Thursday, June 27, 2013

Godzilla's Grandpaw: 1925's The Lost World

So, a bit of mission creep. I originally wanted to just discuss Godzilla and a few of his imitations, but I realized that I was also interested in where the idead behind Godzilla came from. Giant radioactive lizards do not spring from nowhere. Ideas, especially film ideas, have a traceable ancestry, as well as a list of descendents, and I want to delve into the origins of ideas and the way they combine to create something extraordnary. As a result, I'll be in black and white for a little whle. I hope you don't mind.

I would be remiss if I did not include what is considered the first appearance of a giant monster in film, George Melie's À la conquête du pôle (The Conquest of the Pole). In it, a frost giant attacks the party, consuming (and then regurgiating) one of its members.

A Frost Giant and a tasty, tasty scholar, from George Milie's 'Conquest of the Pole'

The anmation of the large puppet is pretty good; the eyes, brows, and ears wiggle, the mouth moves. The professors react in the same way as all humans confronted with gigantic monsters; they fire at it, to no effect. Only when a canon is brought to bear does the giant leave off snacking. It is not killed, however, but withdraws from the noise and smoke of the canon.

But The Frost Giant really didn't have much influence on Godzilla, or many other giant monsters. The construction technique is very different, it is not central to the film, and it has very little personality. The monster is in it's own territory, rather than trespassing on the the realm of mankind.

The oldest film that had the most lasting effect on Godzilla, and giant monster film in general, is the 1925 The Lost World, with dinosaurs animated by Willis O'Brien. This is, rather famously, a film greatly loved by Rays Harryhausen and Bradbury. Dinosaurs and humans share the screen effortlessly, thanks to O'Brien's pioneering use of split screen.

In the foreground, humans.  In the background, dinosaurs, from the 1925 Lost World.

The Lost World was the first very successful dinosaur film, and the first international success of Willis O'Brien. As I discuss Godzilla's ancestry, Willis O'Brien and Eugène Lourié will consistently crop up.

O'Brien's work in The Lost World is meticulous and fascinating. For this film, he incorporated bladders into several the models, allowing them to simulate breathing. His attention to detail and desire to make each model have its own personality serves him well here, but much more so in King Kong, since the big ape has a lot more screen time. The amount of time the film devotes to dinosaurs is impressive. They first appear 36 minutes into the film, and the model sequences are pretty consistent from then on. It's one of the most extensively special-effects films filmed up to that point.

In the foreground, actors.  In the background, dinosaurs, from the 1925 Lost World.

After an hour's worth of adventures on the Plateau of Dinosaurs, Professor Challenger manages to apprehand a sauropod and bring it back to London. In the book, his capture was a pterodactyl, but the brontosaur was a much better idea for on-the streets mayhem. In the Crichton/Speilberg film, it is escalated again to a T-Rex. Kong-style (but off-screen) it gets loose and rampages for five muinutes at the climax of the film. People panic, fences are stomped, a building smashed, all before it crashes through Tower Bridge and into the Thames. Back in its element, it swims off, one of the few giant monsters to survive its inital clash with mankind.

In the foreground, a dinosaur.  In the background, actors. From the 1925's The Lost World.

The sign says weight capacity 3/4 of a dinosaur.  From Willis O'Brien's 1925 Lost World.

This is an enormously influential sequence, and will be referred to by Willis and his protegee Harryhausen several times. Images and scenes that are repeated or imitated include mother and child in the path of the onrushing giant monster (later seen in King Kong). The dinosaur is intrigued by the street lamp, as the Rhedosaur is intrigued with the lighthouse and fog horn in Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Tower Bridge is prominently featured, then damaged, as it would be in Gorgo. The brontosaur sticks its head in a window, the way Kong puts his hand into a window. Fleeing men and women turn to the underground for safety, as they do in Godzilla, Godzilla Raids Again and Gorgo, while monster's heavy tread causes debris to rain down.

How to maintain the illution; a life-sized model of the dinosaur head looking in the window.  From Willis O'Brien's 1925 Lost World.

In this five-minute sequence, the seeds are laid for the first generation of giant monster films. The beast runs amock, people flee in panic, and destruction ensues. Godzilla Raids Again changes the dynamic of the genre, adding the opponent for the monster to fight, but so many of the films I'll be discussing, from Beast from 20,000 Fathoms to Cloverfield take their inspiration, directly or indirectly, from this sequence.

