August 2020 – Nik Dirga

Chadwick Boseman, and the stories left to tell

The death of Chadwick Boseman at just 43 from cancer hurts, coming as it does in a year when there’s been so much hurt already.

Just over two years ago, he was the star of the biggest superhero movie ever at the time, the first nominated for Best Picture. But he was eye-catching and charismatic in everything he appeared in during his too-short starring film career, which spanned just seven years. To most of the world’s shock and dismay, we learned that he was fighting colon cancer for much of the time he was starring in some of the biggest movies on the planet. Unimaginable.

He’s going to always be remembered for Black Panther, but he starred in several wonderful films, carving out a bit of a niche career as a chameleon portraying famous inspirational Black figures. Legendary baseball star Jackie Robinson. Soul star James Brown. The first Black U.S. Supreme Court Justice. He was very different, dazzling in each role and was much more than just T’Challa, the Black Panther. He leaves us these stories.

I always loved the Black Panther as a kid. He was mysterious and cool, and back in the 1980s, he didn’t actually appear all that often in comics. And Chadwick Boseman brought him to life wonderfully on screen, capturing the Shakespearean tumult of a Prince-turned-King wrestling with his own power. I would’ve loved to see what he did in future films.

Boseman’s pivotal place in Black film history is not my story to tell. But his starring as the Black Panther – telling millions of Black kids and adults that yes, a superhero could look like anybody – changed the parameters. He made the world bigger, and broader.

Some of us mourn actors and musicians because we see the storytellers they are, and when one of them dies suddenly or too young all you can see are the stories yet untold. Chadwick Boseman should’ve had a career stretching for decades, and it’s unfair. The last sudden film star death that hit me like this was Philip Seymour Hoffman, and I felt much the same thing – I wanted to see more. I felt cheated.

Two scenes from Boseman’s turn as the Black Panther keep ringing in my head, neither one of them your typical superhero punch-ups. One is the quiet moment at the very end of Black Panther between T’Challa and his vanquished foe Killmonger, which achieves a kind of graceful sadness. The other came at the very end of Captain America: Civil War, where T’Challa confronts Baron Zemo, the villain who assassinated his father.

Both scenes are notable for the calm centeredness of Boseman. At the end of Civil War, T’Challa decides not to kill the man he’s been hunting the entire film, and stops him from killing himself.

He tells Zemo, “The living are not done with you yet.” Yes, it’s a line by a superhero to a murderous villain, yet somehow it echoes to me so much as I think about Chadwick Boseman today.

He is free from pain now, but the living were not done with you yet.

There were so many stories left to tell.

That time the Son of Satan was a superhero

I’ve written before about my love for the weird stuff Marvel Comics put out in the early 1970s. Perhaps one of their strangest gambles was a series that could only have risen from the grave in the age of The Exorcist and The Omen. Let’s give it up for … The Son Of Satan!

After years of comics being constrained by the Comics Code Authority, the reins were loosened a bit early in the 1970s, allowing previously taboo subjects. Marvel Comics went BIG on the horror in the early ‘70s, and as a result dug up some of its best work. Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, a living mummy, a Man-Wolf, a werewolf, a zombie, hell, even a golem and a Manphibian … They’d throw anything at the wall of the horror superheroes boom to see if it stuck.

So why not the Son of the Dark Lord himself? Hilariously, according to a feature in Back Issue magazine #21, Stan Lee actually proposed Marvel do a comic book starring Satan himself – in other words, DC/Vertigo’s Lucifer decades ahead of its time. Cooler heads prevailed and instead a feature called Son of Satan debuted in a 1973 issue of Marvel Spotlight, starring Damien Hellstrom – also confusingly sometimes called “Hellstorm” – the son of the devil and a mortal woman torn between two worlds.

