Big Bang Adventures #30

 

Entirely illustrated by Cesar Madarro, Big Bang Adventures #30 contains a story that the two of us collaborated on a couple of years ago just for fun. As a life long night owl, I recalled the time I lived in Ann Arbor and would often see a couple of the neighbors also leading nocturnal lifestyles through glimpses of them seen through their windows. I always wondered what they did for a living that afforded them that kind of schedule. This story addresses that. 

I'm also happy this would up in a Big Bang comic. I supported their intentions and their initial comics back in 1994 and still have my Big Bang membership kit, including the mask. 

Midnight, Mass. Trade Paperback Collection Now Available

 

Collecting the entire 8-issue series, Midnight, Mass., written by me with pencils by Jesus Saiz, inks by Jimmy Palmiotti, colors by Noelle Giddings and Kevin Somers, lettering by Ken Bruzenak and John Costanza, and edited by Heidi MacDonald is now available at your local comic book store and book store. 

The series follows the exploits of paranormal investigators Adam and Julia Kadmon as they take on a variety of monsters, strange cults, ghosts, and a new personal assistant. 

Midnight, Mass. Trade Paperback Collection Coming In Fall 2024

 

Through it's Black Label imprint, DC Comics will be releasing a 208 page trade paperback collection of the 8-issue series, Midnight, Mass. on October 1, 2024. It will sell for $16.99 retail. You should be able to pre-order it through your local comic book store in the next few months. 

Midnight, Mass. follows the adventures of paranormal investigators Adam and Julia Kadmon from their home in Midnight, Massachusetts. It was written by me with pencils by Jesus Saiz, inks by Jimmy Palmiotti, colors by Noelle Giddings and Kevin Somers, letters by Ken Bruzenak and John Costanza, and covers by Tomer Hanuka. It was edited by Heidi MacDonald and Zachary Rau. 

Here's DC's press announcement:

The Grim Gallery Enters Year 13

Do you like monsters? My companion blog, The Grim Gallery is full of them. Over 4300 of them, posted one per day. The Grim Gallery has just entered its 13th year of surving up all sorts of horrors on a daily basis. Go check it out.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 30 - Movie

Dan Torrance (Ewan McGregor) haunted by his childhood experiences at the Overlook Hotel is a wreck of a man trying to put his life together. He takes a job at a hospice where he is able to to his his shining to help send the dying peacefully on their way.  He finds himself in psychic contact with Abra  (Kyliegh Curran)teenage girl also possessing the shining. The two seem destined to never meet until terrible events become known to Abra. A group calling itself The True Knot is crisscrossing the country feeding on children who shine, and now they have Abra in their sites.

Doctor Sleep (2019), based on the novel by Stephen King is a sequel to The Shining. I liked the book quite a lot, even though I went into it thinking The Shining didn't really require a sequel, and still skeptical when Dan Torrance ended up having his life impacted by yet another type of supernatural beings, but King really pulled it off. Mike Flanagan, who wrote and directed this film adaptation realized that more people would be familiar with the movie version of The Shining than the novel version, so chose to adapt this sequel to fit Kubrick's movie. Kubrick made some changes to King's story that made a straight up adaptation of King's sequel to his own book impossible, but Flanagan is to be commended for finding ways to incorporate scenes from King's sequel into this adaptation that remain true to the spirit of King's book and Kubrick's movie. Flanagan was also able to replicate authentically sets and costumes from the 1980 film and even threw in a number of Easter eggs to King's Dark Tower series of books, and a nod to Frankenstein (1931).

The heart of this film is its characters and the actors portraying them. This is an exceptional cast, and their performances in this completely engrossing and carefully paced film make this a must watch. I've seen this movie three times now, and it is one of my favorite genre films of recent years.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 29 - Book

Ghostland by Edward Parnell. William Collins. 2019 This is not a travel guide to haunted England, but a travelogue of the country and of personal history. Edward Parnell who has loved ghost stories from an early age, traverses the country to sites connected with various authors of ghost stories, the stories themselves, and even BBC and cinematic adaptations. His travels often intersect with places that he'd lived, or visited on familiy excursions, and the memories associated with those trips often entangles with those of the ghost stories. Not all of the ghosts are literary. Parnell has suffered devastating loss, and this book is as much a love letter to those who left him as it is to the stories that inspired him. This was a very engaging read. Even if, like myself, you've read countless ghost stories, this book will make you want to return to old favorites as well as seek out some you may have missed. I'm also really dying to see all those BBC adaptations, especially of the M.R. James stories. I've known about them for ages but have never seen any. The trick for me with Ghostland is not knowing where to shelve it. I actually have a number of regional ghost tour books, but I'm not sure this belongs with them, or with my collections of ghost stories.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 28 - Book

