Xo Orpheus: The Sisters (2013).

Not too long ago, I did a review on a book edited and published by Kate Bernheimer.  It was one of those simple, under-the-radar type fantasy anthologies that you can easily find anonymously dotting the bookstalls of your local Barnes and Noble.  One of those obscure publications that probably doesn't deserve to be left collecting dust on a back shelf somewhere, in other words.  It's almost a commonplace of literature, and what it amounts to in practice is a sometimes great way of stockpiling curious volumes of forgotten lore for rediscovery at a later date.  I first heard of Bernheimer's anthology through a chance review of it on the Truth Inside the Lie blog.  It's one of those brief overviews that always manage to be handy enough to build up an interest in even the casual reader.  The merest description of the contents of the Xo Orpheus book were enough to one day get me to knuckle down and pick up a copy of my own.

The first result of these efforts were published a while ago, like I said.  It may even be possible to level the charge that I what wrote doesn't even amount to a review so much as an informal essay critique, one limited solely to Bernheimer's introduction to the entire collection.  My only defense for going that route was based on the fact that I still think Bernheimer's thoughts on the current state of myths in contemporary life is flawed at its core.  She seems to think that its impossible for anything so ancient to survive in whatever the modern scene happens to be, that all myths are doomed to oblivion in the inevitable march of progress.  Or at least that's what I took away from her editorial introduction.  My own take on that is pretty much the opposite, however.  I think all the best myths have a way of maintaining their own staying power.  It's like they one day take on a life of their own, and live on in the imaginations of new generations.  It appears to be a form of pop-cultural osmosis that is able to transfer all these old legends down through the ages, regardless of era, or zeitgeist.  If that weren't the case, then the content of Bernheimer's own anthology would probably never have been published at all.

What that says to me is that the main reason the figures of Greco-Roman or Norse folklore are able to survive and thrive in the 21st century is because more than anything else, they've managed to find universal forms of expression.  What I mean is something like this. In Danse Macabre, Stephen King once opined that what a good work of Horror fiction is looking for are what he called the "phobic pressure points" of the audience (4).  It's that innermost place where you live, and the good work of Horror is meant to play on those pressure points like a well tuned harp.  I think it's just possible to argue that a similar, yet differing process plays out in the case of all the classic myths.  The difference is rather than anything "phobic", what myth in general plays upon might be referred to, in a Jungian sense, as "perrenial pressure points".  These are the rest of the stock responses to be had in any well told story.

It's the part of our mind that responds to hopes, dreams, wishes, and wonders, in addition to the occasional shock of horror.  These "pressure points", or responses, are so universal as to permit the myths that create them an easy level of translation and understanding from one generation to the next.  It's a phenomenon that guys like Jung, Joseph Campbell or J.R.R. Tolkien spent their whole lives studying.  Sure it classifies them as a bunch of hopeless nerds, and yet that just begs the question.  How come everyone remembers their names, along with all or most of the myths they either helped create or translate for future readers?  I think a better way to explain the current state of myths in the contemporary scene is that all of them are there, on the table, for the asking.  The key thing that determines which myths receive the most prominence at any given moment depends on the particular direction the zeitgeist, or culture, is headed, or rather where it directs its perceptual lens.  It's a process that always seems to be a little all over the place at once.  Hence Bernheimer can get her collection of reworked mythological motifs published, and Dave Lowery can win acclaim with The Green Knight.

In that sense, Bernheimer's concerns about the health of myths in modern society seems greatly exaggerated.  The good news is that none of this really matters for the actual contents of her anthology.  If Bernheimer is wrapped up in questions of the sustainability of myth in her duties as editor, the writers who have agreed to be a part of her collection are burdened by no such identity crisis.  Each of them to an artist has enough experience under their belt to realize that myth is a constant source of inspiration for their work.  As such, all they have to do is sit down at the writing desk, and then start digging for treasure.  That's why I get the sense that contributors like Sabina Murray have a much clearer view of things, and as a result are having a lot more fun with this gig than Bernheimer seems capable of.  I don't know what to say to any of that, other than to note an irony when I see it.  That just leaves us with Murray herself, and the work of hers that is on the docket for review.

Shadow Show: All New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury: Little America (2011).

Sometimes you don't know what to say.  That's just the way it goes, or so it seems.  It's difficult to tell where to begin with a name like Ray Bradbury.  I think there might be a number of reasons for that.  Part of it, of course, is to due to good old fashioned cultural amnesia.  Life itself seems to be moving at a pace where its a wonder if the man on the street is even aware of the town or city he lives in, what it's history is, or where it came from.  What in hell is an Alamo, for example?  Another, more complex reason is the way the reputation of certain ink stained wretches can sometimes grow to impossible seeming proportions over time.  We're not talking about your run-of-the-mill Mid-List fiction writer here.  The kind of authors I'm thinking of have left behind legacies that tower and dwarf over your Don DeLillo's and Sue Grafton's.  These are the simple scribblers whose works have become monoliths with the passage of time.  Something that turns them all into giants whose shoulders sometimes prove impossible to get a purchase on.  It's the case with writers like Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, Jane Austen, or J.R.R. Tolkien.  It's also the truth about Ray Bradbury.

