strange and random happenstance

Where the Body Was by Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, and Jacob Phillips
Published by: Image Comics
Publication Date: January 16th, 2024
Format: Hardcover, 144 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy

It's summer 1984 on Pelican Road. Right where the street ends there's a boarding house. It's mostly filled with junkies and the neighbors eye it with suspicion. Everything kicks off one day when Tommy Brandt stands up for Karina Lane. Tommy's been in love with Karina for awhile and seeing her with an abusive prick like Sid, something inside him snaps. And if their neighbor Palmer Sneed hadn't stepped in waving his badge something inside of Tommy really would have snapped. A rib most likely. Palmer's intervention catches the eye of lonely housewife Toni Melville. Her husband is a well regarded clinical psychiatrist but he's apparently more concerned with his patients than his own wife. Well, two can play that game and she's happy to welcome Palmer into her bed. But the real hero of the neighborhood is eleven year old Lila Nguyen, AKA The Roller Derby Kid. Earlier in the summer Tommy was clearing out the garage of the boarding house and gave Lila a box of comics. Ever since that day she has been obsessed with being a superhero. Cape, domino mask, roller skates, the works. She's the eyes and ears of Pelican Road. And she's the first to see the private eye. She's doing her rounds before going to her lookout when she sees him. And she knows he brings trouble. She immediately goes to the homeless vet Ranko who she's befriended. She brings him food while he's been living rough behind the 7-11 while seeing Dr. Melville. Lila is worried he could get in trouble. She's worried a lot of people could get in trouble, especially Tommy and Karina. They've been robbing the houses in the neighborhood for drug money while also taking a dip in the houses' pools. Lila even confronts Tommy that he needs to cut it out. But Tommy knows that he's not the reason the PI is in the neighborhood. Jack Foster is there for Karina. He's been sent by her family to find her. She skipped out on court ordered rehab and needs to go home. But Tommy doesn't want her to go home. He wants this imperfect but somehow perfect summer to never end. Though that's impossible. While Palmer waving his badge at Sid might have been the start of things, the match that lit the fire, it's the PI's arrival that is the fuel. Because everyone has secrets, the affairs and the petty larceny are nothing when you learn that Palmer isn't even a cop, he's just waving his father's badge around. And the PI knows it. The PI knows all. And then Lila finds the body. A body that isn't there once the police arrive and shatter the taut atmosphere of Pelican Road, a place where murder lurks just below the surface.

When I was younger I read the expected comics, Archie, Richie Rich, The Family Circus, and once I developed taste, Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes. Then there was the darkages, and yes, that is a Philomena Cunk reference. I didn't pick up any comics. For years and years I went to Westfield Comics to buy my Red Dwarf magazines and trading cards. Because you can never have enough Red Dwarf or trading cards in your life she says as she tries to offload a whole bunch of trading cards to anyone who wants to buy them. What got me back into comics was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Firstly, because they had tie-in editions, and eventually because that's how the series continued. But being exposed to comics again meant I started to pay attention and started picking up series that other people recommended. And if I ever remember who told me to read The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen I'm coming for you! Thanks to my library, which has a stunning collection, I started to find creators I really connected to, Bill Willingham, Marjorie M. Liu, Sana Takeda, Cullen Bunn, Tyler Crook, James Tynion IV, and Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. A decade ago I picked up Fatale, Book 1: Death Chases Me and I was hooked. It's noir, it's eldritch, it's got amazing art! I devoured the whole series in a matter of days, actually having to go to Westfield Comics to buy the final arc because the wait at the library was too long. After that I was an acolyte. The writing and the art just can't be beat. Though I do like the stories that tend to veer towards the supernatural, like Fatale and Kill or be Killed, but you can't fault their Noir Old Hollywood vibe either. In 2018 though an interesting thing happened. They released My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies, an original graphic novel instead of issues on an approximately monthly basis. This was so successful, along with the expanded arc from Criminal, Bad Weekend, that starting in 2020 with the first Ethan Reckless book all their joint projects are now graphic novels. Continuous stories that aren't serialized. Though Covid did also play into this decision with supply chain issues. There have been five Ethan Reckless books to date, and other deservedly lauded books like Pulp and Night Fever. But for me it's all about Where the Body Was. This 2024 release was the hit of nostalgia that I'd been craving. Focusing on a dead end road in the summer of 1984 it tracks an intersecting cast of characters over what ends up being a rather momentous summer. I mean there's a dead body, and then there isn't! One of my favorite films of all time is The 'Burbs and this tapped into the same suburban vibe that tilts to the ominous. But there's also a fluid narration that gives us past and present. And most importantly of all, it namechecks one of the greatest episode of The Twilight Zone ever, so says my Dad, "Walking Distance." For those sentimentalists among us who love intrigue and art and human connections, even if you've never picked up a graphic novel, let me say, try this one. It really is for you.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Comics, Ed Brubaker, Ethan Reckless, Graphic Novels, Jacob Phillips, Night Fever, Pelican Road, Pulp, Sean Phillips, The 'Burbs, The Twilight Zone, Walking Distance, Where the Body Was