Man, if I was a bigger dinosaur, I could trash this entire block!

Next week, the Big Ape. With a quick side digression about a plumber.

Thursday, June 20, 2013

Quick, Cheap, and Seminal: Godzilla Raids Again

What does a film company do when they have an unexpectedly huge hit? They follow up with a quick, cheap, sequel. King Kong was followed up in nine months with Son of Kong, and Godzilla was followed six months later by Godzilla Raids Again.

Who's that on my island?

I won't be discussing the American versions of Japanese monster films if I can get the Japanese cut. I'm just not that interested. I'm a subs guy, as I find the process of dubbing can be convoluted, especially when attempting to cram English words into mouths speaking Japanese. This distances the dialog from the original concept, and unless there's some sort of genius doing the translating, it's three removes from the original, rather than one. I prefer to read the dialog, and listen to the voices of the original actors. As a result, I'm enjoying Sony's releases of these films on DVD, since they include a subbed Japanese version, as well as the dubbed and often recut American version.

Godzilla Raids Again provides us with the answer to the impotent military posited in the original Godzilla. If the colossus cannot be defeated by conventional weapons, then how do we provide narrative tension? The answer is to fight fire with fire, and introduce another giant monster. And this is the moment the Godzilla franchise comes into its own, providing a stage for two or more gigantic monsters to meet and fight.

Godzilla is no longer a mystery, so he appears much earlier in the film that the previous one. Less than nine minutes in, Godzilla and Anguirus are shown, already locked in combat. This is a second mutated dinosaur. The original Godzilla was killed by the Oxygen Destroyer, and nuclear testing has once again produced a gigantic version of a dinosaur from the same family. But that's not important. What's important is that Japan must now face another attack by Godzilla.

Who's on my island?

To remind the viewer of the original Godzilla film (remember this is the fifties, so there are no DVDs or home versions of film avalable), Dr Yamane (played again by Takashi Shimura, one of Kurosawa's pernnial players) shows us a quick reel from the previous film. It's a hoary old device, but one that works. Yamane and the military explicitly agree that the military is useless against these titanic monsters, and that they must keep an eye on the monsters in order to predict where they will be most destructive, and evacuate the civilians.

We're watching a documentary called Godzilla.

The device used in this film is that Godzilla is attracted to light. This is a small reference to the first film, when Godzilla attacked the broadcast tower, having seen the flashing lights from the photographers. This may also be a reference to King Kong, as it's the photographer's flashes that set Kong on his rampage. It also reinforces the Godzilla as American military metaphor, since the authorities shut down the lights of Osaka. The audience would have remembered blackouts during WWII bombing raids. It also serves to show the folly of men. Godzilla is indeed distracted by the flares, but a fire at an oil refinery catches his attention, at which point Osaka gets stomped.

I'll bet this is what a city looks like after being firebombed.



The human characters are much more ordinary. Our protagonists are pilots for a fishing company, as well as the girls they are sweet on. Dr. Yamane appears only to give us plot exposition as the Gozilla expert. The smaller lives of these less-developed characters stand in contrast to the previous film. These are working-class, in the employ of Kaiyo Fishing Company trying to do what they can, not researchers or scientists.

Godzilla's breath weapon is used, but in many ways it is downplayed. Anguirus takes a face full of it, but shrugs it off, either because he is already mutated, or it's not that powerful. But we do see the city going up in flames behind him. The wrestling is famously different from the slightly overcranked Godzilla scenes from the original film. These are slightly undercranked, so the wrestling is a bit fast. The effect isn't all that impressive, lending neither weight nor a sense of mass to the struggle. Which is strange, because some of the scenes of collapsing buildings, and a few of the monsters themselves, are clearly overcranked. This (along with the quick glimpse of a crew member while Tsukioka and Kobayashi are on the island) speaks to the cheap and rushed nature of the film.

Two monsters and a famous monument.  Ready to crumble?

Anguirus is killed and then incinerated by Godzilla just over halfway through the film. As this was establishing the giant monster vs giant monster genre, this is unexpected. Later, the confrontation between the two monsters will be the set piece climax at the end of the film. Here, Anguirus is more or less there to give Godzilla something to do, rather than just crushing Osaka for the first half of the film.

