Pulp Fiction on Pulp Paper

The Jack & Maggie Starr Series: A Killing in Comics, Strip for Murder, and Seduction of the Innocent by Max Allan Collins. Illustrations by Terry Beatty.
Book Review by Kerey McKenna.

I am talking about funny books, kids. The most popular entertainment medium of all here in 1954. My city boasts twenty comics publishers putting out 600-some titles every month, selling eighty to one hundred million copies a week, reaching an audience larger than movies, TV, radio and magazines combined (they figure a comic book gets passed around or traded to six or more readers). It’s an industry employing a thousand-plus writers, artists, editors, letterers and assorted spear carriers...It’s a form of story-telling that arrays newsstands with superhero fantasy and talking ducks, through those are outnumbered of late by monsters both supernatural and humans, as well as cowboys and Indians, romance and war, and science fiction...The chief audience is kids but grown-ups indulge too, especially veterans who learned to read portable funny books, bought at the PX, in the Second World War and more recently in Korea…. What’s important for you to keep in mind is how big, how popular the comic book industry is right now. And how everybody and your Uncle Charlie wants to kill it. What the hell...every murder mystery needs a victim…” –Jack Starr

In this entry for Noir November let’s take a look at the Jack & Maggie Starr Series, historical fiction novels, written in the pulp mystery tradition that explore the formative years of the American Comic Book industry. Who better to tell a Noir style story in that time than Max Allan Collins, who twice won the Shamus Award for excellent writing in the P.I. mystery sub-genre, and has written prose novels, graphic novels, and comic books. His historical fiction gangster comic series Road to Perdition later adapted into the beloved Tom Hanks movie of the same name.

Today much of comics IP is held by the monolithic “Big Two Publishers” who are themselves divisions of two rival large multimedia empires. On the whole comic books are now sold to “the collector’s market” of invested (adult) fans buying directly online or at specialty comic book stores. This is in stark contrast to the so called Golden Age, a wild and woolly time for the nascent comics publishing industry. Focused primarily in New York City, with a mob of small publishers fighting for space on the newsstands for an audience of primarily children, teenagers, and the emerging counterculture. The men and women of the early comic book industry managed to make a place for themselves at the end of the Dirty 30’s, fight through the war years, and arrive in the 1950’s to get their shot at post-war American prosperity. Assuming that they didn’t find themselves censored, swindled out of their royalties...or dead.

In a New York City filled with colorful characters, both in and out of the funny pages, is Jack Starr, a tall, handsome and square jawed former Army MP and very specialized detective. He only investigates one type of crime and works for only one client: Jack investigates crimes related to comic books and the funny pages. His only client is his late father’s company, the Starr Syndicate, one of the outfits that licenses characters from comic books to newspapers to be published as comic strips. Jack is a “troubleshooter” for the syndicate. Attached as they are to the august institution of newspapers, the syndicate wants to avoid or manage scandals that would damage the wholesome image of the superheroes and cartoon animals that they sell to newspapers around the country. In addition to fearing loss in sales, the Starr Syndicate has good reason to avoid close public scrutiny. The basis of their empire of family friendly characters used to be printing race forms and “art books” (wink wink nudge nudge, know what I mean). Despite a shift to more wholesome fare in the 20’s, Mafia families bought shares of competing publishing syndicates and later comic book publishers. In addition to getting a piece of the action of sales, during Prohibition they insisted that the lumber used to print material in dry NYC be shipped on big trucks and imported from wet Canada.

Usually Jack’s job is fairly simple: running background checks on new employees, leaning on artists who fall behind on their deadlines, and trying not to get distracted by his knockout of a boss Maggie Starr, his stepmother and father’s widow. Only five years Jack’s senior, Maggie is a former striptease artist who inherited the majority of her late husband’s comic strip empire. Not ashamed of her past, and having a keen mind for business, Maggie even became a restaurateur, opening the “Strip Joint,” an upscale Manhattan Steakhouse where patrons dine on strip steak, surrounded by wall art from famous comic strips and waited on staff that are clearly part time or former...well you get the idea.

When their industry threatens to get ink in the crime blotter instead of the funny pages, like the murders of a publishing magnate or of a doctor who claims comic books create juvenile delinquents, Maggie puts Jack to work quickly to find the party responsible and bring them to justice to get the story out of the papers as fast as possible.

The Jack and Maggie Starr mysteries are, in the pulp noir tradition, fun if formulaic mysteries with just enough brawling and sex to keep you going to the next chapter. Jack Starr’s witty internal narration, and illustrations at the beginning of each chapter by Terry Beatty done in a classic pop art style, add a nice touch to the homage to classic pulps. Aside from the eccentric Jack and Maggie, most of the characters of the 1950’s comic and cartoon world are clearly based on real personalities of the time but with the names barely changed in ways that would make Law & Order claims of “ripped from the headlines” blush. For example the colorful ubermensch hero “Wonderguy” was created by two naive young men, “Harry Spiegel” & “Moe Sholman” who would not get the full share of the fortune their character makes in merchandising. Other popular superheroes are “Batwing,” created by “Rod Krane,” and “Amazonia” created by a Harvard professor a bit on the kinky side. Wanting to put the kibosh on all these characters is noted child psychologist Dr. Werner Frederk who publishes a sensational book “Ravish the Lambs” and testifies before congress accusing comic books of being the key factor in post war juvenile delinquency.

