COMICS REVIEW: HEAD GAMES: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL (2017)

 

by Craig McDonald and Kevin Singles with Les McClaine

Adapted from a novel by Craig McDonald.

Published by First Second in 2017.

. . .

"It's a bitch to outlive your world."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

So . . . you have books. Novels. Fiction. They get written. They get published. Some get made into movies: American Psycho, Jurassic Park, The Hunger Games, Dr. No, The Lord of the Rings, Fifty Shades of Grey, Perdita Durango, Wild at Heart, Black Rain, Les Miserables, Dracula, The Color Purple, Frankenstein . . .

Non-fiction books also get made into movies: All the President's Men, Lincoln, Oppenheimer, 12 Years A Slave, Heaven and Earth, The Big Short, Moneyball, Charlie Wilson's War, Fast Food Nation, Thirteen Days, Born on the Fourth of July . . .

Books can also be adapted into comic books (a.k.a. graphic novels). Plenty of literary classics have been turned into comics and/or manga: various plays by Shakespeare, various stories by H.P. Lovecraft, Tolstoy's War and Peace, Kafka's The Trial, 1984, Brave New World, Animal Farm, Octavia E. Butler's Kindred, The War of the Worlds, The Martian Chronicles, The Handmaid's Tale, No Longer Human, The Prophet, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Tale of Genji, The Iliad, The Odyssey, Don Quixote, Dracula, City of Glass, Perdita Durango, Fahrenheit 451, those Richard Stark books, Frankenstein . . . 

Usually, as far as my experience goes, these adaptations don't typically involve the original authors. If the work being adapted is quite old, it's usually because the original author is long dead. Living authors are usually busy writing their next book, so it isn't practical to take the time to write a whole new script for a movie or a comic book iteration of the prose fiction original. It also seems to be a common sentiment that writing prose is usually a separate skillset from screenwriting or comics scripting therefore you need people specialized to the task, though this is far from a settled matter. I sometimes think that comic book adaptations of novels are a bit risk averse due to a fear of displeasing the source material's fanbase. I mean if you read a comic book version of 1984 that ended with Ewoks liberating Winston and blowing up Big Brother you'd probably take to the streets in protest. So these "graphic novel" takes on literature tend to closely replicate the prose originals for better and for worse. 

But I found a comic book adaptation of a novel written by the original author in one of those dollar discount stores back in 2019. Those places sometimes have interesting selections of books, usually remaindered copies of popular bestsellers, but for awhile it felt like you could locate super cheap copies of intriguing nonfiction stuff, like critiques of U.S. militarism, history, memoirs-hardback copies of books that are usually futilely priced around $30 brand new, but look a whole lot sexier for $1 (now it would be $1.25). 

And, yes, the occasional comic book. 

Including Head Games, a "graphic novel" adaptation of a book adapted by the original writer in collaboration with a couple of artists. 

But, uh, I didn't buy Head Games because it was adapted by the original author. I bought it because it was a cheap comic book, and I can't resist a cheap comic. Especially when it's 160 pages for $1 plus applicable sales tax-whoa baby! At a price that low, I'm guaranteed to enjoy it even if it sucks. I had no idea what it was about. I did not recognize the names on the cover. I wasn't even sure if I liked the front and back cover art. I assumed it was some kind of a horror tale due to the skull on the front cover. The back cover depicted a trio of what I took to be vampire hunters: a lady with a cross around her neck and two dudes with guns. Nothing amazing, but sometimes comics don't have to be amazing so long as they tell an engaging story. I don't remember, but I'm sure I peeked inside the actual book . . . but maybe I didn't. More and more I suspect this was a pure impulse buy. 

So, I bought Head Games for a buck+applicable sales tax back in 2019 . . .and I think I was gonna read it . . . but time passed, and it was an impulse buy, and I had other things to read . . . and then at some point during the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic I had it in a stack of comics I intended to read in lieu of raising hell out on the town: a collection of the Doug Moench/Herb Trimpe Godzilla comics, Miller and Mazzuchelli's Born Again, a black and white collection of Jack Kirby's New Gods, Fun Home, one of those Lynd Ward woodcut novels, and a couple of volumes of Love and Rockets-and Head Games was basically top of the stack. But it kept getting demoted. Of course I re-read the Moench/Trimpe Godzilla collection first. That's just who and what I am. And then the Kirby book. Aaaaand . . . my memory's a little fuzzy as to what came next. I think I got caught up playing Shin Megami Tensei IV, but, well, a lot of the pandemic felt like one deluxe sized day. And I'm not sure it's actually over. Politically, sure, we in the USofA collectively gave up, like, I dunno . . . Day One? Day Two? What's the COVID-19 body count up to now . . . ? Say, why am I giving a fuck? Presidents, Governors, and regular folk all stopped caring, right? Sure. 

