Reviews by Bob Ignizio
Damn Right I'm From Cleveland
by Mike Polk Jr. (Gray & Company Publishers)
If you're going to live in Cleveland,
you might as well have a sense of humor about it. Comedian Mike Polk
Jr. certainly does. He's the guy responsible for those “Hastily
Made Cleveland Tourism” videos. He's also the author of one of the
finest pieces of bathroom reading material to come out in 2012, Damn
Right I'm From Cleveland. I
don't mean that as an insult; as Polk himself readily admits, this is
barely a real book. It's basically just a collection of short essays
and cheap visual gags tailor made for reading a few pages at a time.
All
the crucial Cleveland subjects are covered – the Free stamp, the
East side/West side rivalry, Michael Stanley, Dick Goddard, The Rock
Hall, the ickiness of Edgewater Park, and of course plenty on our
area sports teams, where jokes practically write themselves. And what
would a Cleveland humor book be without at least some mention of the
notorious “Cleveland Steamer”? I am kind of shocked that the
only mention of Cleveland's fine horror movie host tradition was a
suggestion for a new Great Lakes Brewing Company beer (“Little John
Stout”), but you can't have everything.
Polk
takes a self deprecating tone throughout, which helps mitigate the
few occasions where he comes off like a frat boy, such as the
sections on the different types of Cleveland girls and hot area
bartenders he likes to stalk. Misogynistic? Maybe. Not funny?
Definitely. Thankfully none of the sections take up more than a page
or two, so the duds are over with quickly and something funnier is
just around the corner.
Alien: The Illustrated Story
by Archie Goodwin and Walter Simonson (Titan Books)
I was
9 years old when Ridley Scott's horror/sci-fi hybrid ALIEN
hit theater screens in 1979. I had seen the TV spots and pictures of
the monster in Starlog
and Fangoria
magazine, and damn if it didn't look cool. But there was no way my
parents were going to take me to see an R rated horror movie in a
theater.
As
it turned out, there was one other source for knowledge about the
movie; in fact, an extremely comprehensive source. That was the comic
book adaptation published by Heavy
Metal
magazine. For those not familiar, Heavy
Metal
had nothing to do with head-banging rock & roll. Rather it was a
mature readers science fiction and fantasy magazine size comic book.
With the comic's code authority in full effect at the time, there was
no way that one of the major comic book companies like Marvel or DC
could publish a faithful comic adaptation of ALIEN,
but there were no such restrictions for the magazine size comics. And
that I first saw the chest burster scene while paging through the
periodical that contained it in a shopping mall Waldenbooks.
Goodwin
and Simonson do a fine job of translating film to printed page,
something I was able to verify just a few short years later when
ALIEN
made its pay cable debut. On the surface Goodwin's scripting follows
the film pretty closely, but he brings his own point of view and tone
to the material. Simonson's artwork hadn't fully developed at this
point in his career, but it's still unmistakably his work. He doesn't
shy away from the gore, and you'll see more of the titular monster
here than you will in the movie. Surprisingly given Heavy
Metal's
tendencies towards the sexy stuff, however, he downplays Ripley's
final underwear-clad showdown with the creature.
While
it's no classic “graphic novel”, Alien:
The Illustrated Story
is an enjoyable artifact of the film it adapts, and a nostalgic
reminder of a time when instead of going online to have a movie
ruined for you, you had to buy something like this, and Titan should
be commended for making it available again.
ALIEN: THE ILLUSTRATED STORY was in book form long ago - maybe as far back as my high-school library, which would put it practically on the heels of the movie and the Alan Dean Foster novelization. I know they didn't dare carry Heavy Metal Magazine in the school library, but they did have many cool and edgy graphic-oriented material in the back room (utterly out of view of the students, oddly, so these books never circulated; I just knew about the secret stash because I worked there. Pretty weird, now I think of it), and I believe I saw the ALIEN graphic novel in the collection, circa 1980.
ReplyDeleteDamn you and your conveniently timed childhood. I was 10 or 11 when I was buying the JURASSIC PARK comic...ization, and, even then, recognized that a frighteningly foreshortened triceratops gut and dramatic onomatopoeia
ReplyDelete(e.g., "KRAKA-DOOOOOOOM!") did not a quality product make.
So, props to the convenient timing of this reprinting. My better half picked me up the Original Art Edition of ALIEN:THE ILLUSTRATED STORY, which reprints Simonson's original boards in actual size, coffee rings and all.
Gorgeous. And the standard-sized, full-color (and wallet-friendly) reprint is equally nerd-outable.
As a Weyland-Yutani-boycotting ALIEN nut, I wholeheartedly recommend this graphic novel.