MANGA REVIEW: HOROBI (1990-1991)

 

Story and Art by Yoshihisa Tagami

Originally published in Japan by Tokuma Shoten Publishing Company, 1987

English adaptation by Len Wein and Matt Thorn.

Touch Up Art and Lettering by Bill Spicer

Edited by Jerry A. Novick and John Togashi

Managing Editor Satoru Fujii

Executive Editor Seiji Horibuchi

Publisher Masahiro Oga 

English version published by Viz Comics, 1990-1991 as Horobi #1-8 and Horobi Part Two #1-7.

…

"The flesh of men . . . twisted by ancient horrors!"

…

Review by William D. Tucker. 

An accumulation of small anomalies and sinister omens in late 1980s Japan coalesces into a grandiose Apocalypse in the manga Horobi.

We begin with seemingly disconnected events and visions:

A couple on the run drives off a cliff and dies in a fiery TV-movie explosion in order to escape a hectoring disembodied voice.

This doomed lovers' escape is seen in the nightmares of a sexually frustrated environmental biology researcher. 

This researcher gathers data on newly birthed mutant salamanders who keep dying off at regular intervals almost as if they were being born only to die . . . 

. . . kinda like an illicit glimpse of a spectral monster by a couple having uncomfortable sex in the backseat of a car on a backwoods lovers' lane . . .

 . . . an impossible one-eyed monster resplendent with writhing tentacles manifests like a horror movie villain to punish sex-out-of-wedlock . . .

A group of middle school students are torn to shreds by a looming demon with a horrid face after they discover a sacred object . . .

. . . that has seemingly gone missing from a Shinto shrine that was destroyed when the fleeing couple's car crashed into it . . .

Throughout, the various characters-scientists and psychics, for the most part-chat about the frustrations of dating and sex and love and lust. Horobi emphasizes abstruse, occult connections between binary gender conflicts of men and women; environmental degradation; huge phantasmal monsters appearing like Godzilla to wreak havoc upon Japan; the secret lineage of gods, demons, and humans down through the ages; secret conspiracies of ESP empowered factions fighting for control of the world; and human bodies merging with ancient, sacred artifacts like Japanese mythology filtered through a Lensman novel . 

The rationalized, technocapitalist reality of the Bubble Economy bursts to reveal mythic forces that are pissed off at being displaced by science, technology, and materialism. 

Humans become the tortured vessels of divine wrath.

Grotesque gods fight desperately to claw back their dominion upon the earth and enforce an Apocalypse Regime requiring a magnificent slaughter of all that lives.

Our cast of scientists and psychics are smart enough to wrestle with the bizarre mytho-poetic themes manifesting before their eyes. This serves as both exposition and drama in a clever twist since Horobi ends up being about the conflict between materialism and the supernatural. There's plenty of mayhem, but these dilemmas also require people to sit and think and talk about them as well. The scientists and psychics fight for and against the return of the Apocalypse Regime, and they struggle within themselves to decide how and why to make their stand. 

Horobi, needless to say, bites off more than it can chew, but it is always fascinating, and I was pleasantly surprised by its conclusion. I think it makes for an interesting companion piece to the similarly apocalyptic Akira, another manga that uses psychic powers and mass destruction to express discontent and uncertainty about the future. Horobi is more concise, and its characters are more down-to-earth as opposed to the outlaws and oppressors of Akira. 

Of course, good luck obtaining an official copy of Horobi, which has been out of print for decades. 

I guess the sinister gods of the Apocalypse Regime don't want anyone reading it . . .

MOVIE REVIEW: EXTREME PREJUDICE (1987)

 

Directed by Walter Hill

Screenplay by Deric Washburn and Harry Kleiner

Story by John Milius and Fred Rexer

Music by Jerry Goldsmith

Cinematography by Matthew F. Leonetti

Edited by Freeman A. Davies, David Holden, and Billy Weber

Produced by Buzz Feitshans and Mario Kassar

Starring

Nick Nolte as Ranger Jack Benteen

Rip Torn as Sheriff Hank

Maria Conchita Alonso as Sarita Cisneros

Powers Boothe as Cash Bailey

Michael Ironside as Hackett

Clancy Brown as McRose

William Forsythe as Atwater

Dan Tullis, Jr. as Luther

Larry B. Scott as Biddle

Matt Mulhern as Coker

Andy Robinson as the Missing Liasion 

. . .

"Here we are Space Age high tech, and we get caught by some Stone Age cowboy."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Extreme Prejudice is a mash-up of a Western, a crime thriller, a police procedural, a romantic melodrama, a paranoia/conspiracy thriller, and all of this served up with homages to the slow motion gun carnage scenes of Sam Peckinpah's film The Wild Bunch. It distinguishes itself from the earlier Peckinpah flick by way of casting its action in terms of macho neurosis as opposed to macho psychosis. In Peckinpah films at their bloodiest, the antiheroes get swept up and away by the intoxicating aspects of bloodshed. In Extreme Prejudice, the characters are more uncertain and divided within themselves, and seek to clarify their courses in life by taking decisive, lethal actions. Yes, it climaxes in a grandiose shoot-out, but this is because the protagonists and antagonists can't resolve their divided allegiances, as opposed to the floridly death-seeking outlaws of Peckinpah. 

