MIGHTY SAMSON

When I was a kid (and boy howdy, just how many of these blog posts have started out with those exact same words? I'm thinking about renaming this blog to "When I Was A Kid". But I digress....) there was a comic book entitled MIGHTY SAMSON. Published by Gold Key comics beginning in 1964, the series took place in a post-apocalyptic New York City, now named "N'Yark" by the handful of humans living there. Among the humans was the elder scientist/wise man Mindor (who was always drawn by artist Frank Thorne to resemble actor Anthony Zerbe), his oh-so-lovely daughter Sharmaine and the hero of the book, the Mighty Samson, a one-eyed, animal-skin-wearing super-strong man.

The series lasted 32 issues, which was a pretty good run for an original Gold Key title back in the day. It ended in 1982. The early issues featured stories by Otto Binder and artwork by Frank Thorne (yay!) and Jack Sparling (ugh!). Thorne's expressive, baroque, slightly rococo style was a joy to look at, at least it was for my young (and now old) eyes. But Jack Sparling's artwork, on whatever comic book he worked on, always struck me as ugly and unpleasant. Jack himself may have been one helluva guy but his artwork? Remember the movie MY LEFT FOOT? I think it was a documentary about Sparling's drawing method.

MIGHTY SAMSON was a rollicking sf/adventure series with Samson, Mindor and Sharmaine encountering various mutated beasties and tribes of other human survivors in the ruins of New York and the wastelands of the Eastern Seaboard. It was a fresh and exciting concept and I loved it.



Recently, Dark Horse Comics acquired the rights to once again produce a regular MIGHTY SAMSON comic book. The first four issues of the series have been collected in MIGHTY SAMSON: JUDGMENT (pictured above)  which I read the other day. The script by Jim Shooter extrapolates and expands the basic Samson set up by telling the story of two warring tribes of humans, one in New York City, the other in New Jersey. There's all sorts of political intrigue and power struggles along with bloody battles and the requisite mutated monsters. Into this conflict plops Might Samson who begins playing both ends against the middle and ends up in control of the New York tribe by the end of the story arc. Mindor and Sharmaine are along for the ride along with a number of supporting characters (good and bad).

The artwork by Patrick Olliffe is very loose and sketchy looking in a number of places. It's not bad but it's not Frank Thorne. I enjoyed reading MIGHTY SAMSON: JUDGMENT for the most part. It's a fresh spin on a venerable character and the story was well plotted and complex enough to keep me turning the pages. I didn't like it well enough to want to seek out other Dark Horse issues of MIGHTY SAMSON however. Nope, it just made me want to dig out some Gold Key issues of MIGHTY SAMSON (I have several)  and take a stroll down a disaster devastated and mutant monster populated memory lane.

TARZAN/CARSON OF VENUS

I picked up this beauty in a recent trade with a fellow comic book collector (thanks Nelson!). It's the Dark Horse trade paperback collection of the four-issue series TARZAN/CARSON OF VENUS originally published in 1999.

I'm a fan of both of these characters although I must admit I've absorbed much more material featuring Tarzan (movies, books, comics) during my life than I have Carson of Venus. I read one of the original ERB novels years ago and I've got all of the books in the series on my bookcase shelf but the character hasn't had nearly as much exposure as Tarzan or John Carter of Mars. There was a short lived Carson of Venus comic book series back in the 1970s. It ran as a back up in issues of DC Comics' KORAK, SON OF TARZAN series. The stories were beautifully illustrated by Mike Kaluta (who also did superlative work on DC's THE SHADOW series from the same era).

The Dark Horse series finds Tarzan transported to Venus (in much the same way John Carter traveled to Mars and back). There, he meets Carson and they have a rip-roaring adventure. It's pretty standard stuff and you either dig this type of pulp interplanetary adventure yarn or you don't. Me? I loved it.

The script is by Darko Macan and the artwork is by Igor Kordey. Kordey's work is an amalgamation of Kaluta's art deco style and the work of underground comic book legend Rich Corben (especially on characters' faces). I know. Sounds weird. But it works.

