Michael May's Blog, page 178
September 28, 2013
The Cranmers hate cephalopods
I think it was actually a giant amoeba in the story, but that's not how R.R. Epperly painted it. [Pulp Covers]
Captain Blood (1935)
Who's in it?: Errol Flynn (The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk), Olivia de Havilland (The Adventures of Robin Hood, Gone With the Wind), Lionel Atwill (Son of Frankenstein, Mystery of the Wax Museum), and Basil Rathbone (Son of Frankenstein, The Adventures of Robin Hood, all those Sherlock Holmes movies).
What's it about?: Through a series of unfortunate circumstances, an innocent doctor named Peter Blood (Flynn) ends up on the losing side of the Monmouth Rebellion and is sent to Jamaica as a slave. Thanks to his medical skills and the kindness of the niece (De Havilland) of a powerful plantation owner (Atwill), Blood becomes physician to Jamaica's governor with enough freedom of movement to plot an escape. When he and his fellow slaves do break free, they steal a ship and begin a life of piracy, allying themselves with a notorious pirate captain (Rathbone) and his crew.
How is it?: It's tough to speak ill of a classic, but the first half of Captain Blood really drags after repeated viewings. It's all important character and plot stuff and it was interesting enough the first time I saw the movie, but the more I watch it the quicker I want to get to the escape and the swashbuckling that dominates the second half.
There are some great moments in the first half - Blood's conversation with the judge in England, for instance, and his clever machinations in Jamaica - but there's a lot to slog through as well. I never buy the tension between Blood and Arabella Bishop, for one thing. On a script level, I understand why they're at odds with each other, but Flynn and de Havilland oversell their anger and the transition from that to mutual attraction isn't smooth. Once they're together, I like them a lot, but it's a rocky road getting there.
Getting to the back half of Captain Blood is glorious though. Flynn is dashing, his crew has tons of personality, and the action is expert. Blood is a great character, full of wounded honor, but also loyalty to his crew, whom he considers family. He has some great leadership moments, like his declaration of the ship's articles and a moment near the end where he tests his friends' confidence in him by ordering them into a seemingly foolhardy and pointless mission. The way he handles it and the crew's response is one of my favorite parts of the film.
Speaking of the crew, they're great. From quietly loyal Jeremy Pitt and the jolly gunner Hagthorpe to cowardly Honesty and Bible-quoting Ogle, Blood's men are as funny as they are heart-warmingly dedicated to their captain. The film's classic action scene is Blood's fencing duel on the beach with the wicked Captain Levasseur (Rathbone), but thanks to the crew, the ship battles are just as exciting with the camera shifting between large-scale destruction and closer moments with the individual men.
Grade: B+
September 27, 2013
Tarzan 101 | Fans and Fan Publishing
Celebrating Tarzan's 101st anniversary by walking through Scott Tracy Griffin's Tarzan: The Centennial Celebration.
We've talked before about some of the children's fan clubs that sprang up around Tarzan over the years, but grown-ups also appreciate the ape man and have organized groups and publications in celebration of that passion.
The earliest successful endeavor was started by Vernell Coriell, a childhood member of the Tarzan Clans youth club who didn't give up his fandom in adulthood. He corresponded with other fans like the legendary Forrest J. Ackerman and Ray Bradbury, and in 1948 launched the first Burroughs fanzine, The Burroughs Bulletin , with the writer's blessing.
It was through the Bulletin that readers organized the first all-ages fan club/literary society, The Burroughs Bibliophiles. The group held its first meeting at the 1960 Worldcon in Pittsburgh. The Bulletin remains in publication today and the Bibliophiles still exist, though they went dormant in the '80s when Coriell's health prevented his being as active as he had been.
Fortunately, a new leader emerged. Librarian George T. McWhorter had founded the Edgar Rice Burroughs Memorial Collection in 1976 and continued adding to it, including buying Coriell's large Burroughs collection when Coriell died in 1987. Then, three years after Coriell's death, McWhorter also assumed publication of the Bulletin and resurrected the Bibliophiles.