When he first got started way back in the day, pounding out a dollar a word for himself on whatever typewriter he could afford, spewing out copy for whichever pulp magazine would give him something for his next meal, he was nothing special.  There was very little to distinguish this near dirt poor hayseed kid from Waukegan, Illinois amongst the other toilers in the trenches of the yellow rag press.  It was a setup as far from the New Yorker as you could get.  We're talking dubious periodicals here, with names like Black Mask, or even something as generic as Thrilling Wonder Stories.  They dealt mainly in cheap thrills interlaced here and there with scatterings of work that might just show tell-tale trace elements of quality on occasion.  In other words, there was a lot to like about all of it.  Though you wouldn't suppose that this was the breeding ground for all of the major popular genres as we now know them.  More to the point, there was no way anyone could guess that some four-eyed hick from Illinois would wind up playing anything like a pivitol role in all of this.  You just have to laugh at the idea.

It also doesn't change the facts of history.  What the evidence reveals to us today is that if you have to look for any one writer who can be said to have helped set the definitive mold on Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, then Ray Bradbury is your best candidate.  This is where the difficulty comes in, because when you talk about the artistic achievement of someone like Bradbury, what you're really trying to discuss is the way all the modern forms of popular Fantastic entertainment took shape, and were given the final forms, or stamps of identity by which we know them now.  What we're dealing with, then, is tall order, one that would take a whole book in order to do it justice.  The best anyone can do in a limited amount of space like this is to offer the faint suggestions of a first outline of Bradbury' accomplishment.  Right now, the best way I know how to describe all that is to say that it all came down to two or three crucial ingredients.  The first was that of finding the right, contemporary voice.  The other two were locating the right sort of stage setting, and the proper creative imagery to go along with it.  What this means in practical terms is that Ray gave a voice and home for a lot of old myths.

If you want to get technical about, there was nothing all that new about the stage in which Bradbury set all of his fiction.  So far as I can tell, it's little more than the same one guys like Shakespeare used way back in the day.  All Ray did was stumble upon it while looking for story material, saw some potential in the old, discarded grand edifice, and found all he really had to do was apply a few new coats of paint, and then he was pretty much in business.  He might have done little more than give the forms, themes, and plot devices of ancient myth a surface makeover.  Yet the key thing to note is that in finding a working modern expression for a lot of hoary old tropes, Bradbury didn't just wind up writing a lot of good stories.  He created art in such a way that everything he wrote would go on to set the kind of basic standard for everything to do with either lands far away, worlds located in other galaxies, or else all those dark corners, lanes and byways that he would later designate as "The October Country".

In each case, without ever really meaning to, Bradbury created an artistic mold, or paradigm in which later arrivals such as George Lucas or Gene Roddenberry, Neil Gaiman and Steven Spielberg, or John Carpenter and Stephen King could find room to thrive and carry on where the old Waukegan Martian left off.  Indeed, it could be argued that all King did was to find his eventual way into Ray's October Country, and then set up a permanent office space there.  Just recently it even looks as if King's son, Joe Hill, is more or less poised to take over the management of the Old Country for future posterity.  This then is just a preliminary suggestion of the myriad legacy that was left behind by Ray Bradbury.  It's an accomplishment whose effects aren't lost on the likes of Sam Weller and Mort Castle.  It's the main reason they banded together to help create Shadow Show, an anthology of short fiction dedicated to and inspired by the work of Ray Bradbury.  If I had to take a guess, then it's Weller who started the idea.

He's no stranger either to Bradbury's work, or the author himself for that matter.  Weller spent a great deal of time interviewing Bradbury during the final years of his life.  It was a brief yet impactful meeting of two minds.  At the end of it, Weller had come away with enough of an understanding on who Bradbury was to later give us a full-length, published biography way back in 2006.  So far it remains the standard introductory text to Ray and his particular brand of Gothic Science Fictionalism.  With this knowledge in mind, a collection like Shadow Show takes on an air of inevitability.  Odds are even it's possible that Weller felt the need to give a little something back in return for the writer opening his house and home to him for such a gracious period of time.  So together with Mort Castle, Weller canvassed a list of some of the best names in the Fantastic genres, and this is the final result.