Don't Turn Out the Lights - Edited by Jonathan Maberry. Harper Collins. 2020. In 1981 a thin book of creepy campfire-type stories aimed at young readers appeared. The stories were very short and set up almost like jokes with macabre punchlines. There was a premise, a set up, and a dark finish. Characters were thinly drawn. No matter, this book was extremely popular (and followed by two more) and hgave many kids nightmares, no doubt fuelled by Stephen Gammell's unsettling illustrations. The book was Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz. I was too old to be the target audience for these books when they came out. I was aware of them, but would noy investigate them until many years later. Jonatahn Maberry was also too old for them when they first hit the scene but took a copy camping with him and recognized the power of those stories whie out alone in the middle of nowhere. Don't Turn Out the Lights is a tribute anthology to Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. It contains 35 stories by some of the top spooky YA authors out there. Like the books this is in tribute to, most of the stories are very short, though a few run a bit longer. They also typically foow the format of the original's tales, joke-like in structure with more attention paid to the details than to the characters, though typically, the inhabitants of these stories have a bit more meat on their bones. The stories here are all quite good, and are entertaining, even though, I'm quite a bit beyond the age of the intended audience at this point. each story is accompanied by an atmospheric illustration by the amazing Iris Compiet who is going to explode in popularity soon. If you are a fan of the Scary Stories books, this is a worthy successor.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 27 - Movie

A group of friends enter the house of their friend Tyler. They find Tyler's mom, dead of an apparent overdose, and a paranoid Tyler hiding in a closetmwho then attacks and injures two of them with a knofe before being subdued. Some time later the group has a reuinion, and a wake for Tyler's mother, at her cabin in the woods. The rebonding between the group is a rough process. No one really trusts Tyler even though he's on medication and claims he's better. While scattering his mother's ashes, Tyler witnesses a shimmering, permeable wall surrounding him. He thinks it's a hallucination until later his friends all witness it too, only now it has expanded into a long corridor. This anomoly starts rewiring their brains. They can hear the pilots talking in a plane flying far overhead, then they start intercepting each others private inner thoughts. Paranoia grows as do violent acts, and everything begins to unravel. This corridor just wants to connect, but not simply between itself and the friends, but connect the friends as well, and this is something human brains just weren't meant to do without adverse consequences. QWhen Tyler figures out that the goal is much larger than simply the Corridor and the five of them he tries to stop it. The Corridor (2010) is an ambitious, low budget, well acted movie, that slipped under my radar. It is similar in nature to H.P. Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space" or Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, with an alien phenomenon that begins to transform the life forms living within it's influence. The script, by Josh MacDonald, is well written, but I had some issues with the pacing. It has a nice slow build to it, letting the interrelationships between the characters breathe and isolating Tyler from the others. Once the violence sets in, it seems like everything begins to happen all at once and then the movie is over, taking away a lot of the satisfaction that viewing the first 2/3 brought. If you want a smart, though uneven, science fiction/horror film that doesn't spell everything out, you may want to give this a look. If you need something with more visceral chills and thrills, this probably is not for you.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 27

Actor, special effects technician, and archivist Bob Burns has an incredible collection of science fiction, fantasy and horror props (20th Century Fox gave him essentially everything they had from Alien), but for many years, assisted by many of the top talent in Hollywood, he went above and beyond what was necessary to entertain trick or treators ringing his doorbell. Below are a couple videos of his collection followed by videos of his Halloween extravaganzas.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 26 - Movie

While Diving, Matt Farrell (John Ashley) is abducted by a scientist (Charles Macauley) who wants to use him in one of his experiments combining humans with animals in order to create a super race of beastmen. The scientist's daughter (Pat Woodell) has a change of heart and helps Farrell and some of thye beast people escape. A sadistic henchman (Jan Merlin) and his team set out across the island to hunt them down. The Twilight People (1972) is a low budget Filipino-American film directed by Eddie Romero that is essentially The Island of Dr. Moreau combined with The Most Dangerous Game which is not necessarily a bad thing. This is the kind of movie that you used to kind on tv on Saturday afternoons, or late at night and is perfectly entertaining if not exceptional viewing. While the make-up on the animal people is crude, it's still pretty effective. The actors also try to give their animal characters defining characterustics, such as the antelope man who tends to defend himself with backward kicks. The creatures are also a ittle more ambitious than the straight-up adaptations of H.G. Wells' novel. Here we are even given a flying batman. This movie is probably best known for featuring Pam Grier as the panther woman.