Though the quarterly Bulletin and its monthly spin-off publication, the Gridley Wave , are the grandparents of Burroughs fanzines, they're certainly not the only publications dedicated to Burroughs' work. ERBania has been around since 1956 and Hugo Award-winning ERBDom started publication in 1960. Griffin includes a list of dozens of other Burroughs-focused publications, including Edgar Rice Burroughs News Dateline, Tarzine, The Burroughs Newsbeat, and The Fantastic Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs. ERB, Inc.'s official Tarzan website also has an excellent list of clubs and publications with contact information for each.
September 26, 2013
Tarzan 101 | Tarzan the Global Phenomenon
Celebrating Tarzan's 101st anniversary by walking through Scott Tracy Griffin's Tarzan: The Centennial Celebration.
Burroughs' descriptive prose, fantasy setting, and focus on action made Tarzan easily translatable into other languages and the novels quickly became internationally popular during the author's lifetime. Griffin gives details about many of the translations, including Burroughs' rocky relationship with Germany following the anti-German Tarzan the Untamed. Tarzan also had some problems in Soviet Russia, but that was because the government was upset that the novels were more popular than Marx. As of Griffin's writing, Tarzan had been published in 32 languages, including Esperanto and Braille.
The Tarzan films also proved popular globally, but what's most interesting to me are the various spin-offs and adaptations created specifically for other countries. Italy, China, and India have all created their own movie versions of the character. France had its own Tarzan comics in WWII. Argentina and Australia both created radio versions of the character. We've also previously talked about Tarzan's influence on Japanese fitness and Australian glue. One of the most fascinating phenomena though has been the unauthorized Tarzan novels written by Israeli and Arab authors in which the ape man has served each group in fighting the other. As Griffin writes, "Tarzan's appeal crosses the most widely divergent political and ideological lines."
September 25, 2013
Human sacrifices hate cephalopods
By Robert Graef [via the indispensable Pulp Covers from a suggestion by the equally necessary Shad Daly].
Superman kills
Action Comics #19 (by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster) is weird for a few reasons. First of all, the super-intelligent Ultra (as they're still calling him) isn't so smart. He's revived a medieval plague in an attempt to destroy humanity and start his own race, but decides not to eliminate the one threat to his plan: a scientist named Travers who's working on a cure. Ultra knows that Travers is getting close, but rather than kill the scientist before he succeeds, Ultra chooses to simply monitor him until Travers actually has a cure. I thought that maybe Ultra planned to use the cure as part of his own plan, but there's no evidence of that in the story and there's not a logical reason for it in the first place.
Another weird thing is the reaction of the scientific community to Travers' research. The "purple plague" has already killed hundreds of Metropolitans and the medical world is "mystified" (according to a newspaper headline), but without even inspecting his research they automatically assume that the one person close to a potential cure is a "sensation-seeking opportunist."
Unfortunately, they're right that Travers hasn't quite got to the cure yet, but when his tests fail, they blackball him, even to the point of a chemical company's refusing to sell him supplies. Which leads to the third weird thing:
Superman, who's been encouraging and supporting Travers the whole time, breaks into the chemical company and steals the supplies Travers needs. He doesn't even pull the classic, leave-the-money-on-the-counter trick. He just straight up takes them and dares a guard to stop him.
That's not the last morally questionable action Superman takes in the issue either.
In his final confrontation with Ultra, the mad scientist shoots some kind of weapon at Superman. There's no explanation for what the gun does or whether it would affect Superman at all, but let's assume it could actually harm him somehow. Rather than simply dodge out of its way, he grabs Ultra and pulls the man into the blast, killing him.
Or at least Superman believes it's killed him. It's probably not a huge spoiler to suggest that Ultra may have survived, but Superman mistakenly declares him dead. Clearly he meant to murder the villain, though (as we find out in the very next issue) Siegel and Shuster didn't.
September 24, 2013
If you like Kill All Monsters, try Robot God Akamatsu
I consider Robot God Akamatsu a sibling comic to Kill All Monsters. Both writer James Biggie and artist Frankie B. Washington have been incredibly supportive of KAM since our webcomic phase, and have an awesome comic themselves in RGA. You can read it online, but it's also available now in print and you should totally try it out. My print copy's moving towards the top of my reading pile and I can't wait to get to it.