In his introduction to the anthology, Weller lays out the main premise better than I can, really:

"In Shadow Show, this celebration of Ray Bradbury, artists who have been profoundly influenced by him pen their own short stories in homage, stories that through image, theme, or concept are either ever so obviously or ever so subtly "Bradbury-informed."  From the lyrical magic of Dandelion Wine, to the shifting sands of Mars, to the roiling mist of The October Country, Bradbury's literary achievements in all their scope are honored by a host of today's top writers.  Shadow Show presents our most exciting authors, who, like the honoree, are not contained or constrained by category or locale, as they touch the Bradbury base for inspiration to explore their own singular, wildest imaginings.The stories in this volume are niether sequels nor pastiches but rather distinctive fictive visions by writers inspired by a single common touchstone: the enduring works of Ray Bradbury (4-5)".

It's a book I think I caught in passing, is all.  Like maybe it was a title that caught my eye as I was running my gaze over the list of titles in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section of a local Half-Price Books, or something.  I didn't snatch it up then and there.  However, it seemed like something that could maybe be worth keeping an eye on.  Sooner or later this idea turned from a lingering possibility to a promise more or less kept.  I think what might have cinched the deal for me was a positive review I caught of it from the Truth Inside the Lie blog.  The result was the same, either way.  I knuckled under, paid the ticket, and took a ride.  What follows is a review of the first carnival attraction I took on the Shadow Show.

War of the Worlds (1953).

We almost could have had a Hitchcock version.  Let that sink in for minute.  This would have all happened a long time ago.  Some way back during the 1930s, or so I'm told.  What I've heard is that old "Hitch" once went so far as to track down the author of the original, 1897 Sci-Fi novel, The War of the Worlds, just so he could get his permission to adapt it into a feature-length film.  This is information I picked up from within the pages of Bill Warren's massive, encyclopedia length survey of Science Fiction films from the 1950s, Keep Watching the Skies (878).  As far as I was concerned, I'd never had a clue that ever happened.  It's one of those pieces of trivial information that doesn't matter much except to a small sector of the world known as either bookworms, or various genre geeks and aficionados.  To the vast majority of the world, such information has no choice except to come off as unexpected, and confusing.  That reaction is pretty much the same for biblio and SF cinephiles.  The difference in our case is that rather than just giving a shrug of the shoulders, that kind of information can't help but sound incredibly cool to our ears.  It sort of explains why we're a minority, and yet there's no apologizing for it.

For guys like me, the fact that an auteur genius like Hitchcock would turn out to be enough of a fanboy of the prototypical alien invasion story gives the old Hollywood legend this strange sense of humanity that goes a long way toward making him seem less aloof, cool, and detached as his now famous public persona.  It suggests the image of this young kid growing up on the outskirts of London, and rather than a pint-sized version of the dapper, sadistic Master of Suspense, he's like this walking cliche of geekdom.  The sort of kid you might expect to find making his way home from school in suspenders, with maybe a bottle of soda pop in one hand, and either a newspaper comic, a dime novel purchased off a drugstore rack, or maybe the latest issue of The Strand Magazine tucked under one arm, hoping against hope that Arthur Conan Doyle might have found his way back to Baker Street one more time.  

The information provided by Warren allows us to imagine a further variation on this image.  Instead of an Across-the-Pond equivalent of a Pulp Crime serial, its one of those early periodicals that were making their first tentative stabs at Interplanetary fiction, just before the advent of Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories helped launch the genre's much touted Golden Age.  The picture of a young nerd immersing himself in the Fantastic genres is as cliche, and dime a dozen as they come.  Nor was it anything like an isolated incident even back then.  The proverbial woods, as the saying goes, was and is still "full of 'em".  What comes as a shocker is to find out that a guy like Hitchcock counts as one of the tribe.  In retrospect, I guess that knowledge shouldn't come as too great a surprise.  Hitch would never have been the artist he became if didn't have an understanding and sympathy for the popular forms of storytelling.  I think it's just the way he presented himself in public, and the style he infused into his best work always manages to give off this sense of class, and taste.  He makes you feel as if you're watching a type of cinema for sophisticates.  Realizing he was a Sci-Fi nerd is a left field surprise.

What Warren's information tells the astute reader, more than anything, is just how much of an impact H.G. Well's Martian novel has left on artists and fans throughout the world.The best way to describe a phenomenon like that is to label it a template setter.  It's the sort of thing that, like Mt. Everest, just happens  every now and again.  Some artist comes along, and either by the purest dumb luck, a burst genius, or most likely a combination of the two results in one of those stories that manages to burrow its way into the unconscious zeitgeist of the culture at large.  This seems to have been the fate of Wells's space yarn, and it's shelf life in the public consciousness appears to be guaranteed for quite some time.

