Conan the Barbarian: Queen of the Black Coast #2

The ending of Conan the Barbarian: Queen of the Black Coast issue 2 sets up a great beginning. After a skirmish at sea, desire grows hotter between Bêlit and Conan. Nothing in this issue exposes the mutual attraction and repulsion of Bêlit and Conan as exquisitely as the last page. The issue culminates in the final words of Bêlit: “Make me your queen.”

What to make of this final line from Bêlit? Does it diminish her autonomy? Does it rob her power? No, desire is Bêlit’s impetus. Few works capture the workings and effects of desire, Eros, as well as Sappho’s work:

Ἔρος δ' ἐτίναξέ μοι
φρένας, ὠς ἄνεμος κὰτ ὄρος δρύσιν ἐμπέτων.

And Eros quivers my core

like harp strings,

As a wind down a mountain,

Falling on oak trees.

(fragment 47, Campbell, my translation)

"Make me your queen." One simple imperative. No doubt or hesitancy flutters about this command. It is not offered as an  argument or a point of debate; there are no expectations for rebuttals, questions, or examinations of multiple experts. No. It is a simple straight independent clause that manifests a reality by its mere utterance. Why this immediate willingness for Belit to voice such an order to a man, a young one at that, whom she’s never met and who has just killed many of her crew?

Eros moves quickly, like a mountain wind, and has no interest in debate or other plans of an individual. When Eros arrives, it commands, and moves and shakes the heart and soul of an individual; Eros plays their wants and actions like a master musician commanding her instrument. There’s no possibility to resist—there’s no desire to resist. Bêlit is being played by a god.

A god who moves swiftly and strikes hard, having gathered strength by racing down a mountain, mount Olympus perhaps, and falling upon (drenching with sexual connotations) oak trees, strong mighty columns of wood (let your mind work dirty on this one too). Bêlit utters her command to Conan after such a short interval of interaction because Eros works fast.

“Make me your queen.”

Cloonan renders this shock exquisitely in Conan’s eyes, parted wide with surprise, his head angled on his neck, as if pulling back from Belit. Despite the sword in his hand, and taut muscles, this last panel makes clear that Conan is not the one calling the shots. He too has been quivered by wind from down a mountain.

This tension between Conan and Bêlit, and the way Cloonan and Wood handle the interaction, is one of the great pleasures of reading this comic. Difficulty exists balancing two willful characters prone to murderous rages and extreme violence, bringing these two together, in a believable fashion, and in a way that doesn’t weaken the power of either character had to keep Cloonan and Wood awake at night pondering the best way to pull off such a feat, but, it worked.

In the second to last panel Bêlit states “I am Bêlit.” an assertion of her own identity and existence. A statement of force, yet, her body is arched towards Conan, arms to her side, breasts pushed forward head tilted back to look up at Conan. Her body carriage of submission counters the power and command of her spoken words. Likewise Conan’s stance reveals his hesitancy, Cloonan draws him rigid and slightly tilted back from Bêlit; yet he’s not powerless, he has a notched and bloody sword in his hand (and after slaying about 16 members of her crew), this balance of vulnerability and strength exuded by each character toward one another is masterfully handled, and prevents the book and the characters from falling into something very very cheesy.

In the last panel on the last page, the two finally meet one another with a full on direct frontal view, after each character has explicitly stated who they are:

“My name is Conan. I am a Cimmerian.”

“I am Bêlit. Make me your queen.”

The cores of two individuals have been quivered.

Frankenstein Agent of S.H.A.D.E. #7

Mary Shelley, in Switzerland during a cold dreary summer that didn't exist in 1816, took up a prompt by Lord Byron to create a horrific tale. And so Frakenstein's monster was born, a birth that originated in some friends gathered together looking for a way to pass the time after having read some ghost stories. Frankenstein Agent of S.H.A.D.E. cultures the dark delightful impetus that lead to Mary Shelly's Prometheus.

