I’m Just Saying, Is All.

The Cranberries’ song Zombie, a mid-nineties hit, would have been a lot cooler had it not been about The Troubles in Ireland and instead been about The Troubles with the Living Dead.

But you see, it's not me, it's not my family.
Eat your head, eat your head, they are biting,
With their stench and their lurch,
And their lurch and their mung.
Eat your head, eat your head, they are coming.
Eat your head, eat your head,
Zombie, zombie

Not everybody is Irish. Everybody fears zombies. Simple as that.

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Quote of the day:

“Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.”
--Mark Twain, “Life on the Mississippi.”

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I miss super-villain deathtraps. Cheese-laden though they were, they combined ingenuity with visual flair, capturing the purest heart of comic book madness.

There should be a deathtrap renaissance. Fans might dig it.

At least one of the traps should revolve around a theme of air hockey.

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Marvel Comics is tying into the soap opera Guiding Light. The soap will have a character get super-powers and mention the comic in episodes, and a few Marvel comics will have Guiding Light stories in them.

It would work so much better with Wife Swap.

“Sue Richards, mother of two and full-time adventurer with her science-hero family in New York City, is changing places with Alice Dolphy, a fun-loving junk food junkie from Tallahassee!”

Well, y'know, assuming that comics were real and stuff.

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The expression “a crimp in your style,” meaning something has hindered you, should have an opposite expression. I suggest “a chimp in your style,” meaning that things are going great.

“That raise put a chimp in my style, man!”

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National Novel Writing Month kicks off in about a week. To prepare, I absconded with a stack of “how-to-be-writin’-books-and-suchlike” tomes from the public library. After a few days of scanning through them, I have reached a conclusion about books on writing.

To paraphrase Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, I poop on them.

I’m very, very tempted to review the books as a NaNoWriMo countdown. They’re not all entirely useless, just most of them. Then there was John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, which, while giving a few very fine points, also went out of its way to intimidate the reader and stress the need for perfection in all aspects of writing. Ugh. I drew a bit of stone-hearted comfort in the knowledge that Gardner’s own fiction falls well short of his standards.

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A recent post by Booksteve reminded me of a movie that every lover of cheap cinema should check out: Roger Corman’s production of The Raven. Not only did it inspire Dr. Strange, the movie itself is a riot.

Roger Corman, King of the Hacks, made a string of Poe-inspired movies in rapid succession. The common themes meant he could re-use sets and even shots, thereby saving tons of cash. This was a typical Corman idea. The Raven was one of the last Poe movies, and he had fun with it.

The cast was incredible. It starred Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Jack Nicholson, and Boris Karloff. Ye gods. To see the traditional actors Price and Karloff against the Method Acting madness of Nicholson and Lorre renders the movie worth the price of rental.

It didn't take itself at all seriously--the story begins with a raven speaking with the voice of Peter Lorre. How cool is that? Very. The Lorre-bird tells sorcerer Vincent Price that he had been transformed into the bird by an eeevil sorcerer and he needed Price's help. The movie gets loopier from there. And yes, it has a woman named Lenore.

The Corman Poe movies were hurried, slap-dash affairs, and they were all the better for it. The very last one, The Terror, took this approach to the extreme. Corman had Karloff on contract for one last day, so he shot a few scenes of Boris doing assorted things. Later, Corman and a group of assistants (including a very young Francis Ford Coppola and Jack Nicholson) shot a bunch of other footage around the Karloff footage, making the story up as they went, creating a glorious mess.

Hell yeah.

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After decades of avoiding them, I've started reading The Legion of Super-Heroes. A reboot, plus Mark Waid, got my attention. So I bought the first two trade paperback collections.

Danged if I don't like it. Waid plays into the zeitgeist very well. He is a clever, clever bastard. I'll write a longer post about it soon.

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I would kill a man right now for a sweet, sweet doughnut.