I enjoyed TARZAN/CARSON OF VENUS. If you're a fan of either character or the works of ERB in general, check it out. You won't be disappointed.

DAREDEVIL: FATHER

There's so much emotional baggage to be found in DAREDEVIL: FATHER, that buyers should receive a matched set of two pieces of luggage when they purchase this book. One suitcase should read "Daddy", the other, "Eyes".

Those are the two motifs that dominate DAREDEVIL: FATHER, a six-issue mini series written and illustrated by Joe Quesada. The series was originally published in 2006. I read the hardcover collection of the material yesterday and I must confess that I rather enjoyed it. It's not the best Daredevil story I've ever read but it's certainly not the worst.

Matt Murdock agrees to represent Maggie, a young married woman who has cancer due to exposure to toxic waste generated by a local municipality. There's also a serial killer operating in New York. Nicknamed "Socket Johnny", the killer removes the eyeballs of the victims before killing them. Oh, and there's also a new team of super powered individuals, The Santerians, on the scene. Almost all of these plot elements are connected in some way but it takes Matt a long time to finally figure out just what exactly is going on. Hint: one of these narrative threads is a red herring.

The four main characters, Matt, Maggie and Sean (her husband) and NeRo (a mysterious young media star) all have major father issues. and two of the three characters have backgrounds that directly relate to Matt's childhood.

Quesada's artwork is powerful and dynamic. In some scenes he appears to be channeling Frank Miller. In other places, his Daredevil looks more like Dare-Hulk, a massive, heavily muscled figure that doesn't quite jibe with the trim and graceful gymnast physique that is usually associated with the character.

Bottom line: DAREDEVIL: FATHER is a well executed Daredevil story. It's got a nice mystery plot with a surprise ending that I didn't see coming. It's definitely worth reading if you're a fan of the character, Joe Quesada or both. Thumbs up.

PROJECT PENDULUM

I'm a sucker for a good time travel story. Always have been. Always will be. So when I stumbled across a paperback copy of Robert Silverberg's PROJECT PENDULUM in a thrift store the other day, I couldn't resist buying it. After all the price was right. A buck.

I've read other books by Silverberg and I've enjoyed every one of them. He's one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time. In PROJECT PENDULUM, twin brothers Eric and Sean (one a physicist, the other a paleontologist) are chosen as the first test subjects of a time travel device. The mechanism, which is composed of a man-made, extremely small black hole set in opposition to an equal size, artificial "white hole", will send Eric into the future and then back into the past and then the future, and so on, at gradually increasing intervals of time from where the experiment begins at Time Zero in 2016.

Brother Sean will likewise travel through time on a swinging pendulum of shunts, first into the past, then the future, then the past, and on. When one brother is in the past, the other is in the future, each progressing farther and farther into both the past and the future on each respective swing. When both brothers reach Time Ultimate, the absolute outermost edges of time past and future, they began to move back to Time Zero in swings in the other direction with each twin now experiencing the various time periods and situations that his brother previously encountered.

It's a great idea, a terrific concept and it's extremely well executed. Silverberg never lets us get lost along the way of relating these parallel, separate trips through time. But the book is sorely lacking in any character development or suspense. Each chapter is short and things move along at a brisk pace. In fact, I finished reading this book (210 pages) in less than two hours. Each time period visited (past and future) made me want to read a longer story set in each year the brothers visit. In short, I wanted more, much more.

PROJECT PENDULUM isn't a bad book. But it's not an entirely satisfying one either. It's more a novella built around a really great concept. The bones of a great story are there but there's not much meat on them.

YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION

I bought this one at Half Price Books on Saturday and read it in one sitting later that afternoon. Gotta admit, I've got mixed feelings about THE SHADOW VOLUME 2: REVOLUTION.

Let's start with the good stuff. Cover art by Alex Ross is always a plus. How many covers has he done for Dynamite over the last few years? Glad to see they're keeping him busy as he is, in my opinion, the best comic book cover artist currently working.

The folks at Dynamite are smart enough to recognize that The Shadow works best when the material is kept as a period piece. The Shadow belongs to the '30s & '40s, not the 21st century. So, kudos there for the '30s setting.

