain. This kind of complexity just wasn’t in comic books back then. Well, nothing mainstream, anyway. And like I said, Alan Moore was just starting to change readers’ minds with his own work at the time.


If there was any justice in the world, this book would be remembered as a major turning point in comic book history. It would have been canonized and filmed and everything. Writers like Garth Ennis and Warren Ellis would list it as a huge influence on their own work. Vertigo would have found a way to reprint it in a trade. As it is, I am the only person I know who remembers this book.


Good luck finding it. I bought the last copies from Mile High (unless they’ve restocked, somehow). I don’t even know if you could find it at C2E2. If you do manage to find it, I guarantee that the hunt is worth it.

FORGOTTEN COMIC BOOKS #2: OUTLAW NATION

I find myself in a strange quandary on this one. I thoroughly enjoy the series I’m about to mention, yet I can’t recommend it to you. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Perhaps I should explain.



You know, Jamie Delano is really an under-appreciated writer. He is most recognizable for his groundbreaking work as the first writer of Vertigo flagship HELLBLAZER. He’s also received a lot of accolades for such wonderful books as 2020 VISIONS, CRUEL AND UNUSUAL and NARCOPOLIS. Once upon a time, he was your go-to guy for awesome social commentary through horrific tales and futuristic terror. Why doesn’t he get more work these days? His name should be mentioned in the same breath as Gaiman, Moore, Ennis, and so on.


Perhaps he was jinxed by the series I want to talk about. Anyone else out there remember OUTLAW NATION? It’s mostly about the state of American politics in the days just before 9/11 happened, but it’s also about the art of writing and what it sometimes means to be a writer.


Why is it that people in countries like England and Ireland are really good at writing about America? Okay, get this: OUTLAW NATION has at its heart the Johnson family, a group of nigh-immortal lunatics who have somehow become the biggest fugitives in America and at the same time are actually in charge of America.


We’ll get to that in a moment. Let’s talk about Story Johnson, the protagonist of this unusual tale. He’s been kicking around for about 100 years. Originally a Brit himself, he’s been wandering around America for most of his life, collecting stories about his outlaw cousins and publishing them as cheap paperbacks under the name of Drifter. During the ‘Sixties, he goes to Vietnam to get the real story. Instead, he almost dies in a helicopter crash at the end of the war. Everyone in the world thinks he’s dead, even his own family, but instead he’s holed up in the burnt out wreck of a plane, smoking a shit ton of weed, fucking a native girl (whom he thinks of as War Baby) and writing the great American novel.


Sounds like fun, right? Well, just as he finally hits those final keys on his typewriter, the ones that spell out THE END, his Vietnamese common law wife steps on a forgotten mine in a rice field. In his drug haze, he believes that by finishing this million-word novel about the Vietnam War, he has killed his beloved War Baby. This drives him to swearing off writing forever and ever, and now that he’s got nothing left for him in ‘Nam, it’s time to go home to America.


Here’s what he doesn’t know: his former hippie lover, Sweetcakes (who would rather you call her Ruth these days), gave birth to his child, Sundance (who would rather you call him Sonny), about whom he knows nothing, not even of his existence. And Sonny? Well, he’s got problems of his own. A lifelong fan of Drifter’s work, he has just discovered that he’s a Johnson, and he leaves his pregnant wife, Rosa, with his mother so he can find the Place, which is pretty much considered a headquarters and hideout for the Johnson family.


Who is in charge at the Place? The original Johnson himself, old Asa, who is learning that he isn’t quite as immortal as he thought he was. No, the old bastard is dying, and the only thing keeping him alive is the tender care of his nurses and constant shots of Johnson juice, the latter of which is derived from the blood of his relatives. (He keeps a lot of them locked up at the Place, since he needs these transfusions often.) His ghastly, pox-infested, claw-fingered form rests in a sterile environment, from which he conducts the business of the world. In other words, you know how people keep saying there’s a man behind the man when it comes to the President? Asa’s that guy.


His enforcer is his son (and Story’s half-brother) Evelyn, more commonly known as Kid Gloves, and if there has been a crazier, more depraved bastard in comics, I don’t know of him. Jesus de Sade from PREACHER is a self-indulgent brat compared to Kid Gloves. He’s allergic to women’s sweat, so those of the female persuasion are rarely injured by his cruelty (he just can’t be bothered with them.) However, it’s open season on men, and his appetites are vicious. He’ll fuck any guy, no matter the personage. More often than not, his targets are brutally murdered afterward. In one gruesome scene, he makes a man blow him and as he cums, he shoots the guy in the head, then just sits there grinning. He does some horrible things to a small town sheriff who erroneously thinks he can fuck with Kid Gloves. In another scene, when he shoots a guy he thinks is Story and later finds out is just some swamp drifter, Kid Gloves forces the helicopter pilot to go back so they can pick up the corpse and abuse it out of a warped sense of revenge.


