Ragemoor #4

Property Details for Castle Ragemoor

General Information

Beds	N bed(s)	Baths	Various
House Size	Unknown sq ft (possibly infinite)	Lot Size	Unknown
Price	Soul and mental balance
Property Type	Castle/Estate/Sentient-Guardian Home	Year Built	Pre-history
Neighborhood	Secluded	Style	Ancient
Stories	Multiple (see description)	Garage	Unavailable

 

This property presents a unique domestic opportunity for the right kind of buyer. If solitude, arcane ancestries, and suspense strike you as necessary features of existence's exhilaration, this property excels at providing owners such aspects.

Back from a hiatus, Castle Ragemoor commands a complete array of a unique servant staff to assist in basic maintenance of the structure and the grounds. A scenic ocean view awaits eager residents from the elevated cliff-edge positioning of the castle’s foundation. Not only does such a romantic location offer the gothic-at-heart a fitting vantage point to contemplate universe's intrinsic nihilism, it also reduces the chances of visiting salesmen nagging residents at the back door, while simultaneously providing strategic protection against debt collectors or other assailants (unless they come from beneath the sea).

 Property Features

• Status: Active
• County: Schuylkil
• Endless stories
• Type: Fortress
• Kitchen
• Master Bedroom is haunted
• Living room is haunted
• Kitchen is cursed
• Cooling features: Fear-induced chills
• Inclusions: Soul-Fee Includes: Exterior Maintenance, Lawn Maintenance, Sewer, Snow Removal, Trash, Water
• Community features:Environment for extreme introspection
• Community bungee-jump area(s) and sacrificial plummets
• Lot features: Sea-side view
• Utilities present: Basement Sewer, Well Water
• School District: Home school
• Main Floor Bedroom (subject to change)
• Master Bedroom (subject to change)
• Living Room (subject to change)
• Main Floor Bathroom (subject to change)
• Parking features: Off Street/Ocean-top/bottom Parking
• Stellar basement-botanical possibilities await the adventurous gardener. Fresh discoveries of unknown species available to those willing to plumb the unique fauna of Castle Ragemoor.

Heating Features

Candle flame, Fireplace(s), Hellfires

 

Exterior Construction

Masonry, dynamic stone

Interior Features

Living/Dining Combo, Built-in Morgue, Built-in Celestial Pets, Garbage Disposal, Bath on 1st Floor (sometimes), Bedroom on 1st Floor (sometimes), Bedroom 2 is migratory.

A perfect place for the constant re-decorator. If you often find yourself bored by the static features of previous dwellings, Ragemoor remains ideal for those exasperated by consistency. Corridors, rooms, walls, floors, and ceilings reconfigure themselves in random ways at random times. If you’re displeased with a layout, simply wait, and the dismal design will alter its shape into something new and exciting. This feature is perfect feature for hard-core hide-and-seek devotees.

  
 

Exterior Features

Insulated Windows

An captivating literary pedigree awaits new owners. The stories associated with Castle Ragemoor are guaranteed to engross the attention of guests, friends, and acquaintances alike. A perfect setting for Halloween parties that will allow both guests and legal authorities to recount events for decades into the future. 

 

 

 

Listing brokered by

Herbert West Real Estate |(666) 555-HELL(4355)

 

The current owner tends to warn visitors and potential buyers away, but such caution is no doubt due to the dangerous potential awaiting new owners within these walls. According to the present owner, striking cosmetic surgeries come as a packaged boon with the purchase of this house.

Those interested in scheduling a viewing of the property should contact Miskatonic Realty between the hours of Midnight and 6 am. No day showings unless cloudy and rainy. Serious inquiries only please.  

 

 

 

Listing Agent

This listing is represented by a MISKATONIC REALTOR® 

Conan the Barbarian #5: The Argos Deception Part 2

Laconic Depression

Incomprehension and language inability birthed the term barbarian. Despite his plethora of physical power, Conan’s dialogue in the fifth issue of Conan the Barbarian would earn him treasure chests of rejection slips from Poetry magazine:

“I am going to die today.”

“Crom…”

“!”

“My sword…!”

“Gah! Enough!”

“Over here. Too Slow.”

“You are all my witnesses. I shall walk away from here a free man, as per the rules of the contest, for I have beaten the best that Messantia has to offer.”

“Bêlit.”

"Enough. Is it not enough I have survived an ordeal? You must also remind me of those horrible visions of yours?"

Even though Conan speaks better with hand gestures (at his most articulate when that hand grips a sword), the above collection of words better situate the character as the novice adventurer befitting Conan’s age and experience. While previous story arcs attempted to take Conan back to his youth, to a time when didn’t invulnerability forever accompany the barbarian, he still remained unvanquished in most of these stories. The tales were enjoyable, but doubt never encroached upon Conan’s triumph or superior skills.

In Part 2 of the “The Argos Deception,” Conan’s absent confidence and planning sincerely spills from the pages. Brian Wood has written a Conan that, despite readers knowing the inevitable outcome, has Conan himself sincerely doubting his own triumph. Here, the despair of Conan exudes sincerity and Brian Wood’s writing has the reader emphasizing with the barbarian as strongly and skillfully as any spell cast by Thoth Amon.