The Man in the High Castle was at one time my favorite series out there. The perfect expansion of the book by Philip K. Dick into a true visual masterpiece. I'm not sure where it fell apart though, but aside from a stellar The Twilight Zone parody this season with Stephen Root as Hawthorne Abendsen, AKA the actual Man in the High Castle, this show felt completely disconnected from previous seasons and laboring on some fantastical notion that the death of John Smith would fix everything. My brother would argue that the production team was so convinced of a season five pickup they were busy plotting towards an epic conclusion that they didn't see the writing on the wall and instead we are left with what we are left with. Yet I don't buy into this theory because even if we were to get more I didn't want that more anymore, if you get my drift. My main problem was that the relationship between Julia Crain and Tagomi was the heart and soul of this show and to not have Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa on AT ALL this season made no sense. To add insult to injury they kill him off in a ham-handed scene with a body double. Tagomi didn't deserve this fate and neither did we! Also where was Ed? Can someone, anyone answer that question? Also don't even get me started on deciding to finally, and belatedly, add more African American characters with the Black Communist Rebellion and not being able to find a balance between the old and the new characters. So in other words, just watch the sensational first three seasons and know that season four is unwatchable. Sometimes it just frustrates me how a show can just destroy itself by losing it's vision.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: And the Emmy Goes To, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Hawthorne Abendsen, John Smith, Julia Crain, Philip K. Dick, Rufus Sewell, Stephen Root, Tagomi, The Man in the High Castle, The Twilight Zone

Don't Look Now by Daphne Du Maurier
Published by: NYRB Classics
Publication Date: October 28th, 2008
Format: Paperback, 368 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy

On December the 3rd life changed forever for Nat Hocken and his family. The day before was like any other, he worked at the farm and ate his lunch on the cliffs overlooking the channel. But the birds seemed agitated. That night, the wind came in from the East and turned fall into winter in Cornwall. While he slept soundly next to his wife he was awoken by a tapping on the glass. Upon opening the window a bird attacked him and flew off. This happened once more, though his wife insisted in her groggy state that it was a dream. But once the children were attacked in the room across the hall his wife became scared as well. Nat spent the night fighting the birds off to find fifty little corpses on the floor of his children's bedroom by morning. The day after the night attack they tried to resume life as normal. After walking his daughter Jill to the school bus stop he decided to stop in at the farm to see if this was a unique occurrence to his family. Up at the farm they had heard nothing, but on his way back to his family the home service announced that birds were massing all over the country. Nat went home and prepared his house for the coming attack which he could feel coming deep in his bones. They survived that second night, those at the farm weren't so lucky. But how long can his family survive with their supplies ever dwindling and the birds become ever more fierce and silent?

There are many ways to interpret "The Birds." You can read that the East wind is the tide of Communism, a threat that could arrive at any moment, which was what Du Maurier intended seeing as this was written at the height of the Cold War. I, like Patrick McGrath who selected the stories for this book, found "The Birds" post apocalyptic setting more compelling. Yes, the story IS more Russian scare than world destroying plague, but this 1952 story could be seen as a prototype for what was to come in literature and television. Walking Dead anyone? Yet this is a far more languid way to tell a story that is about "the end." It's peaceful and quiet. The Hocken family trying to withstand an unknown force on limited rations in a desolate landscape sounds just like the best in horror films, but this would be of far more artistic fare, where the lighting of Nat's cigarette signals giving in to the inevitable.