In El Paso, we have Texas Ranger Jack Benteen going up against his childhood buddy-turned-drug-trafficker-nemesis Cash Bailey. Jack and Cash seem to be able to step outside of their roles as cop and crook-in the early going, anyways-and reminisce about old times full of adolescent sexual conquests. Jack expresses skepticism about the value of the Forever Wars on Drugs, since they basically require him to go after people he grew up with who are all subsistence farmers and blue collar laborers looking to elevate their economic status. 

Jack and Cash are both in love with the same woman, the beautiful singer Sarita Cisneros. Sarita, for reasons known only to director Walter Hill and his cadre of screenwriters, believes she can love both men-the Ranger and the Trafficker-I guess because she likes her men tall, angry, and two-at-a-time? Maybe it's supposed to be that Jack and Cash represent Sarita's ideal love but split into two. Jack's morally upright, but Cash is an adventurer. One's reliable but boring; the other's fun but dangerous. Don't worry, the relationship stuff doesn't distract from the shootouts, not too much, anyways. 

Cash operates out of an estate in Mexico, and flies back and forth across the border in a helicopter. Jack has seemingly tolerated this blatant criminal activity for awhile, but then there are some shootings and a bombing, and Old Times' Sakes ain't gonna be enough to prevent a showdown.

Oh, and there's also a gang of Special Forces soldiers called Zombie Unit who have faked their deaths, and are able to run secret operations against Cash's criminal empire. At least that's what seems to be going on in the beginning. They're led by a shifty dude named Hackett and they use their military combat training along with (landline) phone hacking, disguises, and explosives to run circles around the cops as they pursue an obscure agenda . . . an agenda sanctioned by the U.S. government? That’s a mystery, isn't it . . .

Remember, this one is about macho neurosis, not macho psychosis. The characters all have big-ass dreams, and yet these don't exactly pan-out. They're just a bit too calculating, too dispassionate. The various plot lines converge on a stylized gun massacre, yet it doesn't quite blossom into the madness of the climax of The Wild Bunch. We're in the late 1980s. The action is big, but the characters want the money and a stable future. In 1969, Peckinpah's outlaws know they're doomed and therefore needed only sensational lawlessness and thrilling obliteration as ends unto themselves. Our crimelord Cash is basically a next-level coke-snorting yuppie fuck-he owns a helicopter, for Christ's sakes! Jack is good with a gun, but he has no confidence in his role as Righteous Avenger. Jack's playing out his fate dutifully, and that's about it.

The Zombie Unit guys are more amusing to watch as they operate.  They're kinda like a crooked version of Mission Impossible. They, too, come to question their ultimate purpose. 

Dear Reader, I actually like this movie quite a bit moment-to-moment, and yet the more I think about it retrospectively, the less certain I am that I understand what it's all about, if anything. And that bugs me. Maybe the macho neurosis is catching. 

BOOK REVIEW: INFERNAL DEVICES (1987)

by K.W. Jeter
With an introduction by the author, and an afterword by Jeff VanderMeer
Originally published 1987 by St. Martin's Press
Republished 2011 by Angry Robot Books

Review by William D. Tucker. 


Infernal Devices is a ripsnorting, grandly comical Victorian-era potboiler that is far more entertaining than the most recent Indiana Jones movie; indeed it is more exciting than any big budget Hollywood blockbuster that I have seen in the past five years. It is that rare book that is both literary and cinematic. You can't help but pine for a movie version even as you realize that it could never be as good as the book. It's full of crazy, clockwork automatons, cliffhanger chapter endings, sinister conspiracies, and gloriously impossible super-science. It is a book which will transport you to another reality. By book's end, I was satisfied, and yet felt it a crime that there was just the one book. Surely, this would be a series worth following. 


Infernal Devices is also a seminal text in the so-called steampunk movement in speculative fiction and pop culture. According to the author's introduction, and the afterword by Jeff VanderMeer, Jeter coined the word steampunk as a riff on cyberpunk, which was the sub-genre of note in 1980s science fiction. Jeter was poking fun at the tendency to put any old random word and the the word punk together to mint a new stylistic category. Jeter was on to something. Cyberpunk is still kicking, and we also have steampunk, which is getting a lot of play these days, and let's not forget biopunk, cypherpunk, and even cthulhupunk. 


What is steampunk? It's a kind of fetishism of old technologies, especially anything that's made of rivets, gears, steel, and is powered by steam. Do a google image search of steampunk, you'll pick up on it. Trains, flying devices that use huge flapping artificial wings made of wood, metal and canvas, clockwork automatons  and clockwork cyborg prostheses, and various forms of Victorian-inspired fashions, sometimes with kinky, anime-inspired adjustments for a more sexually liberated age of cosplay and Lady Gaga. In the author's forward, Jeter speculates that the vogue for steampunk fashion and apparatus comes from a desire to escape the bland plastic smoothness of computers, cell phones, and other electronic amusements that have become none too amusing these days. Jeter likes his machines as machines. All the better to distinguish them from an increasingly machine-like humanity, now beavering away in cubicle cultures the world over . . .