Conan’s absence of spirit keeps despairing silence as its companion. Although rarely written as an eloquent rhetorician, Conan’s words charm. His stories helped him win over the crew of the Tigress, and while often maintaining a confident stoical silence, silence doesn’t serve him this way at the prison cell and gallows of Messantia. Conan’s despair strangles his words into a statement of doom, “I am going to die today” (the first words he speaks aloud in this issue),and limited bursts of observations, short exclamations, or silence, until he finally defeats the 30-year champion of Messantia. This physical victory restores his words to a powerful confident statement accustomed to a Conan who will go on to trample empires beneath his feet and wear the jeweled crown of Aquilonia upon a troubled brow: “You are all my witnesses. I shall walk away from here a free man, as per the rules of the contest, for I have beaten the best that Messantia has to offer.”  Here, at this moment in this issue we see how Conan’s triumph through physicality brought him confident articulate expression in words. These two simple statements contain all the power and simple truth the barbarian treasures. The crowd heeds Conan’s words; none attempt to impede his escape for they’ve heard and believe his words and know Conan is the best in Messantia. 

Yet after the fight, Conan slides back into fragments and questions. He’s accompanied out of the impromptu arena by N’Yaga, the seer aboard the Tigress who reminds Conan of forthcoming events he glimpsed in a vision. This reference seems to shake the confidence Conan gathered from victory and returns his language to questions for which N’Yaga offers only enigmatic answers.  Once beyond the assurance of his sword arm (with a lifeless headless corpse at his feet for proof) Conan’s naïveté becomes apparent. But we know his ignorance and inexperience won’t endure forever, especially not with a strategist and schemer like Bêlit for his tutor. James Harren’s images strengthen Brian Wood’s verbal sorcery in the script that evokes Conan’s despair. A flying pigeon juxtaposes Conan in a prison cell. The pigeon gains a reprieve from its cage; its handler releases it into the air, and the bird soars under its own power, escaping to emancipation.  The next panel on the third page gives the reader Conan, in the lower right corner (the place where sentences and pages end; the place that holds no hope of possibility or new revelations; the place of endings and conclusions, the last moments and death of a page’s possibility). Having Conan in shadows, one eye swollen shut, the other with the iris half hidden beneath the upper eye lid, a thick manacle ensnaring his wrist, and the slumped of one resigned to doom accompanied by the down-turned gash of a mouth on full frown (all this despite Bêlit’s amorous visit mere hours earlier), add to the main character’s despair. And yet, even though young and revolving through moments of doubt, Conan ends the issue if not free in some existential sense, at least free from shackles and prison and the noose. He holds his sword, his decapitated opponent bleeds at his feet, the ships in the harbor burn and Conan, despite the leg irons, walks towards his escape, treasure, love, and destiny. 

Animal Man #10

Talking Heads from the Red

Aerial melées between skull-helmeted humanoid canines and tentacle-skittering eye stalks would take great effort to make boring and mundane, especially when the fight takes place on a red island of rot floating upon a blood-filled sea. Animal Man #10: Warriors of the Redlands! infuses this fight with the energy it deserves.  Buddy Baker and his Redland escort, the Shepherd (a Herne-Virgil amalgamation who guides Buddy through this Redland inferno) battle the minions of the Rot before advancing to hold counsel with the rules of the Red, the Totems. This verbal exchange offers a greater challenge to rouse reader excitement. Usually, watching someone standing around talking to others (even when the others are giants with unrestrained goat, rhinoceros, or stag horns guarded by alligator men) contains all the excitement of speculating on wallpaper patters for characters in a Jane Austen novel. Yet, in Animal Man #10, Buddy Baker’s discussion with the Totem trio evokes tension and rouses excitement.

An analysis of this dialogue unearthed some aspects for how this conversation eschewed tedium. Hopefully, the following will do the same for you, dear readers (yes, both of you). 

After avian taxi to the Kingdom of the Red, Animal Man prepares to enter the foyer of the Totems. While standing on this threshold, Steve Pugh utilizes a bird’s eye view of Buddy and the Shepherd. Buddy’s closer placement to the foreground has him dwarfed to the Shepherd.  The tilt of the panel slightly moves Buddy away from the viewer while also moving the Shepherd closer. This tilt is balanced by the adjoining panel, tilted to the right to balance its companion’s left-leaning tilt and places Buddy nearer the reader. This composition emphasizes the Shepherd’s superior size without utterly belittling Buddy Baker.

This placement preludes the half page image of Buddy Baker standing before the Totems. Pugh parallels the placements of this page’s first panel; Buddy’s back faces the reader and he stands in the foreground (only the flanking alligator men stand closer to the reader). The other creatures tower above Buddy, and they physically and metaphorically look down on a diminished Animal Man, although one who still maintains a heroic demeanor with a spread stance, and straight back. So far, even though Buddy hasn’t spoken a word (his silence also adding to Buddy’s diminution of power) and holds himself heroically, Pugh makes it obvious he’s outmatched.