Now comes the not so good. For some reason, it's been decided that the "power to cloud men's minds" that The Shadow employed on the radio program of the same name is an actual, bonafide super power of some sort. It's also a power that The Shadow is capable of losing. I don't like this. Clouding men's minds worked well on the radio, a medium in which the listener's imagination had to fill in the gaps and make the stories come fully alive. Here, The Shadow is like Obi Wan-Kenobi whispering "these aren't the droids you're looking for."

I'm beginning to think that it's an editorial mandate at Dynamite that the interior art in all of their comics be inferior to the cover art. In addition to the work of Alex Ross, this volume has a cover gallery of alternative and variant covers of the six issues reprinted within and the artwork on all of them is uniformly superior to the actual story art.

And we get a mixed bag of stories to boot. The title arc, "Revolution" is a four-parter in which The Shadow finds himself in the middle of the Spanish Civil War where he teams up with no less a historic personage than George Orwell to do battle against the insane El Rey and his vicious, female second-in-command, The Black Sparrow. The script is by Victor Gischler, with art by Aaron Campbell. The story is so-so and the art is serviceable if unspectacular and rather generic.

"Revolution" is book-ended by two done-in-one, stand alone stories, each of which are better than the longer main feature. The first story is again scripted by Victor Gischler with much better art by Jack Herbert. It's the best looking story in the whole package. The final story is another Gischler script with passable art by Giovanni Timpano.

I give this one a B. I love The Shadow and I'm always happy to read new material featuring the character. I love the fact that it retains the '30s milieu of the pulp classics. The covers are all nice but the stuff behind those covers could have been better.

PARKER

How's this for serendipity? I finished reading FLASHFIRE, a Parker novel by Richard Stark a couple of weeks ago. I loved it and posted a very positive review of the book here on my blog. I mentioned in the post that the novel had been adapted into the film PARKER (2013) and that I would be on the lookout for it.

I  was in Walmart the other day, browsing through a giant bin of Blu-Ray DVDs and what did I find? Yep, you guessed it, PARKER. I bought it and watched it yesterday.

Overall, the film was a fairly faithful adaptation of the novel. Oh, sure, things are changed a bit. There are characters in the film that weren't in the book (including an ancient looking Nick Nolte as Parker's mentor). Nolte, who would have been a not-bad choice to play Parker in a film forty years ago, has a few scenes with star Jason Statham early in the film and then disappears entirely from the rest of the movie.

Jason Statham makes a serviceable Parker. He's big, well-built and tough with rugged good looks. But he's got an accent which Parker doesn't have in the books. He's not my ideal version of Parker. That remains the great Lee Marvin, who played the Parker analogue "Walker" in John Boorman's magnificent POINT BLANK (1967). But since Marvin is long gone, Statham will fill the part nicely for the 21st century.

Jennifer Lopez is an interesting choice to play Leslie, the greedy real estate agent who becomes Parker's partner-in-crime. In the book, Leslie wasn't a Hispanic woman but Lopez does a good job bringing a deft touch of light comedy to the role and she's certainly easy on the eyes.

Parts of the film (scenes and dialogue) are lifted verbatim from the book. The heist at the beginning of the film is staged at the Ohio State Fair and is on a much larger scale than the robbery that opens the book.

Still, the screenplay follows the general gist of the novel fairly well. Characters and scenes are compressed and changed slightly to make everything more connected than it is in the book. And the violence is off the charts. There are several brutal fight scenes and gun battles but that's what we've come to expect from a modern action film.

Director Taylor Hackford does a good job of keeping things moving. PARKER is a gritty crime film that unfortunately bombed at the box office. It was released early in the year which is a traditional dumping ground for films that studios don't have much hope for. The fact that it underperformed at the box office means it's unlikely we'll see another Parker adventure with Statham in the lead. That's a pity because I'd certainly love to see another one.

If you've read FLASHFIRE, you'll enjoy watching PARKER and playing the inevitable book-to-film comparison game. As always, the book is better but if you're a fan of the series, you'll enjoy the film.