The historical fiction here is not as divergent from real life as say The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Those familiar with the history of American comics will readily catch the “Brand X” references. But if you’re less familiar with the history of the industry, don’t worry. The “Brand X” names aren’t too distracting and might even encourage you to learn more about the real movers and shakers, heroes and villains of the period, especially apropos in the wake of the passing of one of the last great living links to that time, Stan Lee.

Whether you are either an old hand at P.I. style noir mysteries or a fan of comic books I would certainly recommend giving any of these books a read.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

Hero of the Harlem Renaissance

Luke Cage Noir.
Written by Mike Benson & Adam Glass. Art by Shawn Martinbrough & Nick Filardi.
Graphic Novella Review by Kerey McKenna.

I was sad to learn that Luke Cage, the bullet-proof Hero of Harlem, will not be renewed for another season on Netflix. Even if the last season did receive mixed reviews, as a whole I think it did one of the best jobs of realizing life in New York City in the Marvel Shared Universe. Hopefully Luke Cage, Misty Knight, and Night Nurse will return in other Marvel projects, possibly on the Disney exclusive streaming service coming down the pipe. In memoriam of Luke's removal from Netflix—and also because this is Noir November—I want to review Luke Cage Noir, a story that reframed him in a classic film noir paradigm, and incidentally first introduced me to him. I also want to explore some of the historical links between film noir and African American cinema.

In 2009 and 2010 Marvel comics released a limited run of Noir-themed comics. The books were mostly standalone mini-series of four issues each that restyled Marvel Characters like the Daredevil, Iron Man, and the Punisher in classic noir and pulp settings and tones. These stories tended to de-emphasize the fantastical, and transplant characters into 1930’s and 50’s noir mysteries or adventure pulps.

The Luke Cage story boils Luke down to his essence, a black man trying to bring justice to the people of Harlem when they have been ill served by lawful institutions and preyed upon by gangsters. The story takes place in 1930’s Harlem with Luke being released from a ten year stint at Rikers Island. Cage has become an urban legend as witnesses claim that the night of his arrest he managed to take two slugs to the chest...and get back up without a scratch on him.

Now Luke is out to settle old scores and solve the murders of both his woman and a white socialite. Along the way, the reader is taken along a classic hard-boiled detective tale, with machine gun dialogue, frame ups, and double crosses, all playing out in the vibrant and violent environs of Prohibition Era Harlem. Which I found refreshing because you don’t often see African Americans in such central roles or rounding out the majority of a cast in classic film noir.

It is well known that the Luke Cage character was created to chase the trend of the “Blaxploitation” films of the 60’s and 70’s. But what I didn’t know until I started researching this review is that the Blaxploitation movement itself tapped into an earlier cinematic tradition of black gangster/black protagonist crime and detective stories.

Even in the days of silent film, there were studios, or small divisions of studios, producing films for urban black audiences. Known collectively as “Race Films,” they were silent films and later talkies that featured not only predominantly minority casts but often all-minority casts. Like so many endeavors of the time, this nascent black cinema was kept separate and unequal from the mainstream. But unlike mainstream Hollywood, Race Films gave black and mixed-race actors a wide variety of roles over as many genres as shoestring budgets would allow. And yes, there were Race Film mystery and gangster movies. Sadly, because they received limited distribution, only a small fraction of those films were properly archived and tended not to be prioritized for restoration. And all too often, being B movies, they couldn’t afford the more experimental shooting techniques that came to epitomize the film noir canon.

With Luke Cage Noir, we come full circle. It's practically a reconstruction of the Race Film gangster noir stories. But rendered in pen and ink, rather than on the silver screen, and with the corporate muscle of Marvel Comics behind it, it is free of the earlier genre’s artistic handicaps. The creative use of shadow and color by the art team grant a style that the B movie Race Films could rarely afford. It is a great graphic novella, both for those who know The Hero of Harlem through the Netflix series, and for fans of classic hard-boiled detective stories who don’t want a bunch of garishly dressed superheroes running all over the place.

To my knowledge, since the original launch of the noir concept, Marvel hasn’t done much with it—with one notable exception. Stay tuned for my post on the one Marvel Noir hero who continues to appear in comics, cartoons, and video games—and is set for a big screen appearance later this year.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

The Dark Deco Knight

Batman: the Animated Series and Batman: Mask of the Phantasm.
Review by Kerey McKenna.

For our next entry in Noir November I wanted to take a look at the movie and TV series that more than any other imprinted noir and pulp sensibilities into my young mind: Batman: Mask of the Phantasm and Batman: the Animated Series. Not only are they among the best iterations of the Batman mythos; they're also a loving tribute to classic film noir.

In 1992, Warner Brothers Animation launched Batman:The Animated Series to much fanfare by old and young fans alike, a pulpy action cartoon with classic film noir aesthetics and sensibilities. Only a year later the production team managed to take their version of Batman to the big screen with the feature length Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, resulting in what I propose is one of the best Batman motion pictures ever made.