Some other notable steampunk works include William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's alternate history epic The Difference Engine, K.W. Jeter's own Morlock Night, which is apparently a sequel to H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, and the criminally underrated anime feature film Steamboy, which was created by Katsuhiro Otomo, the mastermind behind the manga and film of Akira. Steamboy in particular is a good place to start if you want to get a handle on some of the more fanciful possibilities of steam-based retro-technology and alternate history. In Otomo's world,  a genius inventor finds a way to make steam power the atomic power of its age. Massive weapons of war are developed, and the nationalistic world powers all want in on the action. But the genius inventor has no interest in the machinations of warlike governments, and so he tries to fend off the schemes and dreams of spies and arms manufacturers.


Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine constructs a reality where Charles Babbage's analytical engine was brought to fruition in 1824 and brings on an early onset of accelerated technological progress including ubiquitous personal computing and a worldwide communications network very much like our own internet. Gibson and Sterling's book embodies that aspect of steampunk which seeks to pose alternate possibilities of technological progress: just because we don't do it with punch cards and steam engines doesn't mean we can't make it happen that way. It may seem whimsical on the surface, but it raises some fascinating possibilities, and also forces us to confront the all important issue of who controls the means of production when it comes to technological advance and why that matters. It's not arbitrary, and it could change any day. 


But you don't need prior interest in or knowledge about steampunk to enjoy Infernal Devices. It begins with an uptight young man who is in a bit of rut . . .


George Dower has inherited his deceased father's clock repair shop in Victorian London. Dower doesn't have the mechanical touch, though, and so he struggles with the various clockwork gimcracks that his father's former clients bring to him with the expectation that mechanical genius is hereditary. Dower doesn't have the genius, but he's a tenacious worker, and he's aided by his father's loyal servant, Creff. Creff shows Dower the basics, and by sweat and struggle Dower becomes a good enough clock repairman. Now and again, someone will bring in something truly bizarre, some contraption of gears with chains as fine as silk threads which is beyond Dower's prowess. The son has to send these people away, openly confessing his lack of skill.

One evening, a strange man, whom the excitable and somewhat racist Creff immediately accuses of being a thief of Ethiopian heritage, brings Dower a strange box which contains a totally incomprehensible clockwork regulator device of some sort. The mystery man comes to be known as the Brown Leather Man due to what Dower perceives as his dark, ritually scarred skin. The Brown Leather Man exhorts Dower to figure out what the device is for, and Dower, despite his lack of confidence, promises to find out the device's purpose within the week.

But a strange thing happens as Dower shows the Brown Leather Man around the workshop. The Brown Leather Man accidentally cuts his arm on a piece of junk . . . and seemingly bleeds briny water . . .

The Brown Leather Man leaves Dower a strange coin as security before he exits. It depicts a weird face, part man, part amphibian in appearance.

There are other people who want to know what the regulator is good for, people who are willing to lie, to steal, and possibly even to do murder to obtain the device and put it to some sinister use.

The action of the book concerns Dower's efforts initially to hold onto the regulator and to solve the mystery of the man-fish coin. At first, it would seem that Dower doesn't need to stray too far from his shop to pursue adventure. Thieves and schemers are all too happy to come barreling through his door or window. Among the memorable rogues Dower must deal with are the duo of Scape and Miss McThane, who seem, by their crude patterns of speech and extensive use of slang, to be Americans. The two are engaged with exhibiting clockwork amusements at inflated prices to small-town audiences, and they have a keen interest in getting their hands on the regulator.

Scape and McThane are two of the delights of Jeter's novel. Scape is a burly, swaggering bullshit artist who affects hipster shades with blue lenses and thinks he's got the world by the balls. Miss McThane is a comical strumpet, her every impulse designed to offend and unsettle Dower's ridiculously uptight Victorian sense of propriety. Jeter brilliantly puts anachronistic American slang and profanity into Scape and Miss McThane's dialogue which alternately bruises and confuses Dower's fussy gentlemanly decorum. One gag involves Dower hearing Scape mutter something under his breath that he thinks is a portmanteau of the words "cogs" and "succor." Perhaps an obscure religious entreaty? Miss McThane, who has a liberated sense of sexuality, sees the uptight Dower as a challenge and constantly tries to seduce the Englishman. Personally, my favorite scenes in the book involve the goofy dynamics of Scape, Miss McThane, and hapless Dower.

Another source of humor is Dower's hidebound nature. There are many times in the first person narrative where the reader will find themselves two steps ahead of Dower in deducing what exactly is happening. You want to shout and wave at the guy, try to steer him on to the right track. But even so, the book still plays its cards close to the vest, and it will keep you guessing as to the overall design of what's happening and why.

It would be a crime to give away any more of the story, but suffice it to say that nothing is as it first appears. Jeter is not afraid to go right over the top in terms of the underlying logic of his make believe world.It is not realism, but I found it weirdly convincing. I wanted very much to believe in the reality of this make-believe world.

Also, after you read the book, run this theoretical through your analytical engine: what would it have been like if it had all been told from the perspective of the Brown Leather Man . . .