Cosmocopia by Paul Di Filippo and Jim Woodring

This review originally appeared in somewhat different form on The Green Man Review. Copyright 2009. Reprinted with permission.

Frank Lazorg is a legendary artist of comics, book and album covers, movie posters, and more recently his own abstract ambitions. But since his stroke, he's done nothing new. Until one day he gets "a rather exotic foreign package with — an odd smell" containing a brick of red powder in the mail from an old acquaintance. This powder inspires Lazorg to begin painting again. But when he finds that things can never be as they once were, he has a "sudden impulse" that leads him into another world.

Author Paul Di Filippo has rather transparently used the career of another legend, Frank Frazetta as his model of Lazorg's career, but the similarities stop there (I hope). The fictional Walter Paisley (A Bucket of Blood) may have been another inspiration. But even as this synopsis summarizes the first few pages of Cosmocopia, Di Filippo's new 100-page novella offered in a stunning limited edition package from Payseur and Schmidt, it is only the beginning.

The novella hits the ground running — things are already really weird by page 16 — and Lazorg goes on a journey of highs and lows that lead him toward redemption. (These paths are so surprising and brilliantly original that I want don't want to spoil them by trying to lamely describe them.) Cosmocopia, like the best speculative fiction, offers a vision of another world while making strange-looking characters seem utterly familiar, especially in their personal struggles. And Di Filippo he has done a beautiful job creating a world in so few pages that is foreign yet familiar, and managed to place a love story — and a message of hope — at the center of it. (Interestingly, the title "Cosmocopia" is mentioned in DiFilippo's story "Science Fiction" from the 2003 anthology Witpunk, so this idea has apparently been percolating in the author's mind for some time.)

This terrific limited edition also includes two wonderful examples of the work of artist Jim Woodring. The centerpiece is a 513-piece jigsaw puzzle of Woodring's black-and-white surrealist painting entitled The Artist's Eye, but also of note is an 8" by 10" full-color print of a pulp-style magazine cover mockup showing the major catalytic event of the story (Lazorg's first venture into his new style). These two disparate items quickly and sharply showcase the range of Woodring's talent, as they do not appear to have come from the same hand.

The box has a complete image of The Artist's Eye, with a wraparound band signed by both Di Filippo and Woodring. The package comes to $65 USD, but it is such a beautiful presentation, worth revisiting dozens of times (with Di Filippo's novella alone being easily rereadable at least half that much, that it's really an investment. Payseur and Schmidt seem to be one of the few small presses actually offering products that are well worth the collectors' price tag.

The Best of the Spirit by Will Eisner (introduction by Neil Gaiman)

This review originally appeared in somewhat different form on The Green Man Review. Copyright 2008. Reprinted with permission.

The name Will Eisner is synonymous with groundbreaking comics, and his most famous and most widely acclaimed creation is criminologist Denny Colt, left for dead and prematurely buried, but escaped from the grave and revived as a crimefighter known only as "The Spirit."

The Best of The Spirit culls twenty-two stories from the dozen-year run of The Spirit, with two early selections (including the 1940 origin story). The vast majority, however, come from the postwar period, with 1946, 1948, and 1949 the most heavily represented. The introduction by Neil Gaiman (author of The Sandman series) acknowledges Eisner's influence on him and otherwise reinforces Eisner's importance to the medium (the community's annual awards are named after him).

Since I'm not a comics historian, I'll have to take his word on whether Eisner's work was ahead of its time. But what I can vouch for is the readability of The Best of The Spirit. These are short, seven-page dark crime stories often blended with human interest, the drama of the common man. Sometimes criminals are redeemed. Sometimes victims triumph despite the odds. But always, right wins over wrong — often with an ironic twist that makes the justice more delicious.

The comics format allows Eisner to combine mature storytelling with Dick Tracy-style character names (like Silk Satin, Rice Wilder, and Sand Saref) and not have the latter detract from the former. People just don't stand for that sort of thing in prose, but inside the format of four-color illustration, somehow it's OK. Even hardboiled crime fans who usually scoff at the graphic format (like me) will be pleased, because these are mature tales whose quality is immediately evident and that remain instantly accessible to modern audiences, despite their circa-World War II origins.

The Best of The Spirit is a terrific introduction to Eisner's style, particularly his combination of the trappings of film noir with an occasional dose of slapsticky humor. And it especially succeeds at its primary intent: through an affordable sampling, to pique people's interest in the full Spirit Archives series of hardcover volumes.

The Boys Are Back in Town by Christopher Golden (dark fantasy)

This review originally appeared in somewhat different form on The Green Man Review. Copyright 2008. Reprinted with permission.

