I posted previously about our school comic con and on Saturday, a mini El-Con was held at Moray College in Elgin. I wore my Riddler costume; I've never done cosplay outside of school before and the atmosphere was very friendly. I bought a Dalek print but I was disappointed to see no graphic novels or comics on sale. However, Andy Mackenzie from Elgin said they'd been let down by a vendor.
As I've said recently, I've ordered a spinner rack and I've been buying (too many) old comics for it that are iconic to me of childhood and adolescence. I've been particularly keen on Gil Kane and Gene "The Dean" Colan: late 60s Dr. Strange and Avengers but also early 80s Wonder Woman. I bought myself the collected first run of Wolfman and Colan's Night Force for my 56th birthday, last Sunday.
Night Force first appeared as a "free prevue" in New Teen Titans in the later spring/early summer of 1982. It's not unlike Marvel's Tomb of Dracula in that a disparate group of individuals ( divorced reporter and schlub Jack Gold, psychiatric patient Vanessa Van Helsing, apparently possessed by demons and groovy parapsychologist Donovan Caine, all reminiscent of the classic ToD team) are swept up in a supernatural conspiracy. They are also the often-unwilling agents- Shadow-style- of the timeless Baron Winters, an enigmatic and manipulative occultist, who reminds me of Vincent Price blended with Jonathan Frid.
The series comprises three story-arcs. The first focuses on Gold and Caine's quest to liberate Vanessa from a Siberian scientific complex, where she is being tested as a living weapon. Caine loses two limbs and Gold finds himself in a loveless marriage: the cost of restraining Vanessa's psi-power, which resembles Raven on a rampage.
The second and most successful arc, "Beast" depicts Winters dispatching hardened criminal Paul Brooks to free the tenants of a New York brownstone. They are being held hostage by a Lovecraftian alien. The third and final arc, "Mark of the Beast" is an origin of sorts for the Baron. The Night Force here consists of his son and ex-wife and a secretary from 1933, stranded in the '80s. Unfortunately, it's a virtually incoherent mash-up of Nazi ghosts and the Beast of Revelations in a carnival setting.
An amalgam of Dark Shadows and The Exorcist, Night Force is gorgeous but tedious. The literally shadowy conspiracy in "The Summoning" is never resolved and the seven-issue story feels interminable. Katina, the wheelchair -bound lost love of the Baron, looks a little ludicrous when levitating and the potentially tragic relationship of Gold and Vanessa is handwaved away later in the series. The biggest problem for me, as in all of Wolfman's work, is the affected, melodramatic writing:
"There's something phoney about those agents. They weren't real".
"You're funny as a corpse".
"I'm purposely letting myself grow angrier".
"The dark powers have totally insinuated within her and they feel so very, very good, Vanessa thinks".
"If there is a god in heaven, surely he must cry."
"Paul will pay. Oh how Paul will pay".
Like Chris Claremont, Wolfman is painfully unfunny and both his dialogue and narration are prey to redundancy and idiosyncratic stresses that are almost Shatnerian. Although he's not literally unreadable, compared with, say, Don McGregor's Morbius scripts for Vampire Tales, Wolfman's flaws spoil Night Force and NTT for me. This is awkward because we had a very nice conversation outside AKA in Glasgow in 1985 about the Mac Ryan/ Flash that was never published. But then I also told Alan Moore that Vigilante was a morally reprehensible comic, so too late, probably...
DC's willingness to experiment with genres made it the more interesting of the Big Two at the time. Ambiguous characters like the Baron were also a contrast to the icons like DC's Trinity. However dripping with mood Night Force undoubtedly is, it's Wolfman's weaknesses which hamper the series, in my opinion.
Summer horror continues of course, in the spirit of the BBC2 Double Bills with dvds and Dr. X, which I last saw in July 1979 ( paired with Hammer's Curse of Frankenstein).
This 1933 shocker is very like Golden Age Batman: a hooded, disfigured killer; mad science ("Synthetic fllllesh!"); wisecracking reporters and a bevy of suspects. My copy was colourised with sickly greens and pinks. It was more gripping than, say, White Zombie but it's no Hounds of Zaroff. Similar fare can be found on the Horror Channel and Talking Pictures TV, of course. However, this summer, I've lined up Vampire Circus, Paranoiac and Legend of the Werewolf, among others. And as ever, I'll play Soul Limbo to make the experience as authentic as possible.
Coming up, potentially: The DoctorDonna; King Kull; Mysterio and the Fatal Five.
All images are presumed copyright of their respective owners.
No comments:
Post a Comment