The narrative of the film actually takes place in two time periods, the “Present” of the TV series (a version of the 1990’s that looks uncannily like the 1950’s; more on that later) in which Batman is well-established as the protector of Gotham, and ten years prior, when a college-aged Bruce Wayne is about to begin his costumed crusade against crime. Going back and forth between the two eras is actually a great way to do the “Superhero origin story” and I’m a bit disappointed no millennial superhero movie has lifted the trick. A fully formed Batman bursts into action in the very first scene, and over the course of the film we get to peer back in time to see the moments that informed the man he would become. Unlike some origin stories of popular characters, these flashbacks don’t obsess about trying to explain every little piece of Batman’s iconography and signature weapons. Instead the grand insight offered by the flashbacks is Bruce Wayne’s state of mind in becoming Batman; along the way they also provide crucial clues to a mystery playing out in the present.

The film begins with present-day Batman doing a bit of gang busting to break up a counterfeiting ring. However things go sideways when a mysterious cloaked figure uses the chaos of the fight to single out the gang’s ring leader and dispatch him with lethal force.

While trying to uncover the identity and agenda of this mysterious Phantasm, Bruce Wayne is haunted by thoughts of more sanguine times, thanks to the return of old flame Andrea Beaumont to Gotham. We learn that ten years ago, just as young Bruce was taking his first forays into vigilante justice, he crossed paths with Andrea, and his caped crusade almost ended before it began. Andrea could have undone Bruce's plans for vengeance by offering him the alternative of a loving and happy life. Unlike the other women of high society—flighty, vain, and gold digging—Andrea knew tragedy through the death of her mother and could relate to the serious and brooding orphan Bruce Wayne on that level, while still offering him a chance at normalcy.

However it seemed destiny had other plans. Andrea mysteriously called off their engagement, leaving Bruce no choice but to throw himself wholeheartedly into his one-man war on crime.

Meanwhile in the present, the Phantasm appears to be targeting specific mobsters for a very personal, but as yet unknown grievance. A grandstanding politician pins the murders on Batman and sics every cop in Gotham who isn’t Commissioner Gordon on Batman’s trail. Further complicating matters, Batman’s archnemesis, the Joker, is on the Phantasm’s hit list and the Clown Prince of Crime decides the best defense is a good offense...and lots of explosives.

The past and present begin to converge as we learn how the Joker, the politician, the targeted mobsters, and the loss of Bruce’s lady love ten years ago are all connected.

With great pacing and a character-defining voice cast (Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill, voicing Batman and Joker respectively, would reprise these roles many times over the next twenty odd years), Batman: Mask of the Phantasm is a great entry in the superhero canon. But why am I bringing it up as noir?

Dark Deco Design

In 1989, Tim Burton’s summer blockbuster Batman introduced mainstream audiences to a Gotham far more grim and dark than they remembered from Adam West's 1960’s campy romp. Yet the new gothic take on the material didn’t deter kids (and adults) from shelling out millions of dollars for enough bat-themed bric-a-brac to fill two Bat Caves.

To coincide with the release of the sequel Batman Returns, Warner Brothers turned to their animation studio to keep the momentum going and further capitalize on the character with a Saturday morning cartoon show.

Instead of a toy-centric cash grab, however, the show’s creators set about creating a high quality program that would stand on its own merits as something beyond a movie tie-in. They kept the darker aesthetics of the Tim Burton movies and then leaned hard into anachronisms in the set and prop and character designs to create a style that would be referenced in Warner Animation well into the next century, Dark Deco or Deco Noir. The sets, props, and even the characters themselves have a geometric and streamlined look that is characteristic of the art deco movement, which had experienced a revival during the 1980’s. I believe this was also done as a statement of respect and homage to the Max Fleischer Superman Cartoons of the 1940’s which until then had been the high water mark for realizing a superhero in animation.

Viewers of Phantasm could be forgiven for believing the movie is set some time earlier in the 20th century. Gotham City appears to be stuck in the golden age of art deco design—1930's Streamline Moderne, to be precise, which would dominate city skylines for decades to come. In the TV show, unless it was a very specific piece of technology like a VCR or a supercomputer necessary for the plot, the denizens of Gotham appear to have universally decided nothing designed past 1960 was aesthetically pleasing. Eagle-eyed fans did spot on-screen calendars and documents indicating the show was taking place in the 90’s. However when I poured through the film for this review, I couldn’t spot any obvious anachronisms that would be alien to the 1950’s, save for Batman's crime fighting technology and Joker’s uncannily accurate mini auto-gyro drones.

Adding to the sense that the viewer is looking at something from another time, the creators translated era-appropriate editing and visual effects, such as certain screen wipes, vignetting, and discretion shot pan-aways. Speaking of discretion shots, since this Batman was ostensibly for a family audience, the creators had to work within constraints similar to those classic noir creators laboring under the Hayes production code. While mainstream “neo-noir” creators of the 90’s reveled in the freedom of R-ratings, Batman’s writers used the tricks of the trade of the 30’s and 40’s to sneak a bit of sex and violence into their noir tale but always left the most explicit material to the audience's imagination.