Frankenstein Agent of  S.H.A.D.E. issue 7 contains the story of Frankenstein (combining the intellect of Mary Shelley’s Romantic hero and the good looks of Boris Karloff) and his monster companions battling a coup of S.H.A.D.E. headquarters and lead by “failed” scientific creations. While re-reading issue 7, three words stood out that capture the multiple appealing facets of this book. for Frankenstein

1. Familiar: "Who is she? She seems familiar." A discarded scientific monster asks of its creator.
2. Gateway: S.H.A.D.E.Net, open the gateway." Frankenstein demands of a locked door.
3. Pleasure: "Hrrn...with extreme pleasure, Father." Frankenstein responds to his boss regarding the elimination, with extreme prefudice, of the rebel humanids.

Familiar:

Humanity inherited the Frankenstein monster. Mary Shelley's monster rests as a familiar touchstone where a reader already has the basic knowledge of the tale. Some details may vary, but the core elements (manufactured life, severe parenting issues, social misfit, tall, dark, and ugly) are present and provide some known orientation for any Frankenstein story. J.G. Jones's cover to issue 7 hearkens to the airbrushed colors of the 1931 movie poster. Behind this cover, Jeff Lemire, Alberto Ponticelli, and Walden Wong work fit the familiar Frankenstein features to great effect. Frankenstein sports beloved neck bolts, green flesh, and a skein of sutures unwound upon his skin. Frankenstein even has a bride, Lady Frankenstein, albeit an estranged one, that shares the shade of his skin but with fewer stitches; she's also relaxed her hairstyle from one worn by Elsa Lanchester in 1935. Frankenstein even meets some friends also familiar to general audiences for at least 50 years (Griffith, The Wolfman (1941); Velcoro, Dracula (1931); Nina, The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954); Khalis, The Mummy (1932). All familiar fiends.

Gateway:
Lemire and Pontniceli take the familiar monster archetypes and move them through a gateway to meet the 21st century reader. Nanotechnology exists side-by-side with Frankenstein's flintlock pistol and broadsword. These magical creatures are essential to the operation of this high-tech world. Each character, while still representative of a tradition, has been brought by Lemire through some creative temporal gateway to become relevant and adapted for 21st century readers.

So what?

Pleasure!
This  book is a sheer delight to read! The storyline dazzles, dances, and brawls across the pages, a fitting progression for a host of magic science monsters. Frankenstein and his motley crue take on a rebellion of humanid slaves who have a life span of only 24 hours.  As if this isn't enough, issue 8 promises a scuffle with the spawn of Frankenstein (read Son of Frankenstein (1939)).

Amidst battling humanids, Velcoro and Griffith retreat to retrieve some weapons. Griffith asks the vampire who wears an aviator's cap and wearing yellow and black checkered arm warmers how he obtained the code for the weapons' room. The winged fiend replies "Won it off one of the science nerds in a poker game last week."  Lady Frankenstein, after shooting a gooey "science fair reject" comments "God, I'll never get this stuff out of my hair." Grim monster humor akin to the above lines augment the pleasure of an already pleasurable book.

The hyperbolic science in the stories delivers a sublime sheen with each issue. Frankenstein Agent of S.H.A.D.E. continues the distillation of a fiction that started amongst friends in Switzerland during the year without a summer, and it still spirits the imagination with wild ideas as only a horror-science-superhero comic book can.Just as the wolfman Griffith Warren (of Zevon fame?) expressed upon seeing the plethora of weapons within S.H.A.D.E.'s Secret Armory X, "I'm in heaven."

Wolves: Becky Cloonan

Past Tense Present

δαιμονίη, τί με ταῦτα λιλαίεαι ἠπεροπεύειν;

“Goddess, why do you long to deceive me with these things?"

Helen to Aphrodite in book three, line 399of the Iliad, my translation.

The past is always present in Becky Cloonan’s Wolves; all the verbs are in the present tense, with the exception of only three cases of the past tense and just one of the future tense. Verbs are the heart of a sentence, and in Wolves, verbs sluice the content and form of the tale into an eternal present where love unceasingly exists and fundamentally transforms a man.