Although Godzilla Raids Again is still grim in tone, the scenes of destruction are not interspersed with scenes of human suffering. There are no crying children, and no scintillation counters. Immediately after the attack, the protagonists are seen cleaning up the burned remains of Kaiyo Fishing, and the president promises that he will rebuild it. This is a spirit of post-war Japan. Their country had been bombed pretty heavily, and there was a lot of work to be done.

The ruins of Osaka.

Who's that on my island?

Who's that on my island?

Godzilla vanishes the minute Anguirus is defeated. And then we are treated to a sort of slice-of-life comedy. It's a bit strange, although if the intent was to have the characters return to a 'normal' life after Godzilla's rampage, I suppose I understand it. It doesn't contribute to the disaster feel of he film, however.

David Kalat equates the death of Kobiyashi, the popular and genial pilot looking for love, with a kamakazi suicide action. I think that's unclear in the Japanese version of the film. I find it equally possible that Kobiyashi was attempting to distract Godzilla. Yes, he is angry with the big lizard, but he is hit by Godzilla's atomic ray and crashes into a mountain. He was clearly conscious as he did so. If he wanted to crash into Godzilla, he could likely have done so, on fire or not.

For the first tme in the franchise, the military is not entirely useless. Tanks and missiles are ineffective, and when the search is on to find Godzilla, the military deploys jets. It takes Tsukioka in his prop plane to locates him. However, once Godzilla is located, bombs and missiles work indirectly, causing avalanches of ice to fall on Godzilla, trapping the giantic beast at the cost of several planes and their pilots.

Possibly the best shot of Godzilla in the film.  So many of his appearances are dark.

Godzilla Raids Again is an unexciting, but not awful entry in the genre. It requires a bit of patience to appreciate and love; it's not a great, layered work of art. I find it interesting as a look into the way that the genre evolved.

In the end, Godzilla is buried under induced avalanches of ice on a remote island. And there he would remain until he wakes again. But was it the footsteps of a giant ape that awaken him to color after a seven-year sleep? Or was it something else?

Thursday, June 13, 2013

My Year of Monsters: Godzilla 1954

I suspect Godzilla has more than a hundred reviews around the net, not including Amazon.com. Certainly it's the best known kaiju film, having demonstrated the genre could generate a lot of money. And though it is credited with starting the kaiju genre, the genre's roots go further back than 1954. King Kong (1933) is one of the first giant monster films. Kong doesn't destroy New York, but he presents us with that frission of the monster in a city. The work of Ray Harryhausen is another influence. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and Giant Behemoth gave a great deal of inspiration to Godzilla, making the Big Lizard not so much the originator of the genre, but it's mega-break-out star.

Godzilla did, however, establish the Japanese suitimation monster movie, and the dozens of films (Godzilla himself stars in some twenty-nine) that follow the formula of giant monsters emerge and devastate a city.

Often imitated, never equaled.  Godzilla!

Giant monsters work best, for me, in film. Film has an immediacy, and an ability to leave questions unaswered where books can be blunt. The way that a giant minster moves is so important to its character, especially as the creature has no words, and thus is very difficult to portray in a static medium, such as in a comic or a book.

Only Japan could have birthed Godzilla. While it is well-known that Godzilla is the the son of nuclear testing and attack (it was released in the wake of not only the atomic bombing of Japan, but also the fallout poisoning of Lucky Dragon 5, which happened early in 1954, the year Godzilla was being made. The immediacy of that connection is often lost on modern audiences. But Godzilla can also be seen as the son of tsunami, typhoon, and earthquake, all natural disasters with which Japan is intimately familiar. Godzilla comes from the sea like a tsunami, or typhoon.

A blinding flash...

Until 1984's Return of Godzilla, this is the only film in which Godzilla does not fight another giant monster. Here, Godzilla is faced with only the military, which is completely ineffectual. This is a recurring theme in the franchise, the inability of the military to stop the creature. Science destroys Godzilla, not force. This pacifistic paradox stands in many of the earlier Godzilla films. While the military is called in, they merely mark the gigantic creature's invulnerability and frightening powers, such as radioactive breath. In subsequent films, there is a feeling of pro forma military action. Everyone knows tanks and missiles are useless, but something has to be done. In this first film there is some hope that tanks and artillery will work, but it is extinguished when Godzilla responds with a more terrible weapon, his radioactive heat ray. So in addition to everything else, Godzilla can also be seen as a version of American aggression, which responded with nuclear hostility when attacked.