These 1930-50’s film aesthetics were then realized with an often dark palette. Famously, many visuals for the series and the movie were actually created by painting the art on black paper instead of the animation industry standard white. The creators were very careful with their use of light and shadow and the result was a film and TV series that didn’t look like anything else produced by American studios at the time.

Friends from out of town

Any film student worth their salt could tell you that a drastically tilted shooting angle in film can help convey unease, tension, or even madness. It was a popular technique in the film noir canon and also the often psychedelic Adam West Batman. The technique is referred to as a Dutch Angle or Dutch Tilt as it was introduced to American filmmakers primarily from German (Deutsch) impressionist films, and even actual Germans (and other Europeans) who came to the West after the two world wars and wove their own sensibilities into film production.

The Batman animated projects that launched in the 90’s also have another international influence on their style—the influence of the Far East. To meet their TV release schedule and a theatrical production time about one-third of what it took a contemporary studio like Disney to get something to the big screen, Warner Brothers

Akira (1988)

animation had to subcontract a lot of work overseas. For the film, they collaborated with Ong Yang Animations of South Korea and Spectrum Animation of Japan. And while American animated films and cartoons of the time typically weren’t dealing with more “cinematic” shot composition and mature subject matters, a lot of Eastern animation was.

In addition to providing resources for the tedious process of hand drawn animation, these two Asian studios brought much needed experience in how to produce the effects Warner Brothers was looking for. This resulted in…

Standing the Test of Time

A lot of work went into creating an animated Batman that would be taken seriously, and I argue that Batman: The Animated Series and its companion movie Mask of the Phantasm represent a definitive take on the character and mythos. At a time when a Marvel Cinematic Universe would have been considered a fever dream, an animated DC universe of interconnected TV series and further films had already sprung forth from this iteration of Batman. Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill have been called upon again and again to reprise their roles because to fans of my generation they are the voices of Batman and Joker. In this version of Batman, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. played Alfred not simply as a loyal, unquestioning servant, but as a man struggling to make sure that Bruce’s quixotic quest doesn’t end in more tragedy. This is the tone struck by every subsequent version of the character in TV and film. As for breakout character Harley Quinn, known to more recent audiences from her central role in 2016's Suicide Squad, she was invented for this series.

In honor of what this version of Batman has meant to fans, this Veterans Day weekend Warner Brothers is airing Batman: Mask of the Phantasm in select theatres throughout the country. If you, like me, are a longtime fan, or if you somehow missed it but are intrigued by anything I’ve described for you, I would highly recommend trying to get yourself a seat for a screening this holiday weekend.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

Noir-sferatu

Already Dead: Joe Pitt Casebooks Book 1 by Charlie Huston.
Book Review by Kerey McKenna.

Now that November is here and things are getting darker, it’s time to turn the clock back a bit here at Nerds who Read. Not just by an hour for a bit of extra shuteye this Sunday morning. Instead, back to a time and genre where hard-boiled men wore their hats just so in mean city streets and the haze wafting around a femme fatale might be from her smoking cigarette—or her smoking gun.

Yes, readers, it’s time for a series of reviews I like to call Noir November, where I look at tales crafted in the style of classic pulp mysteries. Now this being Nerds who Read there has to be a bit more of a gimmick than just a clever bit of alliteration; my editor insists upon it. I’m not just going to be dusting of some Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler for you. So the subjects of this month’s reviews will have some kind of nerdy angle to them. Sometimes it will be the subject matter, sometimes the medium, and sometimes the way the story mixes classic noir with a nerdy genre like Sci-Fi, horror, or superheroes.

As it is November 1st and the Halloween decorations are just about to be given the bum’s rush to make way for Christmas, I thought we might borrow a creature of the night or two for our first entry in Noir November, Already Dead. The first in Charlie Huston’s six-part Joe Pitt Casebook series of novels, Already Dead follows the adventures of Joe Pitt, a vampire in New York City, trying to make an un-living doing the dirty work of the city’s feuding vampire clans.

First a little introduction to the genre of Urban Fantasy. In broad strokes Urban Fantasy is what happens when you take the mythical and magical creatures of folklore—ogres, wizards, boggarts, werewolves, and what have you—and pave over their lush forbidden forests and decrepit keeps with cities of steel and concrete. Like owls, raccoons, and foxes foraging in dumpsters, some creatures don’t actually change that much; they exchange the dark corners of the forest for the dark alleys of the city, growing fat because nobody looks too closely at the missing persons or even murder rates of a large city. Other creatures make something of themselves in the city and take quite well to “civilization.” An enterprising witch opens up a shop for hipsters looking for “organic alternative medicine.” Trolls and ogres use their muscle to start protection rackets. Furthermore the cities attract people from all over the world and those people bring their own spirits, monsters, demigods and demons. A Dullahan, the headless horseman of Celtic myth might trade in his nag for a Kawasaki and tear through the streets of Tokyo while half a world away a Kitsune, a beguiling Japanese fox woman, might ensnare an eligible bachelor in Manhattan. Urban fantasy offers up a metropolis full of possibility as mythologies mix and mingle and creatures have to survive in the big bad city. As film noir and the pulps wrote much of the book on how to tell stories set in the city, it should be no surprise that many urban fantasy stories are also…noir stories.