31 Dyas of Halloween - Day 19 - Movie

A family in isolation during a devastating pandemic finds their safety and routine disrupted when a stranger breaks into their home. Inviting the man's family to come live with them with the idea of greater safety in numbers leads to paranoia and mistrust and violence.

It Comes At Night (2017) sounds like a monster movie, but it's not. The "it" of the title merely refers to bad dreams endured by the teenage son. There isn't a much tension, and introduced story points are often dropped without development. It's a well made film, but not much happens, and the tension it wants to ratchet up, never really appears. In our Covid-19 world a movie about a pandemic really should have hit home, but the characters in the film didn't really do much more than I did while quarantined at home, short of carrying guns like paranoid survivalists, and burning a couple of bodies. This was disappointing.

#1 Days of Halloween - Day 18 - Movie

After a woman and her daughter in law are brutally raped and murdered by a band of samurai, they return as onryo; avenging spirits, set out to kill all samurai.

Kuroneko (1968) directed by Kaneto Shindo does for bamboo, what his earlier film, Onibaba (1964) did for tall grass. Quite spooky, atmospheric and mesmerizing, this film is a real showcase for lighting, staging, composition, and cinematography. Shot in gorgeously luminescent black and white, it's like watching a dream, or nightmare unfold. At the heart of the film is a tragic human drama of these two wronged women, and then the tension of reuniting with the missing son/son-in-law who returns from battle only to be ordered to find and destroy the avenging spirits. This is a true classic.

32 Days of Halloween - Day 12 - Book

The Resurrectionist by E.B. Hudsbeth. Quirk Books. 2013

Dr. Spencer Black was a renowned surgeon and anatomist in the late 19th century, but his studies in teratology led him to bizarre beliefs, and his undoing. According to Black, mythological creatures were real, and when a person, or animal was born malformed, it was due to the body attempting to revert to one of those hybrid mythical forms. Dissections and mutilations led Black on a mad quest to attempt recreating numerous mythological species through surgery rather than genetics.

The Resurrectionist is divided into two parts. The first section contains a biographical overview of his life and work. The rest of the book is devoted to his notes and precise anatomical drawings of his mythological recreations. While an initial perusal would suggest this as slight reading material created to support Hudsbeth's finely rendered drawings, there is something unsavory about the book as a whole. Another book that was created to serve as a biological and anatomical field guide to mythological creatures using the same illustrations would come off as fascinating, but after reading the disturbing account of Black's disturbing experiments, those same illustrations come across as grotesque and unsettling, like something you really shouldn't be looking at. This is a strong recommendation.










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31 Days of Halloween - Day 9

Make-up maestro, Rick Baker is one of my favorite people on the planet. I probably would not be who I am, or do what I do, without him. He has recently retired, but seems to be busier than ever in retirement, doing what he loves best, and having a lot of fun doing it. Now that he's no longer creating make-up for movies, he's doing it for himself and his family, especially for Halloween. Here are some of the Halloween creations he has done on himself and his family. Most images came from Rick Baker's Instagram account, which is definitely worth following.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 8 - Book

The Tribe by Bari Wood. Signet . 1981.

A group of Jewish men save themselves inside a Nazi concentration camp by bringing to life a golem, a legendary monster made of clay and brought to life through magic. Nearly forty years later in Brooklyn, then on Long Island, death comes to members of their families and once again they create a golem to act as a tool of vengeance, but that vengeance takes a wrong turn.

The Tribe is truly a great read. Full of mystery, dread and horror, it's also an immersive experience into parts of a culture that, even in 1981, was mostly alien to most of America. The characters are richly conveyed and sympathetic, even when at odds with each other, and even when things start to go bad. This book was completely engrossing and there was a tremendous build-up to the reveal of the golem. For much of the book we only knew its strength and terror through the aftermath of its actions, and the dread fear that the protagonists felt as they approached their inevitable confrontation with the monster was real, and tremendous.

I highly recommend this book, which is now again available through Valancourt's Paperbacks From Hell collection.




 


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31 Days of Halloween - Day 7 - Book

North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud. Small Beer Press. 2013.

I'd never read anything by Nathan Ballingrud before reading this collection of short stories. Having read it I am now an enthusiastic fan of his. This book collects nine of his stories. There are vampires, werewolves, the walking dead, the titular lake monster, hauntings, Lovecraftian horrors, but not like you have ever read them before. Ballingrud has taken traditional narrative expectations, not just genre tropes, but how stories are told in general, and done away with the rules and created fiction that delivers the goods with a punch in a way that never goes the way you think it will. He doesn't care about answering all the questions he calls forth, or even ending where you think a story should end, but that's okay. These stories are powerful and powerfully told. I don't know if it's an odd coincidence, or a theme that Ballingrud prefers to play with, but each story also features a character who represents the different faces of toxic masculinity, but in ways that are non-preachy and often sympathetic. The combination of these broken men who don't know how to love, or can't, or won't makes for a potent combination with the fantastical elements.