The scope of this story is what I find most compelling. Knowing that this was the impetus for an Alfred Hitchcock classic I had assumptions as to what this story would be. Assumptions that I should have second guessed knowing Du Maurier's dislike of the adaptation. This shows horror on a very intimate and knowable scale with a single family facing off against the mundane omnipresent birds. Could we die because of something we took for granted as being peaceful turning against us? Could the known become unknown? You can see why this story still appeals to readers today, fear of the unknown, and attack by the previously known will always be a real threat, be it the reanimated corpses of loved ones as zombies or birds. Yet here it boils down to the fatalism in that last ambiguously bleak cigarette.

If you've only read Daphne Du Maurier's novels you truly haven't experienced her range as an author. Yes, her novels are some of the best and most beautifully written and suspenseful books you'll ever read from Rebecca to Jamaica Inn to The Scapegoat, but they often cover the same ground and don't even touch on the supernatural and strange that her short stories, such as "Don't Look Now" and "The Birds" delve into. It's like Du Maurier felt a freedom in this shorter format that let her handle the outre, the other, and the persecuted that will surprise you in their range and occasional depravity. Each story is easily worthy of Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone with a supernatural agency at work in the everyday lives of our heroes and heroines that is never quite fully explained. In "Blue Lenses" Mrs. Marda West has ocular surgery with special lenses inserted to regain her sight only to open her eyes and see that everyone has an animal's head. At first she thinks it's a joke being perpetrated on her but soon comes to realize that these visions are giving her insight into the true nature of people. People whom she trusted are animals of dubious nature and ill repute.

"The Blue Lenses," besides showing this "otherness," showcases an ongoing theme in these shorter works. Du Maurier's protagonists often think that they are the object of a joke being played at their expense. They are the victim of a con and the proper authorities are often viewed as conspiring against them. From "Split Second" to "La Sainte-Vierge" to "Don't Look Now" to the aforementioned "Blue Lenses" delusion and trickery are what everything hinges on. But this paranoia that has these people confused by what they see, hoping they are mistaken, actually shines a light on Du Maurier's true interest, plumbing the depths of humanity. The fact that these characters are so willing to believe that someone would go to the trouble of conning them shows a fear of the "other," a fear of what people are capable of. Because looking deeper, past the supernatural trappings, at the root these stories show that people are capable of murder.

In fact sometimes Du Maurier forgoes the supernatural entirely and tells a tale that is, in the end, just about murder. In fact my favorite story, "Kiss Me Again Stranger," is about a troubled girl who kills RAF men she meets. Of course it wouldn't be a true Du Maurier story if you weren't bamboozled into thinking it was a love story until the very last page, but again and again that is why these stories work, she is continually subverting your expectations. Yes you could boil this all down to man versus nature, be it's man's inner nature or actual nature or something against nature, but trying to condense it down does an injustice to the writing. Du Maurier through stories about killer birds, "The Birds," and killer usherettes, "Kiss Me Again Stranger," and women joining mountain cults that may be leper colonies, "Monte Verità," touches on so many truths and so many weighty topics that you can see why she was always miffed that people called her a "romance" author. She is so much more. If you don't believe, just pick up this book. I think it will change your mind.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Cold War, Communist, Daphne Du Maurier, Don't Look Now, Du Maurier December Deux, Hitchcock, Jamaica Inn, Kiss Me Again Stranger, Post-Apocalyptic, Rebecca, Rod Serling, The Birds, The Scapegoat, The Twilight Zone

Don't Look Now by Daphne Du Maurier
Published by: NYRB Classics
Publication Date: October 28th, 2008
Format: Paperback, 368 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy

John and Laura have gone to Venice in the hopes of putting the past behind them by revisiting places they loved when they were whole. They haven't been whole for awhile. They have been drifting apart, trapped in depression since the death of their daughter Christine due to meningitis. Venice is supposed to reinvigorate them. Instead what starts as a pleasant trip soon turns incomprehensible. One day they see elderly twin sisters in a restaurant. Laura runs into them in the restroom and discovers that one of the sisters is blind and claims to be a psychic. She tells Laura that she sees Christine there with her and her husband and that she is happy. When Laura tells John this story he claims they are nothing more than charlatans and goes out of his way to avoid them. Yet fate has other plans. That night after getting lost in the labyrinth of Venice they again meet the sisters in a restaurant and the sisters are very enthusiastic to meet Laura again.