But back to Head Games . . . basically I read, like, all of the other comics I had accumulated . . . and then I still wasn't ready to take a chance on it. I still had some Kirby shit I wanted to read and re-read. The library hooked me up with three fat volumes of black and white reprints of 1960s Avengers. Those Marvel movies put me to sleep, but I get super activated by the primal comics. I was writing some silly shit about video games, so I was messing around with video games. There was always something else. Usually something comfortable, something familiar, and I'm a big re-reader, so . . . Head Games just didn't scan for me. I hate to be such a brand loyal consumerist slob, but I was totally freezing out the new guys, so to speak.

And then, a couple of weeks ago . . . I noticed a book that was unfamiliar to me. Head Games. I didn't remember buying it, not at first. Was it something gifted to me? Did I steal it? Did someone leave it here by mistake? I picked it up, opened it, started reading it . . . and I was like, Oh, I bought this back before the Deluxe Day of Pandemic . . . as I read I realized it was an adaptation of the first book in a series of historical hard-boiled crime thrillers about a tough guy who writes tough guy stories who gets threaded into the 20th Century histories of Mexico and the United States. So, you have a fictional lead character rubbing shoulders with Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich, Ernest Hemingway, Prescott Bush, Pancho Villa-it's kinda like Forrest Gump by way of James Ellroy. 

The art style is in-the-moment with occasional flashbacks, anchored to real world locations, lots of shootouts and guilt-ridden interludes of self-reflection all in black, white, and piss gold. It's gold because it's about the pulp protagonist facing the end of his personal Golden Age . . . and it's piss because he's a drunk in a world of liars and killers and thieves. The action centers around various unsavory characters fighting to obtain the skull of Pancho Villa, including gangs of cannon fodder frat boys dispatched from the sinister Skull and Bones Society based out of Yale University. Head Games isn't quite a conspiracy theory book, but it does take a cynically hilarious view of the pampered and the privileged. 

In short, I put off reading the impulsively purchased Head Games throughout most of that Deluxe Day of Pandemic because it was an unknown quantity . . . and then I rediscovered it amongst my shit, and read it on an impulsive whim in a single sitting. And it was great. 

Head Games has an incredibly effective structure. I don't want to give too much away beyond that, but it does a very good job of putting across the dilemma of its main character who is a 57 year old two-fisted pulp hero whose body is still barely up for a fight but is also just starting to fail him as his alcoholism and long-untreated diabetes begin to degrade his eyesight and his mobility. Truly, he's a hero of both piss and gold. And it is my opinion that Head Game's clever story structure is the result of the direct involvement of the original writer, a newcomer to the field of comics writing who was just protective enough of his book that he was able to nudge the project into unpredictable territory, but not so stubborn as to be closed off to the uniquely expressive qualities of comics. If I have a criticism, I do think the very last page is a bit of a letdown, most likely due to it being a blatant setup for a sequel, but that's a problem with many forms of serialized storytelling. Endings are tough.

Head Games . . . I had to play a game with my own head to finally read it. 

What a world!

MOVIE REVIEW: THE SHAPE OF WATER (2017)

Directed by Guillermo Del Toro

Written by Guillermo Del Toro and Vanessa Taylor

Produced by Guillermo Del Toro and J. Miles Dale

Cinematography by Dan Laustsen

Edited by Sidney Wolinsky

Music by Alexandre Desplat

Starring
Sally Hawkins
Octavia Spencer
Richard Jenkins
Doug Jones
Michael Shannon
Michael Stuhlbarg

Review by William D. Tucker

The Shape of Water is a Cold War era science-fiction fairy tale about monstrosity, romance, interior states of fantasy, and the break down of perfect systems of control whether they be American capitalistic militarism or Soviet totalitarian communism as agents or assets within those systems break under pressure, find love, decay in their given jobs, or some combination of these factors. The movie bounces back and forth between different levels of harsh external reality and interior fantasy.