You see, Kid Gloves is the first to discover that Story is alive, and the pale psychotic bastard, who is next in line to inherit everything from Asa, sets out to kill his brother before his father finds out that his prodigal older son has returned.


All that shit I just talked about? That’s just the first two issues. I won’t go into a lot of the rest. If that’s not enough to hook you on the story, I don’t know what will. Maybe the Devil Kid. All right, so in Story’s wanderings, he comes upon a teenaged kid on the run from the authorities. Why are they after the young lad? Because he wrote a story for class about a gun that begs him to take him to school. The teacher turned him in to the principal, who decided the boy was too dangerous to have wandering around. In turn, he called the cops. Now the Devil Kid (as the media labeled him) has partnered up with Story (and is it any wonder that the former is a Drifter fan?), and they soon join forces with the boy’s mother, Bad Momma, as they do their best to evade the cops and Kid Gloves and just about everyone else in the world except for Sonny. (Did I mention that as soon as Story finds out from Ruth about Sonny that he wants to find his son? Sorry, there are a lot of things going on in this book, and it’s hard to keep track of everything.)


Political intrigue follows. Social commentary on creative endeavors follows. And don’t worry, there are plenty of tits and violence to keep one interested. How could I not recommend this series to you?


Yeah, that’s the thing. Remember how I mentioned 9/11 earlier? This book was written at the end of 2000 through to 2002. Considering how many people didn’t really care for social commentary criticizing America around September of 2001 and beyond, readership of this book dropped off. Vertigo canceled it before its time. They were kind enough, however, to give Delano one last issue to finish up the story.


And that’s where the problem is. The ending is very, very unsatisfactory because there is a lot stuffed into it. Not only that, but some of the most important parts of the ending happen off stage and are explained in brief after the fact. For example, a lot of Johnsons die in a key moment, but the key moment is explained later. In another instance, a major character is shot in the back of the head, and we only see the results. We don’t even find out for sure who does the deed. (It was probably Kid Gloves. Probably. But I can’t confirm that.) Lastly, two major villains are offed off stage, and we’re told about it by one of the characters later.

Oh, and the cover for the final issue gives away the ending.


So . . . if you’re looking for something with resolution, I guess you have it, but it’s done in such a slapdash way that it’s almost not worth it. If you’re one of those the-journey-is-better-than-the-destination kinds of people, on the other hand, go for it. I recommend OUTLAW NATION whole-heartedly.

I realize that in this tirade, I have not given the artists enough time. I feel like a douche just tossing this in at the end, but what the hell? It’s better than nothing. The two Gorans, Parlov and Sudzuka, work wonders with the art throughout the series. Even if the writing got sloppy near the end, the penciller and inker never faltered. And they’ve got balls, those fellas. Some of the things they showed Kid Gloves doing were just nasty. And I will never forget Kid Gloves in the red-white-and-blue bikini with hand grenades in the cups for as long as I live.


And of course there is cover artist Glenn Fabry. Anyone who has seen his work on HELLBLAZER and PREACHER will never forget it. Here, he does an excellent job except for when he gets silly. There are just some ridiculous covers every once in a while, covers so silly that it detracts from the importance of the work within. Aside from these rare instances, it was a hell of an attractive book to see on the racks.


Anyway, I guarantee you’ll be able to find these books. If anything I said in this installment of Forgotten Comic Books has appealed to you, hit those long boxes in the middle of the store. You’ll probably find the entire run of the series, and you might even get ‘em for a buck an issue. Don’t look for it in trade, though. Remember, OUTLAW NATION has been forgotten . . . .

FORGOTTEN COMIC BOOKS #1: EL DIABLO

Welcome to another feature here at Tales of Unspeakable Taste that I want to try out on you guys. Every once in a while, an awesome comic book comes along, but no one pays much attention to it, and it fades from memory. I want to tell you about a few of them.