Barriers were meant to be broken... by Godzilla.!

Unlike subsequent films in the series, Godzilla draws its emotional power by focusing on the suffering caused by Godzilla. Scenes include the relatives of the Emiko-Maru's crew waiting to find out their fate, Shinkichi screaming for his brother to run as his house collapses, children being checked with a scintillation counter, (cut from Godzilla, King of the Monsters), and a mother holding her children in abject terror as the city collapses around them (also cut from the Amnerican release). This aspect, which includes showing us Godzilla 23 minutes into the film, tells us that the monster is not frightening for what it is, but rather what it can do. In later films, we see the stock image of people running from the giant monster, but we seldom see them in pain or weeping as the titan destroys their lives.

Families of Emiko-Maru's crew wait for word on their loved ones.

Shinkichi screaming for his brother to run

A war widow comforts her children in their last moments.

Radioactive kids?  Aw shit.

In addition, the various protagonists, all sympathetic, are at odds as to what to do about the gigantic menace. Dr. Serizawa has the power to destroy it, but doesn't want to expose the world to his terrible creation. Dr. Yamane wants to study the creature, given its uniqueness. Emiko, Yamane's daughter, promised to Serizawa and in love with Hideto Ogata, it torn between duty and love. Only when she sees the distress around her does she break her promise and sacrifice her personal honor in order to try to destroy Godzilla. Ogata himself, working class and handsome, is the only person convinced (until Emiko walks the corridors of the hospital choked with the wounded and dying in the wake of Godzilla's attack) that Godzilla must be destroyed.

Wait, destroyed cities look depressing?

Initially Godzilla is attacked with machine guns. It is only during his second trip to Tokyo that he is attacked with tanks, artillery, and a large electrical fence. During this attack, Godzilla first unleashes its terrible nuclear breath, which melts steel, destroys tanks, and turns Tokyo on a sea of fire. This may be a call back to the horrific firebombing of Tokyo in 1945, and possibly the 1923 Kanto earthquake, which devastated Tokyo and Yokohama. Following the earthquake, enormous fires broke out, consuming more than half a million homes.

Tokyo burns.

As a soundtrack afficionato, I feel that the contribution of composer Akira Ifukube is often overlooked. Some of his atmospherics uninspiring, but the Godzilla theme remains a classic. The heart of the film is in the beautiful "Prayer for Peace" which, accompanied by the scenes of devastation and long panned shots of bloodied hospital patients, punches the audience in the gut. "May we live without destruction/May we look on tomorrow with hope," sings the choir, guiding the audience to the same conclusion Dr. Serizawa does--that peace and hope are worth sacrifice.

Godzilla's death is not a triumph. It is a sad moment, both for Serizawa and for Godzilla. As Godzilla surfaces for one agonized scream, we feel little triumph, despite the reporter calling it such. Instead, we feel relief that the disaster has ended. This identification with the tragedy of the monster is another emotional thread that sets this flm apart from most other monster films. Godzilla is not a villain. He simply is too large, too destructive, to co-exist with humans.

Monsters are tragic beings; they are born too tall, too strong, too heavy, they are not evil by choice. That is their tragedy. -- Ishiro Honda.

The film ends with an on-the-nose plea for nuclear testing to cease, lest it bring up another Godzilla-like disaster. Ultimately, the world did not grant this wish.



Godzilla is a great film, and practically unique. Few other films take a gigantic monster so seriously. The human action is pretty good, pitting the characters against themselves as the Giant Disaster Lizard pushes everyone. This may not be where the kaiju got started, but for me, it's where they got interesting.

Thursday, June 6, 2013

Monsters over Giant Robots

As long as I've liked gigantic things destroying buildings, I've preferred the monsters over the robots. The giant robot genre has never interested me, and I think I finally know why.

A huge monster is what it is. A giant radioactive lizard, a gargantuan moth, a massive alien from another planet, it doesn't require an explanation. It just is, and it's coming to tear down the city, and it has to be stopped. The giant robot, on the other hand, is made by human ingenuity, and the director always feels the need to show off how awesome that creation is. What we inevitably get is the overlong deployment.

Mechagodzilla being repaired

Here's Mechagodzilla ("Kiryu") from the 2003 Godzilla: Tokyo SOS. It's being repaired from it's last encounter with Godzilla (Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla, 2002). It's big, the third Mechagodzilla, and it looks pretty cool. However, how long are you interested in staring at it? Because the filmmaker, like many before him, gives us plenty of time to look at the mini-maker's handiwork.