We begin in the depths of some lagoon, and zoom into the submerged hallway of an apartment building. The water drains away, and we realize we are in a kind of dream, or some more elastic than normal reality all in tones of green. When the narrative voice over comes across the speakers, and the opening credits of actors, producers, and craftspeople appear on-screen it actually kind of brings us back down to reality because we get our bearings: we're watching a narrative movie with actors playing characters conceived in a screenplay written by humans, produced by humans, directed by a human. We, the audience, exit the zone of uncertain surrealism, and begin to navigate the Cold War, pre-Kennedy assassination world of The Shape of Water.

Our protagonist is a mute-but not deaf-woman named Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins), who works nights as a janitor inside a top secret government facility in Baltimore rather cleverly called Occam Aerospace Research Center. Elisa was abandoned as an infant, seemingly bearing the scars on her neck of some horrible mutilation which has left her mute. Elisa's partner on the night shift is fellow janitor Zelda Fuller (Octavia Spencer), who confides every last detail of her mundane marriage to Elisa, who is happy to listen since she lives alone and seems to live vicariously through Zelda, and her neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins), a middle-aged commercial artist who also lives alone. Giles and Elisa both live in neighboring apartments, and they constitute each other's primary form of social life. If Giles were heterosexual and thirty years younger, he would've proposed to Elisa by now, and maybe Eliza would've accepted-but this reality isn't so simple for these good-hearted, struggling people.

One night, Elisa and Zelda are cleaning a chamber of the gothic research center containing an open pool when a high tech cylinder is wheeled in containing a humanoid fish man creature (Doug Jones, who played the similar Abe Sapien in the two Del Toro directed Hellboy movies) overseen by Colonel Strickland (Michael Shannon) a super creep in a suit who's in charge of the fish-man at the research center. Elisa sees the creature through the plate glass of the cylinder and there's an immediate connection between the human and the seemingly non-human. Or less-than-human? Or more-than-human? Later, we find out that the the fish-man-referred to as "the asset'"-was kidnapped from his home in a river in South America, and that this creature is believed to offer new modes of existence to the human race which could make them more durable in outer space . . . but the only way to know is to dissect "the asset."

Complications arise. Colonel Strickland reveals himself to be a white supremacist and a  sexual predator. Elisa establishes an unexpected rapport with the fish-man. Not to mention there's a Soviet agent in the house. The Soviets may try to steal the fish-man, or destroy him to prevent him from giving up cosmic secrets to the Americans. Everyone sees some precious dream within "the asset," who is characterized as having been once worshiped as a god in his native land, and may possess paranormal power.

Along the way, conflicts involving sexuality, class, race, white supremacy, and the oppression of women during 1960s America boil forth from the soul of this intricate dream of a film.

I don't want to give away too much, here, you really should just see how it plays out for yourself.

The Shape of Water is my personal favorite film I've seen in an actual movie theatre this past year. Only Get Out, Logan, Blade Runner 2049, and Detroit came anywhere near moving me the way this movie did. It's also a strong return to form for Guillermo Del Toro, who's previous films-Crimson Peak and Pacific Rim-were gorgeous visual spectacles, but came up short in the script department, falling back on the tropes of gothic romance novels and mecha anime. Entertaining, sure, but somewhat insubstantial for me. This is easily his best movie since Pan's Labyrinth. Nothing comes easy for any of the characters-good, evil, in-between-in this story. Even the repulsive Colonel Strickland is shown in context as an effect of a system of brutality more than a cause, though Strickland himself is absolutely complicit.

The Shape of Water even has my single favorite line of dialogue of this past year's cinema . . . which I wouldn't dream of spoiling!

Be good to yourself. Go see it.

Every Day Is Halloween 5: Shadowing Up

Every Day Is Halloween 5: Shadowing Up
by William D. Tucker

Santa pulls the chains
attached to the steel arrows
buried deep in the heaving flanks
of His twelve cloud-tripping reindeer.

Claus reaches into His bottomless sack
(all done up with runes that keep twisting themselves up into ruins evocative of bygone empires, makes your brain hurt to stare at it too long, makes you want to go build an empire, just so it can eventually be all bygone and shit)
grasps the blazing industrial complex of intertwined mandalas of intertwined industrial complexes within
transmits dreams of world-girdling conspiracies through all the face-splitting hairs of all his beards
(which are, of course, mystically empowered antennae, learn something new every-)
to all the faithful of all ages
gives them ENEMY
gives them the Rubblemind to go deal with ENEMY
broadcasts to all the boys and girls
on both lists, actually,
who have all mostly organized themselves into competing militarized secret police agencies,
the militarized secret police model having displaced all the others-nuclear family, tribe, organized crime, cult/organized religion, legacy political party, terrorist cell, tabletop role-playing gathering, online gaming network-to become the primary mode of human professional and/or social activity.