It appears to have left enough of an impact on the mind of someone like a young Hitchcock to such an extent that the man who would later leave a definitive stamp on the Mystery genre still felt compelled to hunt down one of the main shapers of Speculative Fiction all the way in Nice (ibid), and try to ask his permission to make a movie out of it.  It's one of those great what-if moment that history like to tease us with.  Because: reasons.  It means at one point, we could have had an early, big screen, Invaders from Mars epic from the same director who brought you Psycho, and quite possibly featuring Orson Welles himself in the starring role.  None of that ever happened. And it's at moments like these when it's possible to understand how people keep asking the question: Why can't we have nice things?

Wells doesn't seem to have shown any reluctance to Hitchcock's film proposal.  The one monkey in the wrench, as Wells pointed out, was that the rights for the novel were then locked up with Paramount studios, and Hitchcock was still a young novice at the time.  His star was rising, yet even though his career would soon be on the make, it was still at that point were he was considered "Little People" by the moguls running Hollywood at the time.  That's got to be one of the sharpest kicks in the teeth history had in store.  What makes it worse is that it was lying in wait for such a long time, and still you never see it coming.  So, the movie rights to the book languished away, possibly in some studio vault, way out there in the Paramount lot in Hollywood.  There the rights to the novel sat, and waited, with all the time in the world, and nothing to do.  Hitchcock became a film legend, and still no one bothered with the property.  H.G. Wells himself, the man who first brought Mars down to earth, shuffled off whatever we think these mortal coils are supposed to be, and the rights to his work stayed right where the were.  A carbon copy paper version of the Sphinx, and just as inscrutable.  Nothing important happened with them for the longest time.  And then Hungarian producer George Pal took them up.

Pitch Black (2000).

For the longest time, I thought this was a Dan O'Bannon film.  I'm pretty sure of where I got the idea.  Over at the Moria Science Fiction, Horror, and Fantasy Film Review site, there is a neat set of retrospectives taking a look at movies such as Dark Star, Alien, Heavy Metal, and Total Recall.  The one thing each of these films have in common boils down to just a name: O'Bannon.  He's become something of a known-unknown quantity for today's filmgoers.  He's a name that sounds familiar, like a memory on the very tip of the tongue.  It's just that no one can think of a good reason why that should be the case.  These days almost everybody can recall the impact left on them by Ridely Scott's haunted house film in space.  They might have a bit of trouble recalling every last scrap of that film's opening credits, however.  

No matter how iconic the damn thing is.  If any names stick out among that film's cast and crew, then it's a pretty short list, mainly consisting of the usual suspects.  There's the First Lady of Cinema Badasses herself, of course: Sigourney Weaver.  Then there's our favorite Chest Burster victim, the legendary John Hurt.  Beyond that, the memory palace is sometimes able to reserve reservations for the rest of the film's cast who lent their talents on-screen.  Names such as Tom Skerritt, Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto, Harry Dean Stanton, and Veronica Cartwright.  A few may even recall the name of H.R. Giger, the man responsible for bringing the Xenomorph to life.  Beyond this, the rest is a blank, including who wrote the damn thing.

Such is the ironic fate of Dan O'Bannon, the man who wrote the original screenplay for Alien.  The fact that he has to dredged up from the clouded swamps of the attic storage files means that not only has the man (if not his legacy) been half-forgotten, it's also sometimes easy to confuse his own work with that of others.  This is what happened to me in the case of David Twohy's Pitch Black.  What happened is Richard Schieb, the owner and operator of Moria.com, posted the following question at the start of a review:

"One of the great mysteries of the 1990s and 00s was “What ever happened to Dan O’Bannon?” As scriptwriter, Dan O’Bannon made two grandslams in the 1970s with the scripts for Dark Star (1974) and Alien (1979). O’Bannon then went on to deliver some fine hard-edged scripts, including the likes of Dead & Buried (1981), Heavy Metal (1981), Blue Thunder (1983), Lifeforce (1985) and Invaders from Mars (1986), before making an excellent directorial debut with Return of the Living Dead (1985), which inverted George Romero’s Dead trilogy with a cheerful punk cynicism. However, in the 1990s, Dan O’Bannon almost entirely dropped from the cinematic radar. There were a number of scripts with his name attached – Total Recall (1990), Screamers (1995) and Hemoglobin/Bleeders (1997) – but all of these were old scripts that had been reworked by other writers (web)".

In just a single paragraph, Schieb has given the reader what has to be one of the most succinct summaries of the ups and down's of one of the most distinguished, yet unjustly neglected careers in the history of movies.  For the purposes of this review, however, what it did was get cross-wired somewhere in the old memory banks.  The result is that I labored until just recently under the assumption that O'Bannon was the one responsible for helping to bringing Vin Diesel to a wider audience awareness after his first big break with Spielberg the year earlier.  Turns out I was dead wrong, while also being kind of right.  It's true that O'Bannon never had a thing to do with Pitch Black, however, I'm not the first one to see a link between him and the Diesel film.  Perhaps I'd better explain.