We hear the command to deploy Kiryu at 46:20. And then we begin a long series of beauty passes, intercut with people looking or saluting the awesome vehicle.

Begin deploying Mechagodzilla!!

Which goes on...

Isn't Mechagodzilla huge?

And on...

Dear viewer, we really want you to be impressed with Mechagodzilla.  Please be impressed.

And on...

Problem is, if you're not interested in Mechagodzilla, this is excruciatingly dull.

As it continues to happen...

Still deploying Mechagodzilla

Until it finally ends at 48:50, a full two and a half minutes after we hear the order to deploy.

YAY!  GIANT ROBOT CROTCH!

The problem is that nothing interesting has happened. I love suitimation more than most, but the long passes don't impress me. I'm more interested in what it does. Heck, you don't even have to tell me all of it's Checkov's Guns. The giant robot is going to pour a bunch of different-colored special effects into it's opponent, and that's going to make explosions. That's what I want out of a giant robot. Imagine a two and a half minute scene, with cuts, of someone awesome standing in an elevator, saying nothing. That's excruciatingly dull. The fact that the character is huge and a robot does not make it any more interesting.

I'm hoping that with the plot elements and human drama that are integral to the the giant robot deployment in Pacific Rim, it will be less excruciatingly wasted time.

Sunday, May 26, 2013

Pacific Rim is Coming...

Have you seen those trailers?



Pacific Rim is gong to be the first IMAX film I see, and the first 3d film I see. Yeah, I'm that technologically backwards.

I love monster films. Have for a long time. Godzilla is, among other things, my personal trainer. I own more films with Godzilla in them than any other character. One of the most expensive book I have ever purchased was the second edition of David Kalat's Critical History of Toho's Godzilla Series, 2nd edition. (In case you're wondering, the most expensive was the slipcased God of the Razor from Subterranian Press.) Because Godzilla films are fun to watch, and they also present an interesting history of Japan. As Kalat says, Godzilla is commonly understood to be a metaphor for nuclear bombing, it is also uniquely indicative of the Japanese experience. It almost always comes from the sea, like a tsunami. Under its weight, tall skycrapers crumble, as if from an earthquake. There is a power, and at their best a majesty, to these films.

I also enjoy Godzilla pastiches and homages. I've recently acquired Gorgo, the British version in which the titular monster stomps London. Yonggary is a South Korean remake. Each of these puts a unique national stamp on the story of the creature that destroys cities by stomping on them. The lost Bollywood version is Gogola, and I would love to find a copy of it. So would a lot of other people.

In the next year, two major American kaiju films are coming. Pacific Rim this year, and Godzilla next, which is the 60th anniversary of the release of the original Godzilla. I'm hoping that these movies will revive the viability of the kaiju franchises. I also hope they don't suck, like the last American version of Godzilla. If these two films are good and succesasful, we might have another wave of influenced films, especially in this climate of imitation over innovation.

Certainly the prices on certain Godzilla DVDs are astronomically stupid. Destroy All Monsters, released on DVD and Blu-Ray in 2011, just two years ago, is a hundred bucks on Amazon. And while Sony is doing a magnificent job releasing the earlier Godzilla films in both American and original Japanese formats (I'm a sub, rather than a dub sort of guy), their release has been spotty. Hopefully, the 60th Anniversary will prompt the release of the more obscure DVDs, such as Smog Monster, and finally an American release of Godzilla 1984 on DVD. We got Godzilla vs Biollante last year. Weird-o film Zaat just got a Blu-ray release, is it really that difficult to finagle a couple more Godzilla releases?

For the next year, I'll be intermittently (how can a blog that gets updated once a month carry on an intermittant series? Hell if I know). discussing Godzilla and adding a few thoughts I have on the Big Guy.

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

"Strong Leaders"

I have come to realize that I have a distrust of people who are described as 'strong leaders'. We consider the democracy the most civilized of governments, and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel lays out why democracies with social mobility are some of the most successful governments in history. But humans are social creatures, and we have a social hierarchy. We instinctvely like strong leaders, our alphas.