I know I'm only at day 7 here, but I don't expect I'll read another book of fiction for this countdown that is so fresh and so good.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 6 - Book

Tom Sutton's Creepy Things edited by Michael Ambrose and Donnie Pitchford. Yeo Books, 2014.


When I was a kid, before I got into superhero comics, I was into the monster and horror comics published by Marvel, DC, and Charlton. I actually found the Charlton ones the most disturbing of the batch, and one of the reasons was the organic art of Tom Sutton.

As part of Yoe Books' The Chilling Archives of Horror Comics series, the volume dedicated to the work of Tom Sutton features some of those stories I fondly remember, and a bunch that I hadn't seen before. There are over a dozen in total and a good introduction to the man and his art by Michael Ambrose, along with a bunch of covers Sutton produced.

This is the perfect comic book anthology for the season. I hope that Tom Sutton gets a volume 2.










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31 Days of Halloween - Day 3 - Movie

A young boy, raised by wolves, is taken in by a traveling troupe of entertainers. As a young man he transforms into a werewolf, kills one of the performers and runs off. He ends up in Paris where he falls for a prostitute, unaware of what she does for a living, Once he finds out, he starts killing all lot the men who pay for her services. Peter Cushing plays a police scientist determined to stop him.

Legend of the Werewolf (1975) feels like a really cheap Hammer film, not surprisingly since, besides Cushing, the film also features Hammer regular Michael Ripper. The screenplay was by Anthony Hinds (as John Elder) writer of numerous Hammer productions, and directed by Freddie Francis, also a Hammer veteran. Despite the talent involved, the film comes across as a lackluster Curse of the Werewolf (1961), Hammer's only werewolf movie, right down to the look of the werewolf himself. The two films also feature some overlapping story similarities since both are loosely based on The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore. Watched at 1:00 in the morning, this movie might be passably entertaining, but overall it's more of a miss than a hit.






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31 Days of Halloween - Day 1 - Book

When Darkness Loves Us  by Elizabeth Engstrom  (Tor. 1986) is made up of two novellas also including Beauty Is... Both stories are about young women growing up on farms in rural America with isolation and sex being a big part of what are really only coming of age stories in the broadest sense.

In the first story a sixteen-year old newly wed woman is accidentally sealed into a series of pitch black caverns and eventually discovers she is pregnant. What's most shocking in this tale is not what she needs to do in order to survive, but Engstrom's spare storytelling controlling the amount of time that passes in the woman's subterranean life. The story has a peculiar feeling to it and is entirely engrossing.

The second story is about Martha, now in her fifties and living alone on her family's farm while the people of the community, out of thanks to Martha's mother who was a local healer, care for most of her day to day needs. Martha was born without a nose, and while corrective surgery, more or less, fixed that, a traumatic experience in her youth made her something of an imbecile. Now as she finds someone in the community who genuinely cares for her, her intelligence slowly starts to re-emerge and she also develops a confidence that wasn't there before. There's one member of her community who is a real bad seed and has it in for Martha and her new friend and his confrontation with her leads to a dark conclusion. While the ending is abrupt, and not entirely unexpected, since Engstrom does plant the seed for it early on, the story itself is very engaging, and again Engstrom's spare style somehow emphasizes the dread and isolation that provide so much of what makes these stories successful.

This book is a real gem. It somehow wound up in my collection decades ago and remained unread until now. Apparently long difficult to get ahold of, it's now easily available as part of Valancourt's Paperbacks from Hell series cultivated from Grady Hendrix's outstanding book of the same title.







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31 Days of Halloween - Day 17 - Movie

In The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism (1967), Count Regula is quartered for murdering twelve young women (of thirteen intended victims) in a bid for immortality. He vows he will return for vengeance. Thirty-five years later Roger, a lawyer is invited to the castle of Count Regula where he will be given information about his past. Along with a thief posing as a monk, a baroness and her maid, Roger visits the castle to discover it is a death trap full of torture devices, and that the undead Count Regula plans to finish what he started 35 years ago.

Loosely based on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum" this movie is full of atmosphere, and  more garish haunted castle decor than the entire run of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?. It's an entertaining, minor, Christopher Lee starring film. Perfect for the middle of the night, or a rainy afternoon.