Cage of Light (1984).

Not long ago, I made first introductions to an obscure piece of media.  It was a long forgotten radio program, known simply as Nightfall.  One of those fly-by-night creative experiments of the early to mid-1980s.  Looking back now, I almost want to call it the last Golden Age of artistic achievement.  It was a time when there always seemed to be enough loose change lying around, with enough imagination left over to spare.  The result was this brief, yet vibrant span of time for the entertainment industry worldwide.  It was a window of opportunity where the basic rule of thumb was, if you can dream it, try and see if you can make it real.  As a result, part of the charm of the 80s was that it was something close to the last time anyone thought of trying to take a chance on the now rare, anthology show format.  That's the kind of show where there's no single cast of characters, or plot, and instead each episode of the show is dedicated to a simple, stand-alone story with a definitive beginning, middle, and end.  It's became a near endangered species in an age devoted to franchise tent-poles of higher budgets and lessening returns.

While the format is practically a collector's antique these days, it still remains one of my favorite types of programming.  I think part of the charm of the anthology format is that it's the one media style that comes closest to the experience of reading a story in its purest form.  By that I mean simply that the best thing about an anthology series is that it comes closest to the experience of picking up one book, living within its pages for a span of time, and then being lucky enough to find another story, just as good as the one that came before, just for different reasons.  There must have been some sort of mutual wavelength going on back then.  As the 1980s appears to have been something close to the last final bow for the genre anthology.  I think part of what explains this is that a lot of the people who grew up as young kinds watching shows like The Twilight Zone, or Alfred Hitchcock Presents came away inspired by what they saw, and now that they were established names in the industry, they wanted to revive the particular creative thrill each of them got out of  the efforts of format pioneers like Rod Serling.

It helped in no small part that the original Big Three TV networks who were responsible for giving us shows like The Outer Limits, and One Step Beyond, were now eager to try and see if each of these old war horses still had some life in them.  Could the old, gray mare still run with the input of some new blood, in other words?  By and large, the answer to that question seems to have been, pretty much, yes.  That's how we wound up with a slate of new and improved anthology shows, such as the first (and so far, the most successful) reboot of the Zone, along with new offerings such as Tales from the Darkside, or Steve Spielberg's Amazing Stories.  Even good ol' Uncle Freddy Krueger got his own Tales from the Crypt style series for a brief span of time.  In fact, however crazy that sounds, let it at least stand as a good example of just how the networks were willing to take risks on real, actual creative challenges.

This spurt of creativity didn't apply solely to the Idiot Box, however.  The format of dramatic radio, what some have referred to as the Theater of the Mind, was also able to get in on the act.  In addition to shows like The Ray Bradbury Theater, the full cast audio performance began to find the start of a new footing for itself, after a long span of dormancy, which started sometime in the early 60s.  By the time the 80s rolled around, the OTR format was beginning to show signs of stirring back to life.  It was a revival composed of many parents.  For the purposes of the article, the creator we have to focus in on is known as William Lane.  If the name has any familiarity to a few of you reading this, then it's because we've already covered his efforts once before.  Lane was the primary wunderkind behind the Nightfall radio dramas.  A good way to sum up his achievements there is to claim that Bill Lane might have been the man responsible for bringing the legitimate Gothic story of Horror and the Supernatural back to the airwaves.  It's the sort of achievement that no one ever talks about, and barely anyone remembers, all the while going on to leave ripple effects across the genre and various mediums for ages to come.

I suppose it's safe to claim that Nightfall remains Lane's chief claim to fame.  It was his baby, and he found the right way of raising and treating it that catapulted them both into a minor, yet genuine, form of the stratosphere.  Even if that's the case, it's still a mistake to treat him as the radio equivalent of a one-book-wonder.  In addition to Nightfall, Lane seems to have had one other long lasting endeavor to his name.  Much as he'd done for the Horror genre in his first big breakout series, he then went on to pay the same compliment to the related, literary strain known as Science Fiction.  The title for this new, spaced out anthology was The Vanishing Point. In many ways, this seems to have been a natural outgrowth of Lane's earlier efforts.  The Nightfall series ran from 1980 to 83.  By that time, Sci-Fi and Horror where reaching a height that they've never been able to achieve since.  Lane picked up on all this, and his successful effort in audio Tales of Terror must have left him eager for more of the similar.