John, in his cynicism, thinks it's the sisters sinking their claws into Laura, while Laura insists it's because the sisters have a message for John from Christine; he is to leave Venice at once because he is in danger. John scoffs at this but when they get back to their hotel there's a message that their son Johnnie, who is away at boarding school, is sick with appendicitis and Laura thinks this is the reason that Christine wanted them to leave. Laura is able to get an early flight out but John has to wait. When the plane was supposed to be in the air he sees his wife and the sisters on the grand canal. Thinking there must have been a mix up or the sisters are up to something he spends the day trying to find his wife and the sisters. But perhaps he should have paid more attention to Christine's warning and the sister's insight that John himself has the power of psychic understanding.

"Don't Look Now" is an odd little story, perhaps best remembered by the movie with the same name. The problem I faced with this story is that we are given this glimpse into the marriage of John and Laura but it's as if we are looking through glass from the famous Murano workshops. There's this weird distance that stops us from forming any real connection with the couple. This entire story is written in such a way that the reader always feels like an outsider. It's not just the lack of connection with John and Laura but "Don't Look Now" was written with an insider's knowledge of Venice. Of course during the time period Du Maurier wrote this story her readers would have been more familiar with Venice as it was a common tourist destination but that doesn't help me. I've sadly never been to Venice so the way John rattles off locales makes me think he's smug and is just another way I am excluded from becoming a part of the story. But then again, John is kind of an idiot. His ham-handed approach to finding his wife to his complete unwillingness to actually listen to the sisters means he gets what's coming to him. As for the supernatural of it all? Du Maurier has done better, but that ending. It is a shocker. Mostly because it was so vaguely foreshadowed.

But if you've only read Daphne Du Maurier's novels you truly haven't experienced her range as an author. Yes, her novels are some of the best and most beautifully written and suspenseful books you'll ever read from Rebecca to Jamaica Inn to The Scapegoat, but they often cover the same ground and don't even touch on the supernatural and strange that her short stories, such as "Don't Look Now" and "The Birds" delve into. It's like Du Maurier felt a freedom in this shorter format that let her handle the outre, the other, and the persecuted that will surprise you in their range and occasional depravity. Each story is easily worthy of Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone with a supernatural agency at work in the everyday lives of our heroes and heroines that is never quite fully explained. In "Blue Lenses" Mrs. Marda West has ocular surgery with special lenses inserted to regain her sight only to open her eyes and see that everyone has an animal's head. At first she thinks it's a joke being perpetrated on her but soon comes to realize that these visions are giving her insight into the true nature of people. People whom she trusted are animals of dubious nature and ill repute.

"The Blue Lenses," besides showing this "otherness," showcases an ongoing theme in these shorter works. Du Maurier's protagonists often think that they are the object of a joke being played at their expense. They are the victim of a con and the proper authorities are often viewed as conspiring against them. From "Split Second" to "La Sainte-Vierge" to "Don't Look Now" to the aforementioned "Blue Lenses" delusion and trickery are what everything hinges on. But this paranoia that has these people confused by what they see, hoping they are mistaken, actually shines a light on Du Maurier's true interest, plumbing the depths of humanity. The fact that these characters are so willing to believe that someone would go to the trouble of conning them shows a fear of the "other," a fear of what people are capable of. Because looking deeper, past the supernatural trappings, at the root these stories show that people are capable of murder.

In fact sometimes Du Maurier forgoes the supernatural entirely and tells a tale that is, in the end, just about murder. In fact my favorite story, "Kiss Me Again Stranger," is about a troubled girl who kills RAF men she meets. Of course it wouldn't be a true Du Maurier story if you weren't bamboozled into thinking it was a love story until the very last page, but again and again that is why these stories work, she is continually subverting your expectations. Yes you could boil this all down to man versus nature, be it's man's inner nature or actual nature or something against nature, but trying to condense it down does an injustice to the writing. Du Maurier through stories about killer birds, "The Birds," and killer usherettes, "Kiss Me Again Stranger," and women joining mountain cults that may be leper colonies, "Monte Verità," touches on so many truths and so many weighty topics that you can see why she was always miffed that people called her a "romance" author. She is so much more. If you don't believe, just pick up this book. I think it will change your mind.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Daphne Du Maurier, Don't Look Now, Du Maurier December Deux, Jamaica Inn, Kiss Me Again Stranger, Monte Verita, Psychic, Rebecca, Rod Serling, Short Story, The Birds, The Scapegoat, The Twilight Zone, Venice