Will James, reporter and critic for the Boston Tribune, has just been passed over for a promotion — on the weekend of his 10-year high school reunion — because his articles are too "eccentric." (They are primarily exposés in the style of his idol Harry Houdini on occult subjects like Wicca and vampires.) The next day, he travels to his hometown of Eastborough, Massachusetts, for the reunion.

But since this is a Christopher Golden novel, this isn't going to be just any high school reunion. Almost as soon as Will arrives, something strange happens: when he asks about his friend Mike (Mike had sent Will an e-mail saying he would attend), his other friends look at him in horror. That's not funny, they say. You know Mike died before graduation; you were at the funeral.

Even odder is the fact that Will suddenly does have a vague memory of that series of events — where there was no such memory before. Before long, other things Will thought he remembered are changed, and he begins to notice changes in the personalities of the people around him as their memories (and therefore realities) are affected. But the worst is when he watches his best friend Ashleigh transform before his eyes from the shiny girl he loves into a world-weary sufferer, all due to a single event. Someone is messing around with their pasts, and Will seems to be the only one who realizes it. To fix it, and to find out who's behind this insidious transformation, Will has to go back into his past and rediscover a talent he has long tried to forget.

The Boys Are Back in Town represents a sort of coming of age for author Christopher Golden (then known primarily for his media tie-in and young-adult series novels). Previously, his works wore their influences on their sleeves (Straight On 'Til Morning was a Peter Pan update of sorts; The Ferryman featured Styx guardian Charon) — a practice Golden continues to adopt with his modern updates of classic stories (Bloodstained Oz, etc.) — but Boys Are Back feels truly original. The premise may feel somewhat familiar but the plot framework is Golden's own.

Golden's characters, as usual, are detailed and realistic. Since a good deal of the action focuses on their time in high school, he gets to cater to his faithful young-adult audience while not alienating the adult market. The only trouble is that the adults (with a few important exceptions) aren't really all that different from their younger counterparts (but, then again, we all know people who haven't changed since high school). Threaded among the events is a nice lesson in how our memories shape the people we later become. But his greatest accomplishment is in his very moving portrait of the platonic love between Will and Ashleigh. Even if you never had a best friend you truly loved, you'll know what it feels like when you finish this book.

I've read a number of novels where problems are caused, then solved, through the use of magic (usually spelled "magick"), but The Boys Are Back in Town is the first one that didn't resort to silly, florid incantation or spells cast in an ancient language for verisimilitude. Golden accomplishes this by a simple feat: he has his characters use magic and believe in it, and so the reader does, too. This kind of matter-of-fact approach succeeds with all of the more "out there" parts of the story, like time travel (with the usual paradox omitted, allowing characters to interact with their other-time selves), letting us be swept up in Golden's murder-mystery suspense-thriller plot that pulls the best parts from The Twilight Zone and Back to the Future, among others. And he does not slight us on the ending, offering up a conclusion that is both literarily satisfying and emotionally rewarding.

It's always fascinating to watch an author develop, and The Boys Are Back in Town is a big step forward for Golden, one that shows how he was perhaps training his literary muscles for a larger task, such as the recent Veil trilogy (beginning with The Myth Hunters), in which all of his skills come to fruition. But it's also just a solid thriller, a fully involving read ideal for anyone in search of a fast-paced, character-focused novel, even if they don't generally enjoy stories with elements of fantasy, because Golden integrates them into his story so seamlessly.

Strip for Murder by Max Allan Collins (a Jack and Maggie Starr mystery)

Manhattan, 1953 — Rehearsals are underway toward the opening night of the musical Tall Paul, based on the popular comic strip of the same name by Hal Rapp. Rapp's ex-employer (and chief rival), Mug O'Malley creator Sam Fizer, has threatened to sue, saying Rapp's characters were originally created by Fizer when Rapp was working under him on the O'Malley strip. To make matters worse, Fizer's estranged wife has been hired for a role in the musical.

On Halloween night, shortly after a party at Rapp's apartment, Fizer is found dead in his own room — an apparent suicide but with painfully obvious signs pointing to Rapp as a murderer. Rapp asks Jack and Maggie Starr for help. Maggie runs the Starr Newspaper Syndication Company, and her stepson Jack is a private investigator "with one client: the Starr Syndicate." (Maggie is a former ecdysiast only 10 years Jack's senior — a situation that is a constant source of Oedipal-incest jokes at Jack's expense.)