It's been difficult, if not impossible, to find a sufficient amount of background material to this anthology.  In that sense, Vanishing Point is very much in the same boat as its earlier, sister show.  Each of them is an unjustly neglected, under-documented aspect of real life history, and so we've let each of them slip way back in the corridors of memory.  This makes the critical historian's task a bit more difficult, though not always insurmountable.  The most reliable facts available are that "Vanishing Point was the CBC’s follow-up to Nightfall, which had instilled new life into its many regional drama centers.  Like that series, Vanishing Point drew from the CBC's entire coast to coast network, gathering together the CBC's finest production, engineering, writing, and acting talent to mount one of the better radio dramas in CBC history.  

"While primarily a science fiction series, the anthology presented a wide range of genres, including thriller, horror, detective, psychological drama, comedy and even the occasional musical.  A number of episodes were adaptations of short stories from famous authors like Ray Bradbury, Roald Dahl or Evelyn Waugh, but many were original plays from Canada's top talent.  Bill Lane workshopped plays from the winners of various Canadian literary competitions as a way of "reaching the audience by developing the talents of new playwrights (web)". And that, believe it or not, is all the background information I can find on the whole thing.  The only other interesting piece of trivia I've been able to find was something dredged up by accident.  It was a brief promotional line for the show.  It's tagline was promoted as: "The point between reality and fantasy (web)".  One critic goes on to describe it in the following terms: "Don’t expect to make sense of -these- as you would any other show. These stories are taken from the dream state that you slide into at night, just out of grasp of your senses, completely surreal, but in the dream, it makes every bit of sense… The shows are designed to confuse and twist; they have small meanings that resonate only with the dreamer’s subconscious (ibid)".

What's interesting about this circumstance is the way it can have of creating a proper sense of mystery surrounding the whole production.  It's one of those neat little unsung endeavors that fly under the radar during its moment in history.  Then it re-emerges as a relic of time at some later date, leaving an interesting enigma for people to wonder about.  That seems to have been the legacy of Vanishing Point.  In order to get better acquainted with it, maybe the best way of making first introductions is by taking a look at one of the show's sample offerings.  It's a first contact yarn, known simply as, Cage of Light.

Death on the Nile (2022).

There's a dirty secret that few know about.  I've never been impressed by how movies look.  I guess that's supposed to be this major shock in a lot circles.  I'm just not sure I've run into any one of them.  All I know for certain is that as far back as I can recall, what made me like or dislike any work of art, whether on the page or on the big or small screen wasn't its production quality, or its "star" value.  Nor am I at all certain that this is something that the majority of the audience cares about all that much.  If audiences really had a care about the performers, then actors like Katherine Hepburn, Clarke Gable, or Donna Reed would still be familiar names in the back of the minds of viewers almost everywhere.  

The fact this isn't the case tells me it's more of mistake to rely on the so-called "quality" of any given film production than is normally assumed to be valid in most movie-going quarters.  For what it's worth, I've also heard talk that the importance of movie "stars" is something that's on the way out as far as modern fandoms are concerned.  This could either good or bad.  The only constant I've been able to find, the one that has proven the most reliable over the years, all boils down to a single question.  Is the writing good?  If the answer can manage to be yes, then I don't care how poverty row the "production" side of things gets.  You could strip it right down to no real props or background, just a bunch of unfamiliar faces saying the lines on an undressed sound-stage, like Thornton Wilder's Our Town, and all I'd still care to know, even then, is whether or not the narrative itself is able to hold up to close scrutiny.

I say all this as prelude to a simple observation.  I want you to know that I can't be bothered to give much of a rip about how well Kenneth Branagh does either in front of or behind the camera.  I don't know how that makes me sound, and I'll swear I don't care.  All I know is he's got one of those MST3K type reputations in the industry, and among audiences.  He's accused of being over-the-top, with an incurable hankering for "Ham 'n Cheese", no matter what film he makes, or is in.  It's the kind of thing that acts as a distraction for most people.  The minute he starts doing his thing, whatever that is, he gets folks laughing at him, like this unintentional Ringling Bros. clown.  The main claim in all this is that he makes himself impossible to take seriously as an actor, for some reason.  To which, all I can say goes as follows: "Good for him, where's the story"?  If we're going to go the whole Hot Topic route on this, drop me a postcard, cause I fundamentally count myself out of all such considerations.  To me, the gossip columnist approach to works of fiction is the gutter where all legitimate criticism of art goes to die.  And I have too much respect for the medium of storytelling to even think of writing like that.