The structure of Wolves is symmetrical—the story opens in the present of the unnamed main character, moves to the near-past (the hunt), then moves to the further-past (passion/prelude to the hunt), then back to the near-past (wolf fight and banishment) and finally a return to the present time when which the story began. These time shifts free the plot from temporal-enslavement; it also stretches suspense by causing the reader to wonder how the unnamed into such a savage state?

 

What can cause such flagrant regression?

Love. Even memories of a lost love.

The present of the unnamed is dirty, dark, lonely and exposed—his past exiled him not only from society, but humanity as well. The nudity, the eating of uncooked meat, and the hunched posture of the character conveys a defeat, a fatigued beast forever hunted. The present is brutal, but for the unnamed the remembrance of the things past that brought him to this state wounds more than his primitive existence.

These temporal transitions are one of the many deft moves Cloonan utilizes in this story.  Not only does love pulse through the story, but the beloved (The king’s wife? Daughter? Mistress? Sister?...it’s difficult to say for sure…as in life, love in this story is a powerful anonymous enigma) moves the story through time. The negative space in the panel when the woman first appears (and in all subsequent human appearances) has a background of hatch lines—that serve not only to highlight and contrast her skin and hair, but also conveys temporal shifting. The verb tense, however, remains in the present, keeping these memories current for the nameless hunted atavistic main character depicted on the opening page of the story.

 And the verbs, grammatically sexy, are employed to full effect to make this remembered love immediate. “You are cursed,” are the first words thought by the unnamed. The sentence is in the passive voice, the unnamed is acted upon…he is the hunted rather than the hunter. Cursed by whom or what? The King? Fate? Love? Again, Cloonan molds ambiguity to sharpen the power of the tale and to allows it to extend to any universal time and place. 

On page eight, the past tense appears as the unnamed hunter slumped, holding his head, alone thinks about the further-past: “I tried to reassure her. I said, ‘Who else would the king send?’”. The anguish and loneliness Cloonan conjures in this scene with the solid black background, a wispy shade of grey to contrast the character and the bush has the look of flames (both passion, memories, and doubt burning and consuming the main character). The next panel gives an uncomfortable close up, with wide scared eyes and sweat beads that seem pushed out of pores by fear. The unnamed hunter thinks “She’s not wrong. What I do is dangerous…but what we did was practically suicidal.”

The use of the past tense in the active voice suggests that the unnamed, and one would surmise his beloved too, knew the full danger of their passion, and yet much like Helen, the characters continued in their action, unable, or unwilling, to resist. They act on the choice, but the consequences of the choice act on them. It is with the effect of the these consequences that the sole use of the future tense is used. The unnamed upon approaching the king thinks "And now there will be no lenience..." In Wolves love is dire in the past, present, and future. 

“Take your reward, hunter, and go. You can never return to this place. You are cursed.” The king speaks these commands to the unnamed (as he remembers the near-past). And the reward? Even though coins are shown, they're never retrieved or carried. The love that coins can buy doesn’t wreck souls to the degree shown on the opening pages. What does the king mean by "this place”? The throne room? The castle? Civilization? Humanity? The state of love? Again Cloonan’s resistance to clarify bolsters the mythic eternal implications of this story. All these meanings are contained in the king’s words, and the character leaves the king, the castle, civilization. The unnamed thinks “But the curse was already in my breast. It blackens and consumes. Its corrosion transforms me. Where once was a hunter now lies a wolf. Haunted by my past…hunted by my memories” It is a chilling end. What is the curse? An absence of the beloved? A constant present memory of the lost beloved? Lycanthrope? The only answers Cloonan offers are memories. The memories of the nameless hunter-now-hunted’s lost love have transformed him from man to a beast. This pain of the eternally-present past erode his humanity and his ill-fated love makes him akin to the words Helen utters to Love: 

ἔχω δ᾽ ἄχε᾽ ἄκριτα θυμῷ. 