Santa makes sure to shadow up
before appearing on radar as a paid propaganda asset of various military-industrial-infotainment complexes around the world
or for His select on-camera major media market appearances
wouldn't do to let the kids-of-all-ages behold the pierced reindeer
(reindoors, actually, that let Claus clip in and out of vanilla space-time, make the goddamn schedule)
definitely would not do
to let anyone
of any age
behold His true face
or any part of His true body
which is mostly a lot of teeth, claws, and agonized vestigial faces
glitching in and out of mundane reality
too many leftover, conflicting design assets,
too much malevolent design creep going in all directions,
over too many iterations
across too many corrupted, partial-build realities
trying to be too damn many places at once'll do that
gotta provide all the boys and girls
of all ages
on both lists, mind you
with ENEMY
on schedule
in all the asshole realities.

Which doesn't leave much He can reveal without properly shadowing up first.

Ho-ho-ho, motherfuckers.
-December 2017

Copyright 2017 by William D. Tucker. All rights reserved. Used with permission. 

Free Agent 2: The Throne of Contemplation

Free Agent 2: The Throne of Contemplation 
by William D. Tucker

As part of my indoctrination into RIVALCORP, I am cracked, scanned, and drained-which means I sit in a well-appointed Throne of Contemplation  with all my bodily needs attended to, the drug-pump primed just so, and my choice of authorized flickers via direct brain stimulation. I re-watch the Beverly Hills Cop Trilogy, including the TV edits. I'm actually a really big defender of Beverly Hills Cop 3, and I even think there are some inspired cuts in the censored-for-television version. A couple of the shootings are actually more abrupt and violent with the cartoonish squib-work cut out, but other scenes do suffer. I go through every iteration of the Beverly Hills Cop saga before cycling into a state of lucid dreaming.

I got into the habit some jobs ago of refusing to dream when locked down into the Throne of Contemplation, because I didn't want my internal phantasia to be recorded and made property of the system. But then they would just interdict the sleep state, and that took awhile to resist. Once I got into lucid dreaming I forced the most depraved scenarios and imagery into the system: vast howling chancroids vomiting up greasy feces and broken off teeth; syphilitic samurai seppuku; cockroaches eating eyeballs out of Muppet Baby faces; a U.S. president eating nothing but hair for every meal ... but I got worn out with that routine.

Why bother to monkey wrench the system? The system is, itself, Sabotage Incarnate. The true believers keep it puttering along on a lean mixture of malice and avarice. Juvenile shock perversities  are amusing dirty jokes to spice up a puritanical day.

Moreover, I'm certain every loyal employee has engaged in such acts of so-called resistance. I got the idea from a colleague who has been mostly deleted from my memory. The system is fully capable of total erasure of an individual identity but that method has been deemed, for now, to be inefficient. The web of an individual mind has too many useful strands, connections, intersections, and working networks to be obliterated outright when it can just be steered onto the right path with the proper rewards and stimulation. Some pruning-sure, fine, and they have refined that capability to a shockingly precise degree. I admire it. I do. What they've achieved is absolutely astonishing. Solo units such as myself have largely seen an enhanced quality of life at the end of all processes. So why fuck with shit?

I don't exactly love Big Brother, or whatever you want to call it-it ain't that warm of a sentiment.
And I wouldn't say He loves me.
But He's done right by me in terms of the basics.
-August 2017

Copyright 2017 by William D. Tucker. All rights reserved. Used with permission. 

Hopper

Hopper 
by William D. Tucker

1.
White light against a plaster wall
Looking with my back turned.
Window is the vacancy of intersection.
A perspective on one aspect of the jagged upper texture
There is pointing and then there are jabs from the buildings.
You sit there, white light on your back.
The room is so suffused with cold, clear light.
Nothing is hidden yet nothing is revealed in the cold, clear light.
We speak of matters with a speech that the Observer does not render exactly
In the rendering, we become a pantomime.
Nowhere above and beyond this room,
So filled with light,
Can we ever speak truly of the vacant point of intersection.
Who has ever spoken before the cold, clear light suffused this room,
How was it even possible?
It isn't blinding, it isn't sudden, in fact it lacks all flourish or sensationalism.
The cold, clear light simply is, and it is in a most unavoidable way.
Nothing hidden, nothing revealed.
Looking with my back turned.