So that means when it comes to talking about Branagh's next film, if you want to know anything about plotting, characterization, or themes, all that boring good stuff, then you've come to the right place.  If it's a Soap Opera you're looking for, then aren't there still 24 hour cable TV channels for that sort of thing?  I don't know, I've never bothered to look any of that up.  I just took a wild guess, here.  Either way, the answer remains the same, no.  I'm here to concentrate on the importance of story, as story, nothing more, and never less.  With that in mind, let's talk Agatha Christie.  I said a moment ago that names like Kate Hepburn tend to get lost in the sands of time.  I don't know whether that's a basic rule of thumb, yet it does seem to be a cruel fate for a lot of once great talents that perhaps shouldn't be forgotten.  I guess that's what makes Christie's ability to hang on for so long all that more remarkable.  She's an exception that proves the rule, and yet she is also one of the most common of phenomenons to any longtime bookworm.  She's a reliable dime store rack novelist, and she's still hanging around, while other great practitioners in this trade (and here I'm thinking of names like David Goodis or John D. MacDonald) have long since faded from memory.  I'm not saying this makes her bad, by the way.

Far from that being the case, I think I'd have to go so far as to call her one of the undisputed geniuses of the Mystery Noir genre of writing.  What would be interesting to me is to figure out just what it is about her work that makes her linger in the memory after such a great passage of time.  John Fowl's The Collector used to be a Very Big Deal to audiences everywhere, until one day he wasn't, and now everyone wonders who the hell I'm talking about?  Christie still doesn't seem to need that much in the way of an introduction just yet, and its something like a modern marvel in a short term memory loss culture like ours.  Whatever the case, stories like Death on the Nile are still regarded fondly, whereas I'm not sure anyone has an idea who Mickey Spillane is.  To this day its held up as one of the best examples of the genre, and it has proven famous enough to have gained at least two prior adaptations to the Cinema and TV screen, first with Peter Ustinov, and second as part of the classic David Suchet series.  Branagh's efforts make it a trifecta, which brings us to the important point, the story itself.

McCay (2018).

When we think of the Comics Industry at all these days, it's usually less for the the actual art and format, in and of themselves.  And that's kind of a shame, really.  As it tells you a lot about the shape things are in, when you find any behind the scenes drama a lot more memorable than any of the stories contained in the pages of DC or Marvel.  For my part, I just know what it's like to be able to grow up in a time when this wasn't the case.  I got here in 1984, and if you do the math, it means that while I was sort of too early and young for the party, I arrived just in time for what in retrospect is the last great burst of artistic creativity in the world of comic books.  When I was still learning to walk and say or read my own name, guys like Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Dave McKeon, and Neil Gaiman were all finding ways to bring all the various comics they grew up with as kids into a more sophisticated format, written and designed in a way that even the most snobbish of adults could respect.  Looking back on it now, it's that over-arching desire for respect that stands out the most about it, at least to me.  Comic books had fully entered into what is now known as the Bronze Age, with all the major superheroes and their brands having gone into a major slump.

Moore, Gaiman, and the others, all held a shared conviction that the comics art form was capable of much more than it was putting out at the time.  It's what led them to conceptualize stories, layouts, and designs that would go on to be hailed as a revolution that revitalized the Comics Industry, and gave it a new lease on shelf life.  What I find ironic about such statements isn't the effect it had.  It's more to do with the familiar adage that everything old is new again.  A lot of the main reason for why Morrison and McKeon succeeded as well as they did in their endeavors is because aside from being real talented at the drawing and drafting board, each of them was highly literate as an artist.  What they did was to take the techniques, practices, and above all the themes from some of the best works of Great Literature, and apply them to the world of sequential storytelling art.  The result could sometimes be stories with influences drawn from the interconnected worlds of classical film, painting, and literature.

We have Grant Morrison's Arkham Asylum, for instance, of which he had this to say.  "The story's themes were inspired by Lewis Carroll, quantum physics, Jung, and Crowley; its visual style by surrealism, Eastern European creepiness, Cocteau, Artaud, Švankmajer, the Brothers Quay, etc".  Also, "We were also referencing sacred geometry, and the plan of the Arkham House was based on the Glastonbury Abbey and Chartres Cathedral (web)".  In this, all Morrison was doing is taking the lead from Alan Moore, who often worked the symbols or archetypes from ancient myth and ritual practices into the plotting and structural schemes of work like Watchmen, From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Promethea.  Moore was even able to take this further by writing prose poems, or poetic essays such as Snakes and Ladders, and then have them transcribed into comic format with the help of illustrators like Eddie Campbell.  In a similar vein, Neil Gaiman seems to have found the knack for taking the ideas and plot beats from some of the best writers in literature, and giving them a home for people who've never even heard of H.P. Lovecraft, or James Branch Cabell.  It is just possible that some readers picked up a liking for Shakespeare from the pages of Sandman.