You’ve got to admire the chutzpah of calling a comic book Son of Satan – Fredric Wertham surely would be turning in his grave. I love the title, even when the book itself was rather schizophrenic – during his 20 or so issue solo run in Marvel Spotlight and then his own short-lived comic, Damien Hellstrom’s adventures fighting both evil and his own evil side ran all over the place and went through many creators (the best being the late writer Steve Gerber). At one point, he even got into a fight with Adam – yes, that Adam. Like many Marvel books of the era, Son of Satan constantly changed course to try and win readers. He was clad in circus-devil yellow and red and carried a pitchfork, teamed up with Human Torch and Ghost Rider and kept on with all his daddy issues.

He did get flak – at least one letter writer accused the creators of being “tools” of Satan. Artist Herb Trimpe told Back Issue he was “uncomfortable” with “evil being the star of the book.” Years later, ol’ Son Of was even retconned so he wasn’t actually the son of that Satan, but of a more generic demon who sometimes called himself Satan. Son Of Someone Who Might Be Satan really isn’t as catchy.

The original ‘70s run was all nicely collected in the Son of Satan Classic paperback. Later, Damien popped up in Marvel’s clearing-house non-team book The Defenders for some fun stories, and kept bopping around ever since. You can’t keep a good devil down.

Hellstorm got grim and gritty in the 1990s, really leaned into the whole Satanic thing and started looking like Rob Zombie and gave up the superhero spandex in a 1990s well-received gory reboot by Warren Ellis. He’s often been an outright villain in more recent appearances. He’s even finally getting some kind of adaptation in a TV series (with a fairly underwhelming first trailer, and this time he’s spelled Helstrom!).

Admittedly, the entire concept is better geared towards dark horror than heroics, but I still kind of dig the era when a guy calling himself the Son of Satan ran around in a superhero cape. “Hellstrom” or “Hellstorm” or whatever is a decent enough name, but to be honest, if you’re the son of the devil, you need to own that.

Son Of Satan is an intriguing little throwback to an era when such a character could be featured in what were ostensibly kid’s comics without major protests. So you know, hail Satan — he might just have cleared the way for much darker and grimmer comics yet to come.

I’ll be back. And back, and back, and back again.

So I finally got around to watching Terminator: Dark Fate the other night, the sixth in a series of films that have been going since I was 13 years old. I am now pushing 50.

And it was … fine. Good action, bit of Arnold and Linda Hamilton, hitting all the right Terminator beats. But was it essential?

It’s not like this is any startling revelation, but the field of genre films is littered with unnecessary sequels that are only there for one reason – cash and “protecting the brand.” So many of these sequels fail to pass the pub test – do they tell a story that is worth telling?

Terminator and Terminator 2 together tell a concise apocalyptic story, one that has been exhumed every few years with diminishing returns ever since. Instead of it becoming a story of humanity changing a dark future, seen over six films it’s actually a tale of how no matter how many robots you kill, everything is still going to go horribly wrong somehow in the end.

Take the Alien movies. I had to do a double-check to actually see how many there have been now – eight if you count the spin-offs! Yet the story of Ellen Ripley is actually told pretty well through the first two or three movies alone, and all else is papering in cracks and investigating corners that didn’t turn out to be that interesting in the long run.

Or Predator, one of those franchises that they just can’t let die. One perfect bloody brawler of an action movie. Five increasingly nonessential reboots, sequels and prequels.

And, as I said, Terminator: Dark Fate was fine. It was certainly better than the fourth and fifth Terminator movies, not quite as good as the rather underrated third. But for all intents and purposes, the story of Sarah Connor and Terminators trying to kill her was told perfectly well in the first two movies.

The marketing machines gear up these nonessential sequels and reboots every few years and they become a blur. Just in the last 15 years or so we’ve had airy reworkings of Total Recall, Fright Night, Robocop, Tron, Ghostbusters, Point Break and more that evaporate almost from the moment you think of them. It doesn’t mean a franchise can’t carry on indefinitely – the Marvel movies machine franchise manages to keep you wanting to know what’s happening next in the sprawling tapestry, and even if the movies aren’t all of the same quality, you generally feel they were worth telling. And even a years-later sequel to an old idea can still bring something new, such as Mad Max: Fury Road or Blade Runner 2049.