2.
Drink. Purchase. Sitting. Another drink/purchase.
Routine of the room of the cold, clear light.
Papers. Organize. Read. Papers. Sort. Prioritize.
This is the work of the room of the cold clear light.
Pillows. Laughing. Porch. Train car. Outdoors. Indoors.
This is the room of the cold, clear light.
Green, beige, red, blue, yellow, purple:
These stand out in strange new ways beneath the cold, clear light.

3.
He wished to communicate sunlight on the side of a building.
Many received his communication.
Others received many other things besides.
Drink. Routine. Cold. Clear. Light.
"More real than real" as one person put it.
Critical response: good, suffused with the cold, clear light.
He did not try to explain, except for elaborate designs and plans.
Many view. Experience an array of emotions.
There is a look of awareness at the science and rigor of construction.
Science/rigor/effort is reduced to "emotional response."
Cold, clear light becomes invisible.
"I get a sense of loneliness," one person says.
"This makes me feel a certain way," says another.
Rigor, effort, construction, science subsumed by "emotion."
Opinion. Subjective. I like. I think. I feel.
Drink. Routine. Cold. Clear. Light.
Looking with my back turned, I see them turning away having observed,
felt, thought, and processed very briefly the offering before them.

4.
Plans. Construction. Intersecting lines of purpose.
The science and the rigor necessary to achieve that specific effect.
"I want to communicate sunlight on the side of a building."
Result: opinions.
I think. I feel. Maybe. I like. I did not like.
I am approached for moments, perhaps, having extensively researched, practiced, and calculated myself.
Moments.
The rigor disappears. Lines of intersecting purpose are softly, gently smudged into pleasant, distinct blurs of opinion.
Invisible. Cold. Clear. Light.

5.
Opinion passed.
Return of routine.
Beyond initial foray into understanding.
Drink. Office. Papers. Organize. Dance. Sunbathe.
Analysis:
Cold, clear light becomes visible perceptible
Intersecting lines of purpose rise to the surface.
"I can see the wires."
Repetition of analysis.
Rigor and science unearthed
Notebooks are thumbed through
Paradigm shift/analysis again:
Cold, clear light hides nothing and reveals nothing.
Analysis:
"In this place there are fewer, wealthier people. No one has any memory of the past. Everyone is prosperous, satisfied, happy, and no one quite wants to remember how it got that way."
Paradigm shift/analysis again:
"He is expressing a deeply ambivalent attitude towards his subject matter. The elements of the voyeuristic collide with an overwhelming sense of the privacy of each person's universe. Ultimately, the voyeuristic wins out, because, alas, the end result is the work itself. He could not resist looking into the realms of privacy and then sharing what he saw with others."
Paradigm shift/analysis again:
"It is the portrayal of man's environment as supremely indifferent that wins out over everything else. His settings are neither threatening nor comforting, destructive nor supportive, good nor evil. His humans, likewise, have learned to dwell in this environment with all harmony by becoming creatures of supreme indifference themselves."
Analysis. Results ad infinitum. Each analysis different.
Return of opinion.
Opinion refined.
Opinion/analysis synthesis.
Still opinion.
Cold, clear light hides nothing and reveals nothing.
-February-April 2003

Copyright 2003 by William D. Tucker. All rights reserved. Used with permission. 

living skeleton actor fuck (7/24/15 version)

living skeleton actor fuck

by William D. Tucker

role puts flesh and guts and blood on me

it used to make me feel complete

now it makes me feel heavy, arbitrary, old,

like I was never quite here

it’s fuckin’ weird

Because

I have all the evidence in the world

that I was here

never really went away

never gave up

but, uh, I dunno.

the feeling inside

does not change

a lot of work,

a lot of awards,

a lot of love from all over the world

but it’s, uh, it’s definitely a king of shreds and patches kinda deal

yeah . . .

. . . multiple past personas inhabiting my body at an advanced age . . .

OVERCROWDING OF PERSONAS

My head is thick with Personas-I won’t lie . . .

but for my next project

very stripped down

just the bones

black box theatre

no vocal chords, lips, tongue, lungs,

none of that.

maybe just have the air conditioning cranked up to the max

with, like, the script in front of the vent

breeze will lift the text off the page

let the words whisper right through me . . .

heh,

won’t that be something?

-May-July 2015

Copyright 2015 by William D. Tucker. All rights reserved. Used with permission.