Which brings us back to Joe Pitt. His stories don’t just take the teeny bopper glitter off the vampire left by the Twilight and Vampire Academy YA series. They take the romantic gothic horror and aristocratic tropes from Stoker to Rice and cover them with urban grime and grit. Then they rough up those tropes for being in the wrong part of town and leave them curled up in an alley after rifling through their pockets for walking around money.

Joe Pitt is by no means the first vampire (or vampyre as the book insists) urban fantasy protagonist...but in some ways he is more real and down-to-earth than the more celebrated undead. He isn’t all that long in the tooth and therefore doesn’t share the angst of vampires who belong in another age, like Angel or Michael Knight. He doesn’t have the cutting edge equipment or fancy martial arts of the daywalker, Blade. He most certainly does not have the flashy wardrobe and pretentious nom de guerre of Alucard.

What Joe does have is street smarts and a burning desire to survive on his own terms. He “doesn’t drink...wine,” because when he’s not discreetly sneaking some plasma he’s knocking back whiskey with the rest of the gray-collar criminals and working class of the city.

The Pitt series doesn’t go in for elaborate mythology or flashy magic powers. Joe’s world consists of navigating the human and vampyre underworlds of the city doing enough odd jobs, chiefly investigator, enforcer, and bodyguard. The virus (or vyrus, Huston loves that y for i substitution) that creates vampyres is a grab bag of strengths and weaknesses. Humans stop aging and become more resilient when they become a vampyre, but they are by no means impervious to conventional weapons. While they will be unravaged by age and resistant to most poisons, direct sunlight will melt them in under a minute. While the vampyres are in no hurry to “come out of the coffin” and human vampyre hunters are a distinct possibility, the greatest danger for an urban vampire is other urban vampyres.

Joe is an independent contractor in an island full of vampyre clans vying with each other for power, territory, and the limited supply of human blood that can be discreetly syphoned from the donor supply. While Joe has friends in The Society—a group of “youngish” vampyres styled after the 1960’s-70’s radical left—he values his own autonomy over their political agenda, that agenda being chiefly tussles with the corporate and old money vampyres of the Coalition faction. To further complicate matters, the Enclave—the only group of vampyres explicitly interested in the occult—have their own plans and prophecies concerning Pitt. In Already Dead, Pitt has to navigate the precarious detente between the rival gangs to find a missing heiress, stop an outbreak of zombieism, and along the way make enough money to pay the rent and keep his stash of refrigerated blood sufficiently full that his friends and neighbors don’t look like four-course meals on legs.

As I said urban fantasy offers a world of possibilities as a genre. If you like your crime fiction and your gore full of blood and pulp, the Joe Pitt novels would be a good place to start.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

A Middling Murakami

Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami.
Book review by Michael Isenberg.

Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, Killing Commendatore, was released in English this month, following its Japanese premiere back in February.

I didn’t love it.

First a little back story. Commendatore is Italian for Commander. A knight or a military officer. The Commendatore is a character in the story of Don Juan, best known from Mozart’s operatic version, Don Giovanni. The opera begins with the Don’s unsuccessful seduction of Donna Anna, who rather noisily refuses his advances. The fleeing Don is confronted by her father—the Commendatore. They fight. The Commendatore is killed.

The episode figures into Murakami’s book in the form of a painting. The narrator—an artist of no real fame, whose name we never learn—has recently separated from his wife. A friend of his offers to let him stay at his father’s house in the mountains. The friend's father—a famous artist—is in the advanced stages of senility, confined to a nursing home, and therefore no longer able to reside in his now-empty mountain abode. The narrator takes his friend up on the offer. A short time after he takes up residence, he hears something moving in the attic and goes up to investigate. An owl, it turns out. But while he’s up there, he discovers a painting wrapped in paper and hidden away. It is labeled “Killing Commendatore” and despite its Japanese style, and the traditional Japanese garb of the figures in it, the scene and characters from Don Giovanni are readily identifiable.

The painting is an enigma. Clearly a masterpiece, why had the artist hidden it—alone among his works—from the eyes of the world? What meaning did it hold for him and did it have something to do with his involvement in a plot to assassinate a Nazi official in 1938 Vienna? And who is the grotesque figure poking his head through a trap door in one corner of the painting—the narrator calls him “Long Face”—the only character not recognizable from Mozart’s opera?

“Dragging a painting like that out into the light could well have been a mistake,” the narrator tells us. “By discovering it, I had set a cycle of some kind in motion.”

Such cycles are common in Murakami’s works and must be allowed to run their course. Before the circle is complete, the narrator is awoken by mysterious bells ringing in the night, discovers an underground chamber of unknown origin and purpose, and comes face-to-face with the Commendatore and Long Face—not as intimidating as it sounds, since they’re both about two feet tall, their actual sizes in the painting. Finally, his neighbor, the thirteen-year-old Mariye, goes missing. In order to save her, the narrator must journey through a bleak supernatural underworld, cross the River between Presence and Absence, and confront his lifelong fear of confined spaces.

