LOST AUSTIN RESTAURANTS

This is the first of what will hopefully be series of posts about Lost Austin Restaurants, old-time joints that I used to frequent that are sadly no longer with us.

First up is the beloved Stallion Restaurant (yes, a restaurant, despite what the sign above reads) on North Lamar. There's a MacDonald's there now. What the world doesn't need is any more MacDonald's restaurants. What we need is more classic dives like The Stallion.

The Stallion served great greasy-spoon diner rare in a rustic atmosphere. It was a semi-ramshackle building but I never went there for the decor. I went there for one thing (well, three things, actually): the chicken-fried steak, the onion rings and the one-of-a-kind yellow gravy.

If I recall correctly, you could order the chicken fried steak dinner with one, two or three pieces of meat. We're talking big pieces of meat here. I never attempted the three piece meal as two pieces was an absolute belt buster .I used to eat there for lunch on my day off at least once a month back in the 1980s. I never left hungry.

Boy, do I miss The Stallion

PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES

The first time I saw PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES (1965) was at my buddy Blake Brown's house on a Friday night when we were in high school in the early 1970s. Blake had cable television (which, in those days, meant he could get broadcast signals from San Antonio as well as Austin) and KSAT-Channel 12 out of San Antonio ran PROJECT TERROR, a late night horror movie double feature every Friday night beginning at 10:30 p.m. I'm sure our viewing experience was accompanied by the following food staples: one giant bowl of homemade queso, one giant bowl of homemade guacamole, one giant bag of Fritos, giant peanut butter and strawberry preserves sandwiches and giant glasses of ice cold milk. I've seen the film a couple of times since then and I watched it again yesterday afternoon but it wasn't nearly as much fun as that first time all those years ago.

Directed by Italian genre maestro Mario Bava, PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES is a colorful science fiction/horror hybrid. It's incorrectly titled however. There are no vampires in the film. The main villains are disembodied alien minds who cause the crew members of two spaceships to kill each other in order to possess and inhabit the dead bodies which then rise from the dead and attack the remaining living crew members. A more accurate title, given this plot device, would be PLANET OF THE ZOMBIES.

Bava didn't have a lot to work with in terms of budget but he makes the most out of plastic rocks, fog machines, colored light filters, in-camera special effects and creative camera placement to bring the surface of a hostile alien world to life. Shot entirely on sound stages at Cinecitta Studios in Rome, many of the planetscape scenes in POTV anticipate the yet-to-come STAR TREK television series.

The crew members all wear black leather spacesuits with yellow/gold piping (and very high and stiff collars) making them all look like students at Professor Charles Xavier's School for Gifted Students. The spaceship sets are cavernous and the tech and hardware on display is strictly off the shelf of a mid-60s Italian electronics surplus store.

Uber wooden Barry Sullivan is the only American actor in the cast but nobody watches PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES for the great performances (there aren't any). The chief appeal of the film is the fact that it clearly influenced Ridley Scott's ALIEN (1979) (as did IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE (1958)).

 A distress call from a cloud covered world. Huge spaceships with tripodal landing gear. A fog enshrouded planet surface with weird rock formations. A spaceship exit port that looks like a giant condom. A derelict alien spacecraft. Skeletal remains of giant aliens. An escape from the planet only to discover that aliens are actually aboard. All of these plot elements are in both PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES and ALIEN.

PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES isn't a great film but it's a genre touchstone for many of us monster kids. It's got a great little twist ending and it's worth seeing at least once if you're a horror/science fiction film enthusiast but I can't recommend it to a wider audience.

MY AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D.

September, 1966.

 That was the month I made the conscious decision to purchase every Marvel comic book on the stands each month. It wasn't too difficult. There were only about a dozen titles released each month and with the regular size comics priced at twelve cents (giant-size issues cost a quarter), it was financially feasible on my admittedly limited 5th grade budget.

Thus, STRANGE TALES #151, became the first issue of that title I purchased. I don't know why I hadn't bought any issues prior to that. I'd certainly seen the house ads in other Marvel Comics for the series and I'm sure I'd seen copies of STRANGE TALES on the spinner rack. Plus, I was a huge fan of both James Bond and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. so S.H.I.E.L.D. should have been right up my alley.

Turns out it was as I discovered once I'd purchased and read STRANGE TALES #151. The cover is terrific, a pairing of two of my all time favorite comic book artists: Jack (The King) Kirby and Jim Steranko. Kirby started out pencilling the series when it debuted and soon moved to providing breakdowns and layouts for other artists. Steranko was then the bold new kid on the artistic block and before Stan Lee was ready to turn him lose as sole writer and artist on the S.H.I.E.L.D. strip, he had Kirby pencil this issue with Steranko inking the King's work. The result was pure comic book magic.

I loved this story and instantly became a fan of Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (Supreme Headquarters Intelligence Espionage Law Division was what those letters originally stood for, by the way). Nick Fury, the WWII veteran, now wearing an eye-patch (which upped the cool quotient) and promoted to the rank of colonel from sergeant, was now the director of the super-secret spy agency S.H.I.E.L.D. The supporting cast included two former Howlers (from SGT. FURY AND HIS HOWLING COMMANDOS, Marvel's monthly WWII war book, another comic I bought on a regular basis): Dum Dum Dugan and Gabe Jones, Jimmy Woo, Val (Fury's girlfriend) and the lovely Agent 13, Sharon Carter (who was Captain America's sweetheart). All of those connective threads helped make the Marvel Universe a fun and cohesive world of the imagination.