The problem, of course is that we have ALWAYS had strong leaders. And being a strong leader does not qualify one to be a good democratic, or republican leader. Idi Amin Dada and Pol Pot, Robert Mugabe, Francisco Franco, and Slobodan Milošević were certainly charismatic. They were leaders because they were strong, posessed of 'strong' personalities, and kept the underlings in line. But fanaticism has a charisma all it's own, and democracy does not need people who rule by strength. Further, the implied dichotomy is that anyone who is not strong is weak, a backhanded slap at anyone who does not crush their opposition.

Is this about Margaret Thatcher? Damn skippy.

David Weigel, the Thatcher apologist who got his article on Slate.com is typical when it comes to strong-leader apologism. I stopped reading when he wrote "Crass basically transformed into an all-Thatcher-bashing band, commemorating the war with "How Does It Feel to Be The Mother Of A Thousand Dead" (British casualties were 255)." Because this contains the sort of irritating and self-serving parochialism that I find so distasteful in followers and excusers of strong leaders. British casualties were only 255, but Argentinian ones (according to Wikipedia were 650, leading us to, wait for it, 900 casualties. Which is not exactly the thousand from the song, but I'm allowing for artistic licence. Weigel chooses to ignore all the Argentine deaths, because they're not on his favored side of the war. But there can be little doubt, if we accept that Thatcher provoked the war (as Crass says) then she is responsible for all the deaths resulting from it. But Weigel doesn't see fit to acknowledge the humanity of the Argentine soldiers.

Which is about right for anyone who supported Margaret Thatcher. I'm not going to celebrate her death, the way many Scottish writers have. But I am going to say that we need a clear-sighted retrospect. She destroyed manufacturing in the UK. She enriched herself and her cronies by selling off the public utilities. She was a friend of aparthied, and considered mass murderer, torturer, and embezzler Augusto Pinochet a personal friend. Possibly because she considered him a 'strong leader.'

We no longer need these strong leaders. We have had charismatic dictators for thousands of years, and most people would not want to live under their rule. What we need now are leaders with ideas. Leaders who welcome all rational points of view to the table, and don't get their own way all the time. Because democracy is not many people following a strong leader. It's the people making the decision for themselves, of their own free will, without coersion or expectation of reward, and making compromises because they respect their neighbors.

Friday, March 22, 2013

Gone...

Sometimes I think that we don't die of old age, we die of the accumulated sorrow of missing our friends.

Yesterday, one of the most generous and unfailingly pleasant people I have ever met died.  Rick Hautala was a pro, but at NECON or Anthocon, he always had time to listen to little people and talk with us.  He was great person to talk with, a straight shooter, and a magnificent storyteller.    

Rick was unfailingly critical of himself, and spoke frankly about his depression, and his struggles to be motivated.  In that, we had a lot in common.  Only I'm still too insecure to talk about it.  It was incredibly reassuring to hear that someone so successful and talented as Rick struggled.  That he was able to talk about it told me about his strength of character, and that let me know that I was not alone.  I didn't know him well enough to call him 'brother' and I never had the privelige of working with him.  But I did appear between covers with him in Epitaphs.  His story, "Perfect Witness" was typical of him, brilliant. 

In an unpublished book, someone I invented representing a fictional religion once said "We are like stars.  And even if we aren't there, our light still reaches out to those around us.  We are not gone, we are not forgotten, so long as that light is seen."

Rick may be gone.  But his light will be felt for a long the in the hearts and writing of many for years to come. 

Sunday, February 24, 2013

Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Media Properties

Yesterday, I picked up Hellblazer #300.   The final issue. 

I'm sad.  John Constantine, the archetypal Sweary British Mage, has been a fixture for more than half of my life.  I've got more comics featuring the character than I can comfortably lift.  The most popular section of my website is dedicated to John Constantine. And now he's gone, subsumed into a younger, blander version of himself without any sort of ties to the culture that he grew up in.

That's the John Constantine in the DCUniverse, the new 52.  He's younger and nobs around with Zatanna, the Phantom Stranger, Frankenstein's creature.  But he's not much of a character.  Original John Constantine was rooted in the punk of the 70's and 80's.  He was a member of a spectacularly failed band (Mucous Membrane).  This gave him a center, a starting point.  His disrespect for authority, his iconoclasm and cynicism made perfect sense, because I understood the movement he came from, the zeitgeist from which he was born.  The desperate 70's were his formative years.  