All the elements we’ve come to expect from Murakami are there: classical music, food, astral projection, alternate dimensions, and finely crafted passages like this one:

Low patches of clouds hung over the surrounding mountains. When the wind blew, these cloud fragments, like some wandering spirits from the past, drifted uncertainly along the surface of the mountains, as if in search of lost memories. The pure white rain, like fine snow, silently swirled around on the wind.

Really makes me feel like I'm there. Or perhaps seeing it in a Japanese painting. In my imagination, a cello plays a mournful sonata.

With all of Murakami’s trademark elements in place—and I’m a fan of Murakami—I’m not sure why the book didn’t work for me. But I think a lot of it had to do with the narrator. I just wanted to slap him. Even before the trauma of learning his wife was sleeping with another a man, he was dead inside. “At some point in my life,” he tells us, “I had given up on new music. Instead, I listened to the old stuff over and over again. Books were the same. I reread books from my past, often more than once, but ignored books that had just come out. Somewhere along the way, time seemed to have come to a screeching halt.”

The screeching halt goes far beyond his tastes in music and literature. Although he has other relationships after he leaves his wife, and the sex is good, it all seems rather mechanical; he derives no joy from it that I can see. He is effete, unable to act. He mainly watches while the characters around him drive the story. He is aware that one of them might be using him, and although he should be resentful of that, he isn’t. “I remained, as ever, the impartial observer.”

Most significant of all, he is stunted artistically. Even while he was with his wife, he lived off commissions for the kind of formal portraits of company presidents found in board rooms. Not what he wanted to be doing, but it paid the bills. After he leaves her, he shows some promise of developing as an artist. But I don’t think it’s a spoiler to remind you that he describes the course of the story as a “cycle.”

Even the climactic journey through the underworld, with all its trials and ordeals, is ultimately pointless. It is never made clear how it did anything to help Mariye, who we eventually learn was never in any real danger. Maybe it’s more a journey of discovery for the narrator than a rescue mission for Mariye. But the narrator doesn't seem to have discovered anything.

It doesn’t help that the book is sloppily edited. There is at least one misspelling, a split infinitive, and some minor inconsistencies. At one point we’re told “Menshiki, I, and the Commendatore were seated at that large table,” followed two pages later by “The Commendatore finally made an appearance in the dining room, though not at the seat at the table prepared for him. Given his short stature, he would have only come up to nose level, hidden by the table. He plunked himself down on a kind of display shelf diagonally behind Menshiki.” Of greater concern, from an editing point of view, is the novel’s repetitiveness. The narrator tells us multiple times—each time as if it’s the first—that he’s separated, that he had a sister who died when she was Mariye’s age, that this, that, or another woman reminds him of her.

Killing Commendatore often seems profound. And yet, its profundity doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The Commendatore tells us he’s an Idea incarnate. Sounds deep, but what idea is he? Freedom is an idea. Is he freedom? Marxism? Archimedes’ method for measuring specific gravity? Similarly Long Face is a metaphor, we’re told. A metaphor for what? We’re never told explicitly. As for the River between Presence and Absence, what is it that’s present, and what’s absent?

Maybe I just wasn’t bright enough to figure these things out. Or maybe I’ve outgrown Murakami. I hope that’s not the case. Despite Killing Commendatore, I’m still a fan.

Check out Mike’s Nerds who Read review of Murakami’s 2004 novel After Dark, “Vignette Films get the Murakami treatment.” Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com

Back to Basics

Daredevil Season 3.
Review by Michael Isenberg.

The Marvel Defenders universe is in trouble. After an enthralling start in the first seasons of Daredevil and Jessica Jones, the subsequent entries in the franchise just haven’t had the same punch. In the past few months we’ve had a second season of Luke Cage in which the title character might just as well have stayed home washing his hoodie, and an Iron Fist installment which was just like Black Panther but boring. There was practically zero buzz about either. Two weeks ago, the news broke that Netflix had cancelled Iron Fist, followed by last week’s announcement that there would be no third season of Luke Cage either.

So it is encouraging that Season 3 of Daredevil, released on Netflix this weekend, gets back to the fundamentals that made the franchise so great to begin with.

The first season introduced lawyer by day/Daredevil by night Matt Murdock, his law partner Foggy Nelson, and their office manager (not secretary) Karen Page. They teamed up to fight organized crime in Hell’s Kitchen in a taut and gripping story.

Season 2, in contrast, was all over the map. The force of multiple plotlines spun the team of Nelson, Murdock, and Page in three different directions.

But if Season 2 drove them apart, Season 3 brings them back together. It’s a bumpy road—they act at cross purposes more than once—but eventually, they reunite. As if to symbolize their return to their roots, Daredevil even wears his Season 1 homemade black costume, instead of the custom-made horned red body suit traditionally associated with the character. What brings them back together is their Season 1 nemesis, the Kingpin himself, Wilson Fisk.