Once Steranko took complete control of the S.H.I.E.L.D. strip, my young mind was well and truly blown. He delivered dazzling artwork that combined pyrotechnic psychedelia with hardware fetish, cinematic action scenes, innovative layouts and page designs and incredible plots and story lines every month in ten page installments. 

In the spring of 1968, Steranko really got a chance to cut lose when STRANGE TALES was cancelled and the book's co-features, Dr. Strange and Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. were given their own respective individual full length books. With a full twenty pages to work with, Steranko went wild producing some of the greatest comics of the Silver Age.

Alas, it was not for long. Steranko left the book after a few issues and his work appeared on an irregular basis in Marvel comic books. A cover here, a short story there, maybe a run of two or three issues someplace else. Steranko's work was always a pleasure to behold (it still is) but nothing can compare to the sheer visceral thrill I experienced on that fall day, now forty-seven years gone, when I bought STRANGE TALES #151. 

MY FAMOUS MONSTERS 31

Vincent Price's fire-ravaged visage from HOUSE OF WAX (art by Basil Gogos) graces the cover of FAMOUS MONSTERS #64. This issue features a look at the first wave of 3-D films from the 1950s, an article about Boris Karloff's grandchildren (!), Bela Lugosi in MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE and the Japanese giant monster classic DESTROY ALL MONSTERS. 

THE LONE RANGER & ZORRO: THE DEATH OF ZORRO

Like 99% of all of the comic books I've read that were published by Dynamite, the cover art (by Alex Ross) of THE LONE RANGER/ZORRO: THE DEATH OF ZORRO, is absolutely the single best thing about the comic. Every comic from Dynamite I've read has seduced me by it's cover and then profoundly disappointed me with the interior story and art.

THE LONE RANGER/ZORRO: THE DEATH OF ZORRO is no exception to this rule. The script by Ande Parks is okay but certainly nothing spectacular. Do the Lone Ranger and Zorro meet in this story? Yes and no. Does Zorro die in this story? Yes and no. I'm not being coy, just telling the truth.

In addition to a somewhat lackluster story, the art, by Esteve Polis, is also slightly below average. I had trouble telling Tonto and other native Americans apart in several places. The coloring is extremely dark and somewhat muddy at times. The storytelling is good but the art is just too generic for my taste. At times I thought I could see such artistic influences as Marshall Rogers and John Severin. Both of those men are, unfortunately, no longer with us. But boy, either one of those guys, both first rate comic book artists, could have really gone to town on this one.

Recommended only to hardcore Lone Ranger and/or Zorro fans.

THE AMERICAN WAY

I scored a copy of the trade paperback collection of THE AMERICAN WAY in a recent trade with another comic book collector. I sat down and read it yesterday afternoon and I was very impressed.

THE AMERICAN WAY is an eight-issue mini-series published by DC Comics under the Wildstorm imprint in 2006. The story is by John Ridley and the art by Georges Jeanty.

The year is 1961. Wes Catham is an ad-man for an automobile company. When he loses his job shilling cars, he's contacted by United States Attorney General Robert Kennedy to come to work for the government. Instead of selling cars, he's selling super-heroes. The Civil Defense Corps to be exact, a team of super-powered men and women who are not all that they appear to be.

Turns out the CDC is the equivalent of professional wrestling. The fights and the villains are fake and the outcome of their battles is always the pre-determined, scripted same thing. The good guys always win.

Some of the members of the CDC do have real super powers, the results of genetic manipulation by the government to induce superior abilities. A couple of them are just average joes with lots of gimmicks.

But when a member of the team dies unexpectedly during a scripted battle, Wes has to spin the death and find a suitable replacement hero. He does so in the person of the New American, a new, genetically enhanced hero who also happens to be the first black superhero in a still segregated nation.

There's more to this compelling series, much more. There's superhero thrills and action, political intrigue, a high body count, racial tension, a surprise villain and some unexpected twists and turns. The story is well told by Ridley with three-dimensional characters who all have their various motivations for doing what they do. Wes, the narrator and more-or-less hero of the book struggles mightily to provide hope and faith to a nation desperately in need of both commodities but fears he's lost his soul in the process. The art by Georges Jeanty is good and his story-telling abilities are first rate.

THE AMERICAN WAY is one of many post-modern deconstructions of the super-hero trope. It puts comic book heroes into a real world, historically accurate setting. It's dark, grim and gritty in several places but ultimately hopeful and optimistic. The world is a vastly different place at the end of this graphic novel than it was at the beginning. And that's a good thing.

THE AMERICAN WAY is recommended and well worth your time and effort to track down a copy and check it out.

MY FAMOUS MONSTERS 30

Peter Lorre from MAD LOVE is beautifully rendered by Basil Gogos for the cover of FAMOUS MONSTERS #63. This issue features coverage of the various cinematic versions of the Orlac story (by the way, MAD LOVE is one terrific film!) plus photos of Boris Karloff in his Frankenstein make-up.