The following page has Buddy finally speaking, but his dialogue panels place in bounded fields; each bordered panel encloses Baker’s words while each of the Totems speak beyond boundaries. In fact, in this four-page conversation, only two panels have Buddy outside of grid lines, and both of these instances involve Animal Man either asking a question or bleating distress for his children. Aside from these two instances, Buddy either remains silent when not given a border, or he speaks within a boxed panel, and always he’s dwarfed by the Totems. This composition constraint dynamically enhances the exchanges between these beastly chatterboxes.

The Totems, when they respond to Buddy, convey their grandeur by transcending their panels; no Totem’s head completely fits the allotted space. Buddy’s full head appears each time he speaks on the second page of this interaction. Again, this variation between Animal Man and the Totems enhances the eminence of the Totems and animates this creepy conference.

Finally Animal Man, like Lydia Bennet savagely plopped in the plot of Justine, moves more than any of the Totems. Buddy gestures, fist shakes, a tilts his head to enhance menacing eyes, finger points, and covers his mouth in surprise. All these kinetics magnify Buddy’s reactions and keep the readers’ eyes moving along with their empathy. In the final scene, the Totems pass a judgment on Animal Man. Pugh positions Buddy at the right edge of the page while placing an alligator man who holds a curvy halberd menacingly aligned with Buddy’s neck behind him.  Opposite the pole arm, a Totem’s extended finger nails aim towards Animal Man’s neck and  heart; it is no wonder that Buddy appears so stiff and motionless on the books final panel of the final page.

While perhaps conversations don’t leap to mind as the most captivating aspects of super-hero books, the elements Pugh employs transfers some of the physicality of the earlier battle into the verbal exchange between Buddy and the Totems. One could only hope all conversations would appear half as dynamic.

Ubu Bubu: Filth

After finishing the collection of Ubu Bubu, I mourned the absence of future work from artist and writer Jamie Smart because I thought for sure he had been instantly whisked to hell after completing the final page of issue 4 and given a high command of marshaling demon hordes. 

Thankfully he hasn’t. You can find more of his dark twisted evils here.

This “itchy stink of badness” first came to my notice through listening to the comic-book podcast Awesomed by Comics. The husband and wife hosts (Aaron and Evie) couldn’t finish a sentence without laughter interrupting when speaking of this devil cat.

But the humor here is dark, so dark that even the shadows of the shadows cast shadows. The basic premise of the story involves a demon who possesses the body of a kitten of superlative cuteness (imagine a combination of Pikachu and Nermal) who establishes its base of operations in the house of a single mom and her two children. After eating the mother, the demon proceeds to terrify and care for (as best as any demon can) the children and work through a kill-list of souls to initiate the apocalypse.

A blurb from Ed Kaye at hypergeek.com on the back cover perhaps captures the mood well:  

“This is really fucked up stuff, but 100% entertaining with it.”

The book even wounded Warren Ellis (another back-cover blurber): 

“Fucking buy it…seriously. I actually hurt myself laughing at this.”

This comic must be making Fredric Wertham spin, twitch, and convulse in his grave.

At times the art work creates a dense page and seems difficult to process at a glance. Yet, upon reading, rather than scanning, the continuity of the story transitions easily from moment to moment. The style (I think of it as abomination-animation) harmonizes with the amusing grim tone and plot of the book. The lines of Smart are loose, but focused and vivacious. The images drawn are easily identified at a glance, and the thickness of the lines vary from thick to thin and provide the panels with movement and variation so that the images are as dynamic as the story. Also, despite the organization of Ubu Bubu’s kill list, the apocalypse seems immeasurably chaotic. While possessing order and a clear architectural design, the minimization of panel borders creates a appropriate disheveled muddle to accompany the end of existence as we know it.

I can’t imagine the current incarnations of Marvel and DC releasing a book with this vein of originality and humor. Slave Labor Graphics published the work and Ubu Bubu stands as a premier example of the benefits and importance of independent publishers and the ecstasy in departures and variations from superheroes with such creations as skull-kicking mercenaries or tigers practicing law.

Humor, especially humor as dark as the infernal malebolgias from which Ubu Bubu conjures its wickedness, extracts delight, albeit an uncomfortable delight you shouldn’t confess to at a job interview. Yet this delight serves some larger function as Jamie Smart notes in his introduction, he hopes Ubu Bubu could serve as:
 “a mental catharsis for me, and hopefully a disgustingly enjoyable comic for the small handful of people amongst whom it could be our guilty secret. Our sinful fetish. Our dark corner wanderlust. Drawing this stopped me going apeshit, maybe it’ll at least raise a smile for you.”

Aristotle charged tragedy with the role of evoking catharsis to purge harmful emotions that may inhabit the human soul so the spectators could be better fit to function within human society. Ubu Bubu serves a similar role, although if any thoughts and sensations darker than those able to be fumigated by the contents within the covers of Ubu Bubu remain with you after you finish reading this work…please stay away from me.

So come on you twisted lovers of sequential art, buy a copy of this story and have a good dark laugh to purge the vile thoughts festering between your synapses. It can be our guilty secret. Our sinful fetish. Our dark corner wanderlust.

ALL HAIL THE APOCOLYPSE!