Fisk is a fascinating character—thanks to his contradictions. Despite a brutal disposition—he began his violent career at age 12 when he murdered his father by smashing his skull in with a hammer—he would move heaven and earth for those he loved: his mother Marlene, and his romantic interest Vanessa. He’s so protective of the latter that he might not, to coin a phrase, beteem the winds of heaven visit her face too roughly (Whether Vanessa wants that degree of protectiveness is another question, one that is answered in Season 3). Fisk was also a man of vision: he wanted to demolish the slums of Hell’s Kitchen and replace them with gleaming, modern towers. That anyone might oppose that vision—the people who call those slums home, for example—was a source of genuine bafflement to him; one almost feels sorry for him. At least until the next time he beats the bloody crap out of someone with his bare fists.

The plot of Season 3 starts slow. Daredevil is broken in body and spirit as the result of having a building collapse on him at the end of last year's The Defenders. It takes an episode and change before he begins to Daredevil again, and this part is a little boring; it’s not like there’s any suspense as to whether that’s going to happen. The Kingpin meanwhile, who was imprisoned at the end of Season 1 and barely seen in Season 2, has cut a deal with the FBI to transfer him from the slammer to house arrest in a luxurious penthouse hotel suite, in exchange for turning state’s evidence. Daredevil and friends don’t like that and start poking their noses into the situation. Kingpin retaliates by getting his own Daredevil. Ah, the Marvel Universe, where there’s always a fight between superheroes with similar powers. It’s not until mid-season that we discover just how much the Kingpin has manipulated the FBI—and that he has a larger plan than merely getting better accommodations.

The Kingpin’s plan involves a certain amount of political intrigue, and this being 2018, those are perilous waters. Anyone creating a series for mass consumption must navigate a narrow channel to avoid pissing off one side of the political divide or the other. Daredevil manages to pull this off using the same solution as the recent season of The Man in the High Castle: give something to everybody. Conservatives will see parallels to current events in the way that the FBI has been thoroughly corrupted by the Kingpin’s machinations. And for my left-of-center friends, they will see their calls for Medicare for All vindicated by the character arc of FBI agent Ray Nadeem: it's set in motion when his sister-in-law’s health insurance is cancelled in the midst of cancer treatment, bringing financial ruin on the family (didn’t Obamacare fix that?). And then there’s this speech, which Kingpin delivers at a press conference:

You’ve been manipulated, poisoned into believing the news media’s fake story, that I am evil, that I am a criminal. Quite the opposite is true. Because I challenge the system, because I’ve told the truth and tried to make this city a better place, the people in power decided to tear me down, to tear me down with false allegations.

Sound familiar? Well, the Kingpin is a Manhattan real estate tycoon.

As with most entries in the Marvel Universe, Daredevil 3 has its share of plot weaknesses, if not actual holes.

There’s a big reveal about Daredevil’s past which, IMHO, is lacking any real emotional resonance. It merely serves to pad the run time by having Daredevil sulk for an episode.

We get a big reveal about Karen’s past, too. It takes up large chunks of Episode 10. Like Eleven’s Chicago journey of discovery in the latest season of Stranger Things, it’s a complete side quest that temporarily derails the arc of the season.

As for the heroes’ plans, none of them seem to work. At one point, a discouraged Karen complains to Foggy, “Do you know what happens when you make a plan? Fisk has already thought of it and he’s made it part of his plan.” Trouble is, the Kingpin is so adept at delving one yard below the mines of Daredevil and company that he would have had to foresee things he couldn’t possibly have foreseen.

Then there's the final three-way battle between Kingpin, Daredevil, and the other Daredevil. It’s got some good fighting—the two Daredevils match the Kingpin’s brutality blow for blow—but it’s completely pointless. The season would have ended exactly the same with or without that fight.

And yet, despite these flaws, I couldn’t turn it off. I binge watched all thirteen episodes in two days. There were other things I needed to do this weekend, but every time I started on one, I ended up saying, “I’d rather be watching Daredevil.”

Daredevil is back, baby, and I hope it marks a turning point for the battered but still standing Defenders franchise.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Photo credit(s): IMDB

Staffel Null

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick.
Book review by Michael Isenberg.

Season 3 of The Man in the High Castle dropped on Amazon this past weekend. I binge watched it and found it to be an exciting ten episodes, with important character development for most of the leads and a gripping climactic scene. Politically there's something for everybody. My left-of-center friends will no doubt see themselves in the Resistance, and will also be gratified that the writers delivered on the hint they dropped in Season 2 that one of the characters will come out as gay (as will several others). My right-of-center friends, meanwhile, will see chilling parallels to current events in the Nazi plan to wipe out American history by destroying statues and other memorials to our past.

But since this is Nerds who Read, rather than dwell on the series, I’m going to review the original Philip K. Dick novel which started it all. Think of it as Season Zero.

Philip K. Dick is not generally thought of as part of the 1960’s New Wave movement in science fiction. Nevertheless, he contributed to New Wave anthologies like Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions. More importantly, his work shared the salient characteristics that distinguished New Wave works from earlier generations of sci fi: the writing is exceptional, intended for a more literary, avant garde audience. And it had more imaginative plotlines; it didn’t limit itself to the earlier “Space travel—yay!” kind of story. Both features are to be found The Man in the High Castle.