Rapp has offered his new strip, Lean Jean, to the Starrs, so they are very invested in keeping him out of jail — especially since it looks like he is being framed. Jack takes on the case, hoping to remove the frame from Rapp before Captain Pat Chandler can nail it on tight.

Though Strip for Murder has some basis in history, author Max Allan Collins plays around with the facts here more than with his other historical-mystery novels, which usually hew closely to the facts with just a fictional character thrown in.

In fact, in this case, even the main participants' names have been fictionalized right along with the timeline of events and the characters' relationships, though their real-life counterparts can easily be discovered with a little research. Collins gives them names that aren't obvious caricatures, but realistic names in the style of the real ones. (Even the fictional characters in the musical get this treatment, like turning Daisy Mae into Sunflower Sue.)

Artist Terry Beatty, Collins's collaborator on various comic projects, including Ms. Tree, serves up era-appropriate comics-style drawings at the beginning of each chapter, and also adds a cute feature illustrating the motives, means, and opportunities of all the suspects just prior to the denouement.

Beatty's illustrations do a lot to keep the reader immersed in the world of comics, because once you've seen his renderings of the characters, it's impossible to imagine them any other way. Even with his work isn't on the page, it's still there in the mind's eye. So, though Collins likely had real humans in mind when he created these characters, I had Beatty's renderings in mine while reading Strip for Murder, which gave it a surprising "graphic novel" quality uncommon in a prose volume.

The characters are as two-dimensional as the illustrations — but that may be intentional given the milieu (Collins did write Dick Tracy for 15 years, and his lengthy experience provides fodder for some very welcome comics-business in-jokes). What's important is that Strip for Murder gives a remarkable snapshot of Manhattan in the 1950s and a mystery solution that is as surprising as it is satisfying.

Sleuth (2007) directed by Kenneth Branagh (starring Michael Caine, Jude Law)

Sleuth (2007). Screenplay by Harold Pinter from the play by Anthony Shaffer.

Successful crime novelist Andrew Wyke (Michael Caine) invites actor and sometime hairdresser Milo Tindle (Jude Law) out to his English country home to discuss the woman they have in common: Andrew's wife Maggie. What follows is an elaborate game of wits that can have only one winner. Or is there a winner at all?

The original 1972 Sleuth is one of my favorite movies, so I went into this one with both curiosity and trepidation. I knew it wasn't possible to equate the experience of the original, but with a Harold Pinter script, Kenneth Branagh directing, and Michael Caine as Andrew, I knew I simply had to see what happened. (By pure coincidence, I watched both this and Sweeney Todd in the same week, and they're both remakes of favorites.)

I was both disappointed and pleased. The first hour of the 2007 Sleuth basically replicates the first two-thirds of the 1972 version, up to and including a visit from the police inspector (a small role that is nonetheless pivotal), but in a way that feels very much cut to the bone. All the details are there, but little of the emotion. The meeting of these two should be fraught with tension, but Pinter's screenplay wants so much to just get on with the proceedings that it feels rushed.

From that first hour, however, events begin to depart from the Anthony Shaffer play that is the source. And, similarly, from that point on, things get really interesting for the viewer expecting a retread of the original. In an interview on the DVD, Pinter states that prior to being asked to write this script, he had neither seen the movie nor read the play. He was therefore able to give it his own stamp. And he does indeed. The tone of the final third is completely different from its predecessor, with tonal changes both modern and unexpected (though not necessarily to fans of other Michael Caine films, Deathtrap in particular).

Caine and Law are well paired here. Having played Milo in the original to Laurence Olivier's Andrew, Caine has firsthand seen the role done definitively. Luckily, apart from some hauntingly familiar line readings (Intended? Who knows?), he takes a completely different tack and offers an Andrew almost completely self-assured. Whereas, Jude Law's Milo is a very modern man: somewhat confused by his woman and, certainly in this case, merely acting as the mouthpiece for her needs. But even these perceptions are turned on their heads in a film that refuses to take anything for granted.

I've seen Law in other films before, but Sleuth is the first one where he really shines through the material. This may be due to acting opposite a heavyweight like Caine (that always seems to bring out the best in relative newcomers), or to Branagh's direction (not likely as he seems to cast who he thinks can work without his help), or to the fact that, as producer, Law reportedly initiated this project for his own purposes (the most likely, since it means he already saw himself in the role). Either way, he offers a performance far beyond where I assumed his abilities lay and emerges as the real star of the film.

Though this Sleuth can never expect to stand up to the legacy of the original, it does indeed prove itself to be a worthy companion. And one that deserves respect, if only for taking the road less traveled by. In an era that wants film viewers to take everything at face value, a film that circumvents our expectations is a welcome one indeed.