The first book to get this treatment is EL DIABLO from the early ‘Nineties. It ran for 16 issues (not counting an appearance in SECRET ORIGINS). And in case you’re wondering, no, it’s not related to the WEIRD WESTERN TALES hero, El Diablo. That’s what I thought at first, which is why I bought the book. In fact, as the story goes, editor Brian Augustyn originally wanted to update the old WWT hero, but get rid of the original gimmicks that made the first character so intriguing. He got writer Gerald Jones and artist Mike Parobeck to tackle this task.


They did the smart thing and eliminated the connection to WWT immediately. This El Diablo would have nothing to do with the paralyzed avenger of the west. This guy would be a costumed crime-fighter (big surprise there) operating out of a shitsplat Texan border town.


Surprise, surprise, Jones and Parobeck managed to throw together an important book that takes on controversial issues.


Meet Rafe Sandoval. He’s a city councilman looking after a particularly bad neighborhood populated with Mexican Americans. He tries his best to take care of his people, but others in city hall view him as the token Mexican, and shit just doesn’t get done. The injustice of it all comes crashing down on Rafe, so he does what any respectable DC character would do: he puts on a costume to fight the crime he can’t handle at his day job. He becomes El Diablo.


Why the devil? An odd name for a hero, right? According to SECRET ORIGINS #45, young Rafael Sandoval heard a story from his father about the old country, where very bad people hung around a very bad cantina. One day, a handsome rich man arrived for a few drinks, and everyone was his friend so they could mooch off of him. Two men decided they wanted all of his money, though, so when he left, they followed him out of town to murder him. The man turned out to be the devil, and he tore the would-be murderers to pieces. The next day, all of the money the devil had spent in the cantina had vanished, and the sum was so considerable that they went out of business. “So you see, Rafael?” asks old Mr. Sandoval. “The Devil, he helps God sometimes, to punish the sinners.”


And things are never simple. EL DIABLO was published in a time when people were starting to question the nature of being a superhero. Long before KICK ASS came along, Jones decided to show what an ordinary guy trying to be a vigilante is really like. El Diablo doesn’t always win. Sometimes, he gets his ass handed to him. He fucks up his quips during fighting. And later, he remembers something he should have said instead that would have been much cooler.


But the most interesting parts of this book are the political moments. When city hall, where Rafe is the only non-white politician, decides to hold a parade for a Mexican holiday, they get all the details wrong. When Rafe tries to correct them, they ignore him because this parade is not about Mexican pride, but about symbolism. Then, despite all of this, they try to get him to be the face of the parade, to remind the people that all of these crusty white people give a shit about them.


And when El Diablo is not hunting down drug dealers, he’s trying to quell the race riot that breaks out because a man is going around the barrio murdering children. The police don’t make much progress, and the people decide that it’s because this killer is merely murdering Mexican children. If he went after a WHITE kid, well . . . .


But the true heart of this book is when El Diablo goes after a coyote who sometimes abandons his immigrants when the law finds him. More often than not, his wards wind up dead. It’s a heartbreaking story, folks. Maybe if some of these Minutemen could read this book, they’d change their mind about how much they hate Mexicans.


The one questionable part of EL DIABLO, though, is the addition of Los Diablos, the group of teenagers who help El Diablo out whenever he needs it. Yeah, it sounds like adding Robin to Batman, which was pretty lame. But here it actually works out because these kids aren’t just gophers. Sometimes, they lose faith in El Diablo. They fight with each other often over what their mission is. And despite all of this, they’re actually pretty effective. Without their help canvassing the neighborhood, they would have never found the child killer, for example. And without them, the race riot would have been ten times worse.

In short, this could have been a very important book in the history of comics. While Rafe Sandoval is far from the first Hispanic hero in the DCU, the topics tackled in his book should have been a hotbed of controversy. In fact, I wonder what would happen if this book had been published now. All in all, not bad for a couple of white guys (Jones and Parobeck, that is). Sure, they fucked up their colloquial Spanish a lot (and one look at the letters column would show you how many readers wrote in to correct them), but they got the heart of the matter right, and that’s really the most important thing.

Why did the book last a mere 16 issues? As usual, it didn’t have enough readers. But those who did peruse its pages every month were very loyal. In fact, EL DIABLO was supposed to have been canceled after the 12th issue, but DC believed in the book so much that they gave Jones and Parobeck a few extra issues to close out the storylines. So, while there could have easily been much more, all loose ends were tied up. It has a satisfying conclusion.


If you can find these issues, you should give 'em a try. It’s worth the hunt to spend some time with Rafe Sandoval, Mayor Tommy, liaison Dixie, and of course, Los Diablos.