This depth came from the minds of Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, Rick Veitch and John Totleben.  They looked around and created a character that was from their time.  And people responded to John Constantine.  He was something new--a working-class mage.  Until Constantine, comics magic weilders have been remote mages, men with towers, women with witches terrible powers.  John was different.  He was a magical mechanic, not getting involved in the ritual of magic, but doing the necessary things in order to get the desired result.  If the words are the thing, then why not just say them, rather than intoning them?  Was a copper-inlaid pentacle really necessary, or would a quick chalk one on a linoleum floor be just as useful?  This practical approach was unique, stripping away the mysticism and obfuscation, as well as the overblown speeches.  Dr. Strange has all sorts of charms and talismans, the Specter is the Veneance of God, Dr. Fate channels the power of whichever Egyptian god through his helmet, the Phantom Stanger has some strange origin story.  John as none of these.  He wasn't a doctor, a mystic, or Judas.  He was a self-made sorcerer who got into magic as a way to impress the girls.  He came from a poor family, ran away when he was 16.  Never went to college. 

As such, he was always an iconoclast, and a smart one.  He has never been a hero, because heroes do the right thing.  John was a ruthless bastard who looked at the big picture and kept his eye on it, often at a personal cost, or to the cost of a friend.  That said, what he did always needed doing.  And after the price was paid, he usually got drunk.  We've even seem him cry a time or two.  Constantine was that small person who moved the wheels of the world because they had to.  Not because they were getting fame or glory.  He was easy to relate to, because he wore his faults and vices on his sleeve.  He smoked, he drank, he cursed. All of these motions and emotions made him human, someone I could relate to. 

He changed as different writers wrote him differently.  Jamie Delano's Constantine was very different from Garth Ennis's Irish Rebel, Mike Carey's masterful manipulator.  All these were different and yet recognizeable as the same person.  But there were some authors who didn't get it, who didn't understand the point of planting your feet, and flipping off God, the Devil, and the police simply because it needed to be done.  And ultimately, this was Constantine's downfall. 

Because Constantine was a media property.  The media he appeared in was produced on a deadline, and that had to be hit, whether the writer had a good idea or not.  And since the creators weren't willing to write him for more than a decade, the chore had to be passed on to someone else.  And so there were John stories that were from individuals who didn't really understand what he was about.  Certainly the film that used the Constantine name was pretty clueless.  As, sadly, was the last man to write the comic.  But that's what happens when a character is a media property.   

And so one of my favorite favoirte media properties flicks his ciggie into the bushes and heads out for Pubs Unknown.  There's going to be a hole in my life for a while.  But I'll always have those brilliant issues, and when I want, I can open up a box of comics and visit the good old days. 

Sunday, February 10, 2013

My Pyramid Texts

My Pathfinder game is coming along nicely.  The PCs are living and working in Osirion, the Ancient Egypt analog of the Inner Sea.  They're doing a lot of tomb raiding, and I'm getting working my font wonkery out by fancying up the messages they find on the walls and in the messages they get sent.

RPGs are more a performance art than anything else.  A session is dull unless you're involved, and it happens in the moment.  And because I want a larger audience for my work, I'm sharing these pieces of ephemera with my readers.  And because my blog posts seem to get more hits when I post a lot of images. 

I won't say they're beautiful props.  But I am enjoying the creation process. 

First, a sad note from someone trapped in a tomb, from Goodman Games' quite wonderful Malice of the Medusa.  I used GIMPshop's oilify tool to make the ink spread a little.  It looks older, and is difficult to read.  My players were able to puzzle it out, and I think the difficulty made them a) irritated but b) more invested in the narrative, because they had to work on it.
 From Goodman Games' Malice of the Medusa 

The 1st edition adventure Pharaoh is one of the most entertaining I have yet run.  For some background, check out the wikipedia entry.


 Pharaoh is a long-cherished treasure in my collection, one of the reasons that I decided to run a campaign based primarily in Osirion.  After some twenty years, I finally got to run the adventure, and it was delightful.  There's also a lot of text to be 'read aloud' to the players, which easily converted into documents to be fonted up.
 
Instead of just placing the words onto a sandstone background, I also copied the text into a hieroglyphic format, faded it so it wouldn't overwhelm the English text (I love layers).  This allows me to have my cake, readable text, and still have Egyptian Hieroglyphics.  I did this for the majority of the Pharaoh documents.  
From Tracy and Laura Hickman, TSR's Pharaoh adventure, a priests lament  


From Tracy and Laura Hickman, TSR's Pharaoh 
adventure, more plot points  
From Tracy and Laura Hickman, TSR's Pharaoh 
adventure  
Of course, anyone who read this knew it wasn't true.  