("And I hold in my heart unceasing lament." from Iliad Book 3 line 412, my translation. )

Buy your copy of Wolves at Becky Cloonan's website http://beckycloonan.bigcartel.com/! Buy extra copies and give them to friends and strangers! 

Bulletproof Coffin:Disinterred #2

 

I hate and I love. And if you ask how

I can do both, I couldn’t say; but

I felt it, and it shivers me.

            by Catullus

Translated by Charles Martin

Upon finishing the second issue of Kane and Hine’s Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred #2, I too “feel it, and it shivers me.”

Kane and Hine set up irreconcilable factors in “Tales From The Haunted Jazz Club.” Three short tales haunt this single issue, and the tales are said to be true (but of course they’re not…at  least one really hopes they’re not) and yet “The Hands of  Clay” “Fixing Suzie” and “Hairy Inside” are…they’re…they’re just…weird. Lovers killing their beloveds, harmless statues evoking harm, a bald woman with a fear of hair wearing a hair jacket, superheroes and their secret identities, a beatnik dating a guy from tech school, all these factors, and other elements both disturb by their oppositions and yet at the same time intrigue.

 As for how the tales “can do both, I couldn’t say.” Hine and Kane manipulate the basic opposition in comics themselves, texts and words. They use this opposition to tell great stories that speak ineffable sensations without being preachy or pretentious but rather serious and simultaneously silly. These tales also give an answer to Catullus’s question of how someone can reconcile two opposite feelings. As a reader “I feel it and it shivers me.”

Kane and Hine create a nostalgic feel of Golden age comics (think EC’s Tales from the Crypt, and Lee and Kirby’s Fantastic Four) and yet combine this past style with a 21^st century sensibility and style. I don’t know how, exactly, but the story and art doesn’t feel like an imitation, but an application and rearrangement of those earlier elements. Like the Golden Nugget publications themselves, the work is illusively allusive.

The contrast of the colors mirrors the paradoxes in the stories. After the interior cover page (we’re reading a comic within a comic) we have Edgar Landru introducing the first tale amidst a two-tone red background with hovering green quarter and eighth notes in the air. Red and green are contrasting colors…two opposed elements that somehow unify the story and set the tone for readers. The same with Landru himself, zombie-pale skin in a black suit.  Certainly the use of contrasting colors is no earth shattering move, and it doesn’t occur in every panel on every page in the book, but this color-contrast motif strikes the reader hard with the way fields of a solid color are used. No gradated changes appear, if Kane wants a shift in color you’ll be able to find a hostile border dividing the two tones (which won’t always be a black line), these colors combine like two clashing pendulums forever swinging their arcs into each other. And yet it creates a captivating effect for the entire issue, “I feel it, and it shivers me.”

 

These oppositions, while giving tension and a strong dose of the outré to the tales, go beyond merely setting up and pointing out oppositions. These opposing elements collapse into one another through the monstrous. Only something terrible (a something so disturbing it causes Jackson J. Jackson to mentally block it out. Once consciously remembered, J.J.J. suffers physical illness) can reconcile through paradoxes. 

In “Hands of Clay,” a wife’s complete (and erroneous) belief in her doctor husband’s abilities against the doctor’s own doubt and limitations concludes with an operation the doctor describes as “my awful work.” In “Fixing Suzi” a romance between a beatnik and a tech school student results in a stutter repaired by brain surgery. And “Hairy Inside” has two lovers who appear to have the same dislike of hair, until an ill-purchased idol causes one to search for a single hair of difference, and elaborate on this one difference and after a lot of stabbing, state “I’m here to warn you that there are monsters out there.” These stories offer the horrible as a solution to these warring feelings.  Shake your conventions and expectations up. Buy and read issue two.

I’m eagerly awaiting it and dreading it. I want to read about voodoo love, and I want to turn away, and if you ask how I can do both, I don’t know, but I trust the storytelling of Kane and Hine, and know it will shiver me.