I know it won’t happen in Hollywood, but just wish sometimes the question would be asked, is the story worth telling? Most of the time, the answer is that it was told fine the first time.

Sherlock Holmes: The game will always be afoot

It’s no mystery why Sherlock Holmes endures.

I first came to Sherlock as a teenager, sucked into Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s intricate little puzzle-boxes of stories. There are just 56 stories and four short novels that Doyle wrote, which when you tick them all off, may leave you feeling a bit bereft.

But the thing about a great character like Sherlock Holmes is he’s pretty malleable. The pile of “Sherlockiana” – Holmes reboots, sequels, prequels, reimaginings and more – far exceeds what Doyle wrote in his lifetime. He’s the most portrayed fictional character in history.

As a sucker for Sherlock who finished the original canon decades ago, I’m an easy mark for the never-ending cascade of Sherlockiana stories. Some are great, good as anything Doyle ever wrote and occasionally even better. Some of them are pretty dire. Many are just kind of there. But there’s literally a Holmes for everyone, and that’s part of the fun of diving in.

There are new Holmes mysteries, written in as close a style to Doyle as possible. There are alternate history versions, team-ups, and more. I scored a whole pile of Titan Books’ recent reissues of “The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” pastiches a while back, which feature reimaginings galore starring everyone from President Theodore Roosevelt to Harry Houdini to Tarzan, fighting Jack the Ripper or Dracula or The Phantom of the Opera.

There’s an amusingly twisted series of “Warlock Holmes” Lovecraftian comic parodies which imagine a demon-haunted magician Holmes aided by his partner Watson, the true detective of the duo.

There’s even a subset of “ancient Sherlock” stories featuring Holmes in his extreme old age, such as Michael Chabon’s bittersweet “The Final Solution,” Neil Gaiman’s “The Case of Death and Honey,” or Mitch Cullins’s “Mr. Holmes.”

But boy, I wish Sherlock pastiche writers would retire the unbearable cliche of Professor Moriarty “suddenly” being revealed as the mastermind in their mysteries. While Moriarty’s a fascinating character, despite his barely appearing in just two Doyle stories, he’s also a crutch for writers searching for their Joker to Sherlock’s Batman. Pulling him out as the trump card is the lazy way out.

Not that Moriarty pastiches – and of course, there’s plenty of these too – are a bad thing. I particularly like Kim Newman’s Moriarty novel retelling Doyle’s stories entirely from the perspective of Moriarty and his henchman Moran. And none other than famed basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar – a big Sherlockian himself – has done a few novels starring Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s mysterious brother.

Gender swapped, racially reimagined, time tossed or even Sherlock in space, it’s all out there in the Sherlock multiverse. I like a good mystery. And while the flood of Sherlockiana is admittedly inconsistent and requires a solid detective to ferret out the gems, there’s few pleasures more cozy than settling in with a new take on the sacred hunt. The game’s always afoot!

The Amoeba Adventures Archive is now a real thing

It’s here! The project I’ve been filling my pandemic-free hours with for the past month or two.

The AMOEBA ADVENTURES ARCHIVE is now available for your digital reading pleasure, marking the grand conclusion of my 30th anniversary of Amoeba Adventures celebration. A whopping 130-page digital book, it includes:

* The return of Prometheus the Protoplasm in the first NEW Amoeba Adventures story since 1998! It’s been a real trip to return to drawing comics again after wayyyyyy too long, and hopefully you enjoy!

* Troy Hickman pens a long-lost untold story of the Flaming Flag during World War II!

* Not one but rare two team-up stories with Jason Marcy’s brawling bruiser Powerwus!

