Monster of the Day #1176

Are there any good biographies of Christopher Lee available, or in the works? Because I would really love to know how a guy who killed Nazis with (more or less) his bare hands decided he wanted to be an actor, and play pretty mute characters in his first couple of main features.

I have not read it yet, but his most recent autobiography is “Lord of Misrule”. Yes, I did say ‘most recent’.

It seems almost insanity to cast Lee in a silent role and not take advantage of his magnificent voice. Even more so than dubbing over Caroline Muno’s lovely accent in ‘Starcrash’.

True!

This is a great idea, Ken! There are so many Monsters that you could easily get a month out of them and not even cover some of the more obscure versions!

There was a Sherlock Holmes film starring Lee as Holmes some years back, but I believe for the US version they dubbed his voice. (And didn’t they also dub over Karloff’s voice for the Italian version of Black Sabbath?)

This will be very OT, and I apologize, but does anyone here know anything about a pair of movies I’m thinking of picking up? The first one is THE TAKING OF TIGER MOUNTAIN from China (Chinese warlord and his bandit army versus the heroic forces of the Peoples’ Liberation Army; hey, that’s the plot) and THE ADMIRAL: ROARING CURRENTS from South Korea (covers Admiral Yi Sun Sin and the battle of Hansando, 13 Korean warships against 333 Japanese ones). I wondered if these were good movies, so bad they’re good movies, or just plain boring ones. Though given the plots it’s hard to see how they could mess them up.

Same here but ‘The Admiral: Roaring’ sounds fascinating. I’ve been reading about Admiral Yi and the turtle ships- it’s amazing stuff.

The Admiral was apparently a big movie over in South Korea. Given that it’s about Koreans beating the daylights out of evil invading samurai (real history yet!), I can only wonder how it did in Japan.

Agreed on the Koreans! It’s a rough land — winter conditions are literally Arctic — and it bred some rough people.

And wth the other film, looking at Wikipedia, I see that ‘Tiger Mountain’ was directed by Tsui Hark. Not being up on Chinese directors, does anyone know if he’s one of the good ones or not?

I certainly like what they stood for. Good for the sake of goodness, that sort of thing. That’s not a bad price at all. But the closest Barnes & Noble is clear in the next State… Oh well, truth is I don’t read a lot of comics (ironic, is it not?) because there just isn’t enough time in a day!

Eh, likey see it as a form of gang war. Sopranos Vs. Corleones, kinda thing.

It’s for the Post-Modernist crowd…which makes up most of the comic industry. Fashionable bitterness at life not being what it could be, because people are too often stupid…except them of course. They would never have been like those mean folks…they wish…

I have no idea who finds that entertaining. My work has always been geared toward feel-good, optimism, and fun. I wouldn’t even draw for one of the majors anymore.

Until the 80s standard US comics were a mass market product mostly aimed at children. (In the 60s-80s there were also B&W magazine format comics theoretically aimed at adults.) The 70s/80s saw the emergence of specialty comic book stores, which became the medium through which comics were sold as their US mass market distribution died off. The people who patronised specialty stores were predominately long-term readers who were superhero fans, so Marvel’s and DC’s output shifted to being aimed at long-term, older readers. Gold Key, Harvey and Charlton, whose output didn’t appeal to them, folded. Archie kept going, partly by selling digests in supermarkets.

Now, in the pre-specialty shop days comics were distributed on a returnable basis, like other periodicals. (I don’t have details on what the arrangements were.) So whether a comic was successful was an issue of what proportion of its print run sold. The specialty shops bought comics on a non-returnable basis. So the 80s saw the emergence of new companies that aimed their comics at comics fans and put out comics with smaller print runs, which they could do because they didn’t have to absorb the cost of those unsold issues. This material tended to have a creator-owned, alternative character. Sometimes it appealed to geek sensibilities, sometimes arty sensibilities.

The pioneer company here was Pacific, which published the comics in which the Rocketeer appeared, on which THE ROCKETEER (1991) movie was based. Another company that emerged at this point was Dark Horse, which evolved into a company based around licensing things like STAR WARS and is still with us, but has just lost the STAR WARS license as Disney now owns Marvel and has moved it there. (Marvel was the first STAR WARS publisher but Dark Horse got the license in the later 80s.)

Meanwhile the price of old comics kept going up, and many people got the idea that current comics were also going to be worth a lot of $$$ some day. This fuelled a speculator boom in the 90s. Under the conditions of the boom the market rewarded excess of various kinds. Some of Marvel’s hot creators left and founded Image. Then the speculator bubble popped and the industry crashed. Today Image has evolved into a company that publishes creator-owned titles of all kinds.

Some of the superhero comics from the 80s that got the most praise were ones that appealed to long-term fans looking for something new and envelope-pushing, like Frank Miller’s BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS or Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibbons’s WATCHMEN. These days instead of doing out-of-continuity comics in which taboos get broken the creators break them in the ongoing series. For example, when Captain America was revived in 1964(1) it was established that Bucky, his kid sidekick, had been killed. For decades Bucky’s returning was a never-going-to-happen, although some stories teased it. But in the 2000s he did come back, in a well-received storyline written by Ed Brubaker that was the basis of CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER. But with ongoing comics what happened last year gets superseded by what’s happening now, so the stories tend to be ephemeral even for fans.

Other comics that one might see in a bookstore include comics that have appeal to non-geek alternative sensibilities or that got good reviews in mainstream publications, such as MAUS, most of which first appeared in a comic called RAW. Then there are the mangas (Japanese comics), which are of all kinds.

A lot of older comics, including Marvel and DC ones, have been reprinted in recent years. Marvel and DC have both published a lot of cheap B&W volumes, collecting material from the 50s-80s. Marvel’s are titled ESSENTIAL and DC’s SHOWCASE PRESENTS. Both companies have also published hardcover colour collections. Marvel’s are titled MARVEL MASTERWORKS and DC’s ARCHIVES. I think DC has only published older material in this format, but Marvel has published 70s-80s stuff as well.

There have also been many recent volumes reprinting newspaper strips from such publishers as Hermes Press and Titan Books. These include collections of the old Superman and Batman strips, which were handled by people who also worked on the comics.

We may be entering a new period in which comics are sold digitally. But I don’t know if the industry will reach children again this way. Will parents give children an allowance they can spend online? Also, the current editors and creators at Marvel and DC also aren’t experts at selling to the children’s market but the fan market. And it may be that what today’s teen readers want is sex and violence.
Marvel and DC each put out an enormous number of comics, so they put out all kinds of things, including kid-friendly titles. (A few years ago there was a series of comics starring Franklin Richards from FANTASTIC FOUR that played him just like Calvin from CALVIN AND HOBBES.) But it’s a mistake to suppose that if a feature was kid-friendly in the 70s it’ll be kid-friendly today. They also put out kid-friendly and non-kid-friendly comics with the same characters. I think this a mistake: how are readers supposed to find what they might like? But they’re the characters they’ve got, I suppose. Some of the other publishers do kid-friendly comics.
(1) In AVENGERS #4, which is where the frozen in suspended animation aspect of the 2011 movie comes from. The sequence where he talks to Peggy Carter over the radio while he’s flying the craft struck me as based on the opening of A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (1946).

Thank you, Mister Blanchard. I’ve heard this in bits and pieces elsewhere from other people, but never so concisely or in one place before, thanks.