From Tracy and Laura Hickman, TSR's Pharaoh 
adventure  
The unrobbable tomf of Amun-Ra was no ordinary trapped tomb, let me tell you.  There was a lot of backstory, which is part of the reason there was so much text.  Lucky for the adventurers, the individuals involved were obsessive chroniclers.
From Tracy and Laura Hickman, TSR's Pharaoh 
adventure  
The players never did get the High Priests's name "Munafik" right.  But that didn't bother me, and  they never managed to ask him. 

And in case you didn't think the builders of Amun-Ra's tomb were jerks.  Here they reach out to the party members from 4,000 years ago and thumb their noses at them.  I love those guys.

From Tracy and Laura Hickman, TSR's Pharaoh 
adventure

Here we start a series of documents that are the Pharaoh Amun-Ra's personal chronicle.  I really liked this; it gave the villain of the piece a motivation, and made the guy who built the trap-proof tomb a heart.  He's not a particularly good person, but he's understandable, rather than just eeeevil.  I've altered it a bit here and there to fit into my campaign.  I would have liked to put this on one, long scroll, but I didn't have the printing technology available.  Still, these were a load of fun to make.      

From Tracy and Laura Hickman, TSR's Pharaoh 
adventure, Amun-Re's story, part 1


From Tracy and Laura Hickman, TSR's Pharaoh 
adventure, Amun-Re's story, part 2


From Tracy and Laura Hickman, TSR's Pharaoh 
adventure, Amun-Re's story, part 3

Later, I again turned to Goodman Games, this time plundering their In Search Of Adventure for an adventure of an avatar of the Scorpion Queen.  The adventure doesn't contain a lot of flavor, so I made it up myself.  Dire warnings and all that.  The top is a little muddled because of the darkness of the sandstone and the hieroglyphic text.  But the reading wasn't essential, so I let them struggle a bit. 

From Tracy and Laura Hickman, TSR's Pharaoh 
adventure 
The picture is a Sandwalker from Kobold Quarterly #7 (which is quite worth picking up).  Great picture, which I mucked with to make it look more like a carving with a hint of color.  The real illustration is much more detailed and pants-shittingly terrifying.  

Thursday, February 7, 2013

Why Monster Movies Are Not All The Same

I'm a Godzilla fan.  I make no apologies.  I enjoyed David Kalat's Critical History and Filmography of Toho's Godzilla Series because I think just about any sort of entertainment that stands up to being taken apart has worth. 

I've just watched Godzilla vs King Ghidorah for, I think, the third time.  It's not one of the great Godzilla films, and that's partially because there's so much of the human plot going on.  The fights are dissappointingly short. 

When the monster is the draw of the film, that monster should be front and center.  When I buy a Godzilla film, I'm buying it for the Godzilla action.  I want to see Godzilla blasting away at giant monsters in the middle of a city that's getting massively trashed.  Some monster films, and I'll pick zombie films as an example, aren't really about the monsters.  Night of the Living Dead was not so much about zombies, as it was people under pressure.  And that's how a zombie film should be.  As a monster, zombies aren't that interesting, unless they're given a twist.  They're just dead people.  They're interesting in the fear they produce in living people, and how people react in difficult circumstances, similar to the now little-seen disaster film.     

Big monster films, in which the monster is usually in the title, are about the monster.  Godzilla, for example. The actions of the humans should revolve around the monsters.  This was, in part, a major failing of the American Godzilla.  The audience came to see a monster film.  Instead, they got a number of small personal dramas that had nothing to do with the monster.  Which could have been fascinating (but wasn't), but I wanted to see the monster.  And while the monster sequences, whether suit animated or CG, are expensive, they're what bring the audience in.  Why was GMK: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack the highest grossing film of the Millennium series?  Because the last half hour of the film is devoted to the monster battle.  Godzilla is shown kicking the shit out of monsters, buildings, and the military.  In few other films is he portrayed as so relentless, monstrous, or invulnerable. 

The only film to succesfully straddle these two approaches, to balance the monster with the human drama is The Host.  This was hugely successful due in part to director Bong Joon-ho's decision to make his film more a drama with monster than a film about a monster.