* Rare Amoeba Adventures stories from fanzines, The Rap Sheet, and special publications!

* Excerpts from the legendary Small Press Syndicate jam comic crossover!

* The never-before-published, embarrassingly primitive very first Prometheus two comic books ever drawn!

* A look into the vaults at scripts and art for several stories that never quite made it to print, including a team-up with the late Sam Gafford, an Amoeba Adventures Annual with Lynn Allen, and much more!

* A gallery of rare art by Max Ink!

* A complete cover gallery of vintage Amoeba Adventures publications!

It’s only a mere $2.00 US / $3 NZ to get the whole package downloaded direct to the tablet/laptop/Commodore 64 of your choice, plus, as a bonus, I’ll also throw in the digital reprint of the 1995 Amoeba Adventures 5th Anniversary Special, a 36-page look back at the first 5 years of the All-Spongy Squadron featuring profiles, essays and pin-ups galore. That’s a grand total of more than 160 pages of material for less than the cost of a single new comic book.

(Sorry, at the moment it’s digital-only for me, but maybe once the world calms down a little I’ll do a limited edition print version.)

Payment accepted via Paypal or hit me up via message if you need other options.

And don’t forget, every single issue of Amoeba Adventures is already available for a free download over on this page – so you have no excuse!

21 minutes and done: In praise of the classic sitcom

I don’t know about you, but I’m finding it a little hard to concentrate this year.

I’ve got a hefty 600-page novel I’ve been working on for weeks now that’s really good, yet I keep getting distracted. I have plans and projects. Yet I keep “doomscrolling” (a fantastic phrase) and worry I’ve missed the latest catastrophe.

Thus, for solace, I turn to the essence of distraction: the classic sitcom. I think it might just be the perfect tonic for the befuddled mind. To me, despite all the great dramas out there, the platonic ideal of television is still the 21-minute sitcom.

A good episode of Frasier or Seinfeld or Brooklyn Nine-Nine has all the energy of a terrific one-act play. A familiar cast of characters, a story that unfolds conflict and resolution in just a score or so of minutes, and a few jokes you can laugh at. I’m easy to please.

Not all sitcoms are created equal. Seinfeld still holds up brilliantly, but I simply don’t get the belated critical elevation of Friends, an amiable show that I watched while it aired but feel no need to ever revisit again. I can watch episodes of Frasier until the sun grows cold and dark, but maybe thanks to my son’s youthful addiction to it, my tolerance for all but the most classic episodes of The Simpsons is kinda low now.

It doesn’t all have to be old stuff from the pre-internet days, although the nostalgic kick of an old episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show or M*A*S*H still holds up for me. I fondly remember watching many of these shows after school in an era where streaming was something you did while fishing. I’ve also been rewatching all of the brilliant Community, or newer stuff like the terrific The Good Place, Fleabag or Schitt’s Creek.

A good comedy can take a simple plot – two brothers open a restaurant together; a television clown dies; a group of friends can’t find their parking spot; a cool dude in a leather jacket jumps over a shark – and make it sing.

There’s an endless ocean of content streaming out there, and it seems like there’s a new hot show every week. Yet I have to admit I’m giving most of it a miss. There’s a million classic movies to watch if I feel the urge for something longer, but the bloated storytelling of many streaming shows turns me off.

Looking back, commercial television kind of sucked – I don’t miss the adverts much. Like many of us now, the times I actually watch “live” TV with commercials and everything are pretty rare.

Without commercial restraints a single episode can stretch on as long as it wants, often without really earning that running time. Shows that merit 21 or 40 minutes turn into 60, 70 minutes. They lack the Oscar Wildean economy of wit that tight 21 minutes forced a sitcom to be.

An awful lot of so-called “classic” weren’t all that great either, to be fair. But it also forced creatives to work within those tight parameters. Twenty-one, 22 minutes, tell a story and get out, and for those 21 minutes, all the blues are chased away.