Is it right to call all this a golden age?  At the very least, it was something a hell of a lot close to a Renaissance of sorts.  What makes it kind of sad, thinking back on things as they are now, is that it is possible to debate whether it has ever gotten as good as it was back then.  My guess is that most fans, even the most casual of comics readers, would be willing to go with the idea that it isn't.  Maybe what's happening is that we're all busy waiting for that next creative spark to ignite things once more, and usher in a further renascence of the medium.  It's something that should probably be looked forward to.  In the meantime, all we can do is wait, and hope for the time when that next creative spark manifests itself.  In the meanwhile, part of what can help to pass the time is to recall some of the influences that helped inspire the creators of the format now known as the graphic novel.  There is at least one name that gets banded around a bit, here and there.  It's the work of one particular artist who keeps cropping up at random, whether it be in interviews, or in the panels of some of their most famous works.

Gaiman even dedicated one of his shot story collections to this very graphic artist, featuring a panel from his work as part of the collections frontpiece, just opposite the table of contents.  It's the picture of what looks to be a seven year old boy in pajamas climbing up the side of an otherwise ordinary city building.  The surreal touch comes in when you realize the scale of the windows the little boy is climbing past makes him two or three times the size of the average office floor.  It's like we're looking at a minuscule, human version of King Kong, making his way up the Empire State Building.  The interesting thing is I'm pretty sure this image was created quite some time before even the idea of Kong was ever conjured up out of the topsoil of the imagination.  In the drawing, the little boy is looking down onto the unseen streets, miles below.  As he does so, he muses aloud to himself.  "These people ought to know who we are, and tell that we are here".  It's a curious, strange, and somehow beguiling observation.  The sort of thing you never expect to hear anywhere except within the realm of dreams.  

That's because the artist responsible for this otherworldly picture is doing his best to conjure up an idea of what the inside of a dream might look like.  The man responsible for this image, and the observation is known today simply as Winsor McCay.  I've never found out if the boy in his drawing ever had a proper last name.  He's always young, like Peter Pan, yet slightly more timid, yet just as possible of courage and equal acts of mischief and bravery as the circumstances call for it.  So far as I can tell, he's always just been known as Little Nemo, and he is McCay's greatest creation.  In his short story collection, Fragile Things, Gaiman at least hinted at the kind of influence that a graphic artist like McCay had on his own efforts as a writer.  He originally wanted to name his anthology after the word balloon caption in the image described above.  With this tacit admission in mind, it's not too difficult to see just where and how Gaiman would take a great deal of his inspiration for the concepts, ideas, and sometimes even the visual elements of a graphic novel like Sandman.  He's not the only one, either.

McCay's Nemo comics have so managed to cement their way into the submerged pop cultural consciousness that he keeps cropping up every now and then, like a half-remembered dream recalled at the very tip edges of memory, which is essentially what Nemo and his stories are now.  Aside from Gaiman, here's a partial list of the artists that have taken inspiration from McCay's original land of dreams.  Alan Moore patterned the plot of the fourth issue of Miracleman after McCay's secondary world of Slumberland.  The rock band Genesis released a track known as Scenes from a Night's Dream, in their post lineup album,...And Then There Were Three.  Which gives listener's a summary outline of the basic setup of the Nemo comics.  French Surrealist Jean "Moebius" Giraud tried to write a sequel or two to McCay's work in the early to mid-90s.  Maurice Sendak's style owes a great deal to the original Dream newspaper strips.  Finally, one of McCay's biggest fans, an entrepreneur named Walter Elias Disney, once took the famous illustrator's son into his office, and showed him a blueprint for the park that would one day bear his name.  Then he admitted to Robert McCay that all this really should have belonged to his father.  That's the kind of imapct and legacy that Winsor McCay has left behind.

In other words, what we're talking about with Little Nemo in Slumberland, and its creator, is one of those pop-cultural touchstones that keep finding ways of influencing one generation after another.  As of this writing, awareness of McCay's most famous creation still manages to hover around the 50% mark.  That means half of the world still carries on and keeps the memory alive.  That's got a be a gosh damn record for a globe that's lucky if it still recalls an event like the signing of the Magna Carta.  I've seen enough of this guy and his work, off and on, over the years to grow a certain amount of curiosity about him.  I've leafed through enough of the comics to know I'm dealing with an actual talent.  He's good at what he does.  Very good, to be honest.  In fact, based on what I've seen, I'm afraid there's just no way to avoid calling him an artist.  That is also the sum of what I know about this guy.  Aside from his comic creation, the rest of his life comes off as something of a complete and total mystery.

I suppose that's what made me snatch up a copy of Thierry Smolderen's graphic novel.  The funny thing is I can't at all claim that it was something I was deliberately searching for.  I was busy looking up what I thought was a completely unrelated topic at the time, and there it was, as part of the options brought up as a part of my search engine results.  I'll have to admit I wasn't expecting McCay to put in an appearance, sort of .  What was I looking for that could have brought Smolderen's graphic novel up in the first place?  And what does all this have to do with the creator of Little Nemo in Slumberland?  Yeah, when you put it like that, I guess it all does call for a bit of a damn good explanation.