BACKFLASH

Today's short essay topic: describe how you would plan and execute a robbery of a casino ship in the middle of the Hudson river. You've got to get and getaway with over $300,000 in cold, hard cash. Oh, and security measures will not allow any guns to be brought on board. Ready? Go.

That's the  problem facing super thief Parker in BACKFLASH (1999), number 18 in the series of crime novels by Richard  Stark (in reality Donald Westlake). I finished reading this one yesterday evening. It's one of those books where once I got to a certain point in the narrative, I absolutely could not stop reading. I inhaled the last one hundred pages in one sitting and believe me, I couldn't turn the pages fast enough.

 The book is divided into three acts. The first focuses on the planning of the heist and the recruitment of the players in the caper. The middle third is the actual execution of the robbery. It's an ingenious plan involving a fake politician and his two bodyguards, an invalid girl in a wheelchair and her chauffeur. The final act is the getaway which, in the tradition of all great caper stories, goes wrong when various outside players decide to cut themselves in for a piece of the action. It's up to Parker to tie up all of these loose ends and as he does so the body count starts mounting.

BACKFLASH is wonderfully entertaining, a fast paced, gritty crime thriller in which we're solidly on the side of the bad guys. We want Parker and his gang to be successful and get away with the money but Stark has to put them through the wringer before it's all over. Highest recommendation.

DARKMAN

Hey kids! Let's play spot the influences in Sam Raimi's DARKMAN (1990), which I watched yesterday. This B-movie pulp adventure yarn is part classic Universal Studios monster movie, part Stan Lee-Jack Kirby Silver Age Marvel super-hero comic book. It's a wonderfully entertaining mash up that features nods to The Invisible Man, The Phantom of the Opera, Dr. X, The Shadow, The Incredible Hulk and The Chameleon (the old Spider-Man foe). Is it a great film? Hell no. But it is a ton of fun to watch.

DARKMAN was director Sam Raimi's first big budget film for a Hollywood studio (appropriately, Universal). Raimi made a name for himself as a genre master with his break out hit THE EVIL DEAD in 1981, followed by CRIMEWAVE (1985), and EVIL DEAD 2 (1987). With DARKMAN, his fourth full length feature film, Raimi put his kinetic, over-the-top visual sensibilities on display in a tale of dark revenge.

Liam Neeson (before he became a bonafide action film star) is a scientist experimenting with artificial flesh. His girlfriend, Frances McDormand, is a lawyer standing in opposition to a crooked real-estate developer played by Colin Friels (a dead ringer for University of Alabama head football coach Nick Saban). Larry Drake is Durant, one of Friels goons. In order to put the squeeze on McDormand, Durant and his men beat up Neeson and blow up his lab, leaving the good doctor for dead. That was their first mistake.

Neeson survives the explosion but he's horribly disfigured. He somehow manages to salvage most of his lab equipment and, setting up shop in an abandoned foundry, sets out to put his artificial skin technology to use in exacting his revenge against Durant and his henchmen.

There are some well-staged action sequences (including a helicopter chase with Neeson swinging on a cable beneath one of the choppers) before the final showdown at a construction site. At the end of the film, Neeson disappears into a crowd of people, dubs himself "Darkman" and appears on screen as Bruce Campbell (Raimi's go-to guy) in the final shot of the film.

DARKMAN is all hyperbolic, pulpy fun. Produced one year after Tim Burton's seminal BATMAN (1989), DARKMAN employs a BATMANesque score by composer Danny Elfman. Raimi further cemented his reputation as a comic book film auteur with his three Spider-Man films: SPIDER-MAN (2000), SPIDER-MAN 2 (2004) and SPIDER-MAN 3 (2007). DARKMAN did well at the box-office, prompting a slew of spin-offs and tie-ins including a Marvel Comics series, video games and action figures. Two direct-to-video sequels followed, THE RETURN OF DURANT (1994) and DIE, DARKMAN, DIE (1996).

I saw DARKMAN in the theater when it was first released and loved it. I hadn't seen it since then until I watched it yesterday afternoon when I enjoyed it again all over. Recommended for both horror film and comic book fans.