For those not familiar with the series, MITHC takes place in an alternate universe where the Axis won World War II. It is by no means the first alternate history of the War. Stories of a Nazi-dominated dystopia began appearing in print almost as soon as the guns fell silent, beginning with Laszlo Gaspar’s We, Adolph the First (1945). Isaac Asimov touches on the theme in his 1956 short story, “Living Space.” So although this was well-worn territory by the time The Man in the High Castle was published in 1962, MITHC is definitely one of the best entries in this sub-sub-genre, and thanks to the Amazon series, has definitely become the best-known.

In the world of MITHC, the victors have carved up America between them. The Greater Nazi Reich rules the East Coast and the Midwest; the Japanese control the Pacific States of America. The Rocky Mountain States, a wild and lawless throwback to the Old West, serve as a much-needed neutral zone between the fascist powers, whose relationship is often uneasy. That relationship is expected to only grow more hostile, now that a senile Hitler has been packed away to a nursing home and the remaining Nazi leaders jockey for power.

The Germans and Japanese have brought to America all their loathsome ideologies about the superiority of their own races, along with the hideous practices of their secret police. The Jews in the East have been exterminated; those in the West are subject to extradition if caught. But some time has passed since the war, and for the most part Americans have come to terms with being second class citizens in their own country, and are getting on with their lives.

Then a bestselling novel threatens to disrupt everything. The Grasshopper Lies Heavy depicts an alternate alternate universe in which the Allies won the war. This alternate history within an alternate history is a clever plot device. Freely circulated in the Rocky Mountain States, banned by the Germans, inexplicably enjoyed by the Japanese, Grasshopper seems so realistic that absolutely everybody is talking about it. Many dare to find hope in its pages for a different future. Little is known about its mysterious author, Hawthorne Abendsen, but according to the cover, he has taken refuge in a High Castle, bristling with defenses to protect himself against the onslaught of Nazi assassins. But as the heroine of MITHC, Juliana, will learn, Abendsen is not what the marketing hype says he is.

Fans of the Amazon series will notice that some parts of this is familiar, others not so much. The Grasshopper Lies Heavy was a collection of films in the series, not a book, and Abendsen was collecting them, not creating them (although there’s a new twist on that last point in Season 3). The same sense of familiar-yet-different applies to the characters and plotlines. Many characters from the series are in evidence—the Jewish machine operator Frank Frink, his friend Ed, his love interest Juliana, her love interest Joe, the antiques dealer Childan, Trade Minister Tagomi, and his “Swedish” visitor Baynes—yet they aren’t the same. Frank and Ed have a very different plotline from the series; in the book, Ed and not Frank is the stronger character, and the leader of the duo. Childan is far more layered, thanks to the power of novels to tell us what the characters are thinking.

Some characters from the series don’t appear at all, which is to be expected when a 250 page book is made into 30 hours of television and counting. Takeshi Kido, the Inspector Javert of the Kempeitai, is nowhere to be found (sadly, IMHO. He's one of my favorites). The story takes place entirely in the PSA and the RMS, so the New York and Berlin characters don't appear either. No Smith Family Fascism, no Obergruppenführer discount Christopher Walken, Hitler Youth Wesley Crusher, or Desperate Housewives of Nazau County. I'm less sad about that; I despise Nazis regardless of how hard the writers work to make them sympathetic. Especially American Nazis. F--king collaborators. (Mr. Dick planned a sequel to MITHC. He never finished it, but two chapters appear in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings. The first takes place in upstate New York, and elements of it are found in Season 3 of the series.)

But it is Juliana who differs the most. Even her name is different. She’s Juliana Frink in the book. Frank’s ex-wife. Not his girlfriend. He doesn’t even know where she is. “She was wrong for me,” he realizes, “I know that.”

Juliana—the best-looking woman he had ever married. Soot-black eyebrows and hair; trace amounts of Spanish blood distributed as pure color, even to her lips… Beyond everything else, he had originally been drawn by her screwball expression: for no reason, Juliana greeted strangers with a portentous, nudnik, Mona Lisa smile that hung them up between responses, whether to say hello or not. And she was so attractive that more often than not they did say hello, whereupon Juliana glided by. At first he had thought it was just plain bad eyesight, but finally he had decided that it revealed a deep-dyed otherwise concealed stupidity at her core…[But] he still never saw her as anything but a direct, literal invention of God’s, dropped into his life for reasons he could never know. And on that account…he could not get over having lost her.

Clearly Book Juliana is very different from TV Juliana—a knockout with a size 38 bust where TV Juliana is slim and merely pretty. Book Juliana is stupid where TV Juliana is cerebral, and she has a bit of gold digger in the mix, as we learn when Joe takes her up to Denver for a big spending spree. And yet some things are the same. As Abendsen tells his wife in the final pages,

She’s doing what’s instinctive to her, simply expressing her being. She didn’t mean to show up here and do harm; it simply happened to her, just as the weather happens to us. I’m glad she came.

In both the book and the series, Juliana, without planning to, puts the story in motion and a lot of people get hurt.

Given the whole familiar-yet-different vibe, fans of the series should enjoy the book, and yet still feel like they’re getting something new. If you finished Season 3 and still want more, I highly recommend you read it.

It’s almost as if the characters you know and love are in an alternate universe.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Photo credit(s): Amazon.com